New Report: Evaluating 2020 Homicide Spike
When homicide rises, the groups that were already most vulnerable to violence pay the price.
NEW YORK, NY — In 2020, the United States experienced a 30 percent increase in its homicide rate. However, this was not the case for crime generally, as many less serious types of crime remained the same or even declined thanks to the lockdowns. So why the significant jump in homicides? The question has been highly debated, with some reporting it is just a Covid-related side effect while others believe the summer protests and subsequent depolicing movement are relevant factors. In a new Manhattan Institute report, adjunct fellow Christos Makridis and fellow Robert VerBruggen parse the Centers for Disease Control’s recently published mortality data to determine who was most affected by this surge in lethal violence and rule out any confounding factors.
Makridis and VerBruggen find that though homicides in 2020 increased throughout the country, the spike did not impact everyone equally. Proportionately, homicide rates rose by about 34 percent for black Americans compared to 19 percent for non-Hispanic white Americans. This notable difference in addition to pre-existing gaps in homicide rates exacerbated the issue for black Americans, culminating in an increase similar to the total homicide rate for the country as a whole. The same can be said of other varying demographics such as age, sex, and geography. Groups that had higher homicide rates in 2019 tended to have reasonably similar proportional increases but substantially bigger raw increases in 2020. When homicide rises, the groups that were already most vulnerable to violence pay the price.
Lastly, the increase in homicides cannot be explained by other confounding effects, such as the presence of Covid or changes in the number of gun sales. When controlling for factors such as population growth, employment growth, the number of guns per capita, demographic factors, and the log number of Covid cases and deaths, Makridis and VerBruggen’s analysis shows a consistent growth rate of crime in 2020 relative to 2019.
Click here to view the full report.
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