beginning excerpt:

A group of 34 of America’s biggest cities suffered a 30 percent total increase in homicides in 2020, according to a new survey published Monday, with police in four Midwestern cities reporting increases of more than 60 percent over 2019.

In Milwaukee, homicides rose from 97 to 189, a 95 percent increase. In Louisville, homicides increased from 90 to 173, a 92 percent increase. Of the 34 cities surveyed by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, a project of the D.C.-based Council on Criminal Justice, only four — Raleigh, N.C.; Baltimore; St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Virginia Beach — saw declines in 2020.

The two epochal events of 2020 — the coronavirus pandemic and the nationwide protests over police violence — were likely factors in the increase in slayings, two of the report’s authors said. The pandemic limited proactive anti-crime strategies by both police and social workers, commission director Thomas Abt said, and reduced focus on urban hot spots known to be large sources of violence.

And the drastic uptick in violence beginning in June, immediately after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, paralleled a similar uptick in 2016 after protests against police use of force erupted, said criminologist Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

“The timing is really quite compelling,” Rosenfeld said. “It does suggest there is some sort of correlation between” police violence and increased civilian homicides.

Read the report: ‘Pandemic, Unrest, Crime, and Violence in U.S. Cities: 2020 Year-End Update’

Aggravated assaults rose, but only by about 6 percent, the study found. A separate survey of 129 police departments by the Police Executive Research Forum found that among agencies with more than 250 officers, more than 80 percent reported a rise in nonfatal shootings last year. Overall, the 129 departments also reported a 39 percent increase in homicides involving guns [....]

highway robbery in San Francisco: