HeartDoc Andrew wrote:
> Michael Ejercito wrote:
>
>> https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/1him6f9/covid19_lockdowns_unleashed_a_wave_of_murder/
>>
>>
>> COVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder
>> Researchers find that pandemic policies sparked a wave of violent crime.
>> J.D. Tuccille | 12.20.2024 7:00 AM
>>
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>> AI-generated image of an armed robber in profile, against the backdrop
>> of a line graph illustrating rising crime rates. | Illustration: Lex
>> Villena; Midjourney
>> (Illustration: Lex Villena; Midjourney)
>> Restrictive policies in response to COVID-19 did a huge amount of damage
>> to our liberty, prosperity, kids' education, and even our sanity. But
>> now there's evidence supporting what many of us suspected: Lockdowns
>> also contributed to a surge in crime that temporarily reversed a
>> decades-long decline in homicides. According to a new Brookings
>> Institution report, forcing young men out of work and out of school
>> fueled a surge in violence. Worse, this outcome was predicted.
>>
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>> A Surge in Crime
>> It's no secret that, after years of declining crime rates, crimes
>> against people and property spiked in 2020 and for a period thereafter.
>> Most concerning was the rise in murders, which had happily been
>> dwindling since the early 1990s.
>>
>> "In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate
>> of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country," write
>> Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings
>> Institution published this week. "Across the nation, more than 24,000
>> people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before."
>>
>> They add that "homicides remained high in 2021 and 2022, but in 2023
>> they began to fall rapidly."
>>
>> The surge in crime has variably been attributed to efforts to defund or
>> deemphasize policing that took off during the 2020 riots sparked by the
>> killing of George Floyd, demoralized police officers resulting from
>> those efforts, and the aftereffects of the social disruptions from
>> lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acharya and
>> Morris analyzed thousands of police records and examined the timeframe
>>from which they were drawn. They find that the data best fits the last
>> hypothesis.
>>
>> Murderous Lockdowns
>> "The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local
>> unemployment and school closures in low-income areas," they conclude.
>> "Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen
>> boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and
>> early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that
>> year, on average. The persistence of these changes can also explain why
>> murders remained high in 2021 and 2022 and then fell in late 2023 and 2024."
>>
>> Interestingly, they write, "the national homicide rate was already on
>> track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was
>> killed" and police defunding efforts gained traction.
>>
>> Most violent crimes, Acharya and Morris point out, are committed by
>> teenage boys and young men in their twenties. Dumping them out of jobs
>> and out of classrooms, at loose ends and often without money in their
>> pockets, was a recipe for disaster. In a focused look at Baton Rouge,
>> Louisiana, they find similar surges in violent crime in that city after
>> Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and following a massive flood in 2016, both of
>> which displaced students from schools and closed many workplaces.
>>
>> What's especially frustrating about the Brookings study is that we were
>> warned that disrupting our society with lockdowns and mandatory closures
>> would do serious social harm.
>>
>> Ignored Warnings
>> "I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health
>> consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and
>> businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and
>> calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself,"
>> David L. Katz, former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research
>> Center, wrote in The New York Times in March 2020. "The unemployment,
>> impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health
>> scourges of the first order."
>>
>> As I noted in a column that same month which quoted Katz, the
>> International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency,
>> quantifies the degree to which shutting down economies damages societies.
>>
>> "For example," a 2013 report from the ILO emphasized, "a one standard
>> deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest by 0.39 standard
>> deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth
>> reduces social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations."
>>
>> "Why would economic shutdowns lead to social unrest?" I commented at the
>> time. "Because, contrary to the airy dismissals of some members of the
>> political class and many ivory-tower types, commerce isn't a grubby
>> embarrassment to be tolerated and avoided—it's the life's blood of a
>> society. Jobs and businesses keep people alive."
>>
>> Likewise, education keeps teenagers engaged—or at least off the streets.
>> Lockdowns killed jobs and closed schools, handing young men and teenage
>> boys a great deal of frustration and free time.
>>
>> "The shocks of teen boys and young men being pushed out of school and
>> out of work in low-income neighborhoods occurred across the country just
>> before murders began to rapidly increase, and those baleful educational
>> and economic conditions lasted for the same period of time that
>> homicides remained elevated," add Acharya and Morris.
>>
>> The Mistakes of the Past
>> These disruptions are a replay of events during past disease outbreaks.
>>
>> "The number of murders and of mass shootings have both increased
>> dramatically," Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president
>> of the RAND Corporation and author of Plagues and Their Aftermath: How
>> Societies Recover from Pandemics, commented in a 2022 piece about the
>> impact of COVID-19. "These last two years have resembled the disorders
>> seen during the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War and the
>> Black Death in the Middle Ages." He quoted Thucydides' observation that
>> "Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of lawlessness."
>>
>>
>>
>> So, what to do? Acharya and Morris propose several anti-crime
>> interventions, but the fact is that the damage has been done and we're
>> now recovering to the extent we can. Murder rates have resumed their
>> previous decline as teens go back to school and young men regain
>> employment. But that's cold comfort for the families of those killed or
>> otherwise victimized by the crime surge. They can't regain what they
>> lost; they can only move on.
>>
>> The best thing to do, then, is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the
>> past. We need to minimize social disruptions and certainly not permit
>> government officials to close businesses and schools by decree. A free
>> and prosperous society, it turns out, is a much happier and peaceful one
>> than what results from the authoritarian whims of public-health officials.
>
> The only godly way to have the peace and joy of the "Prince of Peace"
> (Isaiah 9:6) even while subject to authoritarian whims of either
> public-health officials in their vain (Psalm 127:1) attempts to stop a
> plaque as has happened in the past or now in the present with
> https://AntiChrist45.com and his false prophet, who is falsely
> prophesying that conciousness (i.e. souls) will be saved by colonizing
> Mars, is by living http://WonderfullyHungry.org (Philippians 4:12)
> like (Luke 6:40) our LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Who chose to stay
> quietly in the cold manger though He wanted to be in the warm arms of
> mom Mary being fed and Who chose to eat the "piece of broiled fish and
> honeycomb" (https://bit.ly/Lk2442 ) instead of being hangry at His
> followers and disciples for losing their faith in Him.
>
> Indeed, I am http://WonderfullyHungry.org for food right now (Luke
> 6:21a) and hope you, Michael, and others reading this, also have a
> healthy appetite for food right now too.
>
> So how are you ?
>
I am wonderfully hungry!

Michael