I see that AH Datalytics has published the inaugural version of their Real-Time Crime Index, which provides rough estimates of crime within a couple of months of it happening. This contrasts with the FBI, which takes about six months to provide quarterly estimates and nearly a year to provide final annual figures.
What's more, the RTCI provides monthly data. For example, here's their estimate of murders over the past few years:
Does this give us any insight into why murder increased sharply in the spring of 2020? Maybe....
Up through April 2020—when COVID was already in full swing—murders remained at normal levels. They spiked in May when George Floyd was killed and then spiked further in June. But then they declined rapidly even though COVID was still surging.
So this suggests it was George Floyd, not COVID, that caused the murder spike. However, the annual summertime murder peaks have remained high for three years. It seems unlikely that the George Floyd effect could last that long, while the COVID effect probably could.
So it's still very difficult to say. If I had to guess, I'd say it was mostly COVID but with an extra little surge in 2020 when Floyd was murdered. It's just a guess, though.
don't suppose there is a correlation with gun sales and/or first time gun buyers?
Rate of guns in circulation went up in 2015 and again ca. 2020.
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total/
Guns purchased for personal protection tend to be risker than guns purchased for hunting or sport shooting: when people buy for personal protection they usually buy handguns and keep them loaded and easily available. That makes them prime targets for gun theft.
The pandemic did cause a rise in gun purchases for personal protection by first-time buyers, which is likely correlated with poor storage practices.
Just about every local news outlet has had a story about increased gun thefts from cars, and Everytown has an article as well: https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-thefts-from-cars-the-largest-source-of-stolen-guns-2/
A lot of murders are retribution - someone is murdered, and instead of just leaving it to the police, friends or family murder the person they think is responsible. Places with low clearance rates for murder often end up in this kind of doom loop. The cops can't even solve the murders when they try, because the prime suspects get murdered so fast in acts of revenge, and with each unsolved murder the public loses more confidence in the cops, and are quicker to attempt a revenge killing.
I think that the murder spike is a combination of these things: the Floyd murder crushed confidence in police, so more people decided to get their own revenge; stolen handguns were easier to get than ever; empty streets meant crimes had fewer witnesses; and closed schools/rec centers meant lots of teenagers had huge amounts of time and energy they could spend on criminal activity instead of something useful.
The sheer number of guns people leave lying around now suggests we won't be able to drop to our previous lows for murder. The new normal will be a bit higher. Even without lead, teens are impulsive. Making it easy for teens to get guns is a good way to keep murder rates high.
Contrary t Kevin's disastrously bad analysis, murder was pp by January 2020, pre-covi and was up substantially by April 2020, pre George Floyd. To analyze the data on a monthly time scale one needs to correct for the seasonality of murder.
Before I get to the rest, a word on wording: you should have said "this suggests it was the murder of George Floyd" or something to that effect. Sloppy.
But I don't buy it as a singular cause, or even a primary cause. I think unrest was a secondary cause. What do I think were primary cause(s)?
Well, for starters - whatever was causing the spike even before Floyd's murder. It was already well above the levels of previous years. Floyd's murder can't have caused that.
Also, what do we know about a COVID infection's psychological effects (to say nothing of the indirect effects of the pandemic)? It seems to impair cognition and cause irritability.
Now, if only I could think of something else that impairs cognition and causes irritability and is linked with higher (violent) crime rates... I seem to remember somebody writing about that before lots of other people did.
"being exposed to COVID-19 showed a positive connection with aggression": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10031181/
"they also reported more negative feelings, such as anger and sadness, and higher levels of stress": https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2023/long-covid-sufferers-with-cognitive-complaints-and-mental-health-issues-have-changes-in-brain-function-new-study-suggests.html
‘The Rage Would Come Out of Nowhere’:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/long-covid-symptom-personality-change-1243718/
To cite just a few.
That is an excellent point.
We should’ve seen murder spikes in other countries if Covid was the culprit. At least in high income countries, we tended to see the opposite, i.e. falling crime, throughout 2020.
