From the Washington Post:

From the Washington Post news pages:

Crime rose unevenly when stay-at-home orders lifted. The racial disparity is the widest in years.

In other words, lifting stay-at-home orders was racist against blacks, causing gun violence to racistly descend upon black neighborhoods more than gun violence descended upon white neighborhoods.

While crime remained stable in White-majority areas, it peaked in Black-majority neighborhoods during the summer months after stay-at-home orders were lifted.

By John D. Harden and Justin Jouvenal
Oct. 9, 2020

At least 17 children have died violently in St. Louis this year, a tally that has shocked residents and underscored a widening racial crime disparity in that city and others amid the coronavirus pandemic. As the upward trajectory of crime continues, the gulf between the rates of violence in Black and White communities widened by 106 percent in the nation’s largest cities.

A Washington Post analysis of 27 cities showed the rolling rate [they are using a 21 day rolling average] of violent crime in majority-White neighborhoods fell by 30 percent while stay-at-home orders were in effect, dipping to its lowest point in two years. Once the orders were lifted, violent crime in those neighborhoods returned to pre-pandemic levels, but stayed below average when compared with 2018 and 2019.

In majority-Black neighborhoods, the rate of violence remained relatively steady while stay-at-home orders were in effect, but rose dramatically after orders were lifted, peaking at 133 crimes per 100,000 residents in July, the highest level in the past three years.

Seriously, as I’ve been saying, the media demanding from the death of George Floyd (Rest in Power) on Memorial Day onward that blacks get extremely enraged in the name of Black Lives Matter appears to have helped induce enraged blacks to shoot each other over the summer in vast numbers. But you aren’t supposed to go for the Occam’s Razor explanation, so the media is putting in a lot of effort into various Occam’s Butterknife narratives to explain away their complicity in black violence since May 25.

Crime in White and Black neighborhoods fluctuates month-to-month, historically spiking in summer. But this year, the rate of increase in Black neighborhoods has been most dramatic, peaking higher than in 2018 and 2019 by about 10 and 8 percent, respectively.

And murder rates, the traditional gold standard for well-counted crimes, are up way more, with interestingly shootings up even more due to a proliferation of black-on-black mass shootings at funerals, block parties, and the like, which leave lots of wounded.

Meanwhile, violent crime rates in predominantly Asian, Hispanic and White neighborhoods have fluttered beneath their recent summer peaks.

They keep depicting the lockdowns on their graphs, which didn’t seem to have much effect on crime rates, but they refuse to show on their graph the May 25th death of George Floyd, so as to push their explanation that the rise in black on black violence was due to the end of lockdowns, not the rise of BLM. But, who can remember such an obscure event as the death of George Floyd now that the message has gone out from Narrative Central that it’s better for the Biden campaign to talk about COVID rather than about George Floyd?

In most cities, the violent crime rate in Black-majority areas was above average throughout the summer, while crime rates in White-majority areas remained relatively stable. There were exceptions though. In Baltimore, there is still a wide gap between Black and White neighborhoods, but crime rates overall are down this year.

Murder rates in Baltimore have been skyhigh ever since the BLM riot over Freddie Gray on 4/25/2015, so Baltimore has been like the whole country in 2020 after BLM’s triumph in 2015.

At the time of this analysis, data for Nashville was only available through early August. …

The crimes analyzed include homicide, sexual assault and rape, robbery, aggravated assault, arson, burglary, theft, auto theft and thefts from vehicles.

The analysis shows crime rates dropped in March after stay-at-home orders were imposed to combat the pandemic. Rates flattened in April, but when orders began to lift in May, violent crime rose in majority-Black neighborhoods, surging past levels in 2018 and 2019.

The Post’s findings come as debate rages over policing, crime and unrest in the nation’s cities.

President Trump and some Republicans have seized upon violence and occasional looting that followed the shooting of a Black man by Kenosha, Wis., police and the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis officers to portray cities as dangerously chaotic and Democratic leaders as ineffectual at restoring order.

Trump has also linked a rise in homicides in a number of big cities to the Floyd protests and activists’ efforts to cut funding for police departments, a contention for which criminologists say there is little evidence. In July, the president deployed federal agents to nine cities affected by crime increases, often over the objections of local officials. St. Louis was one of them.

