What happened in 2020?

• Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses rose 29% in 2020 compared to 2019.

• Robberies, rape, burglaries, and larceny-thefts declined 9%, 12%, 7%, and 11%, respectively.

• Aggravated assaults and motor vehicle thefts rose 12%.

• Victims of property crimes, excluding arson, lost $17.5 billion.

Historical Overview

• There is little evidence to support the claim that “root causes,” like poverty and structural racism, cause crime rates to rise and fall. African American crime rates were lower during the 1940s and 1950s when segregation was legal, poverty more widespread, and discrimination more overt than between 1965 and 1990. Indeed, homicides among African Americans shot up despite the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s true that homicides rose during the first few years of the Great Depression. But they then declined in most major cities afterward. And crime rates, including for homicide, kept declining even after the 2007 financial crash and resulting recession, the worst since the Great Depression.

• The underlying drivers of homicide appear related to subjective conditions like ideology and politics. Social conditions like poverty, oppression, and unemployment do not drive violent acts, as people suffering from these conditions have varied rates of violence throughout history. Homicide is irrational and emotional, not a natural and predetermined response to personal setbacks. Roth views the public’s belief in the legitimacy of “the system,” as well as things like patriotism and “fellow feeling,” solidarity with one’s fellow citizens, as the most important factors when it comes to homicide.

• Historical trends have reduced the emotional and practical need for violence, which has given way to the “better angels” of our personalities, traits like empathy, self-control, and reason, argues Harvard’s Steven Pinker. Like the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and sociologist Max Weber, Pinker describes the rise of the modern state, which monopolizes the legitimate use of violence, as a primary cause of radical declines in violence from pre-modern times.

• Public trust in government, researchers find, impacts the prevalence of violence in a way that transcends the immediate impact of short-term economic and social regulations. As such, the “New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War may have reduced homicide rates,” writes Randall Roth in American Homicide, but “the crisis of legitimacy in the 1960s and 1970s (especially in the eyes of African-Americans) may have contributed to soaring homicide rates.”

• Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States follow closely the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late sixties and early seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the fifties and mid-nineties, homicides decreased.

• Violent crime including homicides rose precipitously starting in 1965. By 1980, violent crime rates overall were 250 percent higher than they had been twenty years earlier, while property crime rates were 200 percent higher. Following a brief lull in the early eighties, violent crime rose again in 1984 and peaked in 1991 at over 400 percent of the 1960 level, which many scholars attribute to the rise of crack cocaine and battles between dealers for turf.

• By the early 1990s, violent crime in the United States had never been worse, while property crime remained almost as high as it had been in 1980. Then, between 1993 and 2018, homicides declined 47 percent and violent crime overall declined 49 percent in US cities.

• While the rise of crack increased violence, historians believe that previously high rates of violence in inner-city African American neighborhoods attracted the drug dealing more than the drug dealing introduced violence. Evidence for this comes from the fact that the black homicide rate declined 20 percent from 1970, when Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” to 1990, the height of crack-related violence. The relationship between drug dealing and violence suggests that many of those incarcerated on drug charges during the more violent 1980s and 1990s would have been imprisoned regardless of the war on drugs.

Homicides: A Closer Look

• Thirty times more African Americans were killed by civilians than by police in 2019. San Francisco’s homicide victimization rate from 2009 to 2019 was on average 6 per 100,000 and was 49 percent black and 19 percent white non-hispanic. In the same ten-year period, Oakland’s homicide victimization rate averaged 23 per 100,000 and was 74 percent black and 10 percent white non-hispanic. 

• But the United States has the highest rate of homicide of any developed nation. The homicide rate in the United States is four times as high as that of France and Britain and more than five times higher than Australia’s. Scholars have studied racial disparity in homicides for as long as it has existed. In Philadelphia between 1948 and 1952, scholars found black men died from homicide at twelve times the rate of white men. A national survey found the same difference in 1950. 

• Today, black Americans are seven to eight times more likely to die from homicide than white Americans. In 2019, the homicide rate for white people was 2.3 per 100,000 whereas it was 17.4 for black people.

• And in 2020, in the wake of summer protests against police violence, the homicide rate increased on average by more than one-third in America’s 57 largest cities. Homicides rose in 51 cities and declined just in 6 of them. Homicides rose 35 percent in Los Angeles, 31 percent in Oakland, 74 percent in Seattle, 63 percent in Portland, 60 percent in Chicago, and 47 percent in New York.

