From [HERE] There’s been a wave of media coverage this summer about an increase in homicides and crime across the United States. However according to FBI data crime is actually down and while murders are up, much of the coverage is overblown and exaggerated relative to crime rates in the 1990’s.

After decades of a primarily downward trend in the overall number of people killed, crime experts say they expect 2020 will mark the biggest single-year national jump in homicides since national crime statistics began to be released in the 1960s.

A preliminary government estimate shows a 25% single-year increase in killings in 2020. In some larger cities, the number of homicides has remained higher than usual through the early months of 2021.

While official national FBI crime data will not be released for months, some trends are clear. The rise in homicides likely translated into an additional 4,000 to 5,000 people killed across the country compared with the year before, according to early estimates.

And yet, even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides, Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.

New York City saw more than 2,200 killings in a single year in 1990, compared with 468 last year, according to city data. In the bigger picture, that’s a nearly 80% decrease.

Los Angeles saw more than 1,000 homicides a year in the early 1990s, compared with fewer than 350 last year.

But what’s happening with homicides is not part of some broader “crime wave.” In fact, many crimes, from larcenies to robberies to rape, dropped during the pandemic, and continued to fall during the first few months of 2021.

“Crime” is not surging. Even the broader category of “violent crime” only increased about 3% last year, according to the preliminary FBI data from a large subset of cities. It’s homicide in particular that has increased, even as other crimes fell.

Some police officials and their allies have asserted that last summer’s big, volatile protests against police violence diverted police resources and attention away from their normal patrols, and have suggested that demoralized, angry police officers might be less proactive or effective in dealing with violent crime.

But Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who writes extensively about homicide trends, examined 60 cities and found no correlation between the number of Black Lives Matter protests, and the size of a city’s homicide increase.

Rosenfeld cautioned that any policing-focused explanation for the homicide increase needed to explain why the change would have only affected serious and deadly violence.

“Most crime is down, including most felony, serious crime,” he said. “If the de-policing argument is correct, why did it only affect an uptick in violence and not other street crime?”

Attempting to link changes in how police operated to the political protests after George Floyd’s murder also made less sense than looking at the sweeping disruptions in operations due to Covid-19, he argued.

“If there has been substantial de-policing, suspect number one is the pandemic,” he said. While elevated homicide rates had continued into early 2021 in some cities, Rosenfeld added, the increase already appeared to be slowing.

“I do not expect homicide rates to reach the levels this coming summer that they were at last summer,” he said.

The great phreedom fighter Dr. Amos Wilson explained “The American Dilemma

In its oppression of Black America, White America faces a major dilemma. The White ruling class seeks to project a self-image and public image which are liberal and nonviolent. It wishes to assume the appearance of being faithfully committed to protecting the constitutional and civil rights guarantees of all residents — regardless of race, color, creed, or condition of previous servitude — and to be perceived by them as inherently humane. At the same time the ruling class wishes to retain its power to rule, to maintain its tremendous wealth, power, hegemony and privileges. Thus it is confronted with a major contradiction: it cannot actualize its projected image and commitments without destroying the bases of its identity and power. Since this class is not committed to its own destruction we must logically infer that its projected self-image, public image, and sociopolitical commitments are false and hypocritical. Social equality and privilege across classes and ethnocultural groups cannot exist simultaneous with White American sociopolitical and economic dominance. Class privilege and advantage require the subordination of other classes and groups. For these reasons, American institutions operate in opposition to their publicized missions when dealing with the underclasses and subordinated groups. Consequently, the major social institutions which seek to project an image of objectivity and neutrality, in actuality operate in the oppressive interests of the society's ruling groups and against the interests of its subordinate groups.

In sum, the ruling groups cannot maintain their hegemony and sustain socioeconomic inequality, which are the foundations of their regency, without perverting the ostensible missions of the society's sociopolitical institutions and utilizing them as instruments of oppression. In America this perversion must take place while the ruling groups hide their oppressive faces behind the seductive facade of democracy, liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

Hence, when we look at major American institutions relative to African Americans, we observe the following reversals: the economic system keeps them poor; the criminal justice system mediates injustice; the educational establishment creates ignorance and intellectual incompetence; the family institution breeds broken homes and "illegitimate" children; the health and welfare system catalyzes sickness and administers health-care neglect (the life-span of African Americans is actually decreasing); and the religious institutions support the immorality of racial injustice. These institutions are designed to deceive, fashioned to seem ameliorative while actually aiding and abetting the injurious exploitation of the populations they are supposedly commissioned to help. Paradoxically, they must appear to uplift while in reality maintain, and if necessary, intensify suppression.

In fact, their apparent uplifting efforts must in actuality be disguised forms of oppression and annihilation. Their ameliorative ideology and practice must be endemically opposed to the interests of the subordinate classes and groups while appearing otherwise.

In the context of the American dilemma the socioeconomic immobilization and destruction of the African American population must occur most intensely at the very time when a minuscule segment of that population appears to be garnering increased social and political status, and when a very substantial percentage of African Americans are deceived into thinking that such increasing status is indicative of "Black progress." Racist agendas must be pressed while the dominant White groups for the most part, appear to be less overtly racist in attitude and behavior. Thus, if necessary, African American genocide must occur during the time the ruling segments of the White American citizenry seem to be relatively most committed to African American survival, upliftment, complete social, political and economic assimilation into the mythical "American mainstream."

Hence the American ruling class dilemma: How must the required oppression, and if need be, genocidal elimination of African Americans and African peoples, be accomplished by the ruling class without it appearing to have instigated and perpetuated their oppression and elimination? How can African Americans be made to suffer negation of their political, economic, social, and albeit, their biological existence, without that negation appearing to be the work of the collective White community and its allied hosts?

Practical answers to these questions require that the continuing oppression and/or genocidal annihilation of the African American population by White America be accomplished through deliberate psychopolitical subterfuge, or through use of the collective ego defensive method of unconsciously programming and executing African American oppression and annihilation while consciously appearing not to do otherwise. In actuality, the collective White ego complex utilizes both methods.

Through the use of projection, reaction formation, rationalization and other collective ego defenses, White America magically makes its genocidal destruction of the African American community appear to be the result of African American self-destruction. In reaction formation the individual, and in this instance, a collectivity, represses and retains in the subconscious undesirable impulses and attitudes, and assumes personally conscious and public attitudes and behaviors diametrically opposed to those unconscious orientations. In the practice of rationalization the individual or the collectivity, in order to prevent the conscious and public revelation and the taking of responsibility for unacceptable motives, concocts reasons which superficially appear to be "true" while not indeed being so. Rationalization is perhaps the most frequently used psycho-dynamic mechanism of reality distortion. Through these collective ego defense mechanisms the social, political, economic, moral and physical demise of Black America is made to appear in the collective mind of White America to be the suicidal result of alleged African American predispositions, innate inabilities, disabilities, incompetencies, venalities, and a host of other personality and collective flaws that have nothing to do with White American oppression. [MORE]