In 2019, Washington, D.C. had its highest number of homicides in a decade. The Washington Post, quoting unnamed city authorities, attributes the spike to “a proliferation of the use of firearms to resolve disputes.”
This “proliferation” wasn’t confined to Washington. In neighboring Prince Georges County, Maryland, homicides increased by 20 percent.
Nearby Baltimore, where murder has been on the upsurge since its police force was demonized by the left and the Obama Justice Department, set an all-time record for homicides per capita. New York City, where the homicide number hit a half-century low just six years ago, showed an increase in 2019.
What kinds of “disputes” are increasingly being “resolved” by “the use of firearms”? The Post cites “battles over turf.” The paper is too delicate to acknowledge the relationship between these “turf battles” and drug dealing. To do so would undercut the mantra of leftists and many libertarians that drug dealing is inherently non-violent.
The closest the Post comes to acknowledging the relationship between drug dealing and homicide is a quote from D.C.’s embattled police chief Peter Newsham. He says that many of the city’s homicide victims are “living very high-risk life styles.” He’s not talking about sky diving.
After one homicide, Newsham was heard to say that he didn’t see an end to the spree of shootings any time soon. He later attributed this moment of candor to the emotional toll of visiting so many homicide scenes in such a short time.
Newsham followed up with another moment of candor. He noted that the city is not “appropriately dealing with [repeat offenders] when we get them the first time.” This is the under-incarceration problem that we have discussed many times on Power Line.
The problem, then, probably isn’t so much an increase in the propensity of bad people to use guns to resolve disputes. Rather, it’s an increase in the number of bad people who are on the street and therefore able to use guns.
Apologists for lenient criminal justice policies told the Post that we shouldn’t be alarmed. They noted that homicide rates are nowhere near the levels of 30 years ago.
But those were the levels that prompted the tough criminal sentencing policies that helped produce the drastic reduction in homicide rates. Predictably, the retreat from those policies seems to be producing an increase in homicides.
In other words, leftists and some libertarians are using the fruits of tough sentencing policies, coupled with proactive policing policies, to downplay the spike in homicides that the retreat from these policies seems to be producing.
The sky-high homicide rates of the 1980s were associated with the crack cocaine epidemic, as one of the Post’s sources acknowledges. So, again, we see the relationship between drug dealing and crime. Yet, leftists and many libertarians want leniency for drug dealers and seek relief, in particular, for dealers of crack, claiming that traffickers in this drug have been singled out for race-based reasons.
And why not? “Turf wars” over drug dealing aren’t occurring in their neighborhoods. Neither are the resulting homicides.
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