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Many people are going to argue (as here) that homicides are up in NYC because of criminal justice reform policies. I just don't buy it. We've been reducing incarceration for years, with crime dropping too. Meanwhile, homicides only spiked... last year. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/opinion/politics/new-york-city-homicide.html
Let's look at the data. Here's the Compstat page from the last week of 2020. It's true that homicides were up last year, as were shootings. There's no denying it. But note that other metrics of violent crime were... down. Bear that in mind going forward.
Last year's homicide increase may follow years of criminal justice reform policies at the city and state level. But that's correlation -- NOT causation.
To move beyond correlation, we need to look at the city's broader history, not one year of data. And in context, felony and misdemeanor convictions have been dropping for years, with homicides dropping simultaneously. 2020's homicide increase is the exception, not the rule.
And, if criminal justice reform is to blame, that also doesn’t explain why other metrics of violent crime fell. Why would criminal justice reform policies increase the number of homicides but not assaults? (The same trend played out in other cities, too.) https://www.vox.com/2020/8/3/21334149/murders-crime-shootings-protests-riots-trump-biden
Lastly, many cities saw increased homicides last year -- not just NYC. And not all of them have enacted criminal justice reform policies. It seems more likely that there’s some other, missing explanation. https://covid19.counciloncj.org/2020/11/30/impact-report-covid-19-and-crime-2/
I've studied our country’s crime rate for years; crime is complex, and we just don't know, yet, why it rose last year. And I don’t think guesswork gets us anywhere. This is a serious problem that deserves serious study, and single-cause analyses are always going to fall short.
