It’s not every day that you see officials touting crime trends just as summer begins. Summer is typically when violent crime increases, and no one wants to celebrate a win before half-time’s over.
Why the US had a violent crime spike during Covid — and other countries didn’t
Violent crime is falling. But understanding why it surged during the pandemic is still important.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Marin Cogan is a senior correspondent at Vox. She writes features on a wide range of subjects, including traffic safety, gun violence, and the legal system. Prior to Vox, she worked as a writer for New York magazine, GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and other publications.
This year has been different.
In June, the FBI released preliminary quarterly data for January to March 2024 that shows violent crime rates continuing to decline from their pandemic peaks. In the first months of this year, the data suggest that violent crime fell by 15 percent, with murder falling by more than 26 percent, compared to the same period in 2023.
“Violent crime is dropping at record levels in America,” President Joe Biden said in a statement trumpeting the FBI’s estimates. “Americans are safer today than when I took office.”
It’s always worth approaching preliminary crime data with caution, especially this early. But the FBI’s report broadly fits with last year, when the government recorded a 13 percent decrease in murders — likely “one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded” according to crime stats analyst Jeff Asher.
The Biden administration has — despite what Donald Trump says — prioritized crime reduction. The government sent billions of dollars to cities and states as part of the American Rescue Plan and urged them to spend it on crime fighting and prevention, including hiring more police officers. He also championed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which created real investments in community violence intervention and paved the way for the most significant expansion of background checks in decades.
Whether he’ll get credit for it with voters is another question. Decades worth of polling shows that Americans tend to believe crime is increasing, even when it’s not.
But there might be another reason why Americans are slow to pick up on the good news: they’re still shaken by the genuinely worrisome rise in homicide in 2020. The murder rate didn’t reach the highs it did in the 1970s through the early 1990s, but the fact that it jumped 30 percent in 2020 was a real cause for concern.
Now that violent crime is falling, though, it’s worth looking back at what happened. Was the rise in murders in the United States part of a broader trend, or something more anomalous?
A uniquely American problem
A few years out from the start of the pandemic, it does appear that the rise in homicides in the United States was unique. According to multiple studies and a systematic review of crime data for 2020, in most countries crime fell following Covid-19 lockdowns, then gradually returned to their pre-pandemic levels once the lockdown measures lifted. Homicide was the exception to the rule — but not the way it was in the United States.
Homicides around the world, according to the 46 studies the authors reviewed, didn’t change significantly due to the pandemic. “Most studies reported no relationship between Covid-19 and homicides,” the authors of the study wrote. A majority of the studies, they noted, found no relationship between the implementation or easing of lockdown measures and killings.
The Small Arms Survey, which gathers and analyzes data about firearms ownership and violence across the world, also found that the global rate of violent deaths decreased worldwide in 2020.
What was different in the United States?
“There was no other country that experienced this kind of sudden increase in gun violence,” says Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies the intersections of urban segregation, economic inequality, and violence. It was gun violence, specifically, that sent violent crime soaring. Americans bought guns in record numbers during the pandemic, and according to an analysis by Rob Arthur and Asher for Vox, there’s evidence that more people were carrying guns in 2020 — even before crime soared that summer. “Guns don’t necessarily create violence on their own, but they make violence more lethal,” Sharkey says.
While experts caution that it’s difficult to definitively prove what caused the rise in violent crime, there are a few other factors that likely contributed to it.
One was the killing of George Floyd by police and the unrest surrounding it, accompanied by a withdrawal in policing that followed. Previous research has shown that high-profile incidents of police violence correspond with a pullback by police and a rise in crime — specifically, robberies and murders. Data following the unrest after Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and elsewhere shows a marked decline in policing and arrests that summer.
“There was a core shift in our understanding of policing in the United States,” Sharkey says. Millions took to the streets to demand an end to police brutality; long-standing cultural assumptions about the authority and legitimacy of police to maintain public safety by any means necessary were called into question. “That understanding of who’s in charge of public space broke down in a major way,” he says. “What we know is that when people retreat from public space and shelter in their homes it creates this vacuum where public spaces can carry the threat of violence.”
Violent crime is now falling in the U.S., with several cities showing big declines in homicide and violent crime.
That might be in part because the most disruptive phase of the pandemic has passed, but Sharkey thinks that the federal funding provided to cities aimed at public safety made a real difference. “I think the federal funding is probably the best explanation for why the surge in violence didn’t persist and why it has fallen so substantially over the past couple of years. It’s probably a factor that doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.”
Still, some of the factors that drove the surge — the preponderance of so many guns and the periodic incidents of deadly police violence – endure. And because of that, experts say that the violence from that period shouldn’t be dismissed as a one-time event, but should be studied to see how to prevent violence in the future. Even as crime continues to fall, some of the conditions that helped create the rise in violent crime are still with us.
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