US murders rose 30 per cent in 2020, FBI reports
- Some experts attribute the surge in part to Covid-19 hardships
- Steepest rise since the FBI began collecting data in the 1960s
The FBI reported a nearly 30 per cent increase in murders in 2020, the largest single-year jump since the bureau began recording crime statistics six decades ago.
The surge in killings drove an overall 5 per cent increase in violent crime last year, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
Violence stalked most major cities, the report found, even as the coronavirus pandemic exacted its own deadly toll across the country.
The numbers appeared to closely track preliminary data released early this year by the FBI, which showed that murders had spiked by more than 20 per cent in 2020.
Although the reported annual increase was dramatic, the total number of homicides last year – 21,570 – did not surpass some stunning totals in the early 1990s, including the nearly 25,000 murders recorded in 1991.
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The numbers were also an incomplete assessment, because 15,897 of the eligible 18,619 law enforcement agencies submitted data to the FBI last year.
James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University who analyses data on violent crime, called last year an “aberration” and perhaps not indicative of a longer-term trend.
“Last year was unique in many ways,” Fox said. “Because of the pandemic, people were not in structured activities: kids were not in school and adults were not at work. The whole country was divided by politics, the response to the coronavirus and the social justice movement.”
Those anxious conditions, Fox said, were accompanied by a surge in gun sales.
“Eventually, those guns get used in the heat of anger,” he said.
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The FBI data generally lags behind reporting by individual police agencies, which keep contemporaneous numbers. And recent reporting has indicated a continued increase in homicides.
A midyear report by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a coalition of the nation’s largest police agencies, found that homicides continued to rise.
The group reported that homicides in 2021 were running ahead of last year by a count of 4,033 to 3,341 at the same time in 2020. The agencies reported corresponding increases in rape and aggravated assault.
Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St Louis criminology professor who has authored a series of reports on crime in the wake of the pandemic and social unrest, said that while homicide rates have continued to rise this year the rate of increase has slowed in the second quarter.
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“Even with the 2021 increase, the homicide rate … was well below the rate for those cities in the early 1990s (15 deaths per 100,000 residents versus 28 murders per 100,000 in 1993),” Rosenfeld found in a study for the Council on Criminal Justice.
Still, Rosenfeld said the FBI findings were noteworthy.
“What is striking, in addition to the sheer increase in homicide, is how widespread it was in 2020,” Rosenfeld said.
The FBI has not released homicide statistics so far for 2021, but the numbers from several large cities indicate there has been no let-up in the increased murder rate.
According to World Bank figures, there were 6.5 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in the United States in 2018, compared with 35 in Mexico, 27 in Brazil, eight in Russia and one per 100,000 in France and Germany.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
