1:14
- ABC News
- December 8, 2021
Homicide records broken in 12 major US cities
"It's worse than a war zone around here lately," police official said.
1:14
Indianapolis, Columbus, Louisville, Toledo and Baton Rouge broke records set in 2020, while St. Paul surpassed a record set in 1992.
Among the major cities on the brink of setting new homicide records are Milwaukee, which has 178 homicides, 12 short of a record set in 2020; and Minneapolis, which has 91 homicides, six shy of a record set in 1995.
According to the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report released in September, the nation saw a 30% increase in murder in 2020, the largest single-year jump since the bureau began recording crime statistics 60 years ago.
Robert Boyce, retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department and an ABC News contributor, said that while there is no single reason for the jump in slayings, one national crime statistic stands out to him.
“Nobody’s getting arrested anymore,\" Boyce said. \"People are getting picked up for gun possession and they're just let out over and over again.\"
The FBI crime data shows that the number of arrests nationwide plummeted 24% in 2020, from the more than 10 million arrests made in 2019. The number of 2020 arrests -- 7.63 million -- is the lowest in 25 years, according to the data. FBI crime data is not yet available for 2021.
Christopher Herrmann, an assistant professor in the Department of Law & Police Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said the decrease in arrests could be attributed to the large number of police officers who retired or resigned in 2020 and 2021.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/philadelphia-gun-violence-02-gty-llr-211124_1637795308887_hpMain_4x3t_384.jpg\")
A workforce survey released in June by the Police Executive Research Forum found the retirement rate in police departments nationwide jumped 45% over 2020 and 2021. And another 18% of officers resigned, the survey found, a development which coincided with nationwide social justice protests and calls to defund law enforcement agencies following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
On average, the survey found that law enforcement agencies are currently filling only 93% of the authorized number of positions available and Herrmann said many departments have been hampered in hiring because of an inability to get large classes into police academies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
\"I think, unfortunately, police departments are just losing a lot of their best and experienced officers and then because of the economic crisis, because of COVID, are having difficulties in hiring or just delays in hirings,\" Herrmann said.
Herrmann said he suspects that a confluence of other factors has also contributed to the spike in lethal violence over the last two years. He said the COVID-19 pandemic not only prompted a shutdown of courts and reduction in jail population to slow the spread of the virus but also derailed after-school programs and violence disruption programs.
\"I wish there was one good solid reason that I could give you for the increases, but the reality is there is none,\" Herrmann, a former crime analyst supervisor for the New York City Police Department, told ABC News.
Herrmann said he was surprised to see the number of homicides going up in major cities across the United States after an overall 30% jump last year.
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/austin-mass-shooting-04-rt-llr-210612_1623519966055_hpMain_4x3t_384.jpg\")
“I knew 2020 was going to be a bad year because of the (COVID-19) pandemic but I really thought that a lot of these numbers would come down in 2021 just because a lot of society reopened and reopened pretty quickly,\" Herrmann said. “We don’t have the unemployment problem, we don’t have a lot of the economic stresses, housing and food insecurities aren't as much of an issue. A lot of those things were leading to the mental health stressors that were plaguing the country.\"
As part of a recent ABC News series \"Rethinking Gun Violence,\" Dr. Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said 2020 was the \"perfect storm\" of conditions where \"everything bad happened at the same time -- you had the COVID outbreak, huge economic disruption, people were scared.\"
Webster added, \"It's particularly challenging to know with certainty which of these things independently is associated with the increased violence. Rather it was the 'cascade' of events all unfolding in a similar time frame.\"
![\"PHOTO:](\"http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/indianapolis-shooting-body-ap-jt-210416_1618593813764_hpMain_2_4x3t_384.jpg\")
Chief LeRonne Armstrong of the Oakland, California, Police Department told ABC News recently that the lack of resources to fight crime is one of the reasons he suspects is why his city is seeing the highest number of homicides in decades. Oakland police have investigated at least 127 homicides in 2021, up from 102 in all of 2020. The Bay Area city's all-time high for homicides is 175 set in 1992.
Armstrong said his department's 676 officers is the smallest staff his agency has had in years, nearly 70 fewer officers than in 2020.
\"To have 70, nearly 70 less officers a year later,\" Armstrong said, \"is definitely going to have an impact on our ability to address public safety.\"
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