“In many places, the justice system ground to a halt.”

Having officers out sick and isolated, lessening the number of officers on duty, and trying to maintain social distancing obviously reduced their effectiveness,

“Not only have the police been defunded in some places, they've been demonized and face a more difficult environment to do their jobs,”

Americans bought 4.3 million more guns than usual during the first five months of the pandemic alone, according to a study from the University of California, Davis. The American Medical Association found that there was a 28.4 percent increase in firearm-related deaths, and a 34.3 percent increase in nonfatal gunshot injuries during the first year of the pandemic.14

“It's not that the whole society fell apart,” he says, “It's just that there are enough people who were already living on the edge, and this pushed them off of it.”

find other ways to improve public safety beyond just hiring more cops, including investing in violence prevention, road improvements and other community programs such as having civilians do some of the work now handled by police.

“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.”

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.

Low-income communities of color in cities, however, are experiencing disproportionate numbers of killings. At the same time, distrust between police and these communities has grown, due in part to high-profile events such as the 2020 killings of African Americans George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky.

The U.S. homicide rate increased by 30 percent in 2020 — the biggest single-year increase in more than a century — and continued to rise in 2021.

There were 197 homicides in Milwaukee last year,

African American Breonna Taylor. Her death and that of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked nationwide protests and calls to cut police funding, although most police budgets have remained stable or even increased.

On May 24, at least 19 children and two adults were killed at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, by a teenage gunman.

In one of the city's most recent eruptions of gun violence, 21 people were injured in multiple shootings after a May 13 NBA playoff game. The incident was one of several mass shootings that occurred across the country that weekend — from a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., to a church in Laguna Woods, Calif.1

some argue that COVID-19 exacerbated long-standing societal problems and hampered police,

reduce the use of armed officers to handle many calls.

ometimes all that is needed to keep the peace is a person with credibility — not necessarily a badge — telling someone: “‘Get out of here. You’re bugging.’”

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.

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.

she had paranoid schizophrenia and kept insisting on going to Rite Aid.

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.

“In this area, nobody feels too safe,” she said. “We’re all here surviving.”

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.

They say, ‘We feel more safe. We can walk without feeling anxiety,’” he said. “While they know that we do need police, it’s possible that we can police ourselves.”

ensure that fewer people are arrested and entangled in the criminal justice system.

$2.1 million to help link the local organizations that participate most frequently in the Safety Alliance

The civilians have no arrest powers.

letting neighbors, not the police, respond to low-level street crime.

“They got it,” an officer said.