“There’s not just one pattern that’s really leading to divergent trends in cities,” said Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton University professor and criminologist. “You have the lockdowns and then you have the response to the George Floyd incident and the proliferation of demonstrations against police brutality and racial justice, and the resulting response from police departments.”

No, actually, looking at the data collected by the Post, Occam’s Razor says that it’s obvious that the pandemic had little impact on crime, but the George Floyd Black Lives Matter excitement had a huge incitement effect on blacks to commit more crimes, but not on everybody else.

Meanwhile, protesters and some big-city leaders have pushed for shifting funds away from police departments to services like mental health and drug treatment, arguing that minority communities have been overpoliced for too long and that social services are a better way to address the root causes of crime.

… Children with gunshot wounds are arriving in unprecedented numbers at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, carried by wailing ambulances or cradled in the arms of desperate parents. The hospital has already treated 114 children through Oct. 8 — more than all of 2019 — and the onslaught shows no sign of slowing amid a surging murder rate.

Lindsay Clukies, co-director of emergency medical services at the hospital, said the average age of victims is dropping and that more are arriving with high-caliber gunshot wounds. In July, she treated an infant hit by a bullet. More than 90 percent of the victims this year have been Black.

The young victims are the tragic edge of a wave of violence in the city. While serious crime is down slightly overall, through mid-August homicides were up 34 percent compared with 2019, according to St. Louis police. But the toll has fallen unevenly across the city.

In mid-March, ahead of stay-at-home orders in the city, majority-Black neighborhoods were averaging about one homicide every four days. By the end of July, those same neighborhoods were averaging about two homicides a day. Meanwhile, the rate of homicides in White-majority neighborhoods in St. Louis held stable, at about one every seven days.

It’s almost as if this article’s obsession with the pandemic is intended to distract from the real cause of the post George Floyd orgy of blacks shooting blacks, which is the media promoting the BLM Narrative.

The trend is similar in several cities examined by The Post.

The Post’s analysis of the 27 cities showed that the rolling rate of violent crime in majority-White neighborhoods fell from 31 crimes per 100,000 residents in mid-March to 21 in early May, when stay-at-home orders were in effect. Crime in majority-Black neighborhoods increased slightly during that time, from 62 to 64 incidents.

But as stay-at-home orders were lifted, crime rates began to rise.

Uh, I realize the pandemic was and is the Biggest Story in the History of the World this year, but I also remember that from Memorial Day through George Floyd’s burial on July 9, the Biggest Story in the History of the World was George Floyd’s MURDER by White Racism.

Theories for crime divergence

As part of its analysis, The Post analyzed crime in 2018 and 2019 to see how current trends compare with recent years. The analysis found that the disparity between violent crime in White and Black neighborhoods is wider than it’s been at any time during that period.

Criminologists and police officials said pinpointing the causes of the divergence is difficult given the complexity of the forces driving crime, especially in a year of unprecedented upheaval. Still, they offered a range of theories.

Richard B. Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said the rise in crime in Black neighborhoods is concerning, but the largely unchanged numbers in White neighborhoods nationwide undercut Trump’s argument that crime is rampant and out of control in cities.

He said it’s possible that trends that emerged during the pandemic and after Floyd’s killing may have converged to leave Black neighborhoods more exposed to crime.

First, he said, minority communities may have suffered more from a decrease in proactive efforts to fight crime as police departments shifted to battling the pandemic, instituted social distancing and quarantined sick officers. Rosenfeld surmised that Floyd’s death might also have led Black communities to report fewer crimes and participate less in investigations, leaving problems to fester.

“Those are communities that have already had a fraught relationship with police, and the alienation seems to have grown even more,” Rosenfeld said.

Other experts said Black neighborhoods could be home to more essential workers who were out and about, making them more vulnerable to street crime during the pandemic. White neighborhoods could have more office workers who are working from home, leaving them safer and making their homes less enticing targets for crime.

But you just said that crime was up only 3% in black neighborhoods during the lockdown.

In Chicago, police spokesman Howard Ludwig said officers were told to limit contact with the public and focus on violent offenders to slow the spread of the virus. According to the department, the three police districts with the most criminal complaints are within predominantly minority communities on the city’s south and west sides.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said it makes sense that public safety problems that arrived with the pandemic would fall most heavily on already struggling communities, just as the health effects of the coronavirus did.

