Up to this point, you would think that a health pandemic is great for managing crime in our communities. Despite an alarming surge in gun sales, crime has been sharply down in just about every category except for domestic violence. The surge in violence at home is, tragically, an expected response to social distancing and quarantine measures. And it is tempting to assuage our concern for those victims with a story of how at least there is less suffering from community and economic crime. Yet we should be very concerned that this may be more of a "calm before the storm" than anything so positive as a broad shift in perspectives of our roles in the community.
Daily deaths from the coronavirus surpassed 1,000 last week and have continued to grow. An officer died of the virus in Florida on Friday (link). Riverside County, CA, lost two officers in the same day on Thursday (link). Ninety-one employees of the Chicago PD have tested positive for coronavirus (link). Six officers in East Baton Rouge, LA, have tested positive (link). The list goes on, if you care to look.
Meanwhile, prisons and jails, with little ability to prevent the spread of an infection within their walls, have only just begun experiencing serious outbreaks. Multiple public officials from states across the country, and political spectrum, have referred to their facilities as ticking time bombs. Florida DOC has been tight-lipped about infections but recently acknowledged two confirmed cases among prisoners at a private prison in Pensacola and 26 infections among the prison's staff (link). The federal prison in Danbury, CT, began releasing "high-risk" inmates after 20 inmates tested positive for the virus (link). There are 300 confirmed cases in Cook County jail, IL, and a growing outbreak in the jail in Washington, DC. And Rikers in NYC, the largest jail in the country and one where the virus has already had time to spread, now has over 650 cases among staff and inmates, with at least 5 deaths to date (link). Perhaps the most worrisome of all, a planning document from the Alabama DOC acknowledges that they are unprepared to manage an outbreak and, in such an instance, will require the National Guard to cover staffing shortages and should expect hundreds of deaths (link).
If asked to identify the key motivations for most crime, I would peg them as desperation and self-interest. Note that for the segment of the population that is both potentially criminally active and grasps the threat that Covid-19 poses to them, it is currently in their interest to desist from any crime that involves being out in the community. Even for those willing to risk exposure, the expected gains of economically-motivated crime have fallen off dramatically. Few people are out spending money, no one is walking up to ATMs, and everyone who is in public is far more wary of individuals approaching them. And similar logic applies to the misconduct and violence of those currently incarcerated. The pandemic creates very little in the way of opportunity, so now is a time to protect oneself until the pandemic has passed.
However, despite some hopeful signs from individual states, the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been profoundly mismanaged from the beginning and does not appear to be improving. Our concern should be how the individual calculus changes as public resources become more strained, the disease continues to spread, and the end that some thought might come as early as mid-April (ill-advised though that presumption was) continues to fade into the more distant future. Even if individual areas, such as NYC, manage to ride out their own outbreak without a complete panic, what happens in areas where the local response is as mismanaged as the federal response has been?
When an individual who has little in the way of social or economic means begins to lose hope, they may break into a closed shop or intentionally put others at risk. This is evidenced by a surge of closed businesses being burglarized in NYC. It may even help rationalize the anecdotes I've read of police arresting individuals for intentionally coughing on others or coughing on products in stores. These types of incidents are worrisome, to be sure, but also quite manageable for a competent legal system. It is when large masses of individuals begin to lose hope that truly concerns me. Crimes and violence are liable to surge in ways that our law enforcement agencies are ill-equipped to handle. Not to mention the terrifying prospects for prisons, already understaffed and suffering exacerbated staffing problems due to the virus, when inmates begin to die and the health infrastructure is clearly unable to provide them with suitable care.
The breakdown to a state of panic and rioting, if it comes, will not be a slow and predictable process. It will be a sharp, possibly unexpected, response to breaking news or new public information. And we can only hope that local officials are well-prepared, and decisive but measured, in their response.