On July 4, 11-year-old Davon McNeal stopped at his aunt’s house in Washington, D.C., to pick up a phone charger. Shortly after he stepped out of his family’s car, gunshots rang out. McNeal fell to the ground. His mother thought he was taking cover, but soon realized he had been caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between men he didn’t even know.
He was rushed to a local hospital, where he died.
McNeal’s grandfather, John Ayala, is all too familiar with the reality of violence in America as a member of the D.C. Guardian Angels. But as the tragedy of homicide reached his own family, McNeal expressed sorrow and outrage in an interview.
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“We’re protesting for months, for weeks, saying Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.’ Black lives matter, it seems like, only when a police officer shoots a Black person. What about all the Black-on-Black crime that’s happening in the community?” he asked.
Ayala also offered his thoughts on the national “Defund the Police” movement in a later TV interview on Fox News. Although he agreed with progressive calls for funding social services that could prevent crime, he disagreed with activists’ demand for reduced police budgets. “We can’t take money from the police department. We need the police,” he said. “It’s not going to work. Crime is going to get worse. You need police to run those calls.”
It’s hard to find a big city in America that isn’t seeing a wave of violence, even as reports of other crimes have fallen during the pandemic. University of Pennsylvania researchers have been tracking the incidence of crime during the pandemic and concluded that there has been an “immediate, substantial” decline in reports of criminal activity and arrests, “most heavily pronounced among drug crimes, residential burglaries, theft and most violent crimes.” The big exceptions, however, are shootings and homicides.
In D.C., murder is up 21 percent compared to the same point in 2019. Memphis has seen a 30 percent increase in homicides as compared to last year. In New York City, shootings this June increased by 130 percent from the previous June. There were more than 100 shootings in a week for the first time since 1995. Greensboro, North Carolina, has had a record number of homicides for this point in the year. From coast to coast, the testimonies offered by the people impacted by this violence are heartbreaking. In Atlanta, 8-year-old Secoria Turner was murdered after her mother and her drove near a torched Wendy’s that protesters had been occupying following the police shooting of Rayshard Brooks. One of the men occupying the area shot at the car, killing Turner.
"They say Black lives matter. You killed your own this time,” Secoriya Williamson, her father, told the media. "You killed my baby because she crossed a barrier and made a U-turn? She's a child. She didn't do nothing to nobody."
In Seattle, the city finally shut down the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP)—which involved a group of protesters taking over several city blocks and keeping police out—after four people were shot within its territory over nine days.
Fox News—which often propagandizes against police reforms and the Black Lives Matter movement—was again the only major cable news outlet that chose to interview the father of one of those killed inside CHOP. “This was my son,” Horace Lorenzo Anderson Sr told Sean Hannity. “And I loved him.”
I’ve spent years writing about police reform—from reporting about the 1033 program that lets the Department of Defense hand out military equipment to police to investigating my own county commission’s response to a Black commissioner being racially profiled—and there is a deep need for reform in the way we do policing and imprisonment in this country. When the state abuses the rights of innocent citizens, or even worse, kills them, our consciences should of course be disturbed. The police reform movement exists for a reason.
Yet the state also has an obligation to keep people safe from criminal violence. As horrible as police killings of innocent people are, it’s important to recognize that people who are killed by common criminals grieve no less; their pain is also worthy of our attention. We know that one of the best ways to save Black lives (and the lives of everyone else) is to reduce homicides. One 2019 study published in the journal Demography estimated that 17 percent of the reduction in the life expectancy gap between white and Black men between the years 1991 and 2014 could be attributed to the reduction in homicides during the same period.
It’s not clear why we’re seeing this surge in shootings and killings in cities across the nation right now. There are a number of possible culprits: the pandemic and economic situation we find ourselves in have unsettled the social fabric; or, as has happened in the past, it’s possible that police in some regions are backing off from proactive policing that, contrary to what the police abolitionists claim, can help keep violence in check. And it’s not clear how we can quickly reduce these homicides—it’s one of the questions criminologists have argued about for years.
But before you can solve a problem, you have to admit it exists.
