“President Donald Trump claims that the “anti-police crusade…has led to a “shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.” But the evidence that America is experiencing a major crime wave is mixed at best. Official national crime statistics, compiled by the FBI, are generally published with over a year’s delay, so researchers have to turn to other sources. David Abrams of the University of Pennsylvania pulls together data from some two dozen major cities on citycrimestats.com. His figures show that so far this year crime is actually down by around 10% compared with the same period in 2015-19.” - Fears that America is experiencing a serious crime wave are overblown. The Economist August 1, 2020
Around half the cities* on citycrimestats.com did experience a spike in crime in early June coinciding with the peak of the George Floyd protests:
A brief but huge increase in non-residential burglary was mostly responsible for the spike in crime, as in looting of retail stores.
But things settled down quickly except for a few cities, such as Chicago.
Let’s keep working on reducing crime rates even more. And how do we do that? In part, by hiring more police and investing in better police training. To quote one study: "the likelihood of an immediate arrest and the likelihood that a suspect will be named by a victim or witness both increase as response time becomes faster… [We estimate] hiring an additional response officer would generate a benefit, in terms of future crime prevented, equivalent to 170% of her payroll cost” (Vidal and Kirchmaier, 2017).
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* The citycrimestats.com chart generator didn’t allow me to enter more than nine cities, so the non-residential burglary chart doesn’t include a few cities that also experienced crime spikes. And of the nine cities I entered, the website only had complete data on total incidents for six cities.
Reference:
Jordi Blanes i Vidal, Tom Kirchmaier, The Effect of Police Response Time on Crime Clearance Rates, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 85, Issue 2, April 2018, Pages 855–891, https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdx044