AP: Weird, There Are Fewer Cops and People Are Having to Wait for Life-Saving Assistance.
There Can Only Be One Explanation: The Shortages in Police Must be Due to... COVID

Nailed it, AP. It's covid -- not your own campaigning to "Defund the Police," and painting targets on cops' backs so that anyone who can retire, has retired.

Oh, I forgot: It's not just covid.

It's also due to the "tight labor market" caused by Biden's Miracle Economy. See, cops left policing to pursue career opportunities in Green Technologies, I guess.

The AP briefly alludes to "disillusionment" following George Floyd's murder. For some reason -- I'll leave it to you to figure out why -- they refuse to mention the "Defund the Police" movement, and instead use the bizarre word-replacement, "calls to divest from policing."

They just can't bear to say "Defund the Police" caused this, so they come up with other words to euphemize it.

And then they turn to blaming the lack of cops on covid and Biden's Super Economy instead of themselves.

The AP then also denies that the George Floyd riots and the police pullback demanded by the AP and their leftwing pals had anything to do with the soaring crime rates.

Those, too, are caused by... covid.

Five years after Brian Spaulding's parents found him fatally shot in the home he shared with roommates, his slaying remains a mystery that seems increasingly unlikely to be solved as Portland, Oregon, police confront a spike in killings and more than 100 officer vacancies.

The detective assigned to investigate the death of Spaulding -- a chiropractic assistant who didn't do drugs, wasn't in a gang and lived close to the house where he was born -- left in 2020 in a wave of retirements and the detective assigned to it now is swamped with fresh cases after Portland's homicide rate surged 207% since 2019.

"To us, it's not a cold case," said George Spaulding, who has his son's signature tattooed on his arm. "We're not dissatisfied with the Police Bureau because I think they're doing the best they can," he said. "They are just overwhelmed. It's insane."

From Philadelphia to Portland to Los Angeles, killings and gun violence are rising at the same time officers worn out by the pandemic and disillusioned over the calls to divest from policing that followed George Floyd's murder are quitting or retiring faster than they can be replaced.

Departments are scrambling to recruit in a tight labor market and also rethinking what services they can provide and what role police should play in their communities. Many have shifted veteran officers to patrol, breaking up specialized teams built over decades in order to keep up with 911 calls.

Wow, so many reasons for the huge decline in police! With so many reasons to choose from, it would be irresponsible to single any one of them out as the main cause of blame!

"We're getting more calls for service and there are fewer people to answer them," said Philadelphia Police spokesperson Eric Gripp, whose department has been rotating employees from specialty units for short assignments to increase patrols. "This isn't just an issue in Philadelphia. Departments all over are down and recruitment has been difficult."

Why would recruitment be difficult? It used to be very hard to get a job as a cop, because there were so many applicants.

Why is it so hard now?

Just... covid and Biden's Miracle Non-Recessionary Economy, huh?

Los Angeles, which is down more than 650 officers from its pre-pandemic staffing level, shuttered its animal cruelty unit and downsized its human trafficking, narcotics and gun details and reduced its homeless outreach teams by 80%. Seattle recently announced $2 million in hiring bonuses and benefits to lure recruits amid a critical officer shortage that has hampered the investigation of serious crimes.

The pinch has led some cities to experiment to reduce strain on patrol officers.

Portland recently added unarmed "public support specialists" to take reports on things like vehicle break-ins and bike thefts, and in San Diego, licensed psychiatric clinicians go to mental health calls with officers.

"For me, I wonder, what the profession is going to be 20 years from now if we're having these challenges on a nationwide scale. Are we going to be able to recruit enough people to serve our cities?" asked Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell, whose force has lost 237 sworn officers through retirements or resignations since 2020.

Well, covid won't be a problem in 20 years, and one assumes Biden's Miracle Economy will have abated, so presumably, recruiting will be back up.

Right?

