“With COVID in particular, we saw this run on guns, and we do have a greater supply,” says Charles Katz, director of the Arizona State University Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety. “This is not to take away from anyone's constitutional rights, but when you have an increase in guns in society, we're just going to have greater chances for gun-related violence to take place.”

Police divert traffic around the scene of a May 14 mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., one of several in the nation that weekend. Crime rates have spiked since 2020, with some blaming the pandemic and others calling out city prosecutors for not being tough enough.

In 2018, for example, Republican President Donald Trump signed the First Step Act, a bipartisan measure that provided funding for prison rehabilitation programs and softened some federal sentencing guidelines.10

But many Democratic leaders are convinced that the slogan hurt the party in 2020 and could do worse damage this year. “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police,” Biden said during his State of the Union address in March. “The answer is to fund the police … with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”9

Democrats this year are worried about being seen as soft on crime. Following Floyd's murder, a number of Democrats responded by pushing policies such as eliminating cash bail and limiting the use of force by police.On May 25 — the second anniversary of Floyd's death — President Biden issued an executive order seeking to restrict techniques such as chokeholds, while creating a national registry of officers who have been fired for misconduct. The order did not go as far in terms of holding police accountable as a bill stalled in Congress — or a draft order the administration considered earlier this year.8

many Republicans blame changes in policing and prosecution that have been pushed by Democrats in response to the Black Lives Matter protests that swept the country following Floyd's death.

Although other types of crime have not increased as much, they are starting to rise as well. “Looking at data for New York City, homicides in mid-April are down by 11 percent, compared to the same period last year,” says Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. “But robberies are up by 40 percent, burglaries 32 percent and larcenies 57 percent.”

On May 24, at least 19 children and two adults were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, by a teenage gunman. It was the second-worst school shooting in American history and the 27th school shooting in the country this year.2

Residents had complained that officers had become aggressive, grabbing men off the street to arrest them for minor offenses. The neighborhood was reeling from the 2019 shooting of Kwesi Ashun, a T-shirt vendor with paranoid schizophrenia, killed as he swung at an officer with a chair at a nail salon.

She said the eventual goal was to close that gap and create a system where someone like Alicia, who might have been arrested for fighting or shoplifting, could get shelter, cash and an identification card immediately.

One set of watching eyes belongs to Almond, 47, a former gang member who spent more than 13 years in prison for a bank robbery. He returned to Brownsville in 2014 and got a tattoo of a smoking gun behind his right ear to hide a small scar left from a bullet wound. His past, along with his calm, straightforward approach, helps him navigate conflicts. During one Safety Alliance week, he persuaded a man going into a bodega with a gun to give him his weapon and go home. The next day, that same man returned, but this time to volunteer.

But the Safety Alliance has been thriving amid a positive trend in the 73rd Precinct, Gonzalez said. In the first half of this year, homicides fell 50%, shootings fell 25% and the rate of grand larcenies of automobiles also fell even as it rose in other neighborhoods, he said.

More people around the country do. The Brownsville initiative is part of a movement called the “community responder model,” which aims to reduce the use of armed officers to handle many calls.

So first, it might help if we get on the same page about what crime is, because crime can be a lot of things. It can be homicides. It can be larceny. It can be graffiti, jaywalking. There are lots of different forms of crimes. And so while it’s very easy to just say crime is bad — in scare quotes — not all crimes are created equal and we don’t think about crimes in the same way. So, Alex, when you’re talking about crime, what do you mean?