Why did the murder rate spike in 2020? There are two obvious possibilities: the killing of George Floyd and the start of the pandemic. The problem is that both of these things happened at practically the same time, which makes it all but impossible to tease out which one was the actual cause.
I took a crack at it anyway a year ago and tentatively decided it was probably the George Floyd killing that did it. But it was iffy. You'd need murder rates almost down to the week to distinguish between the pandemic (mid-March) and Floyd (late May).
Well, a pair of researchers at Brookings extracted exactly that data and came up with this chart:
The red line is the key one. It shows homicides starting to rise in April, before the George Floyd killing, and then continuing to rise at the same rate afterward. The murder rate then stayed high for the rest of the year.
Now, there's no way to get around the fact that there just aren't many data points here. This could easily be a coincidence. So the authors took a deep dive into the national data and came up with this:
Data show that just before the national spike in homicides began, U.S. cities experienced two shocks:
- Large numbers of teen boys in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty were pushed out of school in March of 2020.
- Large numbers of young men in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty also lost their jobs in March and early April of 2020.
These two developments had a massive impact on neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. By mid-April, young men laid off due to the pandemic and high school boys whose schools were shut down made up around 1 out of every 30 people living in low-income neighborhoods.
Long story short, young men lost their jobs and were sent home from school. Then in mid-April, according to cell phone data, people started leaving home more often as the COVID lockdowns eased. So you ended up with a whole lot of poor young men roaming the streets with little to do. And according to the authors, cities with larger job and school shocks also had larger spikes in murder:
I'm not 100% convinced by this, but it's an impressive bit of data mining and I'd call it extremely plausible. In truth, it never made a lot of sense that the George Floyd killing could be responsible for a two-year murder spike. It was probably COVID all along, perhaps with just a bit of a tail wind from George Floyd.
When did people think it was because of George Floyd?
Go-slow/slow-down by police, either in protest at "unfair" scrutiny, or because of fear of the same.
I've always been skeptical of this explanation myself.
It’s dumb. It assumes the police prevent crime, rather than investigate afterwards, and you’d have to be a credulous moron who watches too many cop shows to think that.
Because violent crime is mostly concentrated in a small number of individuals, police investigations do have a deterrent effect on future crimes. A lot of murders are retaliatory and a lot of people who commit murder were previously involved in non-fatal shootings. Quickly arresting people can help end that cycle of violence.
If you read the local newspaper every day, you can see the ping-pong action easily. For a while my city had several shootings at funeral homes because of this tit-for-tat. It's also why my city has put extra effort into investigating non-fatal shootings. Many cities identify and focus on the individuals who are most likely to escalate toward murder.
That was always an incredibly dumb explanation, like other conservative ideas. It comes down to an admission that the police decided in concert to stop doing their job. That's quite an admission and no doubt in violation of both contract and the law.
It seems to have happened universally, but leaving no trace of discussions to that end. It is, as somebody123 says, also a dumb explanation of crime at any time, making it held under control by the cops scaring those dark-skinned people s-less.
It's in violation of observation, too. Did crime take place in front of the police, but then where were witnesses? The police do seem that one day of looting in June to have gone easy, but not because they were turned off by BLM protestors. Quite the opposite. They were too busy beating up BLM protestors that day.
As Kevin points out, it has the timing wrong. Remember that the day of mass protests came along with and after crime. It has no explanation for why crime dropped again. Did police decide to go back to work after all? When and why, with little fanfare? Finally and surely biggest point of all: only murder went up. Surely if police were going easy, the spike would be in break-ins and theft.
It sure doesn't look born out by this data.
Heck, their chart basically shows it starting to grow at the beginning of March, with how spikey the data is.
When I get bored, I don’t go around killing people. Do you? Maybe there is some character flaw people are overlooking. The attempts to make excuses (yes, that’s what they are doing) is really astonishing.
This is a bad take. Just plain stupid.
Excuses and self serving rationalizations. A bored guy buys a gun. A guy picks a fight online. A guy picks a fight in person and since they have a gun, boom you’re dead. Why is that so hard to figure out? Hilarious.
You have to explain why the "character flaw" has pretty much disappeared. The urban hellhole that is San Francisco is on track to have its lowest homicide rate in years, maybe ever.
Dumber and dumber? Stupider and stupider?
Both.
Fundamental attribution error much?
Imagine you live in a place where law enforcement is absent, ineffective, or actively harmful. This means you expect justice, if any, to be enforced by yourself or neighbors. You must be ready to protect your rights at all times. This is part A.
You have little power or comfort and little prospect of it. In fact, you seem to be growing less powerful and comfortable. You desperately want more sex than you get. You believe, because everyone around you believes, that the more powerful you are perceived to be the more sex you will get. To be powerful you need to get more from others than you give. To get more than you give, you need to be a credible threat to those around you. You are surrounded by people like you who want to be perceived as credible threats. This is part B.
Now imagine what your interaction with other walking powder kegs is going to be like.
There are more parts, but maybe these can be seeds for some adventures of the imagination.