Portland logged a record 89 homicides last year -- roughly three times its historical average -- and is on pace to top that this year after already tallying more than 50.

Hey that's another possible factor -- now that leftwing mayors and Soros prosecutors have decriminalized crime and set all the criminals free, crime i soaring, and cops can't make a difference, even if they were staffed at their previous levels.

Maybe that accounts for the death-spiral causing them to quit: Their jobs consist of nothing but arresting the same people only to see them put back out on the street by a leftwing mayor and Soros DA within hours.

Nah. Probably just "worn out from the pandemic" and getting great jobs building Tesla charging stations.

A report completed for the city last month by the California Partnership for Safe Communities found it had the largest homicide rate increase among similarly sized cities and 75% of homicides in 2020 were by gun. The city has seen nearly 800 shootings this year.

That follows a national trend. While non-violent crime decreased during the pandemic, the murder rate increased nearly 30% in 2020 and the rate of assaults went up 10%, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Ah, that's bullshit. Non-violent crime increased even more -- people just stopped reporting it, because cops stopped doing anything about it.

Crime has been decriminalized. You have to bother the police to even get them to take an interest in major crimes, let alone thefts.

It's unclear what's driving the surge...

It's "unclear." It's obviously due to the agenda we've been pushing for years and the leftwing Soros government we promote, so we'll say "it's unclear."

But, that said, all this crime is due to covid and guns.

...but COVID-19 created huge social disruption and upended government and community support systems. Gun sales also spiked during the pandemic.

Legal gun sales spiked? Oh, and it's... legal guns being used in these gangbanger murders, huh?

Experts say widely cited theories that violent crime is worse in places that changed policing tactics in the wake of protests over Floyd's murder don't bear out. Violent crime has increased in red and blue communities alike, regardless of their approach.

What about the experts who say those theories are accurate? Are they going to get any press, or just the leftwing hacks who push your Soros Ideology?

It goes on for a bit, claiming that crime rose because of covid and then... remained high even post covid because of covid.

And, I guess-- also because of Biden's Miracle Economy? Shouldn't a Miracle Economy result in lower crime, as every other hot economy in history has resulted?

Scott Alexander took a look at the "experts" denying the obvious -- that the reason crime and especially murder spiked just after the George Floyd riots was, get this, because of the George Floyd riots, and the left's rush to decriminalize crime and demonize police for policing -- and found these "Experts" to be Reality Deniers.

What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?

In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback.

Note right there, in that chart, the debunking of the claim by "experts" in the AP article that small towns were experiencing the same increase in crime as large cities -- um, no.

Is "double" the same? It's also a sharper increase in cities of 250,000 or more.

Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they'd read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike.

Huh, isn't that strange, the AP just claimed all that -- it's because of 1, covid, or 2, "no one knows."

I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here's why:

Timing

When exactly did the spike start? The nation shut down for the pandemic in mid-March 2020, but the BLM protests didn't start until after George Floyd's death in late May 2020. So did the homicide spike start in March, or May?

Let's check in with the Council on Criminal Justice:

It very clearly started in late May, not mid-March. The months of March, April, and early May had the same number of homicides as usual.

The only "source" which dissents with this is a chart from the Intercept, which cherry-picks which cities to count and which to exclude - certainly to produce the numbers their Soros Ideology dictates.

Alexander notes that in the cities which bought in hardest to the George Floyd Martyr narrative, the spike in May -- not March, May -- crimes in the most pronounced.

In NYC, for example:

Same for Chicago.
So if you want to cherry-pick cities, Intercept...

Read the whole thing. It's a great piece.

But the AP cites "the experts" who say that a crime spike that clearly started in late May, 2020 -- just after the George Floyd riots and police pullback -- actually started in March or earlier.

Disgusting. Disgusting.

If this is the response of the city dwellers -- to deny their own responsibility for the crime they've unleashed on themselves -- then let the cities die.

posted by Ace at 01:19 PM

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