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With three weeks remaining in the year, 12 major U.S. cities have seen a record number of homicides in 2021, continuing the upward trend from a year earlier.
The Trends Journal said in March that when politicians lock down economies to fight the COVID WAR, an increase in crime is nearly certain. (SEE: “CRIME ON THE RISE DURING THE GREAT LOCKDOWN.”)
ABC News reported that Philadelphia and Chicago have both seen jumps in homicides. Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million, saw 521 homicides as of 6 December, which is higher than the country’s most populous cities, New York and Los Angeles.
Chicago, which always has a high homicide rate, saw a three percent increase from 2020. The city had 739 homicides.
“Much of what we believe contributed to the spike in homicides and shootings in 2020 has continued into 2021,” Roseanna Ander, the executive director of the UChicago Crime Lab told Axios. “The population most at risk for gun violence involvement continues to live through an economic crisis and mental health crisis exacerbated by the pandemic.”
Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; St Paul, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Tucson, Arizona; Toledo, Ohio; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Austin, Texas; Rochester, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico also had their deadliest years on record, ABC News reported.
The report pointed out that five of the cities mentioned topped benchmarks set in 2020 and that Milwaukee and Minneapolis are both approaching a historic number of killings.
Frank Umbrino, a police captain in Rochester, New York, said the community has to get “fed up” with the number.
“We’re extremely frustrated,” he said, according to ABC. “It has to stop. I mean, it’s worse than a war zone around here lately.”
Robert Boyce, a retired chief of detectives for the New York Police Department, said one of the reasons for the jump in killings is likely the fact that nobody is getting arrested and jailed for lesser crimes.
“People are getting picked up for gun possession and they’re just let out over and over again,” he told the network. The report said police departments are finding it challenging to fill open positions due the COVID-19 outbreak.
The FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report identified a 30 percent increase in homicides in 2020, which represented the biggest single-year jump in six decades.
Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, told CNN that the “pandemic, like community gun violence, concentrates among the poorest and most disenfranchised people.”
“So those communities are doubly impacted, not only by COVID-19, but by gun violence,” he said.
Abt also said the fallout from George Floyd’s killing while in police custody has led to a level of mistrust between the public and police.
“We’re seeing police pulling back in some cities from some of their discretionary law enforcement activities and we’re also seeing communities pulling back from their ongoing collaboration and cooperation with police,” he said. “When you have that divide between cops and communities, violence tends to go up.”
TREND FORECAST: As Gerald Celente has long noted, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”
Again, we had forecast when the COVID War began in 2020 that the worst is not only yet to come, it will become a way of life. Gangs will grow in power as well. Expect thefts, robberies, and violent crimes all to increase now and when the shut-ins end.