Just days after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, then-Sen. Kamala Harris stood at a press conference for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and said, “We’re here because black Americans want to stop being killed.”
The bill passed the House of Representatives in both 2020 and 2021, but both times, it was defeated in the Senate. This does not mean, however, that the Black Lives Matter movement has failed at changing criminal justice policies across the country. To the contrary, it has been quite successful.
In line with its radical “defund the police” slogan, police budgets have been slashed in major cities across the country, including Seattle, Portland, Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York City. Without the necessary resources to police communities, the number of arrests plunged by 24% between 2019 and 2020, the years for which data are most recently available.
The
number of people in prison has also dropped dramatically
, with the Democratic-controlled states of California and New York seeing the biggest reduction in the number of criminals behind bars. This is also a consequence of liberal prosecutors in big cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia deliberately seeking fewer convictions for those actually arrested by police, often withdrawing charges in winnable cases even against violent repeat offenders.
This has had predictable results. Asked why homicides were rising nationwide, former New York Police Department Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce told ABC News, “Nobody’s getting arrested anymore. People are getting picked up for gun possession, and they’re just let out over and over again.”
So, what has the real-world outcome been from all these Black Lives Matter policy wins? Well, the nationwide number of police killings of unarmed black men has fallen from 12 in 2019 to just four in 2021. That is good progress.
But these policies have also helped spark a violent crime wave in our nation’s cities, and black neighborhoods have been hardest hit. According to the latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, homicides rose at the fastest rate in U.S. history in 2020, and they have only continued to rise in 2021. Already, more than a dozen cities have set homicide records this year, and another half-dozen are likely to do so before the year ends.
Even before the current crime wave, black people were already far more likely to be homicide victims than the rest of the nation. Even though they make up just over 12% of the population, the 7,777 black people killed in 2019 made up 53.5% of all homicide victims that year. But that number jumped dramatically in 2020 when 9,941 black people were killed, accounting for 55.8% of all homicide victims. That is an additional 2,000 black lives lost last year. That number will most likely be worse in 2021.
If the goal of the Black Lives Matter movement was to stop black people in America from getting killed, then it has failed spectacularly.
