Miami Has Recorded No Homicides in 6 Weeks Despite Deliberate Decline in Police Enforcement

Miami’s police chief orders officers to reduce ticketing and public interactions. Mayhem doesn’t ensue.

Fears of COVID-19 infection may have emptied the streets of Miami, but criminals are not taking advantage of the situation. Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina says that not only has violent crime plunged in the city, but Miami has not reported a homicide in six weeks. That hasn't happened since 1964.

Colina himself tested positive for COVID-19 last week and is at home recovering. The New York Times reports (you'll have to scroll down for the story) that 20 of Miami's 1,400 officers are sick. That's actually a pretty low infection rate when compared to a place like New York City, where at least 1,500 NYPD officers have become infected out of 36,000 officers. Earlier in April, one out of six NYPD officers was out sick.

One difference appears to be that Colina gave his officers very different instructions. He has strongly discouraging Miami police from interacting with people, both for his officers' safety and the safety of city residents. From the Times:

"I literally told them, 'I don't care if we don't issue a single ticket summons in the month of April,'" he said. "'I don't want you to unnecessarily interact with someone if you don't have to, for your safety and theirs.' And the amount of people who have been impacted financially is absolutely something that we should be mindful of."

Meanwhile, the NYPD appears to be out in force continuing heavy-duty policing of low-level "quality-of-life" crimes even as COVID-19 spreads through the department and the city's jails. NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea has declared that he, unlike Colina, will not be reducing enforcement.

Perhaps he should. Miami's de-policing decision is not leading to anarchy. Colina says the city is seeing an uptick in car break-ins and that he worries about domestic violence incidents going unreported. Nevertheless, crime overall in Miami is down (and has been trending downward for years), and the community isn't any less safe as a result of his officers showing restraint.

Comments

[Ron]

When you don't respond there is no crime.

[ykaryn]

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[Ragnarredbeard]

Exactly. I doubt that there hasn't been a homicide in a city of half a million people in the last six weeks.

Its far more likely that lack of reporting and lack of police response is the deal.

[Ken Shultz]

Yeah, um, this is all about COVID-19 and not about the police not interacting with people.

These are independent variables so long as COVID-19 is happening, and pretending that violent crime would go away if only there were less of a police presence and the police didn't interact with people is absurd.

Being right means not needing to make silly arguments. Just because we think people should be free to do more things without interference from the policy and government doesn't mean that we have to pretend that violent crime rates dropping during the COVID-19 pandemic is about a reduced police presence.

P.S. I understand armed robberies are down in areas where businesses aren't allowed to open, too, but so what?

[Dan S.]

we have to pretend that violent crime rates dropping during the COVID-19 pandemic is about a reduced police presence.

No one said it was. He said that violent crime did not go way up in response to the reduced police presence. Not the same at all.

[Ron]

armed robberies down but breaking in at offices and food banks are up since everyone else is at home

[Propagandaministerium]

Exactly, the current extraordinary circumstances don't disprove broken windows theory. Criminals actually are 'taking advantage of the situation' where they can. In NYC commercial burglaries are up dramatically but all other crime is down. Not surprisingly, crimes of opportunity go down when nobody is going anywhere or doing anything.

[mtrueman]

"and pretending that violent crime would go away if only there were less of a police presence and the police didn’t interact with people is absurd"

Pretending that despite and because mean the same thing is more absurder.

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[Chipper Morning Wood]

Now can we get some stats about how many gators were thrown through windows of a Wendy's, how many giant penises were drawn on radars with planes, how many people tried to stop a hurricane by shooting at it, how many robberies were attempted with a transparent bag used as a mask, how many anti-Hillary messages were painted on crabs, and how many assaults with a fried chicken have occurred?

[Fats of Fury]

Florida Man Dead! A victim of covid-19.

[Nardz]

Florida Man can't be killed.
And, incidentally, is far superior to eunuch

[Chipper Morning Wood]

Dude, you are obsessed with me. Which is fine, I understand my charismatic persona has that effect on certain people. But if you are gonna try to insult me, can you make it entertaining? Try to come up with an original insult, for example.

[Nardz]

Nah, just gonna keep reiterating your utter existential contemptibility

[Quo Usque Tandem]

This has to be the weirdest fucking thing I've read in since a Richard Brautigan novel, decades ago.

But funny; you gots some talent there. Anti Hillary messages painted on crabs. That some fucking Vonnegut man.

[DWB]

The ENTIRE COUNTRY is on house arrest -- what did you expect???

[Unicorn Abattoir]

They're all guilty of something, right?

[Longtobefree]

I prefer the term internment.
Brings things into focus.

[DWB]

Indeed!

[grb]

DWB : The ENTIRE COUNTRY is on house arrest — what did you expect???