There are plenty of shootings and violence outside that scenario.
Kansas City Super Bowl parade…
Alabama birthday party…
Any Saturday night near some entertainment district…
The list is nearly endless. Anyway… you’d make a good defense lawyer with all these questions.
Don’t bother. Like all the other trolls and monsters that exist here, Justin has zero empathy for other people and zero understanding for anything he himself has not experienced living safely tucked away in his mother’s basement. Just ignore his worthless ass until he slithers off to some other blog or Kevin invests in a commenting system that allows blocking of total assholes.
In truth, it never made a lot of sense that the George Floyd killing could be responsible for a two-year murder spike. It was probably COVID all along
Same.
I've always found the Covid-related "a lot of high-propensity-to-commit-crimes young men suddenly had a lot of time on their hands" theory to be the mot plausible explanation myself. But the head-scratcher is that other countries didn't see similar spikes, so...
The guns, always the correct answer for so much of what ails the US.
Yes, the guns are the magic ingredient that makes it all possible. And people bought a ton of handguns during covid with the idea that they were for personal protection. That means that lots of them were stored poorly, easily stolen, and easy to conceal as you wander around town.
So how many thousands of people did the COVID lockdowns kill just from the increase in murders?
For every murder, how many assaults, maimings, and cripplings were there? Again, the lockdowns were responsible.
How many rapes?
How many lives ruined by this insane hyper-safetyism and the teachers' unions lobbying to keep schools close?
Almost certainly a couple of orders of magnitude less than were saved from Covid.
Don’t feed this sick fuck.
There really needs to be online tools to do what the Amish do to antisocial members of their society: shunning them until they behave better or go off into the woods and die alone.
Until these tools exist, the best thing you can do to deal with obvious trolls is not feed them. Let their comments go unremarked upon. They’re just assholes trying to stir shit up because their real lives are pathetic. Don’t feed them.
Rapes went down during 2020.
Now that is interesting. Can think of a few hypotheses, but I wonder if the relationship between number of rapes and reported rates is what really changed. Difficult to test.
"Large numbers of teen boys in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty were pushed out of school in March of 2020."
I would bet, the typical young man you describe, likely, was not actually attending school. They might be school age, but I doubt this type of young man, absent math homework, decided that shooting someone was a better option.
Changes in behavioral are marginal.
Marginal changes add up to big trends in some cases.
Not rocket science, but may be beyond your ken.
Hi Kevin, not totally on topic, but related, highlights lead impacts on mental illness:
https://mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/271925/depression/leaded-gas-exposure-tied-151-million-excess-cases-mental-illness-cases
Nonsense. We have shotspotter data that shows a change in gunfire to the day.
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/07/09/are-minneapolis-crime-increases-tracking-the-2016-chicago-homicide-spike/
Furthermore, we saw similar increases in Baltimore after the Freddie Gray riots and in Ferguson after the Michael Brown riots.
There is also the inconvenient fact that the US is the only country that exhibited such a dramatic increase in murder. One of only a few that exhibited any increase at all. And yet the explanation that they provide should have resulted in universal increases in murder rates.
This "research" exists so that morons have some authority to reference. This is the shitlib version of the libertarian analyses promulgated several years after the global financial crisis -- libertarian analyses that purported to explain how the global financial crisis was the fault of government, and not the financial services industry.
I'm not saying that the people who generated this analysis are morons - you have to be quite clever to come up with bullshit like this. And it takes a while to explore the "garden of forking paths" until you find a dataset and analysis technique that supports your pre-ordained conclusions. That's why such apologia typically appear several years after the events they seek to excuse.
TIL that only gunfire causes murders. /s
What a stupid thing to say. Unfortunately, it doesn't take being all that clever to come up with your bullshit take. And on the topic of apologia, that's all reason.com is: apologia for the societal regression and oppression. I'm 0% surprised you linked to it. Sending my thoughts and prayers for your smoothed-over cerebral cortex.
This isn't data hunting for data that fits your preferred narrative. It's exactly the data you would go looking at if you wanted to examine murder rates (i.e., week by week data, exactly like they did).
As for why the US had a dramatic increase in murder: idunno, why is the US generally more violent than other countries? It's not just the guns, it's also the general propensity for violence, but also probably the indirect effect of there being so many guns: when guns are everywhere, you're going to assume that an assailant has a gun even if they don't, because you can't know. Assailants certainly know this, too, to some degree.
Look at the sad little Blue MAGA boomer with MSNBC brain.
Can't explain Baltimore, can't explain Ferguson, can't explain why massively more violent countries like Venezuela or Mexico saw decreases in murder during 2020.
What about, what about, what about, what about... Spare us your idiotic drivel and fuck off.
PS - far younger than boomer, never watched MSNBC, yada yada ad hominem this, ad hominem that. I'm just not an blithering idiot.
I love the irony of this response.
Name calling as his counterargument. Then he projects his own search for data that supports his pre-ordained conclusion.
The interweb is great sometimes.
+1
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Well now that we now that unvaccinated exposure to COVID can cause cognitive impairment, this makes sense.