When the lead author of the 1619 Project said that the American people are making too much of the historic surge in violent crime, MSNBC host Joy Reid agreed, saying that none of her friends had been affected.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, who just received tenure at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, began the conversation by chalking up national concerns about the mounting death tolls to media-induced hysteria. She tweeted an ABC News story that number of Americans seeing “crime as an extremely serious problem in the United States is at a more than 20-year high” and added:
Given that actual crime is not at or near a 20-year high, not even close to it, where do you imagine these perceptions have come from? Media cannot help itself.
Late Friday afternoon Joy Reid, the host of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” responded:
Solid inquiry. I’ve seen more TV stories about crime than the actual anecdotes from friends in NYC or other big cities bear out. I mean summer is when crime always goes up and Shark Week happens perennially, despite the rarity of actual shark attacks. But it’s … odd for sure.
While not all crimes are up, the most violent form of crime — murder — is, indeed, at its highest level in more than 20 years. Both the total number of homicides, as well as the rate of increase year-on-year, reached a decades-long peak in 2020.
“If current estimates prove accurate, 2020 witnessed the largest single-year increase in homicides in U.S. history, and 2021 is on pace to see a jump an even higher jump,” reported New York Magazine on Thursday, the day before their Twitter exchange. The BBC analyzed statistics from the FBI and found the number of murders in 2020 exceeded those of any year this century. “That amounts to more than 20,000 murders in a year for the first time since 1995, up from about 16,000 in 2019,” according to left-of-center Vox.com. A criminal justice expert, John Roman, told Vox that last year represents “the largest increase in violence we’ve seen since 1960, when we started collecting formal crime statistics” at NORC at the University of Chicago.
Worse yet, 2021 is shaping up to break last year’s record in many major cities. Last month, the New York Times reported, “With Homicides Rising, Cities Brace for a Violent Summer.” The Times analyzed analyzed first quarter data of crime in 2021 and saw that murders had increased 18%. Reporters noted that “[t]he F.B.I. does not release full statistics until September, but homicide rates in large cities were up more than 30 percent on average last year, and up another 24 percent for the beginning of this year, according to criminologists.”
The rising crime rate threatens residents of New York City, whether or not Reid’s friends inform her of the danger. Murders year-to-date have soared by 50% over two years, according to statistic from the NYPD — 12% since last year. Rapes in the Big Apple have risen 11% in two years, and 5% since 2020. It’s true that overall total crime numbers have fallen by just under 1% since last year, due to the large reduction in burglaries last year.
What’s true of New York City holds true nationally in this case. “As of May 2021, homicides in Philadelphia were up 28% over 2020,” reported The Baltimore Sun. “Baltimore will either match last year’s numbers or have an increase that is much lower than the national average,” it seemed to boast.
All in all, former crime analyst Jeff Asher of the New Orleans Police Department told the Times, “We are still looking at a horrific increase in violence.”
Meanwhile, there were 57 unprovoked shark bites globally in 2020, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File. Given the scope and magnitude of the U.S. murder epidemic, it seems a startlingly inexact comparison.
Reid’s friend may not have informed her of these statistics, which are publicly available to the point of becoming ubiquitous. But if she as a journalist cannot find them, as Joe Biden recently told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Reid may be “in the wrong business.”
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