The FBI’s initial homicide data was published this week, and while the numbers may slightly change as the agency reevaluates them before its news release on Monday, the numbers show just how deadly 2020 was.
The initial data for 2020 indicates that the United States has seen the largest single-year increase in homicides since the start of national recordkeeping in 1960, nearly tripling the previous 1968 high. The murder rate in 2020 was the highest recorded since 1998, which is before at least a quarter of the U.S. population was born.
And, according to the New York Times, data suggests that the homicide rate is still climbing in 2021. Crime analyst Jeff Asher wrote, “My collection of data from 87 cities with publicly available year-to-date data shows murder up by 9.9 percent relative to comparable points in 2020.”
In our year of cultural obsession with “racial justice,” many in the media have tried to downplay or ignore the homicide surge even though homicide victims are disproportionately black. Others, such as Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, used the homicide surge to promote their own agendas. Murphy treated this news as vindication because gun sales also rose in 2020, despite the fact that past increases in gun sales did not lead to massive surges in homicides.
But the causes of this surge are clear. The first is the instability caused by the pandemic, which was clear when the homicide numbers first jumped in March 2020. The second is the further instability caused by riots in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. That was compounded by Democratic mayors and city councils pandering to anti-police activists. Chicago saw an increase in homicides of more than 50%. New York City saw roughly a 41% increase in homicides while suffering a decrease of 2,500 police officers since 2019.
Minneapolis, where the Floyd protests turned to riots that saw businesses torched and looted, has seen its homicide numbers rise near the number the city saw in the mid-1990s, when it was dubbed “Murderapolis.”
Many Democrats and media personalities focused on police violence against black civilians in 2020 despite the fact that statistics show those cases are few and far between. They then humored anti-police activists who demanded that police departments see their funding slashed, all while we lived through a historic rise in murders. But narratives can’t erase the data, and this problem must be treated seriously as homicides continue to increase.
