The murder rate rose in 2020.
Substantially.
Here’s a Twitter thread from the end of December from Jeff Asher, a data analyst and former CIA officer who has a lot of knowledge about the statistics surrounding crime, and shares that knowledge often (here’s an example of some of his other work):
If you click in, you can see more, but a few notes from his examination:
- For a few reasons, the final number on how much murder increased in the United States in 2020 is likely higher than that 20.9% figure.
- Murder is up everywhere: “Murder was up 15% in cities of every size with cities under 10,000 people having the largest % change 31.1%.” In other words, the smallest towns saw murder increase the most during 2020. This is not just happening in cities.
- The numbers for cities with populations larger than 150,000 demonstrate very similar numbers in those with Democratic mayors and those with Republican mayors.
- The rate of increase rose in each quarter from Q1 through Q3, with Q4 yet to come (this is one of the reasons the total increase might be higher than 20.9%).
To put this in perspective: The CDC says there were 19,141 homicide deaths in the United States in 2019. A 20% increase would mean roughly 4,000 more people dying in homicides.
This is, of course, a serious issue. It’s an issue we, as a country, want to address. Murder is senseless. Murder is not something like car accidents or deaths from disease, causes of death where it would be hard even in a perfect society, given our technological constraints, to get the number to zero. In a perfect society, given our technological constraints, there would be no murder.
It’s also an issue larger than that 4,000-person change in deaths. Because for each murder, there are other shootings and acts of violence that do not result in murder but do have multitudes of adverse effects. Murder is not efficient. It causes collateral societal damage.
It’s a huge issue. It’s one that deserves our concern. And it will receive our concern. And sadly, it will likely not receive our concern in a highly productive way. Here’s a comment from Asher near the end of the thread:
“Anyhow, my takeaway is that there’s a substantial rise in murder throughout the country that we barely have enough data to identify.
“In a sane world, we’d try to explain it and develop policies to reverse, but instead it’ll devolve into a discussion of political talking points.”
That’s a scary thing about this. It will devolve into a discussion of political talking points. It already has. And it’s hard to see that facet of this improving anytime soon, because the temptations to approach the matter disingenuously are high. Violent crime was a talking point for President Biden on the campaign trail, but he used numbers in misleading ways, and while may have been trying to highlight that the Trump administration’s approach to crime was ineffective, that’s a hard correlation-causation claim to justify (and Biden did not effectively justify it with policy explanations or data). Gregg N. Sofer, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, announced in December a program dedicated to addressing violent crime in Austin. In the first line of the press release, Sofer’s office cited the rising murder rate in Austin, a rate that was—per Asher’s data—lower than the rise in Fort Worth, which is receiving no such attention (and resulted in a total murder number in Austin for the first three quarters of 2020 that was respectively, per capita, between 59% and 75% lower than those of Fort Worth, Houston, and Dallas). Later in the release, Sofer attributed the increase in part to Austin’s effort to “defund the police,” presumably a reference to Austin’s police reform efforts designed last summer, the effects of which could not have been felt in the timeframe from which the data was taken, and which—and let me make clear that they should be analyzed and debated and considered, and not just blindly praised in an effort to reject Sofer’s culture-war-inflaming idiocy—were more than a simple budget cut.
Hopefully, the murder rate drops in 2021. Hopefully we get the pandemic under control, to an extent that any pandemic-driven factors pushing up the murder rate do not push it up in 2021 (and just to be clear, for those seeking an opportunity to minimize the pandemic: according to the Economist’s excess death tracker, even the least tragic week in the United States since the pandemic began has seen 4,000 more total deaths than the same week would have in an average year). Hopefully we do better, individually, in those little things that maybe won’t change the murder rate, but maybe will, and are good things regardless—the things like being kind, and being good, and judging the safety of a neighborhood by statistics and not by the color of the residents’ skin. And hopefully too, the partisanized bullshit around this lessens. Hopefully President Biden and others don’t make more misleading claims on the topic. Hopefully U.S. Attorney Sofer and his ilk quit cooking up these baseless publicity stunts. Hopefully, as Asher said, we “try to explain (the risen murder rate) and develop policies to reverse (the risen murder rate).” As we would in a healthy society.
Let’s be a healthy society.
