Matt Yglesias asks today whether the big rise in murders in 2020 was due to COVID or George Floyd. It's a tricky question: COVID basically started on March 11 and George Floyd was killed on May 25. They're so close together that they're hard to disentangle.
But naturally I thought I'd try. FBI figures don't provide much detail, so instead I went to the CDC and searched vital statistics for all deaths coded as homicides. What I'd like is homicides by date so I could see if they spiked specifically after May 25 as opposed to earlier in the month. I couldn't do that, but I could do this:
Let me explain. The George Floyd murder happened on Monday the 25th. In May of 2020, homicides ran at the same rate as April on Mondays and Tuesdays. Then they rose a bit, rose a bit more on the weekend, and then spiked much higher on Sunday.
It seems unlikely that this happened throughout the entire month. Why would Monday-Tuesday homicides be the same in April and May but different after that—and especially different on the weekend? More likely, I think, is that these numbers represent a spike beginning specifically on Wednesday, May 27th, and spiking higher on the first weekend after the murder, which raised the monthly aggregate. This suggests Floyd rather than COVID as the reason for the murder spike.
Here's another chart:
In May 2020, Blacks were killed at a rate 39% higher than the average of the first four months. Whites, by contrast, were killed at a rate only 10% higher. It seems very unlikely that COVID would produce such a large racial difference. Once again, the evidence points to Floyd rather than COVID.
Matt adds another observation: murder went up in the US but, generally, didn't in other countries. This again suggests Floyd rather than COVID as the explanation for a rise in US homicides. And as Matt points out, it's well known that civil unrest often leads to temporarily higher murder rates (the "Ferguson effect"). What was unique about George Floyd was its size: the protests were national; they were big; and they lasted for months.
Did COVID cause the high murder rate to last longer than it otherwise would have? Maybe. I can't think of any way to tell. Does any of this explain why only murder was up, not violent crime in general? Not really. Do we know why civil unrest frequently leads to spikes in murder? Nope. So we still have mysteries.
And of course, my evidence is a little sketchy. It's just the best I could come up with. But sketchy or not, we have four things that all point in the direction of the George Floyd murder being largely responsible for the rise in murders that began in 2020. That's not case closed, but the door is definitely just barely ajar.
UPDATE: A reader points out that the top chart has a problem. In April 2020 there were only four weekend days. In May there were five.
I've updated the chart to show homicides per day for April and May and changed the text to reflect this. It changes things, but the basic picture remains much the same.
I won't pretend to know all the factors involved, but here is some food for thought. One of the many factors that led to the initial drop in murder rates was the community groups that discouraged people in big cities from seeking revenge for the death of their loved ones. I guess I first heard about such groups many decades ago when they would arrange gang truces, but apparently they worked in a lot of ways to decrease violence and revenge seeking in high crime neighborhoods. This was hard because, apparently, police are really bad at their jobs and often can't bring justice in a lot of murder cases.
During COVID these groups were not able to be effective. I'd put it to you that after the Floyd murder, so many people were angry that murders jumped and no one was around to calm things down. And once the rate went up it led to even more people killing. Before the Floyd murder, things were just coasting on inertia.
I'm sure something like I wrote happened, but was it responsible for 5% of the increase or 55%? I have no idea.
Other people will mention other things that changed and at least some of them increased the murder rate. I guess I'll throw one more thing into the mix that seems pretty obvious. Many killings happen during crimes or disputes and usually involve people shooting and then running away. If the murder rate completely outpaced all the other crimes, then it was because many of these incidents were people deliberately killing other people. A drive by or someone spraying bullets while trying to get away sometimes kill people. Standing there and shooting someone multiple times because you want them dead is a different situation. I'd suggest that there were many more cases of the latter in the last 3 years than in the past.
I likw rhw lofix--treating the murder rate as the result of factors increasing murders and those decreasing murders.
I'd suggest another factor--Covid reduced the number of people on the street, and I think likely increased the proportion of those on the street who were more prone to violence.
whether the big rise in murders in 2020 was due to COVID or George Floyd. It's a tricky question
The question itself is a trick question because without COVID-19 George Floyd might still be alive.
I remember during the unrest in Minneapolis the week of Floyd's death there was a news program on MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) I was listening to a fellow connected to the Twin Cities law enforcement community, not sure who it was, but they were with some think tank or local college or university law enforcement program or study group, and he said he had seen a memo passed around from different law enforcement agencies in the Metro urging them NOT to arrest anyone and bring them to local precincts or lock-ups for petty crimes for fear of spreading COVID-19 either in jail or as the result of being in jail to the wider community.
Apparently Derrick Chauvin did not get that memo or if he did, like so much of his police career, he completely ignored proper procedure.