• The coronavirus pandemic may have played a role. “Gangs are built around structure and lack thereof,” noted a Fresno, California, police officer. “With schools being closed and a lot of different businesses being closed, the people that normally would have been involved in positive structures in their lives aren’t there.”

• But there had been a similar spike in homicides in 2015 when there was no coronavirus pandemic. Back then, as in 2020, a disproportionate number of victims and suspects were black men under thirty from poor, inner-city neighborhoods.

• After the spike in homicides in 2020, some pointed to higher gun sales, which rose in March, at the beginning of the pandemic. But homicides in 2020 only started to rise in June, not March. In truth, young men, street gangs, and large numbers of handguns have existed in American society for hundreds of years, and over periods where homicides declined, such as in the early 1990s. And there was little evidence to suggest that any of those variables had changed suddenly or dramatically enough in 2015 or 2020 to account for the homicide spikes.

Declining Incarceration

• Just 14 percent of state prisoners are nonviolent, low-level drug offenders, and 90 percent of all prisoners in the United States are in state, not federal, prisons.

• The total US prison and jail population peaked in 2008 and has declined ever since. Between 2008 and 2019, the total US and California incarcerated populations declined from 2,304,000 to 2,165,000, and from 273,000 to 192,000, respectively.

• The incarceration rate of the United States and California declined from 762 per 100,000 to 643 per 100,000 and from 742 per 100,000 to 487 per 100,000, respectively, between 2008 and 2019.

Racial Disparities: The Bad News

• Police in the United States kill at a rate of three people per day, for a total of nearly 1,000 deaths per year. Canada has the second-highest rate of police killings in the world at a rate one-third that of the United States. 

• Black Americans are killed by police at between two to three times the rate of white Americans, according to a Washington Post analysis of police killings between 2015 and 2020.

• A total of 15,699 men aged 15–34 died at the hands of law enforcement between 1960 and 2010, found researchers publishing in Harvard Public Health Review in 2015.

• Of those men, 55 percent were white and 42 percent were black. In that fifty-year period, African Americans were killed by police at a rate three to four times higher than white Americans, according to the study.

• A team of Harvard University researchers found in 2020 that police were 53 percent more likely to use nonlethal physical force on an African American than on a white American.

• A national survey found that black Americans were 350 percent more likely to have police use physical force on them than white Americans, found Harvard’s Roland Fryer.

• One reason suggested for this is African Americans resisting arrest more than white people, but Fryer found that black people whom police recorded as compliant were still 21 percent more likely to suffer police violence.

• African Americans are more likely to not be told by police why they were pulled over, be treated with less respect by law enforcement, and have their cars searched after traffic stops, even though such stops turn up fewer weapons than do stops of white people.

• A 2020 study in Nature looked at 100 million traffic stops and found black people were more likely to be stopped during the day, when their race was visible, than at night, an indication of racial bias.

• African Americans are more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder, rape, and drug crimes, to be incarcerated longer for the same crimes, and to be convicted to life without parole for nonviolent offenses, than white Americans. 

• Black people are more likely to receive higher bail requirements for the same crime, to be offered plea bargains that include jail time, and to be incarcerated while waiting for trial, than white people. And African Americans are more likely to be charged with low-level offenses, fined for jaywalking, and have their probation revoked, than white people.

• Between 2010 and 2019, 79 percent of homicides with white victims were solved, compared to just 61 percent of homicides with African American victims. 

• One in ten black men with a high school diploma was, by 2010, in jail or prison, while an astonishing 37 percent of African American men who dropped out of high school were.

• There is significant unpunished racist conduct among police, an alarming prevalence of white supremacy in departments, and many reports of racism. Police unions often exert undue influence over local politicians, including demands for qualified immunity from prosecution for police shootings. And the “blue wall of silence” in many departments eerily reflects the culture of “no snitchin’” within many inner-city communities.

• Police unions have made it difficult for cities to hold officers accountable. Established in a backlash against the riots of the 1960s, unions added obstacles to disciplinary action in the form of binding arbitration, appeals processes, and an officers’ “bill of rights.” 

