Police at the scene where eight people were shot—four fatally, including a 14-year-old boy—in Chicago on July 4.
Photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribu/Zuma PressCHICAGO—Law-enforcement officials in several large U.S. cities are wrestling with a sharp rise in violent crime amid a national debate over the role of police, calls to reduce police-department budgets and growing fiscal troubles.
Some cities are on track to have their most violent summers in years.
In Milwaukee, homicides are up 37% so far this year, on pace to break the record of 167 in 1991, which included 16 murders by convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Homicides so far this year in Chicago are ahead of the pace of 2016, which marked the city’s highest tally since 1996. In New York and Los Angeles, which have seen falling numbers of homicides for years, killings this year are up 23% and 11.6%, respectively. Kansas City, Mo., has recorded 99 killings since January, far outpacing any record for the first six months of the year.
Police departments already face budget cuts around the U.S., the result of falling tax revenues from pandemic lockdowns. Covid-19 has also made it difficult for officers to safely conduct community outreach, say experts, worsening police-community relations.
Community groups acknowledge the crime increase but say more aggressive policing to combat it shouldn’t come at the expense of enacting broader reform.
“This is not a quick fix,” said V.J. Smith, national president of Minneapolis-based Mad Dads, a group that acts as a buffer between the community and police by trying to de-escalate violent situations. “The only way to unite a community is to build it first.”
Amid revenue shortfalls and calls to defund police, Art Acevedo, Houston police chief and head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said cities are now slashing police budgets without plans in place to reallocate funds or replace functions typically performed by police. “You don’t tear down the building you’re living in until you have a new building to move into,” he said.
City leaders and law-enforcement officials say the months of lockdown, rising unemployment, more guns on the street and the fallout from mass protests over the George Floyd killing helped create conditions for more violence.
“This was a perfect storm,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales. “We had a series of events that many of us probably never experienced in our time.”
At the same time, law-enforcement officials say they are weighing the risks of aggressively enforcing the law, concerned that a backlash from activists, protesters and residents could trigger attacks on police or a replay of the riots and looting that marked some of the earlier protests. In some cases, officials say, police are backing away from some kinds of petty crime arrests that give them a higher profile on the street, hoping to quell tensions.
“It’s a lot more dangerous to become a police officer,” said Ray Kelly, New York City’s former longstanding police commissioner. “What you see is a backing away.”
New York City disbanded its anticrime unit of plainclothes officers on June 15, part of a $1 billion reduction in the city’s police budget. The city logged 205 shootings in June, the highest for the month since 1996. Police cited the release of some prisoners from Rikers Island amid coronavirus concerns and bail reforms that went into place earlier in the year.
Some departments, including New York City, have expressed concern that officers are filing for retirement in larger numbers than usual since the protests began. Between May 25 and July 3, 503 New York Police Department officers filed for retirement, compared with 287 in the same period in 2019.
“This is a unique period in policing right now and you’ve got police officers who, if they were thinking of retiring, this pushes them toward that,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., police research and policy organization. He said the effects wouldn’t be felt the same everywhere.
In Chicago, the city announced a new specialized unit targeting violence-prone neighborhoods to combat a surge in shootings and homicides.
Police speaking with members of the community at the scene of a shooting that left one person dead on July 7 in New York.
Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesThere were 27 homicides in Chicago in the week ended July 5, a 125% increase from a year earlier, according to Chicago Police Department data. Twenty-five of the killings were in the heavily Black or Hispanic South and West sides.
Asiaha Butler—founder of R.A.G.E., the Resident Association of Greater Englewood in Chicago—said throwing more cops at the problem isn’t the solution.
“The city or police, they always throw out these initiatives without any insight and input from the community. And guess what? The initiative doesn’t work, and then they come to us. It’s always like an afterthought,” she said.
She said instead the police need to build relationships with the small minority of the population that is involved in these crimes—and work with the people in the community who are in the best position to influence them and prevent crime before it happens.
In Philadelphia, the number of gunshot victims had been steadily increasing since 2014, when 1,047 people were shot. At the current rate, the city could have its highest total since 2007. City officials recently cut the proposed $760 million budget by $33 million, a combination of lower-than-expected tax revenue and calls to retool the police department.
“We’ve put so much stuff on their plate: homeless response, mental health, addiction response, these are not things they are best trained to respond to,” said Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney. “We don’t necessarily need to respond to every call to service with a person trained with a gun and a badge.”
In Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd’s killing inspired an international movement to rein in police departments, tensions between the Minneapolis police and the community ran so high that 12 police officers quit within one month. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s office said it had temporarily taken over some enforcement duties to lower the visibility of local police.
In Kansas City, Mo., where a population of approximately half a million people has had nearly 100 killings this year, Mayor Quinton Lucas said he wants to tackle systemic issues contributing to violence, but right now, they still need police.
Law-enforcement officials near the site of a shooting in Kansas City that left a suspect dead and a police officer wounded on July 2.
Photo: Tammy Ljungblad/Associated Press“We have children dying right now on the streets,” he said.
In part as a response to the violence in Kansas City, Attorney General William Barr said this week that he would send more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; U.S. Marshals Service; Drug Enforcement Administration; and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to help state and local officials fight violence in hard-hit cities.
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The Major Cities Chiefs Association recently issued a list of suggested policy reforms in response to the protest movement, including a requirement that police departments across the country have policies in place to ensure officers use the minimal amount of force reasonably necessary when someone is resisting arrest.
Barry Friedman, faculty director of the The Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, said he worried that police would instead respond to the rise in violent crime with the kind of rough tactics that make people distrustful of them. “Unfortunately, at moments when violence is going up, policing agencies naturally revert to the tactics that caused the breakdown of trust in the first place. It’s a vicious cycle,” he said.
Mr. Morales, the Milwaukee police chief, said the city has been working more closely with communities since it entered an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union two years ago to curb its previous strategy of aggressive enforcement in high-crime areas.
“We were overpolicing those neighborhoods” and alienating the very citizens police needed on its side, he said.
The city has since tried to enlist residents and church groups to help fight crime, and the results have been positive, he said. Some of that work had to be curtailed because of coronavirus. “We’ve got to get back with our foundation of community policing,” he said.
—Ben Chapman contributed to this article.
Write to Julie Wernau at Julie.Wernau@wsj.com and Joe Barrett at joseph.barrett@wsj.com
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