When law enforcement leaders convened one October day, it was to draw attention to the alarming rise in violent crime in cities across the U.S. They announced a new report, “A Gathering Storm,” which warned that FBI crime stats had “confirmed our concerns and those of police chiefs that violent crime had dramatically risen,” and “that this trend was ... expanding into other parts of the country.”
However, this uptick in crime happened within only one year, which does not a trend make. The report notes this in its foreword:
There are some in both academia and government who believe these increases in violent crime may represent just a blip and that overall crime is still relatively low. They argue that before we make rash conclusions we should wait and see if the violent crime rate continues to increase over time. This thinking is faulty. It would be like having a pandemic flu outbreak in a number of cities, but waiting to see if it spreads to other cites before acting. Importantly, for many police chiefs, mayors and others living in dangerous communities, they do not have the luxury to “see what happens.” The time to act is now.
You might be thinking that this meeting was the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference held last October, where FBI Director James Comey implied that rising crime was the result of a “Ferguson effect.” It wasn’t. The “Gathering Storm” convening happened 10 years ago, when police chiefs were sounding the same tocsins about new crime waves overtaking U.S. cities that are often heard today.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/crime/2...rose-in-2015/487259/]
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