No other high income country is flooded with guns.
.. and had a POS as president.
Pretty sure Italy had a POS as leader. Of course Italy had an even worse covid response than the US, as hard as that is to imagine.
What was wrong with our covid response? I know many states/cities kept lockdowns and school closures in place for far too long, but overall, it was pretty successful.
Besides the death rate being more than double countries like Germany and Canada that had adequate covid responses (and adequate response would have saved 750,000 lives) and besides the fact that other early hit countries like China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore were able to completely shutdown the initial infection. How could you ask such a idiotic and fundamentally evil question. And in world of perfect justice this claim "many states/cities kept lockdowns and school closures in place for far too long" would get your skull crushed with a baseball bat.
No other high income country is flooded with guns.
This makes no sense. The surfeit of guns obviously explains America's higher rate of gun violence (and intentional homicide overall). That's been the case for many decades.
But it's not impossible to kill with knives or fists, and in any event many rich countries have fair numbers of guns in circulation, and a considerable number of murders.
In other words, if Covid explains the upwards trajectory of murder in the US in 2020, we should have seen similar spikes (albeit starting at lower levels) in other countries.
But we don't see this.
It's not impossible to kill with knives or fists, but it hardly ever occurs. If you compare homicides with knives and fists in the US with other countries, you'd probably see similar numbers. The difference is that with so many guns in circulation, a fistfight that might likely result in a broken nose turns into a shooting.
Why don't we see an increase in homicides in other countries? I haven't perused all the data, but I do know that if the numbers are a lot lower it's a lot harder to discern statistically significant changes, and homicides in other countries are far lower than in the US. The abundance of guns magnifies the homicide numbers to the point where effects like the COVID effect become discernable. I haven't time to look for data right now, but a better measure would be total violent crime. (Kevin: hint) This includes non-gun-related crimes and should be a better measure of the effect worldwide.
One last point. I think it's non-productive to quibble about which is the effect, when it's likely an all-of-the-above situation. The spike in 2020 began before the Floyd killing, so there has to be another cause, which is NOT to say that the Floyd killing had no effect.
Guns.
Doesn't explain why murder was elevated in January 2020.
That sure looks like noise.
Could be. Or it could be real since deaths were elevated continuously at that point.
Just eyeballing the chart, it sure doesnt look like anything changed in May 2020.
"Just eyeballing the chart, it sure doesnt look like anything changed in May 2020."
I believe the chart was formed by fitting a curve through points spaced monthly. You need to go back to the points if you are looking for an abrupt jump.
May 2020 is the first month that exceeded all the previous months. Subsequent months continued to increase, peaking in July 2020.
If you correct for seasonality that 's 100% false. April was definitely significantly elevated. And January to March were also elevated.
Gun violence is a social disease that is most contagious among the disadvantaged. Covid also struck this group the hardest while also making them more isolated from influences outside of their group due to the various shut downs/social distancing.
When you are struggling, seeing loved ones die, and not getting away for perspective, picking up a gun to solve what should be a minor dispute starts to seem like a reasonable idea, especially when others in your society are doing the same thing.
All sorts of support services from mental health to probation/parole visits and gang violence interventions were suspended during Covid in a lot of places and this had an outsized impact esp. in poor and urban areas where a lot people's lives were completely upended by the pandemic. Then, as you suggest, this kind of desperation mentality sets in and the only way out seems to be to shoot your way out.
Important point here, cold-turkey shutoff of social services. If I were a social scientist looking for a research angle, I might want to find a way to start here.
2020 was an election year, and gun-grabbing Democrats led in the polls. The staunch Republican defenders of Second Amendment rights looked to get turned out, so patriotic Americans had to buy guns while they could. And more guns. And more, just to be sure. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8697522/
In our local area, a pretty intense drug war broke out in 2020-21. Three gangs were killing one another it seemed like monthly. Maybe the supply chain issues extended to drug imports?
