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Today the WashPost reported, that "Fort Worth saw a 66 percent increase in killings in the first nine months of the year" a bigger spike than Austin's even though they had many more murders than us to begin with. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/21/murder-rises-in-pandemic/
It's worth mentioning that, during this fall's political campaign, @GovAbbott held a presser in Fort Worth to criticize Austin's murder rate and say Austin should mimic Cowtown's approach, touting out-of-context data and fallacious claims that now appear pretty silly.
Reporters who credulously repeated the Gov's false framing could/should have known better at the time. When he first said it, Grits calculated that, "if Austin's murder rate this year were as high as Fort Worth's, we'd had seen 74 murders instead of 34." https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/10/with-one-unanswered-question-chris.html
The murder ↑ is disturbing but puzzling, as other types of serious crime have ↓. It's a national trend. https://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.com/2020/11/on-link-between-murder-rates-and.html
Moreover, it's not clear cops solving murders is what makes them ↓. Clearance rates for murders have been ↓ for a generation while murders also ↓.
Moreover, it's not clear cops solving murders is what makes them ↓. Clearance rates for murders have been ↓ for a generation while murders also ↓.
So when murders ↑, what should be done? The Gov says hire more cops, but cops are solving fewer murders than ever, and most of them are focused on duties other than solving violent crime. It's not at all obvious that will solve the problem.
The idea behind #DefundThePolice was that many other factors besides policing influence crime. That phrase is unpopular, but if police aren't solving murders, maybe alternative approaches to the murder spike might be more effective. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/12/defund-police-violent-crime/?arc404=true
