Washington Post: "Why did murders surge in 2020?"

Science says that this [unnamed] guy's theory, which he keeps promoting, even though we've never deigned mention it, must be wrong. Not that we're going to mention his name.

From the Washington Post:

Why did murders surge in 2020? Research says economics, not activism.

New analysis from Brookings shows that the increase began not with the death of George Floyd but the erosion of employment.

December 17, 2024 at 3:53 p.m. EST

Column by Philip Bump

2020 was a tumultuous year, to put it mildly. …

Violent crime surged, with the number of murders committed in the United States spiking after decades of trending downward. Trump seized on this trend and on violent outbursts that followed some of the Floyd protests to suggest that booting him from office posed an unacceptable risk. But then, as now, one question went unanswered: Why? Why did murder start to rise in 2020 and why, during the last few years, did it start heading back down?

One theory — perhaps the most prominent theory — holds that the increase was an indirect response to the Floyd killing.

It’s so prominent that there’s no link to it.

Floyd’s death came at the hands of police in Minnesota, leading to the protesters’ focus on the role of police in communities. These protests, one version of the theory goes, prompted the police to be more wary in how they did their jobs, allowing more crime to occur.

New analysis from Brookings, though, offers a different and more complete explanation. It centers on the idea that the increase in murders has an economic, not a cultural cause.

A central part of the argument derives from the observation by researchers Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris that murders began to increase before Floyd was killed. Floyd’s death occurred on May 25, 2020. In the six weeks that preceded his death, murder was already increasing at a rate of 17 murders a week. It continued to increase at the same rate in the six weeks after he died, as well.

Murders always increase in the spring. Blacks die by homicide 22% more in June-August than in Dec-Feb, while Hispanics increase 18% and whites 7%.

Also there appears to have been a secular trend of increasing homicides even before the pandemic. Homicides went down after the Great Crash of 2008, then went up during the Ferguson Effect, then fell a bit in 2017 and a fair amount in 2018. But at some point in 2019 they started drifting up again, for who knows what reason.

Cherry picking. Why 6 weeks before and after?

Why not 10? After all, there were 10 weeks of covid close-downs before George Floyd’s death.

Or 2?

Let’s graph all the weeks of homicide victimizations and motor vehicle accident deaths the CDC posts online: from January 2018 to June 2024. And let’s break out non-Hispanic black deaths vs. non-Hispanic white deaths, since George Floyd was the beginning of what media used to call the “racial reckoning.”

The vertical green bar is the week ending March 14, 2020, the last one before the covid closure hammer started to come down. The red bar is the week ending Saturday, May 23, 2020, two days before George Floyd died on Memorial Day, May 25.

The black and blue lines are homicide victimizations.

I’m going to put the paywall here. Another 1,259 words beneath the break. C’mon, you know you want to subscribe.

The black levels attained in 2020-2023 were spectacularly high. The CDC puts a 6-month lag on homicide counts to give coroners time to do a careful job, but it looks like 2024 is finally back around pre-George Floyd levels, but still above pre-Ferguson. Thanks, BLM: heckuva job!

Interestingly, black homicides were up 5% in 2019 over 2018, while white homicides were down 5%. In 2020, black homicides were up 42% over 2018, while white homicides were up 13% vs. 2018. (Hispanics were in-between.)

In the six weeks after George Floyd’s death, 42% more blacks died by homicide than in the six weeks before. If you ten weeks, then 48% more died. If you use 2 weeks, 40% more.

So what changed in mid-April? Acharya and Morris point to the overlap of warmer weather

Warmer weather in the spring than in the winter being a unique meteorological feature of 2020.

with pandemic-related unemployment and school closures. In essence, a lot of young men had free time to spend outdoors — and murder started to climb.

Did young men spend more time outdoors in the spring of 2020? It would have been healthier if the authorities were telling people to get outdoors, but instead they were encouraging people to stay inside. Back then, The Experts were predicting a big increase in domestic violence murders. But that didn’t much happen. Instead, there was a huge increase in mass shootings at black social events, especially outdoor parties over the summer and fall.

Finally, upon George Floyd’s death, it was announced by The Experts that you couldn’t catch coronavirus from protesting against racism outdoors because racism was suddenly public health crisis #1. (Ironically, marching in the street and looting shops, as long as you first made sure to smash all the plate glass windows to endure excellent ventilation, turned out not to spread covid much, just as the woke M.P.H.’s had said.)