“[When people have] lost their jobs, and when people, you know, lose hope, that’s when we start seeing the increase in assaults because people are just on pins and needles,” he said. “It’s an unprecedented era in modern history. You put all that together — that’s a lot for society to deal with. And I think when you add it all up, that’s [why] we’re seeing an increase.”

It’s been about six months since much of the nation was forced to stay home, with residents urged to distance themselves amid a pandemic linked to more than 7.5 million infections and more than 212,000 deaths in the United States. Amid ongoing conversations about reforming policing in light of Floyd’s death, experts say the pandemic shows that no single action can universally affect crime across jurisdictions.

Actually, we have seen that a single action—the media falling hook line and sinker for BLM’s anti-white blood libel narrative—can severely boost crime rates among blacks.

As jurisdictions have reopened, most cities’ crime rates have rebounded at or above pre-pandemic levels, based on The Post’s analysis. Several of the nation’s largest cities have experienced increased bloodshed, although experts aren’t sure of the cause.

It’s also too early to know how the pandemic could affect crime in the long term, experts said. The pandemic is an exceptionally rare instance of entire societies being simultaneously shuttered, a scenario with little precedent for criminologists to study.

Matthew Ashby, a criminologist at University College London who has studied crime in the United States during the pandemic, said future studies using data still being collected could lead police departments and criminologists to understand how smaller-scale events — such as floods, hurricanes and protests — affect crime levels.

“It’s really hard to come up with national solutions or even statewide solutions for crime problems that are inherently very local,” he said. “Preventing crime is always about being specific about a particular type of crime and being local.”

But in the Summer of George, we had a nationwide crime phenomena: angry blacks shooting blacks. A national solution might be for the national media not to hype Black Rage 24×7, like they did this summer.

Finally, thousands of words into this article, the Post reveals the truth for the handful of readers still reading:

… St. Louis police Capt. Renee Kriesmann said the pandemic, protests and unrest that followed Floyd’s killing fundamentally reshaped policing and crime in the city.

“We went for a two- or three-month period on what we considered no self-initiated activity, trying to keep the workforce safe and trying to keep the community safe,” Kriesmann said of the period that ended in early August. She said that may have been one factor driving the increase in homicides in the city.

Kriesmann said the drop in crime after the pandemic was noticeable, but she called violence that erupted following the Floyd protests on June 1 a “turning point.” Early the next morning, four police officers were shot and dozens of businesses were looted.

E.g., David Dorn.

But don’t Say His Name.

Kriesmann said it’s likely that the uptick in crime that came during the summer was partially driven by weeks of looting and unrest. She said officers were also pulled away from their regular beats to work protests and guard shops during that period. Kriesmann said she hasn’t seen any change in how willing Black communities are to report crime in the wake of Floyd’s killing.

She said the number of children killed in St. Louis could be tied to more of them being home during the pandemic, as well as the suspension of programs to help at-risk youth and traditional activities that keep kids busy, such as school and sports. …

Methodology
The Washington Post began collecting crime data from several cities in mid-March. The Post selected 27 cities to create an aggregate rate of major crimes, which includes aggravated assault, rape, robbery, homicide, burglary, auto theft and thefts from vehicles. Data for this analysis is current as of Sept. 5, 2020.

The data was collected via open web portals from each city. It was standardized using the statistical program R and UCR definitions to categorize violent and property crimes.

More than 800,000 reported crimes were collected from 2020. An additional 2.2 million crimes were collected for 2018 and 2019 to compare trends and create a yearly average. The crimes were geocoded to Census tracts and merged with data on demographics.

A rolling 21-day average was calculated by dividing the total crimes in neighborhoods with a majority Asian, Black, Latino or White population by the sum population of those Census tracts. The location of some crimes like sexual assaults or homicides were suppressed to protect a victim’s privacy or because the crime was still under investigation, bringing small limitations to the data.

John D. Harden is a metro data reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post after four years working for the Houston Chronicle as a data and breaking news reporter.

Justin Jouvenal covers courts and policing in Fairfax County and across the nation.