As if the Covid-19 pandemic wasn\u2019t bad enough, America is also seeing a surge in homicides this year.<\/p>\n
A new report, by the Council on Criminal Justice, found homicides have increased sharply this year across 21 US cities with relevant data: \u201cHomicide rates increased by 42% during the summer and 34% in the fall over the summer and fall of 2019.\u201d Other data, from crime analyst Jeff Asher, found murder is up 36 percent throughout the year so far, compared to the same period in 2019, in a sample of 51 US cities. A preliminary FBI report also found murders up 15 percent nationwide in the first half of 2020.<\/p>\n
The increase in homicides is large and widespread enough to raise serious alarms for criminologists and other experts. So what\u2019s going on?<\/p>\n
Some experts have cited the protests this summer over the police killings of George Floyd and others \u2014 which could\u2019ve had a range of effects, from officers pulling back from their duties to greater community distrust in police, leading to more unchecked violence. Others point to the bad economy. Another potential factor is a huge increase in gun purchases this year. Still others posit boredom and social displacement as a result of physical distancing leading people to cause more trouble.<\/p>\n
Above all, though, experts caution it\u2019s simply been a very unusual year with the Covid-19 pandemic. That makes it difficult to say what, exactly, is happening with crime rates. \u201cThe current year, 2020, is an extreme deviation from baseline \u2014 extreme,\u201d Tracey Meares, founding director at the Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, previously told me.<\/p>\n
That offers a bit of good news: It\u2019s possible that the end of the pandemic will come and homicide rates will fall again, as they generally have for the past few decades in the US. But no one knows for sure if that will happen, or if we\u2019re now seeing a shift in long-term trends.<\/p>\n
Uncertainty about what\u2019s going on isn\u2019t exactly new in the field of criminal justice. Rates of crime and violence have plummeted over the past few decades in the US, yet there is no agreed-upon explanation for why. There are theories applying the best evidence, research, and data available, ranging from changes in policing to a drop in lead exposure to the rise of video games. But there\u2019s no consensus.<\/p>\n
That a decades-long phenomenon is still so hard to explain shows the need for humility before jumping to conclusions about the current trends.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t know nearly enough to know what\u2019s going on at the given moment,\u201d Jennifer Doleac, director of the Justice Tech Lab, previously told me. \u201cThe current moment is so unusual for so many different reasons that \u2026 it\u2019s really hard to speculate about broad phenomena that are driving these trends when we\u2019re not even sure if there\u2019s a trend yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of that said, here\u2019s what we do know.<\/p>\n
Homicides are up in the US this year<\/p>\n
There are several good sources, from criminologists, economists, and other data analysts, for what\u2019s happened with crime and violence so far this year: an analysis by Jeff Asher; a Council on Criminal Justice report written by Richard Rosenfeld and Ernesto Lopez; City Crime Stats, a website from the University of Pennsylvania set up by David Abrams, Priyanka Goonetilleke, Elizabeth Holmdahl, and Kathy Qian; and a preliminary report from the FBI.<\/p>\n
Crime analyst Jeff Asher offers the most recent data, looking at crime trends in 51 US cities in 2020 so far compared to 2019. He found murders are up 36 percent. Despite previous comments by President Donald Trump blaming the increase on Democrat-run cities, Asher found murders are up about 36 percent in both cities with Democratic mayors and those with Republican mayors. In a smaller sample of US cities, he found violent crime overall is flat and property crimes are down.<\/p>\n
The Council on Criminal Justice report, updated in November, analyzed crime in 28 US cities, ranging in size from Los Angeles to St. Petersburg, Florida, through October. The authors looked for \u201cstructural breaks,\u201d in which reported crime increased or decreased more than would be expected, based on data from previous years.<\/p>\n
They found structural breaks in homicide, aggravated assault, and gun assault increases, particularly starting in the summer. There weren\u2019t significant increases in domestic assault (although the data for domestic violence is fairly limited), and robbery was actually down. Other kinds of crime, including larceny and drug offenses, largely decreased.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the graph for homicide increases:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were 610 more homicides in the 21 cities in the summer and fall of 2020 than during the same period in 2019,\u201d the report found.<\/p>\n
City Crime Stats\u2019 data complicates matters a bit, comparing the 2020 crime trends in 28 major cities to a five-year baseline. With this approach, the homicide increases don\u2019t seem quite as dramatic in many cities, and other types of crime appear to be mostly down as well. Still, homicides do seem to be significantly up in many of the cities included in the City Crime Stats data set. <\/p>\n
