Commentary- Record Rise in Murder Rates in US Not Because of COVID

 

In 2020, murder rose at an unprecedented 30 percent annual rate, as incarceration rates fell, police manpower shrank, and anti-police protests spread across the nation.

As the New York Times noted, "There is no precedent for last year's increase in the number of murders." The previous largest one-year increase was 12.7 percent, in 1968. And the murder rate is still going up in 2021. The Times reports that "data from 87 cities with publicly available year-to-date data shows murder up by 9.9 percent relative to comparable points in 2020. Some cities like Portland, Ore., and Las Vegas are seeing big increases relative to last year."

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Some observers wonder whether this spike in killings was caused by the coronavirus pandemic, but global crime data shows it wasn't. A recent Washington Post editorial “Too much death” asked whether homicides rose in America because of “the COVID-19 pandemic” or “national protests” against the police.

The "protests" likely were a factor. But the pandemic wasn't. The pandemic killed people across the globe, and plunged most of the world into a recession. Yet the United States was almost alone in having a huge increase in homicides. Most of the world saw reductions in homicide rates in 2020.

Murder rates actually fell in most countries that lost many people to the coronavirus. Peru had the world’s highest coronavirus death rate per million inhabitants. Yet Peru’s homicide rate fell by more than 2 percent in 2020.

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