Police in some cities are facing a sharp rise in violent crime amid a debate over the role of police and calls to reduce police budgets. Some cities are on track for their most violent summers in years, the Wall Street Journal reports. Milwaukee homicides are up 37 percent, on pace to break the 1991 record of 167. Homicides in Chicago are ahead of 2016, the city’s highest tally since 1996. In New York and Los Angeles, where murders have fallen for years, killings this year are up 23 percent and 11.6 percent respectively. Kansas City has recorded 99 killings, far outpacing any record for the first six months of the year. Police departments already face budget cuts resulting from falling tax revenues from lockdowns. Community groups acknowledge the crime increase but say aggressive policing shouldn’t come at the expense of broader reform.
Houston’s Art Acevedo, head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said cities are slashing police budgets without plans to replace police functions. Officials say months of lockdown, rising unemployment, more guns on the street and protests over the George Floyd killing helped create conditions for more violence. Officials say some police are making fewer petty crime arrests that give them a higher profile, hoping to quell tensions. “It is more dangerous to become a police officer,” said Ray Kelly, New York City’s former police commissioner. “What you see is a backing away.” New York disbanded its anticrime unit of plainclothes officers, part of a $1 billion reduction in the police budget. More officers than usual are retiring. Between May 25 and July 3, 503 New York officers filed for retirement, compared with 287 in 2019. Barry Friedman of The Policing Project at New York University law school, worries that police will respond to the rise in violent crime with the kind of rough tactics that make people distrustful of them.