Here, for example, is Chicago\u2019s homicide trend, which shows this year\u2019s rate (the red line) rising above the five-year baseline (the gray line and shading) at several points throughout the year:<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot of variation from city to city. Minneapolis, Milwaukee, New York City, and Philadelphia are on the high end of homicides or seeing a flat-out increase. Baltimore, Boston, and Columbus are close to historical trends or actually down.<\/p>\n
Overall, though, Abrams said that his data suggests there was a significant increase in homicides from May to June: \u201cWe did find a statistically significant increase in homicides \u2014 about 21 percent \u2014 in aggregate in the cities we looked at in the month after versus before those protests,\u201d he previously told me, cautioning we can\u2019t say with any confidence if the protests were the cause. \u201cSame for shootings, but that\u2019s from a smaller number of cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
A preliminary FBI report confirmed these other reports\u2019 findings for the first half of 2020. It found a 15 percent increase in murders, a 5 percent increase in aggravated assaults, and an 8 percent decrease in property crime nationwide from January through June, compared to the same time period in 2019. The FBI will likely release a report for all of 2020 later in 2021.<\/p>\n
In Chicago, as well as some other cities, the apparent increase in homicides began before the protests over the police killing of George Floyd. And in some cases, as in Chicago, the spike abruptly ended almost as quickly as it started, only to surge again weeks later, after the protests had calmed. So it\u2019s hard to blame only the protests for a spike \u2014 especially because we know that other factors likely played a role, such as the start of summer, when crime tends to go up, and the end of stay-at-home orders.<\/p>\n
City-by-city variation isn\u2019t unique to 2020. It\u2019s expected, even when talking about national crime waves or declines, to see some places go up and others go down for different kinds of crime. The US is a big country, and a range of local factors can affect different kinds of crime.<\/p>\n
Still, there\u2019s enough in the four data sets to draw some conclusions: Homicides are up significantly this year. But other kinds of crime, including violent crime overall, aren\u2019t up and may actually have decreased so far this year. There was also a brief spike in burglaries in major cities starting in late May \u2014 an increase that was so brief and contained to specific cities that experts told me it was almost certainly due to the riots and looting surrounding some Black Lives Matter protests.<\/p>\n
As Asher noted on Twitter, a disconnect between murders and other crimes would be odd: \u201cViolent crime and murder almost always move in the same direction and they are never this far apart nationally.\u201d<\/p>\n
One way to reconcile this may be the nature of crime reporting. All of this data is based on reports to governments, typically local police departments. But with people stuck at home, and no government agency operating normally this year, perhaps these reports are just less likely to happen or get picked up, especially lower-level crimes involving drugs or stolen property.<\/p>\n
At the same time, it\u2019s far harder for a homicide to go completely unreported \u2014 it\u2019s difficult to ignore a dead person. This is why, for much of US history, the homicide rate has been used as a proxy for violent crime overall: The nature of homicide made it a more reliable metric than others for crime.<\/p>\n
In other words, it\u2019s possible that other kinds of crime are up this year, but they\u2019re simply going unreported. At any rate, homicides are up significantly.<\/p>\n
One note on domestic violence: Some activists and experts worried it would increase this year as people were forced to stay home more often. The Council on Criminal Justice report and City Crime Stats\u2019 analysis suggest that\u2019s not the case, showing no significant change or a drop in some places. But there\u2019s reason for skepticism: Both sources are pulling data from a limited number of cities. And reporting limitations may especially apply to domestic violence, since this year victims are potentially more likely to be trapped with their abusers and unable to make a phone call for help.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of caveats to all this data. Much of it only represents trends in large US cities, which means it might not be representative of the country as a whole. And it only covers 2020 through November at the latest.<\/p>\n
But the trends, particularly with homicides, are very alarming.<\/p>\n
We know less about why there\u2019s a spike, but there are some theories<\/p>\n
So why are homicides up?<\/p>\n
When I posed this question to experts, they again cautioned that no one can say with certainty what\u2019s going on. That said, they offered some possible explanations, based on the limited information we have so far:<\/p>\n
1) The pandemic has really messed things up: Looming over absolutely every discussion about 2020 is the Covid-19 pandemic. That\u2019s no different for discussions about crime and violence. This year is very unusual, with many forced to stay at home and living in fear of a new, deadly virus. That could lead to all sorts of unpredictable behaviors that experts don\u2019t understand yet and might take years to explain.<\/p>\n