Well, that's exactly what I would have expected. But - then again - I'm not one of those sad little dweebs who thought their gun(s) were ultra, ultra, ultra important now because the Zombie Apocalypse was finally here......

[Dillinger]

>>And the amount of people who have been impacted financially is absolutely something that we should be mindful of.

let them eat theft.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Cop 1 - "The victim was shot 5 times at close range"

Cop 2 - "Damn COVID-19 got him"

[Commenter_XY]

LOL

[Tankboy]

The cops just bring in the bodies, it's the hospitals who do the cause of death. The same hospitals that get paid $3,000 extra for Covid-19 patients. Yep, not one death that wasn't Covid-related.
You rushed through an aid package without thinking about how much abuse would happen. Well, we had to DO SOMETHING!!!

[BigGiveNotBigGov]

That shifting police focus from tyranny training of and collecting revenue from the basically orderly general populace to policing actual crimes and criminals reduce, should surprise no one.

[Nardz]

Right, because enforcing lock downs on the general populace and keeping people out of state parks is totes not tyranny

[Frank_Garrett]

Because they're too busy ticketing people at the beach.

[Rich]

Miami has not reported a homicide in six weeks.

Are they testing for homicide? Perhaps all the murders are asymptomatic.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

A study out of California suggests as many as 40% of us may have already been murdered.

[Don't look at me!]

Just wait for the 2nd wave of murders in the fall!

[Longtobefree]

The bodies are rotting inside homes, waiting to be discovered.

[Sometimes a Great Notion]

Hey no spoilers, I just got to that part of The Wire.

[Quo Usque Tandem]

David Simon is an asshole.

[Jeb Kerman]

NY is not Miami.

The demographics are as radically different as the weather.

The spread of COVID 19 is certainly dependent on proximity and possibly on weather. Proximity is partly based on population density and also weather both of which are worse for COVID 19 in NY than in Florida.

Comparing Miami to NY is bizarre and shouldn't lead to policy decisions.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

The demographics are as radically different as the weather.

Yeah, there are no Latinos in NY, right?

[Jeb Kerman]

One reason postulated as to why the virus hit Italy so hard is that Italy has the oldest population in the EU.

Demographics covers many more points of data than race.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

The 2014 median age in New York City was 35.8 years, almost two years lower than the national median of 37.7 years (which also happens to be Miami's median age).

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Maybe you prefer to know the percentage that is 60 and over:
NYC - 15.64%
Miami - 21.94%

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Italy is 21.69% for 65+, similar to Miami.

[Jeb Kerman]

Exactly my point. 🙂

The idea from Scott Shackford is that maybe NY should copy Miami.

I am suggesting that maybe what is working in Miami only works because it is Miami and maybe the people of NY should decide what works for NY.

[Jeb Kerman]

Why I picked Italy. 🙂

[Longtobefree]

Minor detail. Italy got in bed with the Communist Chinese on belted roads. The region that was hardest hit had thousands of Communist Chinese workers flying back and forth for months before "the discovery".

Yes, and lots of the natives were old.

[Case of the Mondays]

Meanwhile in Harris County the dumbass county exec (judge) decides to arbitrarily fine people for not wearing a mask. To which the cops said fuck off.

[Longtobefree]

The judge did promise to deliver masks himself door to door, and pay for the masks as well, right?

[Geraje Guzba]

Less homicides? I thought every time I go outside, or breath, I am literally "killing people." And, I've been outside every day so far.

What's the body count?

[dchang0]

Re: "Miami's de-policing decision is not leading to anarchy."

Be careful with the context in which you use the word "anarchy."
The context of this sentence is the same as what the legacy media uses--the assumption is that without the presence of the state, mayhem ensues. Every time the legacy media uses the word "anarchy" in this limited context, it reinforces the nanny state in the minds of unquestioning listeners.

[EWM]

Indeed.
"The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not." - Joseph Sobran
"Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous." ~Robert Higgs

[DaveSs]

B-b-b-b-ut Somalia!!!!!!!!!

[Crackers Boy]

Interesting about the low number of Miami police getting the bug. I was wonder about that locally. Jacksonville interviewed the police chief and the fire department commander. Each said they had only 1 officer/fireman that had tested positive. I wanted to comment that that was a curious situation; both departments have people who could NOT self-quarantine, and in fact were forced to interact with large numbers of the population. Yet the "heroes" didn't drop dead left and right. Sort of makes one wonder if the "cower in place" order was really necessary.

CB

[Bubba Jones]

"one out of six NYPD officers was out sick."

Not the same as *being* sick.

[DaveSs]

Ya

Good time to use up all those weeks of accumulated 'sick time'

[Echospinner]

Perhaps the Miami gangsters and dealers have declared a temporary truce.

