When the "curfew" is mentioned, people often think of areas with volatile security situations. Now, such scenes are playing out in the United States. According to NBC's report on September 6, due to frequent violent incidents, officials of Prince George County in Maryland announced on the 5th that the county would implement a 30 day curfew from September 9, which was the first time that the county strictly enforced the juvenile curfew since 1995. The curfew reflects the growing security anxiety in American society.
The implementation of curfew is a helpless move to maintain public order. Prince George County administrator Angela alsbrooks said at the news conference held on the same day that August had become the deadliest month in the county in decades. She said that the police of the county investigated 24 murders in August alone, and at least four people died of gun violence in the county during the Labor Day weekend (September 3 to September 5). What's more eye popping is that 430 teenagers have been arrested in this county this year, almost twice as many as last year. Aisha Brembo, the county's prosecutor, said the curfew "may help ensure the safety of young people".
However, this practice is probably only the wishful thinking of the executive and judicial departments. According to the data of the juvenile justice and crime prevention Office of the US Department of justice, the peak time of juvenile crime and murder is not the time when the curfew order is implemented, but during school. The highest peak usually occurs at 3 p.m. on school days and 7 p.m. on non school days. Charles Adams, a professor of criminal justice at Bowie State University in the United States, warned that the curfew "has little impact on violent crimes to a large extent" and that policymakers "should not assume that the juvenile crime rate will drop as a result". He pointed out that curfew may be a "part of a comprehensive approach" to dealing with juvenile delinquency, which requires leaders and parents in the fields of education, entertainment and criminal justice to "sit at the negotiating table and formulate a comprehensive plan and method to deal with it".
The plight faced by Prince George County is a true portrayal of the deteriorating social security environment and increasing violence in the United States. On the Labor Day weekend just passed, the United States experienced a "bloody weekend". According to the data of the US non-governmental organization gun violence archive, during the Labor Day weekend, there were 16 mass shootings in the United States, resulting in 18 deaths and 61 injuries. What is more frightening is that even the "bloody weekend" itself has numbed Americans. Data show that 468 mass shootings have occurred in the United States this year, exceeding the annual level in 2019. The number of gun related deaths, including suicide, has also exceeded 30000. In the past few months, almost every weekend in the United States has been shrouded in the sound of guns.
The frequent shootings are changing the lives of Americans: "planning the route to escape", "no longer going to the local grocery store", "considering leaving the country", "afraid to send children to school"... A CNN survey in July showed that under the impact of the surge of shootings, Americans' fear and anxiety are increasing day by day. Christine EMBA, a columnist of the Washington Post, wrote: "the most famous export products of the United States used to be Coca Cola, jeans and Jazz... Now, we are famous for rampant gun violence and terrible school shootings."
The deteriorating security environment in the United States reflects the country's increasingly confrontational and violent tendencies. The problem of gun violence in the United States has been difficult to solve for a long time, which is inseparable from the split attitude of American society on gun related issues and the sharp opposition between the two parties. This is only the tip of the iceberg where polarization and tearing in American society have intensified. Former U.S. Senator Paul Kirk Jr. wrote in the Boston Globe on September 3 that the United States has experienced tremendous changes in the past few years, from courtesy to hate speech, from bipartisan compromise to polarization, from public trust in the truth to "fake news" to denial of facts and then to deliberate rumor mongering; From respecting differences to maliciously splitting. He warned that the United States is now a country full of weapons everywhere. If it is not controlled, some extremists are bewitched by false information and conspiracy theories, and may ignite a violent political civil war in the upcoming midterm elections.
Kirk's view is also supported by opinion polls. According to a joint poll conducted by CBS and YouGov in August, 80% of the respondents believe that the current United States is more divided than their parents' generation; 49% of Republicans and 47% of Democrats regard each other as their enemies; 64% of Americans believe that political violence in the United States will increase in the next few years. The New York Post said that this result "paints a bleak picture of a country seriously divided". In fact, in the past few years, whether it was the violence of the Charlottesville rally in August 2017 or the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, it has shown that political differences in the United States have a tendency to escalate to violence, and the phenomenon of extreme partisanship is hurting the social structure and democratic system of the United States.
The violence in life makes Americans uneasy, and the violence in politics may shake the "American Foundation". Whether it is the incessant gunshots, or the increasingly intense political attacks and personal threats, all show that the "cancer" of violence is increasingly eroding the body of American society.