Had the police just wrote up a ticket for passing counterfeit currency and given it to Floyd, all of this could have been avoided. Maybe some other incident would have taken place someplace else but Floyd would still be alive and Cities still in tact. But no, they try to arrest him, he's on drugs on probably in panic to go to jail with his police record and having gotten COVID-19 once before. He lost his job at the nightclub he worked because it was closed due to the pandemic. He's desperate, which is why he passed a phony $20. I mean it was just a bad situation made worse because some crooked-ass cop wanted to show what a badass he was to the young cops on his ride-along. Now he's in the can where he belongs thank God.
But the bottom line is the pandemic and all the death surrounding it along with economic desperation and illness I have no doubt it contributed to the scene before it even got to Floyd. The stage was set for some bad things to happen I think a lot of what did happen in the aftermath was a society-wide nervous breakdown for all the reasons mentioned above. Remember, there were riots and protests well before Floyd's death. Everything just built up over time. You may ask why not Europe and it should be said there protests and violence there too but Europe outside Britain was not as restrictive as some parts of the U.S and not for the same length of time. As people are reading New York magazine's website today, maybe the lockdowns were not such a good idea or perhaps not to the extent they did happen.
As for the crime wave which followed, it should be pointed out the City of Minneapolis is well under what its court-enforced charter demands for the number of officers needed for public safety (barley just under 600 for a city of over 400,000 people) There are many officers, many still on the payroll, who claim PSTD disability after the riots took place and well into the crime wave. They still claim it three years later and thanks to a very generous police union contact can do so. Obviously fewer officers and more crime takes place in their absence, especially with restricted traffic stops. Calls to defund the police wrecked morale. A flood of retirements, many of them well before 65, have taken place. That allowed a flood of illegal weapons to come into the city (which fueled a gang-war) and more stolen cars as well. Things aren't as bad as they were three or even two years ago but compared to pre-pandemic 2019 (and especially 2014 where the crime rates were every low) where the Cities was one of the safest metros in the country, it became very dangerous and still has its moments from time to time. Now replicate this all over the country and I think you'll it fits in a lot of places. Throw in fentynal addiction and homelessness, both going hand and hand in some cases, again going back to COVID-19, empty downtowns from remote work leaving them unsafe, especially at night, it all ties back to the pandemic in my opinion.
"He's desperate, which is why he passed a phony $20."
The first thing any decent cop would ask when someone passes a counterfeit bill is, did this guy even know that it was counterfeit? A halfway convincing counterfeit might circulate a long time before anyone notices. When is the last time you really examined a bill?
Next time you write about George Floyd, don't just assume he was guilty. Don't be like officer Chauvin.
To answer the question in the footnote: I’d guess April's numbers are flat due to the lockdowns.
To ask another question: what do February and March’s weekday graphs look like?
The Federalist Society of all people blogged about this exact subject in 2021. The author agreed it was George Floyd, not the pandemic that caused the increase in homicides. Their conclusion on why was typically right-wing, but has some validity. Police withdrew to some degree in large cities and the reduction in policing lead to more violence.
The thing is, the left shouldn't let the right own the Floyd hypothesis. Liberals have long been more concerned about police misconduct than conservatives (the latter very seldom evince any concern about the issue whatsoever).
To put it another way: it's an article of faith among liberals that police misconduct and brutality are real issues, and they cause real problems. Well, the murder spike in 2020-2021 was a problem!
So basically, if we don’t let police act with impunity towards black people, they won’t do their jobs at all and let crime spiral unchecked. Great. Another piece of evidence for the ACAB theory.
A big part of the evidence for the Floyd hypothesis comes from other countries. We mostly didn't see large spikes in the murder rate abroad. And yet all the purported pandemic-related reasons for increased violent crime—idleness, stress, boredom, school closings, etc—should have had an effect elsewhere, and not just in the US. Which suggests the explantion isn't a general effect of the pandemic, but factor(s) specific to the United States. The Floyd hypothesis fits the data, I think.
Crime, guns and the general state of Covid lockdowns looked very different in other countries as well.
Just a general thought....Pre-covid I believe that the murder rate in the US was very high compared to other countries. This should be considered as well.
Pre-covid I believe that the murder rate in the US was very high compared to other countries. This should be considered as well.
I don't think so. No one disputes that fact that different countries have differing *base* levels of intentional homicide. Denmark's base rate of murder is much lower than America's. Mexico's is a good deal higher. But if there are general "pandemic-related" influences that were seen in multiple countries (layoffs, furloughs, school closures, stress, enforced idleness, etc), they should have increased the murder rate in those countries, too. But for the most part we don't see this.
To state the obvious, if Denmark or Mexico saw, say, a 30% increase in murders in the year after the pandemic arrived, those two countries would still have different levels of murder—lower and higher, respectively—than the United States. But we'd expect the trend to be in the same direction in all three countries, driven by the aforementioned, pandemic-related effects.
