COVID-19 crime trends vary by area
Jason M. Walsh, first assistant district attorney in Washington County, said there was an increase in violent crime during 2020.
Tom Ankrom
Uniontown Police Lt. Tom Kolencik said police have seen an increase in neighbors watching out for one another and reporting suspicious activity. He attributed that to more people staying at home due to the pandemic.
Jason Walsh hasn’t run the data at the Washington County district attorney’s office, but he senses that violent crime has been on the rise in the area during the pandemic.
As first assistant district attorney, Walsh prosecutes most violent crime cases, including aggravated assaults that do appear to be increasing since March 2020, online court records indicate.
“We’ve had a wave of violent crimes, homicides, stabbings that we haven’t seen to that extent,” Walsh said. “It’s taking a toll on the system. I can tell you that.”
There have been seven homicides in Washington County during the pandemic, which officially began in Pennsylvania in March 2020. There were three murders in the county in 2019 and three this year, according to the county coroner’s office.
Across the country, there was a 30% spike in homicides, and aggravated assault cases rose by 6% across the nation during the pandemic, the Associated Press reported last month.
But not all of Southwestern Pennsylvania has seen the same trends.
Tom Ankrom, police chief of Waynesburg Police Department in Greene County, said they initially saw a rise in domestic disputes in the first couple months of the pandemic, but all crime has slowed since.
He said the department saw an exponential decrease in all crimes related to alcohol consumption, citing mandatory bar closures as the reason. It was a pandemic-related change he welcomed.
“Anything DUI-related has slowed down, which is a good thing,” he said.
And in Uniontown, city police Lt. Tom Kolencik said if the pandemic had one bright spot, it’s that more neighbors looked out for one another over the past year.
Residential burglaries went down, and police got more calls about suspicious people in neighborhoods. He said that could be because more people were staying home and were more aware of what’s going on around them.
“People are starting to go back to normal living, which is a good thing,” Kolencik said. “Our city residents, I always applaud them for being very vigilant with regards to looking out for their neighbors and looking out for one another and calling us.”
Crime in general, except for domestic incidents, declined during the pandemic in Washington, said Robert Wilson, the city’s police chief.
The nationwide increase in aggravated assault cases during the pandemic doesn’t surprise Stuart J. Miller, a sociology professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington.
Miller said the stay-at-home orders combined with job losses and other stress factors brought on by the pandemic, such as the loss of close contact, can put “people on the edge.”
“Tension levels go up, Miller said. “It’s easy for people to flare and strike out at someone who they think is causing their problems.”
People can suffer depression and not know how to handle life when something like a pandemic changes everything, causing them to lash out when under normal circumstances they would not, Miller said.
The stress can also lead to drug use, said Matthew McKnight, assistant chief of operations of Fayette EMS.
The ambulance service encountered a “significant spike in overdoses” in 2020, he said.
“I’m not sure if that’s attributed to folks leaning toward narcotic use due to the COVID-19 pandemic, whether they were having mental health issues and that’s how they were dealing with it, whether they had more time on their hands and didn’t have anything better to do or if it was the stimulus money in their pocket,” McKnight said.