Youth aged 17 and younger still account for a small portion of violent crime in New York City. As the incidence of interpersonal violence shifted in recent years, the changes among people under age 18 generally mirrored the scale and direction of trends among adults aged 18 and older.
Many criminologists blame the pandemic and its societal and economic disruptions for the spike in homicides over the past couple of years. “It’s not that the whole society fell apart,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It’s just that there are enough people who were already living on the edge, and this pushed them off of it.”
“The Brooklyn recovery seems more striking than other boroughs,” Dr. Butts said. “The Brooklyn spike is horrendous when you look at it over time. But the most recent quarter, the data point is back to where it’s been bouncing around for the past 15 years.”
Jeffrey Butts interviewed as part of a story about recent gun violence trends in the United States.
“We were already in a weakened condition when the pandemic hit — class divisions, overt racism, partisanship, a really poor social support infrastructure — so if you think about the effect of the pandemic on an ‘epidemic’ of shootings — it’s like the immune system of the United States was already suppressed,” Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told ABC News.
“It’s absurd to suggest that a change in New York bail practices somehow led to the shooting surge we’ve seen in cities across the country, not only New York City,” said Jeffrey Butts, research professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “I doubt the officials posing this explanation even believe it. It’s just an opportunity to score political points against a law they would oppose whether it was effective or not.”
