Virginia violent crime up, cause is disputed
(The Center Square) – Virginia’s increase in violent crime from 2020 to 2021 has yielded a lot of debate over policy, but the cause of this uptick is staunchly debated between criminal justice reform advocates and those who support a tough-on-crime approach.
From 2020 to 2021, the number of violent crimes increased from 15,713 to 16,823 in the commonwealth, which is slightly more than a 7% increase, according to the Virginia State Police’s annual crime reports. The number of forcible sex offenses increased from 4,423 to 5,350. Total property theft also increased from nearly $358 million to more than $422 million.
Despite Virginia’s uptick, violent crime went down nationally by about 1% during that time frame. However, some cities saw an uptick in violent crime in 2021 when compared to 2020.
Comprehensive state crime data for 2022 will be published early next year.
“My administration is committed to joining with community leaders, law enforcement, and Virginians around solutions with the Violent Crime task force,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in a statement. “We are taking a comprehensive look at how we can address the rise in violent crime by providing more law enforcement resources, creating alternative and after-school activities for children, and addressing the fear that results in witnesses failing to show up for a criminal hearing.”
Many Republican politicians in the commonwealth have focused on the crime uptick and have blamed Democratic policies signed into law under former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam in 2020 and 2021. During that time, Democrats passed a wide-range of criminal justice reform laws, such as expanding the earned sentence credit program, restricting the number of reasons for which an officer can conduct a traffic stop and banning police from using no-knock raids.
“The criminal first, victim last policies of the previous administration have led to a crime surge in Virginia,” Attorney General Jason Miyares told The Center Square in a statement. “Our murder rate last year was the highest it’s been in two decades, and violent crime in many cities continues to rise. That’s why we’re starting Operation Ceasefire, a proven way to reduce crime by supporting gang intervention programs and hiring special prosecutors focused on prosecuting the repeat, violent offenders.”
Some advocates of criminal justice reform, such as the Virginia American Civil Liberties Union, have been critical of this narrative.
ACLU-VA Policy Strategist Shawn Weneta told The Center Square that many of these policies had a delayed effect and could not have contributed to the uptick. The earned sentence credit expansion, which Republicans have been critical of, went into effect in July of 2022 and could not be reflected in this crime data, he noted. However, some of the bills went into effect in early 2021, such as the restrictions on when police could conduct traffic stops and the prohibition on no-knock warrants.
Weneta also pointed to data that showed murder rates are higher in cities that are in Republican states than cities in Democratic states to argue that criminal justice reform policies are not the cause of these problems. He said that policies like the earned sentence credit program make prisons safer by providing incentives for prisoners to behave well and get skills and vocations that can also alleviate the worker shortage affecting Virginia’s economy.
Some Republican lawmakers pushed to repeal some of the Democratic criminal justice reform bills during the last legislative session, but those proposals could not get through the Senate, which is narrowly controlled by Democrats.
