{"id":47969,"date":"2021-02-21T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T12:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=165044"},"modified":"2021-02-21T12:00:17","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T12:00:17","slug":"what-drove-the-historically-large-murder-spike-in-2020-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/21\/what-drove-the-historically-large-murder-spike-in-2020-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What Drove the Historically Large Murder Spike in 2020?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Amid the pandemic<\/u>, lockdown orders, and nationwide protests against police violence, a historically large increase in murders occurred in 2020. Previously, the largest recorded one-year rise in murders in U.S. history was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. Last year, meanwhile, data from nearly 12,000 law enforcement agencies released<\/a> by the FBI, running through September, shows murders up 21 percent nationally. This matches data we collected<\/a> from a sample of agencies from 60 large cities showing a 36 percent increase in murders in those cities, as well as a Council on Criminal Justice analysis<\/a> from 34 cities finding a 30 percent increase in 2020 compared to 2019. This increase still leaves the murder rate nearly 40 percent below the peak rate reached in the 1990s.<\/p>\n Any explanation for the national spike in homicides in 2020 needs to account for why most U.S. cities saw an increase, and the available evidence suggests that we should avoid simplistic or local explanations to explain what was almost certainly a complex national phenomena. Murders were up at least 15 percent through September in cities of every population group, according to the FBI\u2019s data, and the change in murders was larger in towns with under 10,000 people (up 31 percent) than in cities with over 1 million people (up 29 percent). Murders rose dramatically in big cities like New York and Chicago, but smaller cities like Lubbock<\/a>, Texas, and Shreveport<\/a>, Louisiana, also recorded their highest murder counts in decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Identifying the change in the murder rate is relatively easy compared to figuring out why the increase occurred. The data suggests that 2020\u2019s murder increase can best be thought about as three separate rises. A deeper dive into where and when murder increased shows a number of contributing factors: a challenge to police legitimacy and the strain of the pandemic, exacerbated by a sudden surge in the use of firearms in several cities.<\/p>\n \u201cIt likely takes more than one factor to create a spike of this size. That means it wasn\u2019t just the pandemic, or police violence, or more guns, it was all of these things happening simultaneously and perhaps more,\u201d said Thomas Abt, director of the National Commission on Covid-19 And Criminal Justice and co-author of its report<\/a> of 2020 crime trends.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n First, murder was up in the United States during the early spread of the novel coronavirus, before lockdowns were even ordered. The FBI\u2019s report \u2014 which does not include data on big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia \u2014 found murder rates up 7 percent in its sample of cities through the first quarter of the year.<\/p>\n We found murder was up through April relative to 2019 in 11 of 14 cities that publish monthly murder data. Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey found<\/a> that fatal shootings had risen 75 percent in the 99 largest cities through April. It\u2019s not fully clear what caused the murder rate to be higher early in 2020 compared to 2019, though a variety of factors such as increased domestic violence<\/a> early in the pandemic, warmer weather<\/a>, or just plain randomness may have contributed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Violence accelerated throughout the summer in the second phase of 2020\u2019s murder increase. Cities across the country had big increases in gun violence over the summer. Murder was up 15 percent through June in the FBI\u2019s data, and many cities saw sudden and dramatic upswings in July and August. Portland, Oregon, for example, averaged nine shootings per month over the first six months of the year, but there were 35 and 36 in July and August respectively. In Omaha<\/a>, Nebraska, 32 people were nonfatally shot in July 2020 compared to 4 in July 2019. Shootings in New York City increased from 123 in July 2019 to 316 in July 2020, and 497 people were shot in Philadelphia in July and August 2020 compared to 276 over the same months of 2019. It is certainly possible that local factors played a role, but a change this sudden and widespread calls for a more comprehensive explanation.<\/p>\n