We have written a number of times about the U.S.’s rapidly increasing violent crime rate, which dates to the Ferguson fiasco and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Liberals, meanwhile, assure us that it is all a coincidence.
The Associated Press admits that violent crime has spiked:
Violent crime in America rose in 2016 for the second straight year, driven by a spike in killings in some major cities, but remained near historically low levels, according to FBI data released Monday.
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Still, the FBI said it was the first time violent crime rose in consecutive years in more than a decade.Violent crimes such as shootings and robberies rose 4.1 percent in 2016 from the year before, with homicides climbing 8.6 percent, according to the figures. Violence increased 3.9 percent in 2015, while killings jumped by more than 10 percent.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions says that we shouldn’t accept these higher crime rates as “the new normal.” The AP supplies charts which show the otherwise-inexplicable rise in violent crime coinciding with the Democrats’ anti-police movement:
Nevertheless, the AP wouldn’t want us to think that the Left’s attack on policing has anything to do with rising crime:
Sessions has also been a proponent of the theory that crime has risen as scrutiny of local police has intensified and hurt morale, causing officers to be less aggressive on the streets. As such, he has worked to support the interests of some of the nation’s largest police unions [sic].
But experts remain divided about what caused the rise and about how to respond. Some criminologists believe community distrust in police has made residents less likely to cooperate in investigations, driving up crime.
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Despite the increase, the violent crime rate in 2016 was still down significantly from several years ago. It dropped 18 percent from 2007, and the murder rate was 6 percent lower than it was the same year, according to the data. And it was far from the levels of the 1980s and 1990s, during the height of the drug war, when Sessions was a federal prosecutor in Mobile, Alabama.
In other words, the crime rate had been dropping significantly for some years, until that decline was suddenly reversed after 2014. (Michael Brown attacked officer Darren Wilson in August 2014.) As for the relevance of AG Sessions having been a U.S. Attorney from 1981 until 1993, your guess is as good as mine. Any way you look at it, it is hard to spin a 20% increase in the homicide rate in just two years.
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