Fentanyl shot up during the latter half of the Trump administration.
that's a really interesting idea, and one that seems like a more direct and checkable mechanism for the murder spike than some of the other explanations.
There were just so many non-pro-social behaviors that took off during Covid, along with norms, that I think it really had to be mostly Covid. It’s not like the stress of it would start on Feb. 2020, it took a while for the full scope and impacts to become clear.
That would be my vote as well. There was a wave of shock that started in late March when everything shut down. By mid April, stores shelves were empty as people went into crisis mode. By May, everyone was fully freaked out and on super high edge and it snowballed from there.
Humans (and cats) never take massive disruption of their routines well. Take a bunch of people already in crisis and layer an unprecedented disruption on top and you've got a toxic stew. AND, you get a bunch of people who are angry that their freedom is being infringed and there's a giant government plot to control folks via a hoax pandemic -- super toxic stew. The people with the least impulse control or strong family connections are most likely to crack. Fear is a helluva drug.
I think gangs and idiotic wannabe teenagers took advantage of the moment and kicked off a cycle of tit for tat violence. Turns out… black lives didn’t matter to them.
“For months, a battle had been raging on Instagram between crews based on either side of Market Street. Theirs was a long-running rivalry, but a barrage of online taunts and threats had raised tensions in the neighborhood.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/social-media-violence-young-americans
Covid was a high stress situation that made everyone act as if they'd had child lead poisoning. Luckily it was temporary. This explains everything from murders to reckless driving to yelling at flight attendants.
Kevin has previously pubished studies showing covi infection led to log term losses of IQ. There are studies of sustained brain inflammation following covid infections.
I find it interesting and a little strange that it seems that we really do not know why crime rises and falls. It's like, what has the entire academic field of criminology been doing? And people talk about it in politics all the time and claim to be able to fix it...
You're a big fan of trends and momentum, and the spike in murders was already underway before George Floyd was killed and continued after. I was already close to 150 murders higher than the previous two years, so the spike was well underway in June 2020.
No comment on the clear seasonal variation? Looks like murder is as seasonal as the flu. But why a summer peak?
Wasn't there a Ray Bradbury story linking the increasing heat, increasing anger, increasing violence leading to murder?
Google tells me that in the story Bradbury posits that 92 F is the perfect temperature for murder to occur. Over 100 F is too hot to move around, below 90 people can calm down.
Not sure if more 92 degree days was a factor for 2020 murder rate...
We have AC now.
There is a well-documented link between heat and violent crime.
While no one is saying it here, for the record I do want to point out that the protests of the murder of George Floyd were almost entirely peaceful. A small percentage (~7%, iirc) did involve some violence or vandalism, most of it minor, but even in cases of violence, it was more often perpetrated by police against protesters than the other way around. The perception among many is that violence was the norm, especially among heavy consumers of right-wing media like Fox, which constantly replayed selected clips to stir up anger in its audience, which in turn helped foment the violent insurrection of January 6.
No doubt the George Floyd protests were an expression of anger. They were the largest protests in the history of our country, if I'm not mistaken, and without the Covid pandemic and the disruption to everyday life it's unlikely they would have been so large. People were angry about being stuck home, angry about seeing so many people dying, angry about the upcoming election. The murder of Floyd was egregious and people were very angry about that. The protests gave lots of people a place to channel that collective anger in an acceptable way.
On the other hand, not everyone expressed their anger in acceptable ways. A few protesters went over the line. A few cops did too. Elsewhere, some people resorted to gun violence
We almost never really know why things happen, at least when it comes to human affairs. Historians still debate the causes of wars from centuries past. No one knows why the stock market goes up and down in nonsensical ways. Explanations, by their nature, are extremely limited, and often wrong. (It's easier to disprove nonsense than prove the truth.)
That said, I think it's more appropriate to say the conditions that led to the George Floyd protests and the conditions that led to the spike in gun violence were much the same. To say or suggest than the protests led to the gun violence seems more to be politically motivated reasoning; i.e., a fallacy.
