Crime dropping off

Maybe it's not so much that crime is dropping, but that police are not busting people for petty bullshit.

Experts say the sudden crime decline is probably tied to the growing number of stay-at-home orders, which have been issued in more than 20 states and now cover a majority of Americans.

“So many people are sheltering in place, crimes of opportunities are dropping,” John MacDonald, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “There are fewer potential victims out there.”

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San Francisco data showed the biggest drop in crime reports, which fell 42 percent during the week of March 16. That’s when the city became the first metropolis in the United States to force residents to “shelter at their place of residence.”

Thefts dropped by 60 percent to 231 incidents that week. San Francisco police said they are focused on keeping thieves away from shuttered store-fronts, and have cops out patrolling shopping strips. “With fewer people out in public, there is the potential for closed businesses to be victimized by smash and grab type crimes,” said a department spokesman, Officer Robert Rueca.

The police department also began reducing low-level arrests and replacing them with tickets after San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju sent a letter to the city’s Police Chief William Scott, five days before the stay-at-home mandate took effect, imploring officers to “reduce all unnecessary contact with the community.”

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Two weeks later, police departments around the country—from Philadelphia to Fort Worth, Texas—have directed cops to stop arresting people for low-level crimes.

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The Marshall Project found that the number of shootings [in Chicago] dropped by 50 percent over a four day-period last week compared to the week before. Then on Wednesday, the Chicago Sun Times reported that shootings were rising again; 12 people were shot in one day alone.

Andy Papachristos, a Northwestern University sociologist specializing in gun violence, said the pandemic won’t slow down the shootings, which he says are spurred by entrenched poverty. “Climate change and infectious disease are not violence prevention strategies,” Papachristos said. “Nothing changes with shelter-in-place. Those that are involved in gun violence are already high-risk in every dimension imaginable: health, housing, employment, homelessness.”

  The Marshall Project

Maybe we could think about that.