Lamar Gibson, the star player on my son’s basketball team, was shot and killed in East Harlem on July 14—just one of dozens murdered in NYC since the NYPD was sidelined post-George Floyd.
But it isn’t just the law enforcement vacuum that explains this national spike in homicides. It’s primarily the lockdowns, and their socio-economic consequences, that have caused this “surge” of urban violence.
So we can add these deaths to all the others caused by the coronavirus panic, which has killed so many, all around the world, through hunger, suicide, drug overdose, domestic violence, medical neglect and sheer despair: countless deaths, in rising numbers, yet that somehow matter less than those very few caused (reportedly) by COVID-19.