Jun 18, 2022 4 min read

If you want to understand where Americans believe crime happens, just look to the television shows they have watched through the years.

“Law and Order” unfolds in New York City. “The Wire” is set amid the grit of Baltimore. Going back further, “The Streets of San Francisco” is, well, you can figure that out.

Obviously, not many of these cops-and-crooks series have dramatized lawbreaking in rural communities. The assumption for a very long time has been that crime is something that happens in densely packed urban areas, while the denizens of rural or small-town America can safely leave their screen doors unlocked and sleep soundly at night.

Now, many cities are safer than they once were thanks to diligent revitalization efforts, and crime tumbled across the board starting in the 1990s, for reasons sociologists still debate. Crime started to creep back up in the 2010s, however, and violent crime has been spiking since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. And this crime wave is not bypassing rural America.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that homicide rates went up by 25% in 2020, almost corresponding with the 30% increase in cities. In that same year, murders skyrocketed by 49% in Pennsylvania, and violent crime overall saw a 27% rise. The Council on Criminal Justice said that homicides increased by another 5% across the country in 2021.

Residents of Washington, Greene and Fayette counties have witnessed a pronounced escalation in crime and mayhem. Waynesburg saw its first murders in at least a couple of decades in February. A month later, five teenagers were charged with attempted murder after a shootout at a Carmichaels gas station. And though the city of Washington would not qualify as a rural area, last month a 58-year-old woman was shot and killed while sitting on her front porch. Also, a Peters Township man is accused of murdering his 11-week-old son.

Washington County District Attorney Jason Walsh told us, “It’s not just shootings, it’s violent crime generally. That includes shootings. It includes babies being violently murdered and things of that nature. Aggravated assaults. All those are up.”

In an article last weekend in The Wall Street Journal on violent crime in rural America, one Arkansas prosecutor put it this way: “It was like people lost their ever-lovin’ minds.”

Even before the pandemic, rural America was experiencing some of the problems that inflamed crime in cities, such as joblessness, poverty and drug addiction. The pandemic added fuel to the fire, with some rural residents unable to even connect with others online because they lacked a decent internet connection. Institutions that bind communities together, like restaurants or churches, were also closed. Sickness and fear of it added to the stress. Family members got on each other’s nerves during the enforced togetherness, sometimes with fatal results.

Social media can also be an accelerant for violence, according to Dr. Michael Crabtree, a professor of psychology at Washington & Jefferson College.

“There is a tipping point for each one of us,” he explained. “That accumulated stress for the so-called normal person, what they’re going to do is talk to someone. For a person who is, we’re calling them at-risk, violent behavior is a consequence.”

A many-faceted problem defies easy, quick solutions. More resources should be provided for law enforcement and, at the same time, counseling and mental-health services. Bringing down the number of guns in circulation, and getting the most lethal off the streets, would also help.

In many ways, it seems like a certain madness has gripped America since the pandemic, whether it’s reflected through an increase in violent crime, traffic accidents or general misbehavior in public. Our national nervous breakdown will end. The question, though, is when?