But that's not what we saw. The US is an outlier.
FWIW, I've generally been of the "school closures and layoffs" school of thought in terms of the explanation for the murder spike in the US. When high schools and colleges close, a lot of young men in their prime crime-propensity years have too much time on their hands. Same thing with the workplace (lower paid work—where you'll find a lot of men of lower SES—was much more adversely affected by layoffs than white collar work). This seemed a highly plausible causative mechanism for the murder spike. But lots of countries closed schools and told workers to stay home. And they didn't experience murder spikes. Kevin's micro-look at the time sequence likewise seems to favor the Floyd hypothesis: the big spike occurred after George Floyd's death, and not in March and April, 2020 during "peak lockdown."
If it's pointed out to me that the data don't fit my priors, I change my mind, and in this case I'm now leaning "Floyd hypothesis."
It just seems like many uninformed assumptions are doing all the work with this 'conclusion'.
You have assumed that we should see murder rates spike in many other countries if Covid or shutdowns are behind the rise in murders in the US.
Given the US penchant for murder along with the high and ever rising gun ownership and how different the US is in these regards from the countries we are compared to.....it's not clear to me that we must see murder rise all over for Covid/ shutdowns to be behind the US murder surge.
The assumption you have to make for your conclusion to make sense is that Americans and everyone around the world must react similarly to Covid/ shutdowns.....but this strikes me as simply assuming the conclusion and certainly not something that you know with any certainty.
Another interesting fact that complicates the comparison to other countries is the surge in gun purchases during the pandemic and the fact that nearly all of the increase in US murders were gun related.
This greatly complicates the assumption that if covid affected US murder rates, murder should have jumped in other countries as well.
The assumption you have to make for your conclusion to make sense is that Americans and everyone around the world must react similarly to Covid/ shutdowns.
And you're assuming the incidence of murder in a spate of diffrent countries would not be affected if the countries in quesitons experienced the same factors (school closures, mass furloughs, enforced idleness, stress) the US did. I might say your take had a smidgeon of plausibility (a smidgeon, mind you!) if we were only talking about the richest, safest European social democracies. But we're not. Mexico is hard to explain away.
You're not wrong, mind you, to be looking for an explanation grounded in "American exceptionalism." But in this case that exceptionalism is the preciptitous deterioration in the effectiveness of US policing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
Other countries also aren’t awash in guns. So it’s entirely possible that (1) the desire to commit murder rose in other countries too but (2) the means to commit murder was restricted enough to keep foreigners from fulfilling their desire. (It’s a lot harder to kill people using knives, poison, fists, etc - you can’t do it as well from afar like you can shooting them.)
So it’s entirely possible that (1) the desire to commit murder rose in other countries too but (2) the means to commit murder was restricted enough to keep foreigners from fulfilling their desire.
Seems unlikely. Mexico is awash in guns and didn't see a COVID murder spike. And murder is hardly unknown in countries with strict gun laws: If pandemic-related effects actually have a general tendency to incentivize or generate homicidal tendencies, why wouldn't we see more, say, knife murders in Switzerland or Norway (even if the elevated rate still left them with a lot less murder than the US)?
Occam's razor to me suggests pandemic-related effects didn't have such a tendency: the problem in the US wasn't COVID but a marked reduction in the effectiveness of policing and a related collapse in trust (below already low levels in some cases) between police and many US communities of color.
You need a convergence of items, and one of them would be abundance of guns. As for comparing to other countries, you'd really need to get into the weeds. Gun violence may have dropped in some segments and risen in others.
You need a convergence of items, and one of them would be abundance of guns.
Mexico is awash in guns and didn't see a murder spike. But in general, this take isn't logical: we're not talking about the absolute level of murder. We're talking about the trend. Factors that tend to make Americans more homicidal should have the same affect on the trend in other countries, namely upwwards.
I see no one is willing to mention the name Steve Sailer, who has been providing convincing evidence that the George Floyd incident generated the increase in murder of Black folk for some two years now.
He has willingly put himself outside the bounds of acceptable discourse. Being a white supremacist/segregationist will tend to do that. Yes, Virginia, there are lines society doesn't want crossed. Does anyone seriously think otherwise? When you cross those lines you suffer the consequences including, in his case, ostracization by the MSM.
Reminds me of the Donald Sterling—former owner of the LA Clippers—case. He had every right to speak his mind on any topic that suited his fancy; what he didn't have was the right to do so in a public manner and escape the inevitable economic consequences of doing so.
The data presented doesn't really support either camp.
Kevin makes 2 assumptions with no evidence in order to support the George Floyd case:
- Murders spiked only after Floyds murder
- Covid, lockdowns and the general approach of Americans toward daily life were identical in April, May and June of 2020.