[Granite]

'I don't want you to unnecessarily interact with someone if you don't have to, for your safety and theirs.'

We all know he didn’t say those last two words.

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[mtrueman]

I'm reminded of an evening I once spent in a jungle on an island in Indonesia. Normally, the evenings were a hive of activity with insects and lizards chirping and calling out, mosquitoes making trouble for me and so on. This night was raining very heavily and there was thunder and lighting. All insect activity came to a stand still, for the duration, as if a truce had been called and the creatures of the night had decided to put aside their differences and wait out the storm.

[Dean Michael Jackson]

Don't you just wonder about the IQs of people in general? Does Reason search out for low IQ writers? Obviously Reason does.

Not one murder in Miami in six weeks? That tells us that the gangs are controlled by the State, and the State has ordered a stand down during the fake coronavirus pandemic, a pandemic where the virus loved Wuhan city so much, it decided to leave the rest of China pretty much alone! A pandemic where the CDC on March 4 regurgitated its January-issued 'false positive' laden test kits!

Marxist China is a paranoid security State hanging by a thread with a mere 6.5% of the population being communist party members. No new virus would be allowed to spread without drastic containment procedures being immediately implemented; a new virus' pathology and virulence aren't known, hence Beijing would have procedures in-place to contain the pathogen. But these procedures, we're told, weren't implemented, allowing contagion to spread, a contagion five times more infectious than the yearly influenza virus, yet the coronavirus pandemic decided to remain primarily confined to a city - Wuhan - rather than severely infect all of China, as the coronavirus has severely infected the whole world. In other words, we have another empirical proof for the virus' non-existence, because if it existed naturally the virus would have spread severely throughout China, quad erat demonstrandum.

And what of the front lines in the United States’? How’s the battle going there? Like their comrades in Beijing, the CDC is doing all it can to obfuscate the fact that there’s little there:

In January the CDC rolled out a test kit that identified any pathogen as the coronavirus!

“Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus”

What of the new test kits the CDC sent out on March 4? The CDC regurgitated the same test kits(!):

“Within days, some labs reported back that they were getting false positive results in their negative controls. The CDC recalled the problem batches but didn’t explain what was wrong, according to Tomer Altman, a Silicon Valley bioinformatics consultant.”

Some labs reported the new test kits are defective? That informs us some labs are honest, while the balance are silently going along with the charade.

Notice that the article doesn't direct our attention to the fact that with both CDC test kits defective, falsely identifying subjects as having the cononavirus when they don't, then there can be no pandemic, the existence of a pandemic necessitating correct infection assessments. This tells us that the media is nothing more than an adjunct of the Marxist establishment, regurgitating whatever government-dictated scripts contain.

This 'fake disease of the week' psy-op is to be used to impress on our minds the incompetence of the Beijing regime, where the people will rise up in despair and vanquish the Marxists. Of course, no such revolt can take place in China because every citizen is closely watched by a robust network of informants in the cities and countryside, which the West's Marxist co-opted establishment conspires to not inform its readers*...

“Since at least the early 1970s, the Communist party of China has been poised to create a spectacular but controlled “democratization” at any appropriate time. The party had by then spent two decades consolidating its power, building a network of informants and agents that permeate every aspect of Chinese life, both in the cities and in the countryside. Government control is now so complete that it will not be seriously disturbed by free speech and democratic elections; power can now be exerted through the all-pervasive but largely invisible infrastructure of control. A transition to an apparently new system, using dialectical tactics, is now starting to occur.” -- Playing the China Card (The New American, Jan. 1, 1991).

...and...

“A campaign for a new system of World Government will be launched at Summit level and will be accompanied by pressure from below, the active use of agents of influence and secret assassinations of leaders who are seen as obstacles. The campaign will come as a surprise to the US Administration [sic]. In the ensuing negotiations, the US President of the day will find himself facing a combined pressure from the Russians and the Chinese. The Chinese will by then have adopted a ‘reformed’, pseudo-democratic system.” -- KGB Defector Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, 'The Perestroika Deception' (April 1993), p. 166.

------------------------
* The 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held from 25 February to 6 March 1986, was attended by 4,993 delegates, each delegate representing 3,670 party members, giving a total number for communist party membership of 18,324,310. The 28th Congress, held in 1990, had 4,700 delegates, each delegate representing 5,000 party members, which = 23.5 million communist party members.

In 1986 Soviet Party members were 18.3 million, in 1990 23.5 m. Membership increased, not decreased. In Yugoslavia, membership increased 40.75% between 1982 and 1991. The West knowingly regurgitated disinformation from the Soviet Bloc, thereby proving the Marxist co-option of the West. The West conspired to regurgitate false Soviet Bloc under counting of Soviet Bloc communist party membership in order to provide a narrative of imploding Soviet Bloc political establishments.