FBI Statistics Show a 30% Increase in Murder in 2020. More Evidence That Defunding Police Wasn’t a Good Idea.
By Kelly - Sep 30, 2021
The surge in violent crime over the past year—murders in particular—has been astounding and historic.
The numbers back this up and paint a grim picture.
Property crime is generally down, but violent crime is way, way up.
The murder rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020, more than any other time in the last half-century. This is according to recently released statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its annual report on crime.
The report shows that there were 4,901 more murders committed in 2020 than in 2019.
It’s the largest single-year increase — by a wide margin — in murder rate since the FBI began compiling these statistics in 1960.
“The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29 percent,” reported The New York Times. “The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. The national rate— murders per 100,000 — still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.”
The total murder rate is still far away from its historic high, but the trend is unmistakable. It looks like 2021 will have similar numbers to 2020, with only a slight dip in the national rate of increase in murder.
Again, that’s a dip in murder rate, not total murders. The trend is still going up, but not quite as historically fast.
And in some places, like Portland, the rate of increase actually continues to climb. More on Portland in just a moment.
Of course, some on the left have been quick to conclude that the issue is gunsor possibly even simply the pandemic itself.
These conclusions seem dubious. Violent crime has been falling for decades even as gun ownership in the United States remained high.
It’s also important to note that the murder increase didn’t really start until the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. This was after the pandemic began and the country went into various states of lockdown.
While there certainly could be a variety of factors involved in the murder surge, it’s hard not to see both the efforts to defund the police and—perhaps more importantly—the “Minneapolis Effect,” as driving factors.
Following Floyd’s death, many cities hopped aboard the “defund the police” movement. Los Angeles, Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis went through with this idea, often stripping millions of dollars out of their police budgets and directing them toward other social services.
Minneapolis is going even further and is looking to abolish its police department altogether.
This push to defund, which happened during a time of protests and increasing anti-police rhetoric from activists and lawmakers created what some have called the “Minneapolis Effect.”
This is similar to the “Ferguson Effect,” which was the violence that followed the fatal police shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
The effect of this phenomenon was described by Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, on a Heritage Foundation panel in March.