AMERICA'S RISING CRIME

Democrats feel ripple effects as crime waves swirl

- Nirmal Ghosh

W/GIt is the kind of Twitter alert that is almost par for the course on daily basis in any city in the US.

"ARMED CARJACKING WAGON TAKEN... (Police Department) on scene investigating an armed carjacking with an individual having their Mercedes G-Wagon taken by two individuals armed with a gun." America is in the midst of a crime problem which over the years appears to come in waves.

But it has a policing problem too.

And both are political problems, mostly for President Joe Biden's Democratic Party, which is regularly accused by the Republicans of being soft on crime and not supporting the police enough.

Crime in the United States is complicated, involving the intersection of, among other factors, poverty, drugs, guns, gangs and race. Data can be both flawed and misleading; generalising in a country so large and diverse risks missing critical nuances. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discourages ranking locations and making comparisons, since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors.

"The only commonalities across the states are the extraordinary levels of interpersonal violence, the extraordinary incarceration rate, the absence of a viable social safety net in most places, and the nearly unfettered access to firearms for much of the population," Dr Jeffrey Fagan, professor at Columbia Law School and expert on policing, crime, gun control and race, told The Straits Times.

According to the newest report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a think-tank, the number of homicides in 27 American cities that publicly report homicide data monthly, was down 4 per cent from 2021, from 5570 homicides in 2021 to 5328 in 2022..