We have shotspotter data that shows -- on a day-by-day basis -- the impact of Covid and George Floyd's death on gunfire in multiple cities.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/09/21/george-floyds-murder-discouraged-americans-from-calling-the-police
Covid had no impact. But after George Floyd's death the number of detected gunshots increased massively. People used the resulting civil disorder to settle scores, setting off a cycle of violence that persisted for years.
This is not the first time, either.
Same thing happened in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray (on April 19th of the following graph).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/murder-rates-dont-tell-us-everything-about-gun-violence/
Same thing happened in Ferguson after the death of Michael Brown.
This dude has a whole post about it:
https://thecausalfallacy.com/p/anatomy-of-a-ferguson-cycle
Don't you remember that Portland (Oregon) was burned to the ground several times by BLM protesters?
I'm dubious of a Floyd effect on murders. I think a better question would be where did the murders spike the most? Pew Research has this: " At least eight states saw their murder rates rise by 40% or more last year, with the largest percentage increases in Montana (+84%), South Dakota (+81%), Delaware (+62%) and Kentucky (+61%), according to the CDC. Higher-than-average increases also occurred in several heavily populated states, including New York (+47%), Pennsylvania (+39%), Illinois (+38%), Ohio (+38%) and California (+36%).
So unless George Floyd's murder was especially salient in Montana, South Dakota, Delaware and Kentucky, the evidence for a link seems weak at best.
Always be careful about large percentage increases in small numbers. Montana and South Dakota are small states and I'd bet had low murder rates before.
The first thing to note from the graph is that murder is very seasonal. Thus it's hard to interpret at a monthly level without correcting for that. In particular, many of the trends identified by Kevin were simply the fundamental seasonal trends. For example "But then they declined rapidly even though COVID was still surging." was simply the normal seasonal response. and "Up through April 2020—when COVID was already in full swing—murders remained at normal levels." is 100% false. In fact murders were elevated by January 2020 prior to covid, and were indisputably significantly elevated by April 2020, before George Floyd.
Yglesias is pretty convinced there's a strong Floyd effect.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-2020-murder-surge-wasnt-about?r=7j7hw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Here's an article about well-known criminologist Richard Rosenfeld. Long story short, Rosenfeld was prominent in the pushback against the notion of a Ferguson effect on crime in St. Louis. But he changed his mind as more data came in:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-effect-real-researcher-richard-rosenfield-second-thoughts
The steep slope of the increase of murders occurred in early 2020 when the Covid epidemic began in the US. The start of the presidential primaries also occurred at that time. The polarization caused by President Trump's Covid response and coincident start of the election season may have more to do with the increased murder rate as the nation divided into antagonistic camps. Floyd's murder provided an example of how easy killing is by those with the capacity to commit violence, whether with authority, opportunity, rage. Floyd's murder also exposed opposite opinions about the right to kill, reflecting the differences of the opposing antagonistic camps Covid and the election exacerbated. The right to kill cohort displayed their guns and committed additional murders. A subset of those outraged by police and racist murderers were stimulated into a defensive response, who also took up arms and killed. A national feud like that between the Shepherdsons and Grangerfords commenced, peaking in the summers.
My guess is that anytime you have a major disturbance in the "normal", there are people with unstable personalities that are just barely holding on, that go over the "edge". The graph looks like the signature of ringing a bell with low damping.
Here's a chart and some ramblings, I dunno, why don't you readers do the blogging work today.
The other thing that makes this knotty is that the George Floyd protests themselves were probably a consequence of the lockdowns. Tons of (young) people home from work and school, already on edge, and enough time on their hands to notice a video of an egregious, violent act.
Based on the 2019 spike and winter 2020 trough, it looks like murders were already rising before COVID or George Floyd's murder. Flooding the streets with guns and disrupting social connections in early 2020 may have been the final straws on something that had been building up. I don't see why the Floyd protests would have had this sort of effect, unless there's some nationwide conspiracy of cops involved here.