The fatal stabbing at Center City Macy’s is a symptom of another kind of pandemic

The armed rage that led to the fatal stabbing of a Macy’s security guard on Monday is an indication that the COVID-19 pandemic has given birth to yet another contagion. This time, the disease is violence.

Eric Harrison, who was 27 and who’d spent the last two years working as an unarmed loss prevention officer at Macy’s, was killed when he and a colleague were stabbed after confronting an alleged shoplifter. Harrison’s fellow guard remained hospitalized in stable condition this week, and a 30-year-old man faces murder charges in connection with the incident.

Besides his position as a security guard, Harrison also held a night job with the U.S. Postal Service, just like my 20-something daughter. It’s difficult to think of such a hardworking young man dying at the hands of someone who police said was trying to steal hats. It’s harder still to consider the void left by his passing for his mother and three sisters.

But perhaps the most difficult aspect of this stunningly senseless crime is knowing that it is neither an isolated incident nor a surprising occurrence.

The trend seems to have begun in 2020, when cities around the world shut down in an effort to protect the public from a virus that killed at least three million people worldwide in a single year, according to World Health Organization estimates. That year, as schools and offices closed, interpersonal guardrails like after-school programs and social services were removed. An economic downturn and a historic uptick in gun purchases occurred. The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor spurred worldwide protests, and amid all of those factors, the divisive politics of a presidential election also boiled over.

Daniel Webster, the director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins, told ABC News that 2020 was the “perfect storm,” adding that “everything bad happened at the same time — you had the COVID outbreak, huge economic disruption, people were scared.”

That fear seemingly turned to violence, yielding deadly results. Homicides increased by 30% between 2019 and 2020, which was the biggest one-year increase since 1905. The spike in violence, the economic uncertainty, and the civil unrest appeared to create more fear, and between 2020 and 2022, Americans purchased nearly 60 million guns, according to an analysis by The Trace, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence. That was nearly twice the rate of gun purchases from two decades before.

However, the epidemic of violence was about more than just guns. As the pandemic wore on, there also seemed to be a change in the way people conducted themselves and interacted with each other. I’ve seen it in the way people drive, in the way they communicate, and in the way they approach conflict. I believe there is a level of aggressiveness that was much less prevalent prior to the pandemic.

Academics have studied this change in behavior. In a 2022 study authored by Angelina Sutin, a professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine, researchers found that on the back end of the pandemic, there were sizable declines in certain personality traits. Their findings indicated that Americans were less adept at handling social situations, trusting others, thinking creatively, and acting responsibly. The changes were especially prevalent among young adults.

I believe the changes in behavior are linked not only to the removal of the societal supports that were present prior to the pandemic. I also think the changes in behavior are due to the removal of people from the spaces they once occupied — spaces like downtown Philadelphia.

According to a report by the Center City District, residents and visitors are coming back to America’s downtown areas, though workers have been slower to return. That has left space for the crime epidemic to take hold.

I’ve visited the Center City Macy’s many times. To get there, I’ve had to navigate the gauntlet of misery that too often characterizes Philadelphia’s downtown streets. There are people suffering from apparent mental illness. Others display the stooped-over posture that comes with opioid use. Still others lie on steam grates outside of expensive hotels. Then there are the rest of us — shuffling along and trying not to stare.

Though the violence that marred the store grieves me, I’ll return to Macy’s when it reopens to browse the polo shirts and sports jackets, to purchase my wife’s perfumes, to stand near the Wanamaker Eagle statue while listening to the store’s historic organ.

We cannot allow this crime to make us cower in fear. To fight it, we must stand up and be present.