The FBI has released final crime figures for 2022. Murder was down 7%:
Because of changes in the FBI's methodology, it's still not clear if the 2020-22 numbers are all comparable to each other. Nevertheless, the trend is pretty clear, and it's one I've noted before: violent crime was basically stable while homicide spiked up. This remains a mystery after decades of the murder and violent crime rates moving almost identically.
Why would murder spike so dramatically if overall violent crime was showing almost no movement at all? I've pondered this before and come up with nada, and nada is still all I have. It is a perplexing mystery.
The motivations between violent crime and murder are different. Violent crime is about forcibly taking something. Murder is about settling scores. During covid, we reduced the need to forcibly take things while idle time was created to settle scores.
Do forget the guns.
Yeah, the guns are worth considering. Gun sales, as I remember it, spiked sharply during COVID. Can't just let them sit around.
It's also increasingly easy to make ghost guns from parts sourced on the internet or using 3-D printing technology. I don't know about other areas of the country, but it seems these days whenever cops arrest someone around here on a weapons, assault, or murder charge, and the guy has a gun on him, it's almost always described as a "ghost gun" of some kind.
If that were the main source of the problem it wouldn't be declining.
Interesting possibility my local newspaper just reported on: https://www.startribune.com/guns-switches-turning-more-firearms-into-automatic/600312536/
Apparently these "buttons" started getting imported from China in higher numbers in 2020ish. These devices make the same number of shooting incidents more likely to result in someone being killed due to more bullets being fired in the same period of time.
Obviously just a correlation, and it may not fit the data correctly. But I had not heard of these, so thought I'd pass it along.
The lack of correlation is the weird part.
I could likely make a case that in 2020-2021 the difference is just that Covid & lockdowns led to fewer arrests in general, so violent crime did actually increase, but less of it got reported, etc. However, a murder is always reported b/c you can't avoid dealing with a dead body.
Are you claiming that a crime for which an arrest is not made is not counted in the stats? I don't think that's the case.
That’s an interesting thought; however, the violent incidence rate remained basically the same so your suggestion would be that it also went up but it was not recorded. If we check another hard wired crime like car thefts, we see that the number has increased something like 8% each of the last three years so I guess it is possible that the police is maxed out concerning violent crime. I would like to see other data points like actual convictions since some violent crime is inscrutable (e.g., rape) and other can be very subjective (e.g., attempted murder).
I would suggest that lockdowns resulted in far fewer opportunities for violent crime. People were staying home a lot, especially at night. A lot of businesses were closed. So fewer armed robberies, fewer rapes (date and stranger), fewer bar fights escalating out of control.
Of course homicide is a big head scratch there since there should have been fewer opporunities for that too.
Still well below the high point in early '90's of ca. 9.8
I never understand why people say this. Okay sure it's true. But it's still a big spike over where we were so we became significantly unsafer. That there was more danger 25 years ago doesn't somehow make the increased danger irrelevant.
I never understand why people think a minor spike in a long term trend makes us significantly unsafer. Yes it's bad for folks who live in neighborhoods with a lot of guns and for people who do own guns but folks who live in the 'burbs or rural areas who do not have a gun in their house are very safe.
Perhaps people being forced to spend every moment together wasn’t a good idea for some households? I definitely heard from my coworkers about how awful it was to have to spend every single day with their own children when the schools were closed. I can’t imagine that lockdown worked wonders for couples that hated each other.
I can't find a good set of numbers for murders related to domestic violence, but wouldn't surprise me if that contributed to the rise in murder rates.
Made our 3 person family closer tbh. Maybe your coworkers shouldn't have had kids.
Here in Northern Virginia there was a spike in crimes against family members, murders and assaults. The pandemic brought some families closer and sadly for some families it brought nightmares.
Kevin, did you listen to Malcolm Gladwell's series of Revisionist History on guns? (The latest season.) He points out that there would be MANY more murders if medical treatment hadn't advanced so much in the past few decades.
With the number of multiple-murder incidents involving assault weapons, that may skew results in the other direction
Personally, I just thinks it is where guns weren’t until the Supreme Dipshits ruled NYC gun laws and those like illegal.
I recently learned from Malcom Gladwell's podcast on Guns how important medical care after a shooting is to our evaluation of homicide rates. So maybe the issue was not more gunshots (which we do not track!) but instead a reduced ability to save the lives of those shot.
I can think of two reasons. First, overloaded medical systems with staffing and bed shortages. Second, getting shot must have a very high comorbidity multiplier on Covid.
More rounds, more holes. And with mass shooting events involving assault style weapons, aka really high muzzle velocities, the victims insides are turned into ground beef.