According to newly published FBI crime data for 2021, murder rose by almost 30% in 2020 and is still rising in 2021.
According to a report from the New York Times, the United States in 2020 experienced the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960, based on the data gathered by the F.B.I. for its annual report on crime.
Despite some claims that the surge in crime is due to the pandemic, crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories—namely homicides and shootings—while property crimes and robberies mostly continue to fall. Historically there is no link between short periods of economic disruption and murder rates.
The current surge in homicide is not occurring in most other countries and is only present in certain parts of the United States among certain populations.
According to a study out of SJ Quinney College of Law, American cities
are witnessing significant declines in some forms of policing, which in turn is producing exponential homicide spikes.
According to the study, the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a “Minneapolis Effect,” similar to the earlier “Ferguson Effect, directly after the 2015 protests.
Another report from the Daily Mail describes how proactive policing in Minneapolis plunged dramatically following the death of George Floyd last year, even as violent crime soared. Traffic stops in the city dropped by 74% and high crime area patrols plummeted by 76%.
Anonymous police sources said that the slowdown was due to a massive staffing shortage amid an exodus from the department, and the exodus was due to a fear of becoming the next flashpoint.
One officer said that some Minneapolis officers now deliberately take a longer route than necessary to respond to 911 calls, hoping that whatever incident the call is about will be resolved by the time they arrive. According to another report from Reuters, the average police response time to priority 911 calls was 40 percent longer than it had been a year earlier.
In Chicago, the number of cops that have retired this year has already surpassed all of the retirements in 2018 and is on track to be the highest number in the history of the department.
According to a report from Chicago Sun-Times, between January and June, around 363 officers quit, and another 56 were expected to retire in February of this year.
With only around 13,000 cops remaining, Chicago’s 117,000 gang members now outnumber officers by roughly 10 to one, at a time when the Windy City is facing a surge in homicides and shootings.
“We’ve never seen an increase like that. Previously the biggest one-year increase in the murder was a 12.5% increase in the 1960s,” statistician and crime analyst Jeff Asher said recently. “We’re really talking about unprecedented increases in murder.”
In St. Louis, Missouri, the city saw the highest homicide rate in 50 years at 87 killings per 100,000 residents. Asher says that’s one of the highest murder rates ever recorded in a U.S. city.
To put this into perspective, Rio De Janeiro has a homicide rate of approximately 29 per 100,000 people, and the murder rate there as well as in other third-world cities has remained relatively stable throughout the pandemic.
Using the FBI data, Asher concluded that the murder rate for 2020 was approximately 6.5 per 100,000 people. Not since 1998 has the country seen a murder rate that high.
Additionally, according to the data, the black share of known homicide offenders rose to a record of almost 60%, with the same demographic committing over 50% of all violent crimes. for the year.
While the number of known murder offenders increased by 17.3 percent, the number of unknown murder offenders grew 36%. Murders in black neighborhoods tend to have the lowest clearance rate, and overall, around 50% of all violent crime goes unsolved.
As per every year, the FBI statistics combined Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites together into one category, blurring the racial breakdown of known crime offenders for some analysts.
According to the same data, anti-white hate crimes are the second most common hate crime category. The data also show that black offenders of hate crimes occurred at over twice the rate per 100,000 people than hate crimes committed by white offenders.
For hate crimes specifically, the recent FBI dataset tallies reported hate crimes, not the number of hate crimes proven in court.
According to Real Clear Investigations:
“The recent FBI dataset tallies reported hate crimes, not the number proven in court. It’s unknown whether the “true” number of hate crimes committed in 2020 is higher or lower than the FBI’s reported total. On one hand, not all crimes are reported to police, which could lead to undercounting. On the other, it’s likely that some portion of reported hate crimes would not withstand legal scrutiny, meaning the FBI’s figures might be inflated.”
On average, black Americans commit hate crimes at a rate that is three times higher than whites per 100,000 according to FBI crime data from the five previous years.
Traditionally, white Americans are far more often victims of interracial crime than any other group. In 2018, The Bureau of Justice Statistics released its survey of criminal victimization, breaking down 593,598 interracial violence between blacks and whites. Black Americans committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies or 90 percent, and white Americans committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.
In 2012-13, then-President Obama’s DOJ recorded that black Americans committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; white Americans only committed around 15 percent.
Furthermore, despite making up only 13.4% of the American population, black Americans commit more than double the amount of interracial homicides on white Americans, who make up 60.4% of the American population.
In July of 2021, MSNBC Anchor Chris Hayes definitively declared on his show that increased gun sales are what’s driving the spike in violent crime we’ve seen over the last year or so.
The idea that increased gun sales are responsible for the surge in violent crime across the country has been debunked by academic studies. In fact, the results of one study were even reported by the left-leaning paper, The Guardian.
Through July of last year, there was no clear association between the increase in firearm purchases and the increase in most interpersonal gun violence at the state level, according to a new study published in Injury Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
