Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

More people will be killed in Philadelphia this year than at height of crack epidemic in 1990, and more than during any other year since at least 1960 & perhaps longer, since that's the first year the Police Department started tracking homicides

inquirer.com/news/philadelp…

Long discussion of what could have caused the homicide increase with precisely zero mention of Ferguson effect, despite overwhelming consensus among criminologists that it has played a major role, or the election of Phillly's progressive prosecutor in 2016.

I annotated the graph

The reporters wrote 6 paragraphs on guns, even as they admit there's no evidence more guns caused more homicides, and zero on Ferguson effect, i.e, anti-police protests resulting in withdrawal of police and emboldenment of criminals

They blame the coronavirus pandemic, and higher gun sales, which rose in March.

But homicides in 2020 only started to rise in June, after Black Lives Matter protests, not March.

And there had been a similar spike in homicides in 2015 when there was no coronavirus pandemic.

The basic dynamic in all of these cities are that progressive prosecutors stop acting like prosecutors and act like defense attorneys, which in many cases, including San Francisco and Philadelphia, they were before becoming DA. But there's a reason we have two separate roles.