Crime on the decline

In the chaotic early months of the Covid pandemic, when the U.S. was also going through the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, violent crime rose across the country. Murders in 2020 increased at the fastest rate since national statistics began in 1960. Other crimes, like shootings and car thefts, also increased.

The surge in violence left some experts worried that the U.S. might be entering another era of high crime, similar to that of the 1960s through the ’90s.

But the data over the past year has offered a much more optimistic picture. The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent — which would be the biggest national decline on record. The spike that started in 2020 now looks more like a blip, and the murder rate is lower than it was during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The recent data also suggests that the violent-crime rate in 2023 was near its lowest level in more than 50 years, as Jeff Asher, a crime analyst, wrote for his newsletter.

Fading shocks

To understand why murders and other crimes have declined, it’s useful to look at the likely causes of the increase: the pandemic and the fallout from Floyd’s killing by the police.

Covid, of course, upended American life in 2020 and 2021, including in ways that affected crime: Police officers stopped some forms of in-person contact, and more illness contributed to staffing shortages at police departments. Schools, which help keep teens out of trouble, shut down. Some social services and other anti-violence programs also had to scale back.

Covid does not explain everything. Many other countries did not report increases in their murder rates during the pandemic. Perhaps something unique to the U.S., such as its abundance of guns, made the country more vulnerable to the disruptions of Covid.

Regardless, the reality is this: During Covid, murders increased. As life has returned to normal, they have decreased.

The second explanation involves Floyd’s death. High-profile police killings typically strain relations between law enforcement and the public. This leads some officers to pull back from activities that can stop crime. More people become skeptical of working with the police to solve and prevent crimes. And as they lose trust in the police and the justice system, more Americans resort to their own means, including violence, to settle conflicts.

A similar phenomenon played out in the mid-2010s. Widely publicized police killings of Black men in Ferguson, Mo.; Baltimore; Chicago; and elsewhere strained relations between the police and their communities, and murders increased.

Back then, murders declined after a couple of years, as tensions eased and officials tried to repair police-community relations and improve policing. The same seems to have happened in the last couple of years.

Not the ’60s

This outcome was not inevitable. The crime surge that began in the early 1960s also seemed connected to societal unrest. But rather than quickly reversing, it continued for decades. One potential difference is that back then the causes were more spread out: the civil-rights unrest of the 1960s; federal scandals, like Watergate, that reduced trust in government in the ’70s; and the crack-cocaine epidemic in the ’80s.

Crime is a complicated topic, and an explanation that seems correct in one moment can look less certain after years of scrutiny. There are usually crosscurrents, too. Car thefts, for instance, have remained significantly higher in recent months than they were a few years ago.

Still, we know that murders in large U.S. cities fell rapidly last year, and most other forms of crime seem to have fallen as well.

Related: Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist and friend of the newsletter, died this week at 75. Rosenfeld was a leading expert on what caused crime trends in the U.S. He helped found the criminology doctorate program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rosenfeld was an unusually clear communicator for someone of his expertise. He approached questions with an open mind, readily acknowledging that he did not have all the answers. He was also kind, often referring reporters to his less well known colleagues to give them a boost. You can read an obituary in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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