There’s been a wave of media coverage this summer about an increase in homicides across the United States, with attention often focused on the same political question: will Americans still want to defund or even reform the police if “violent crime” is on the rise?
Anxiety about violent crime is often used to win elections. Police and politicians routinely share misleading, out-of-context crime statistics to advance their agendas. Fearmongering about rising crime has also been used for decades to undermine Black Americans’ protests for civil rights. So it’s important to ask: is this homicide increase actually significant? And how much evidence is there for any of the explanations about why killings are going up?
The numbers
After decades of a primarily downward trend in the overall number of people killed, crime experts say they expect 2020 will mark the biggest single-year national jump in homicides since national crime statistics began to be released in the 1960s.
A preliminary government estimate shows a
25% single-year increase in killings in 2020. In
some larger cities, the number of homicides has remained
higher than usual through the early months of 2021.
While official national crime data will not be released for months, some trends are clear. The 2020 homicide increase happened across cities and towns of all sizes, from those with fewer than 10,000 residents to those with more than a million, according to preliminary FBI data.
The rise in homicides likely translated into an
additional 4,000 to 5,000 people killed across the country compared with the year before, according to early estimates.
It was an especially hard year for cities that have never seen decreases in gun violence to match the overall national trend. Philadelphia and St Louis returned close to their historic highs for the number of people killed in a single year, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the St Louis Post-Dispatch. Chicago, which had seen homicides fall below 500 in the early 2010s, saw them jump to 770 in 2020, though not to its historic 1974 high of 970 homicides, according to the Chicago Tribune.
It does not take a huge numerical increase in killings to translate into big percentage increases in a city’s homicide rate. Chicago, a city of 2.7 million people, saw 300 more people killed in 2020 than in 2019, and more than 1,000 additional nonfatal shootings, according to data from AmericanViolence.org.
New York, a city of 8 million people, saw an increase of about 150 homicides and 700 nonfatal shootings.
Smaller cities saw smaller total increases: Oakland and Minneapolis, which both have populations of about 400,000 people, each saw homicides increase by about 30 additional people killed last year, and between 100 and 270 additional nonfatal shootings.
And yet, even after an estimated 25% single-year increase in homicides, Americans overall are much less likely to be killed today than they were in the 1990s, and the homicide rate across big cities is still close to half what it was a quarter century ago.
New York City saw more than 2,200 killings in a single year in 1990, compared with 468 last year, according to city data. In the bigger picture, that’s a nearly 80% decrease.
Los Angeles saw more than 1,000 homicides a year in the early 1990s, compared with fewer than 350 last year.
