Why America's Great Crime Decline Is Over

[DonViejo]

Even before the recent mass shootings, violent crime was surging to its highest rate in 30 years. Patrick Sharkey illuminates what’s happening.

MARCH 24, 2021

Derek Thompson
Staff writer at The Atlantic

Americans are experiencing a crime wave unlike anything we’ve seen this century. After decades of decline, shootings have surged in the past few years. In 2020, gun deaths reached their highest point in U.S. history in the midst of a pandemic. In 2021, although researchers can’t yet say anything definite about overall crime, shooting incidents appear to be on the rise in many places. We have also already witnessed several mass shootings, including the murder of spa and massage workers in the Atlanta area and a grocery-store massacre in Boulder, Colorado. Americans can no longer say, as we could 10 years ago, that we are living in the safest time in our nation’s history.

Why crime rises and falls is a devilishly complicated question. Few people have thought more deeply about it than Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University. While others reach for easy solutions and simplistic slogans, Sharkey embraces complexity and uncertainty. In his 2018 book, Uneasy Peace, Sharkey argued that intensive and often aggressive policing and incarceration policies probably helped reduce crime in the past few decades, to the great benefit of low-income neighborhoods. But rather than glorify these policies, he argued that often they have involved brutal policing strategies that could provoke a backlash among the public—hence the “uneasy” nature of the peace.

This thesis has proved doubly prescient in the past year. Sharkey anticipated both the summer of anti-police protests and the possibility that souring police-civilian relations would contribute to an increase in violent crime.

This week I spoke with Sharkey about his thoughts on the 2020 crime surge. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity; statistical context from a follow-up email is in italics.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/is-americas-great-crime-decline-over/618381/?

[underpants]

1. Fascinating

Thanks for posting

[Aristus]

2. Well, without a doubt, the fact that the cops are also the criminals plays a huge part.

We need police reform and we need it now.