We can see that in independent data. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the number of men aged 16 to 24 who had full- or part-time employment fell by 1.7 million in the second quarter of 2020; that is, between April and June.

Are black murderers normally gainfully employed waiters and cellphone salesmen who turn to shooting each other because idle hands are a devil’s workshop? Or do they tend to be career criminals who aren’t terribly familiar with a W-2 form?

If you want to blame the black murder surge on the pandemic, think about the policy of releasing prisoners from jail and prison during the first half of 2020 for coronavirus reasons. That put a lot of bad guys back on the street, where they likely proceeded to restart their feuds.

But Philip Bump doesn’t want to do this because he backed letting bad guys out of jail.

Or, another way to blame on the pandemic is to point out that homicides are, along with motor vehicle accidents, one of the Deaths of Exuberance that tend to go up when people have cash in their pockets, as they did in 2020 due to federal policy of dropping money out of helicopters to prevent a depression.

Black traffic fatalities were up 27% in 2020 over 2018 while white traffic fatalities were up 3%.

Interestingly, in contrast to homicides, white traffic fatalities per capita, rather than per miles driven, are much more seasonal than black traffic fatalities. Whites appear to have obeyed shelter-in-place pronunciamentos more in spring 2020 than blacks did, so there traffic fatalities were exceptionally low then, finally climbing in 2021 when they figured out what blacks had realized the weekend after George Floyd’s death in 2020 that the the cops were cowed.

But white traffic fatalities were up 11% in 2021 vs 2018 while black traffic fatalities were up 40%.

During that second quarter, there were 575 more murders than in the first quarter of the year, according to data from the Real-Time Crime Index. There were 117 more murders in May than April and 144 more murders in June than May — meaning only a slight increase in the month after Floyd was killed relative to the month at the end of which his death occurred.

But there were a huge number of murders in the last days of May, such as the all-time record 24 hours in Chicago, May 31, 2020, with 18 murders.

Unemployment and school closures aren’t the only factors identified by Acharya and Morris. The surge was also heavily centered in low-income areas.

I.e., the George Floyd racial reckoning was heavily centered in black areas.

This compounded the challenges introduced by the pandemic.

“Students who lived in low-income areas were far more likely to lack internet access at home, which forced many teens to completely leave school when they could not participate in virtual instruction,” they write.

There’s a lot of evidence that it’s good for underclass kids to go to an organized place everyday and be talked at by middle-class grown-ups.

What's more, residents of low-income communities were also more likely to have service-sector jobs that were harder hit by layoffs.

And thus these 21st Century Jean Valjeans turned to shooting each other to acquire the loaves of bread to feed their families, along with the Dodge Hellcats they were paying for with their PPP loan fraud.

Both unemployment and school absences lingered for young men through 2021. Over the past five years, FBI data suggests that 69 percent of murders were committed by men and 57 percent of murders with offenders for whom age was known were committed by those under the age of 30.

But, Philip Bump, let’s not mention what share of murders were committed by blacks.

Acharya and Morris also offer an explanation for why the surge that occurred in the United States wasn’t matched in other countries that also had school and business closures: guns.

There were 1.6 more murders per 100,000 residents in 2020 than in 2019. The data suggests that 1.5 of those 1.6 murders were committed with firearms. Even before the pandemic, the difference in murder rates between the United States and other countries was primarily a function of firearm availability.

Uh … Alternatively, you could say that the difference in murder rates was primarily a function of blacks.

Both are true. A sizable combinations of blacks and guns is not good.

On the other hand, how well-armed the law-abiding US population is helps explains why, in the 21st Century, black criminals mostly shoot other black criminals. But it also explains why pro-gun theories of a good guy with a gun shooting a bad guy with a gun are naive in the inner city, where instead there are a whole lot of bad guys with guns banging away at each other and random innocents in the background.

“The shocks of teen boys and young men being pushed out of school and out of work in low-income neighborhoods occurred across the country just before murders began to rapidly increase,” Acharya and Morris write, “and those baleful educational and economic conditions lasted for the same period of time that homicides remained elevated.”

It is an explanation that conflicts with a popular political narrative, yes. But it is also one that accounts for the actual data.

It’s a popular narrative with this one guy on Substack and Twitter who keeps posting these updated versions of CDC cause-of-death data graphs that I, Philip Bump of the Washington Post, am obsessed with debunking, but I’ll never mention his accursed name.