• A 2017 investigation by the Washington Post found that while 1,881 officers had been fired since 2006 for offenses including fraud, sexual assault, and unjustified shootings, over 450 were reinstated after appeals required by union contracts. A New York Times review of about one hundred controversial police killings found that departments did not discipline or publicly disclose discipline in the majority of cases, with some departments refusing to answer basic questions or release records.

Racial Disparities: The Good News

• Harvard’s Roland Fryer was that he and his research team didn’t find racial differences between the use of lethal force by police after they accounted for whether the shootings or killings were “justified” or “unjustified,” which is something that the databases created by the Washington Post and other media organizations did not do. In Fryer’s data, around 20 percent of police shootings could be considered “unjustified” because the person did not attack, draw a weapon, or otherwise make the officer feel at risk of bodily harm.

• Fryer found no evidence of higher rates of police shootings of African Americans than white people, when the suspect is stopped by police. “When using the simple statistical framework that economists have used for more than a half century to analyze racial differences on myriad dimensions—from wages to incarceration to teen pregnancy,” wrote Fryer, “the evidence for [racial] bias disappears.”

• Others, using different data sets, came to similar conclusions. The nonpartisan Center for Policing Equity found that police killings are rare, that black Americans face higher rates of nonlethal force, and that racial disparities are smaller in lethal use of force. And the authors of the 2015 Harvard Public Heath Review study concluded, “We cannot, based on the limited data available, address debates over whether our findings reflect racially biased use of excessive force.”

• A big part of the reason social scientists can’t say whether police unjustly kill black Americans at higher rates than others is that police departments lack a uniform protocol for reporting victim demographics and encounter characteristics. Fryer notes that “[u]ntil recently, data on officer-involved shootings were extremely rare and contained little information on the details surrounding an incident.” Violent interactions with police and civilians are “rare events.” On average between 2000 and 2020, 1,481 people were killed nationally by police per year (about 0.5 per 100,000). Those numbers for the police departments of New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were 17, 24, and 4, respectively. Among those killed whose race was known, 29 percent were black and 71 percent were non-black, compared to 13.6 percent black and 86.4 percent non-black in the general population.

• That African Americans are disproportionately killed by police is evident from these numbers alone. What is more difficult to discern is whether this reflects the reality that black people are more likely to end up in a situation that involves lethal force, or whether it reflects racial bias, a targeting of black people above and beyond the requirements of just policing and public safety. A rigorous measure of racial bias would require regulated and more transparent incident reporting by police departments.

• In the end, Fryer could only use data from Houston to measure racial bias and differences in justified lethal force. “Racism may explain the findings, but the statistical evidence doesn’t prove it,” said Fryer. Other studies have attempted to analyze differences across US counties, using whether suspects were unarmed as a shortcut for estimating whether force was unjust, but have still failed to find differences in shootings of white and black Americans that hold up in margins of error. The bottom line, notes Brandon Vaidyanathan of Catholic University, is that “none of the data on police shootings can tell us whether racial bias is a motivating factor.”

• There is wide variation between American counties when it comes to racial disparities in the rate of police shootings, and those differences could not be attributed to different crime rates. “Does racism play a role?” asks Frank Zimring, a criminologist who has been studying and writing about homicides for more than fifty years. “You bet. Is it the dominant force in explaining American lethal violence by police? No.”

Progress in Reducing Police Violence

• Police killings of African Americans declined from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s in the 58 largest US cities. Police killings of all races in New York City declined dramatically, from an average of 59 per year between 1970 and 1975, to an average of 12 per year between 2015 and 2020, even as its population increased.

• In San Francisco and Oakland, the rate of police killings per year increased slightly, going from 2.7 and 2.8 per year, respectively, in the 1970s, to 2.4 and 3.9 per year in the 2010s, but police killings per capita in the two cities declined by 8.3 percent.

• While many police departments need to do a better job, it is also the case that police departments have improved markedly over the last fifty years. Racism in police departments persists, but there is now more representation of black Americans among officers and commissioners.

• While racial disparities persist, racism in police violence is today heavily outweighed by other much larger factors, such as the degree to which police have been properly trained and managed, and the power of police unions to block necessary reforms.

• Many police departments have seen significant reforms in recent years. Use of force by the San Francisco Police Department declined by nearly one-third between 2016 and 2020.