Most American cities are way, way below early 1990s violent crime levels, San Francisco included. SF had three times more homicides in 1993 than in 2019.
You saw around a 30% increase in homicide rates in large cities last year, and that increase began suddenly at the beginning of June. No environmental cause like exposure to lead can cause that.
The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years.
You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.
Well that is in a completely different category than "lead", now isn't it?
Although I don't remember the "massive upheaval of lifestyles" suddenly happening at the beginning of June last year, is that your recollection of events?
To be clear, I wasn't supporting the hypothesis that lead exposure explains 2020, only pointing out that large year-on-year jumps in crime rates are almost irrelevant on the long trend. The Bay Area homicide rate went up 35%, but it was still lower than 2012 and all years prior to 2009.
That didn't really affect a lot of lifestyles. There's some economic evidence it caused people to stay home more (which had the result of reducing covid deaths) but they were already doing that.
A possible reason everyone was free to protest was they were unemployed.
It went up a lot in 2020, quite possibly as a reaction to unemployment and especially not having anything else to do.
But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.
