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Yes they do claim it for that purpose. Look at the rhetoric around the preppers, the bitcoin scammers, the gold buyers, and all those zerohedge types: The collapse is coming, we are going to use it to take control.
Do you think the spike in crime is driven by the pandemic? A GLOBAL pandemic? Do you think there is a spike in crime in other nations as well? Or do you think that maybe, just maybe, a radical political movement casting all law enforcement officers as bigoted predators may have more to do with it?
I vote Democratic, have my whole life, so I can bash the GOP all day long, but acting as if the incredibly massive, and corporate sponsored "Defund the Police" movement hasn't had an impact on crime is simply irrational and not supported by data. The spike in crime in US cities has not been universal, and the data clearly shows the cities which cut police budgets and predictably lost officers were the worst hit.
Well, see, that's the subtle part. Is there really a crisis-level crime wave (in the US)? There was a sharp decrease in crime in the initial months after lockdowns went into affect, but a spike in gun purchases. As such, homicides, which in the US are overwhelmingly committed with guns, are definitely up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rat...
But it's not anywhere near the historic rates of the '70s. You won't know that from reading the "violent crime collapse porn", which likes to point to absolute numbers (Most murders in 25 years!) while ignoring population and other factors.
So my contention is that the collapse has been embraced by the reactionary Law and Order types to sow fear and uncertainty. This is partly has a pushback against the attempts to reform police and partly as a way to push for economic austerity as well as a return to racist criminal justice policies of the 80s.
I couldn't find month-by-month numbers quickly for some of the cities in that article like Chicago or NYC, but Baltimore has some: https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020
Interestingly there, the biggest spike during 2020 happened in May 2020, so generally before the George Floyd killing and protests and "defund the police" movement.
The coarse yearly numbers tell us these crimes have increased, they don't let us see how they play out with regard to the different things that changed in 2020.
"It was worse in the 70s" is "the climate is always changing"-level deflection.
"It was worse in the 70s" is not a compelling argument for a political platform - having nothing meaningful to say in response to new events is exactly what would help "tough on crime" un-nuanced crackdown politicians elected.
Here are some of those issues.
- Bringing back the plainclothes police unit that was famously disbanded last summer.
- Deploy more police to poor neighborhoods.
- Bring back a variation of stop and frisk (stop, ask questions and frisk).
Or the correlation/causation fallacy of assuming that new gun purchases (primarily in the suburbs) drove the spike in murders because it's politically inconvenient to assume significant departures of police officers in cities like Minneapolis might be a more potent correlating event to investigate?
50% of the gun murder victims in the USA are Black, and the vast majority of these murders (like all murders in the US) involve a perpetrator matching the ethnicity of the victim. The human beings who live in these neighborhoods feel like their safety has "collapsed", and they certainly aren't right wing reactionaries. They just don't want every summer holiday weekend to involve kids getting shot in crossfire between rival gangs. The polling data reveals this rather markedly.
Here's a Gallup poll (a few months after George Floyd's murder by Derek Chauvin) which shows that 81% of Black Americans want the police presence in their community to remain the same or be increased.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
It's almost as if the ivory tower, academic egghead activists who CLAIM to represent Black Americans weren't elected and shouldn't be viewed as if they were.
We ALSO shouldn't ignore that behind the black murder rate is a pre-defund-the-police failure of the police, as a whole, to prioritize crimes against black victims in the same way they do against white victims.
"Get rid of police" can be a naive reaction to the newly-enabled broader exposure of police racism (violently racist cops are no new surprise to minorities!) at the same time as "actually, the police are good" can be a naive counter-reaction.
(And there are some very good ideas in the details of the general "defund" proposals - sending non-lethally-armed responders to handle non-violent interactions or traffic stops, say, is a good way to avoid needless escalation into someone's death, while in no way requiring us to get rid of cops that would investigate shootings.)
Starting point for an example: "Reported violent crime rate in the United States from 1990 to 2019" -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
"The number of homicides in 2020 compared to 2019 rose by 25%, according to an FBI preliminary report. That represents the largest jump since the agency started releasing annual homicide figures in the 1960s."
https://www.denverpost.com/denver-homicides/ (Murders increased sharply in 2020) https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/07/27/violent-crime-surge... https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/bca/bca-divisions/mnjis/Documen... https://www.news10.com/news/ny-news/nypd-shootings-up-166-fu... (shootings up 166%, totally not a big deal according to you)
Like I always tell climate deniers, it's not the temperature, it's the rate of change that's the problem. The Earth was far hotter in the time of the dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem that it's getting hotter now. You sound like them, but with crime instead of climate.
And 2019-2020 saw the sharpest increase in murders since the FBI began collecting stats in the 60s according to this article from CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/29/us/homicide-rise-us-report/in...
Since the article doesn't support your thesis, feel free to denounce it as right wing propaganda, like you've done elsewhere in this thread. That's totally what CNN and the AP are known for, right?
While drug related crimes have gone down, it’s likely that criminalized drug behavior has actually gone up but just moved off the streets into homes. Along with decreased enforcement in light of the current cop hatred, this all means that reported crimes are down but criminal behavior may actually be up.
The entire criminalization of drugs was invented by the Nixon White House as a pretext to oppress black people and “hippies”. There are official tapes and transcripts where it’s all described in great detail so this isn’t a conspiracy theory.
The war on drugs had the side effect of obliterating the credibility of the police. Because its motivations were so blatant and its punishments so harsh, the greater public (yes this includes white people) see the police as causing more problems than they solve. In my city, murder clearance rates are well below 50% because nobody talks to the cops. They’re not going to solve any more of them by having more cops on the street; we have to think about policing differently because the war on drugs has distorted it beyond recognition.
When I've looked into this in the past, almost everything points to an alleged quote from John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's advisors, with Dan Baum in 1994. The alleged quote wasn't published in Baum's 1996 book and only later appeared in 2016 for an article in Harper's Bazaar, 16 years after Ehrlichman's death. On its own it never seemed like compelling evidence, especially as Ehrlichman was dead when the quote was first published.
Are there any other sources you are familiar with?