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The Murder Rate Is Up . . . Sort Of

This is from a story in the Washington Post a few weeks ago about the rise in homicides in 2020:

The grim body count isn’t quite over yet, but the data collected so far is stark — a 20.9 percent increase in killings nationwide, in the first nine months of the year, according to the FBI.

....Experts agree the pandemic has played a huge role in the rise in killings, but it has also probably contributed to a significant decrease in nonviolent crimes, which the FBI data shows fell by more than 8 percent in the first nine months of the year, possibly because there were fewer people on the street, fewer stores open for business and fewer crimes of opportunity available.

A huge rise in the murder rate is obviously bad news, but it's paradoxically good news too. The trendline for national crime rates never changes by more than a few percentage points a year, which means that a 20.9% increase is plainly a huge outlier. Maybe it was prompted by the George Floyd protests. Maybe it was prompted by the pandemic. But whatever it was, there's no chance that it represents a genuine change in long-term crime trends. This is confirmed by the fact that nonviolent crime was down and—if I remember this correctly—that violent crime other than murder was also down (or at most very slightly up.)

Crime rates have been unusually spiky over the past few years, and it's hard to extract much of a signal from all the noise. We need to figure out why the murder rate is up, but we should also expect that in 2021 it will probably go right back down.

8 thoughts on “The Murder Rate Is Up . . . Sort Of

  1. cephalopod

    My city had major protests, and the initial crime stats reflect that: arson up 78% over 2019, commercial burglary up 70.5%. A lot of those happened during the protests themselves. Only rape and residential burglary are down.

    It looks to me like crime rates are being impacted by both the protest fallout and the pandemic. People are less willing to talk to the police, making retribution killings more likely. People who work to calm tensions cant go out, due to the pandemic. Having the streets more empty than usual because of the pandemic makes a lot of crime seem less risky - there are fewer people to see you and report it. But home burglaries are tougher, since that's where all the people are.

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      There's been a lot of speculation that domestic violence has been one of the drivers in the increase in murder. I'd guess a couple of others are: a general spike in substance abuse and an overall deterioration in public safety due to both police cutbacks and sharply reduced pedestrian flow. I wouldn't be shocked if a stressed healthcare system likewise means a higher percentage of shootings and stabbings have been resulting in deaths (thus partially and hopefully just temporarily reversing one of the causes of the decline in homicides in America: the improvement in emergency medicine over the years).

  2. fqmorris

    I don’t have statistics, but in my New Orleans Bywater neighborhood gunfire has gone way up this past year. I can hear it from my house, and this wasn’t the case when I moved in four years ago. This COVID19 times is wearing a lot of people thin.

  3. Crissa

    Also, US crime rates are a selective sample: We don't actually sample much of the midwest and south, because they don't report to the feds.

    And also, only cases the police decide are violent are counted. They don't count justified homicides, suicides, or accidental deaths as murders, but there is overlap. Shifting just a few from one pile to another will have dramatic shifts in the murder rate.

    We saw this when stand your ground laws took effect: More people died, but there were fewer 'murders'.

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