CBS News’ Anne-Marie Green breaks down what the numbers show, then she and Vladimir Duthiers speak with Jeffrey Butts, Ph.D., from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, about what’s driving these numbers and related racial disparities.
My contributions to a discussion at Yale Law School stressed the need to build community violence prevention with credible evidence rather than progressive rhetoric.
“Crime is constantly fluctuating,” said Dr. Jeffrey Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in a recent phone interview. “The numbers go up and they go down,” he said, and looking at short-term changes doesn’t reflect meaningful trends. “You never understand the history of something until you can look at it with a little bit of distance.”
“…we see video, we see security video, street cameras, and it gives you the impression that it’s increasing.”
The pandemic and the social unrest it caused has also played a role. Eight million Americans became first-time gun owners between 2019 and 2021, said Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York.
[Jeffrey] Butts is a research professor at the John John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He said prevention efforts have focused on youth intervention and economic disparity. “That was all designed for a pre-pandemic world,” Butts said. “An erosion of civilization happened with the pandemic. It seemed like society was coming apart. People were scared.”
