Almost like keeping them home for two years wasn't the best idea.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth...
The list goes on. Not mentioned above is the indisputable fact in crime statistics that a very small percentage of the population commits a disproportionately large amount of the crime, especially violent crimes. If you put 2 and 2 together, and remind yourself that the criminal reforms removed in NYS the dangerousness consideration for bail, it's pretty obvious that repeat criminals are allowed to go on sprees. It's bearing out every day in headlines, and the breakdown of trust in the society is because quite simply: you're rubbing shoulders with violent and unhinged people on a daily basis in NYC.
I'll take my down votes with glee here. That's the Zeitgeist : denial by the current crop of people in power. And the pendulum will swing back in a few years, as it does.
But the more salient one probably is the social climate of rapidly increasing public distrust, desperation, not giving a shit about each other in society, the zeitgeist as it were. These kinds of wooly vague things do really matter, you know.
For example:
Do you remember the 2004 northeastern blackout? Of course you do. A third the US/Canada population was without power for a day or two. Nothing terrible happened, no rioting or anything. A lot of observers were amused, relieved by this, because the last big NYC metro area blackouts in the 1970s immediately triggered severe rioting.
And clearly, the zeitgeist was quite different in 2004 than in the "End of Growth" supply-crunched 1970s.
Considering how dramatically the national mood was shifted by the pandemic, I would not actually be surprised if the rise in crime was largely caused by that.
Another example: Did you know violent crime and rioting are significantly more common in the summer than winter? A statistical fact that goes back a long, long time.
I advise not being so quick to dismiss the effects of such things, even if they seem more abstract and less simple to understand. The world isn't simple.
Keeping them at home obviously had/has its challenges. And if we had to go through this again, perhaps there are ways to improve - but to offer only the snark "maybe it wasn't the best idea" is neither very helpful nor insightful.