This article is struggling and stretching to connect historical dots and speculate about potential causes, while ignoring the most likely causes, which are recent societal/political trends. As long as we’re exchanging opinions, to me it seems pretty clear that the increase in murders is coming off the revolving door of restorative justice over the last decade, which removes accountability for criminals, therefore inducing crime instead of deterring it. And of course we just spent an entire year demonizing all police officers and the entire practice for very rare unjust police/involved deaths, and in the process enacted arbitrary budget cuts to police departments. Look at what Mayor London Breed of SF just announced yesterday - redistributing $120m in taxpayers’ hard-earned money away from law enforcement and towards a slush fund for “black communities”, in one of the most crime-ridden and unsafe cities in the US (https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...).

In other news, Minneapolis is re-funding their police department and no one’s talking about it: https://www.allsides.com/blog/minneapolis-voted-fund-police-...