I dont know if either assumption is correct, but these assptions are doing all the work in this analysis.
Blacks killing and injuring other blacks seems to be a thing we don’t really care about. Heck, it’s not even acceptable to point it out. It’s a mystery!
What do you care? You generally think that everything is going to hell in a hand basket anyway, and seem to welcome it in all other contexts.
An untestable hypothesis---COVID amped up liberal response to George Floyd. People who supposedly think we shouldn't broadly condemn a group of people felt comfortable to say, openly, 'cops suck' or related. Monitoring twitter feeds and CNN made many of my liberal friends into something I did not recognize, at least that is my hypothesis.
This is a bad take. Murder's spiked because America was staying home due to COVID and family/roommate togetherness plus guns definitely caused a spike in domestic homicides in Northern Virginia. On top of that there could be some disruption of those violence disruptors and police shenanigans out of spite for the George Floyd protests.
By the time Floyd was murdered, people were pretty tired of being trapped at home. The protests were the catalyst for a lot of people finally going out and congregating in large numbers.
For young Black men, murders tend to happen around other people. It's a lot of hotheaded fights that escalate and group rivalries. They are more likely to happen at parties, concerts, funerals, etc. It's not a lot of secret poisonings or killing for insurance money. It's the kind of crime that is highly impacted by people gathering in groups and the likelihood of police presence.
Mix in police forces that are overwhelmed/pulling back and a large segment of the population with major grievances against the police, and you have the recipe for more, retributive violence.
It doesn't surprise me that murders and carjackings were the things to spike. Other types of violent crimes were just not going to be easy to commit during the pandemic, because the victims were just less available. Fewer open bars means fewer drunken fights between people who dont know each other. Less dating in person and fewer opportunities to drink in public means less acquaintance rape. More people at home all hours makes it harder to break into homes and get away with victimizing the inhabitants.
One other note: comparing May/June to the winter will always get a spike. Murders just aren't as common in winter, because a lot of this country is just too cold to go out "looking for trouble."
we also released people from prison due to covid
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/impact-covid-19-state-and-federal-prisons-march-2020-february-2021
The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-two-decade-red-state-murder-problem
Let me get this right: someone is angry that the police committed a crime and killed George Floyd. Their response is to go out and kill an unrelated person????
Just a counter narrative....
Lock downs meant more time at home and online. That lead to more online taunting and "disrespect". Eventually action had to taken, so jump in gun violence and hence murders. This has a lag time and wouldn't truly reveal itself until there was some ease up in lock downs. Turns out that timing coincided with the Floyd protests.
Other data that Kevin failed to include:
Violent crime is seasonal, rising in the spring and summer. Kevin paints this normal, yearly patter as evidence that George Floyd caused violence to surge, but it may just be the regular pattern of violence increasing in the summer.
Violent crime also peaks on the weekend. Kevin paints this regular pattern in May as proof that George Floyd is to blame although he admits he has no evidence and is just making it up to fit the narrative. He even points out that it is April that appears to stand out as odd, defying historical precedents....but he still oddly concludes this is evidence for Floyd.
Other reporting indicates that crime was already spiking in March/April 2020, but this is oddly left out of this analysis. Showing that March and April were historically average while May and June saw huge increases would be actual evidence. but its not shown.
Doesn't crime usually spike on weekends since more people are out and about and more people are indulging in booze and the like?
Yes, this is true.
Kevin felt that even though this a regular, every-week occurance, it provides evidence that Floyd protests/reactions were to blame because, while he cant find any evidence, the weekend spike following the Floyd murder might be different from the regular weekend spikes that occur all the time. But hes not sure there was actually a spike following the Floyd murder, so lets just assume this is true and now we have evidence pointing towards the Floyd protests/reactions.
When you are determined to come to a conclusion, any data will work.
>May 2020, Blacks were killed at a rate 39% higher than the average of the first four months. Whites, by contrast, were killed at a rate only 10% higher. It seems very unlikely that COVID would produce such a large racial difference.
On the contrary, this is exactly what you would expect from 1) prisoners being released early, or arrestees not being jailed pending trial; and 2) young guys hanging out with nothing to do getting in trouble. Note that members of both groups are disproportionately likely to become victims as well as perpetrators.
Did the % of black people being killed by other black people change? Probably not. Isn't this mostly black on black crime? Did one more black guy getting killed by police with nationwide protests etc. cause more black guys to kill other black guys? Probably not.
I don't think some police generally deciding to not do more at work than they really had to would make much difference, but the widespread perception that laws were not being enforced (true or not), and particularly with murders of black people might. That plus maybe the prisoners being let out early, and maybe other factors.
Seems like something extreme enough to get some criminal justice experts interested in figuring it out.