Gun violence in Philadelphia nearly doubled in the past year, with researchers linking the rise to lockdown measures implemented to combat the coronavirus, Fox News reports.
More than 500 people were murdered in the city in 2020, and more than 2,200 were shot in total.
The research was conducted by experts at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the Temple University Lewis Katz School of Medicine, suggesting that the lockdown measures exacerbated indicators in the city which tend to lead to crime.
"And so, we took those data and aggregated them by week, which means that we just very simply converted them to accounts of shootings per week," said senior author Christopher N Morrison. "we used the data from...the first week of 2016 up until when we did the analysis which was the end of November. And then, we used the statistical methods."
The study focuses on gun violence in the aftermath of specific events including the closing of "non-essential" businesses, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the partial lifting of lockdown measures.
The researchers ultimately found that 25 people were being shot per week on average in Philadelphia until the city began implemented lockdown measures, after which weekly shooting victims shot up to 46.
According to the researchers, weekly shootings began increasing gradually beginning in mid-March, but no single incident or policy implementation resulted itself in a sudden rise in shootings.
The researchers admitted that there are some limitations to their study, noting that crime has risen in general across the entire country in 2020 and that the report did not include self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
"In the city of Philadelphia, shootings are often geographically concentrated in lower-income communities," said study co-author Jessica Beard. "These communities have not only been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus disease itself, but the pandemic and its associated policies have also exacerbated issues that were already present, including unemployment, poverty, structural racism and place-based economic disinvestment, which are empirically tied to firearm violence in Philadelphia."
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