First murders of 2021 recorded in 11 American cities

Bad economy, police drawback and quarantine boredom all possible reasons for spike

At least 11 major American cities have already recorded their first murders of the new year.  

This comes after an increase in murders during the pandemic year of 2020. 

The Council on Criminal Justice showed in a new report that across 21 American cities “homicide rates increased by 42 per cent during the summer and 34 per cent in the fall over the summer and fall of 2019". 

New York had a total of 447 murders in 2020, a 41 per cent increase from 2019 and the largest total since 2011, New York Magazine wrote. 

But this is still substantially lower than a few decades ago. In 1990, 2,245 people were killed in New York. 515 people were killed in 2011, according to numbers from the NYPD.

2020 is the third year in a row with a rising murder rate. More than twice as many people were shot in 2020 in New York compared to 2019, The Daily Mail wrote. 1,855 people were shot in 2020, 914 suffered the same fate in 2019.          

"The confluence of COVID into the protests into all of the debate about defunding the police, I can't imagine a darker period," said NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, according to ABC7 New York.

In 51 cities across the United States, crime data analysed by Jeff Asher showed that murder was up 36 per cent by late December compared to the year before. 

According to the FBI, nationwide murders had increased by 15 per cent in the first half of 2020. 

The cause of this is unclear, but some experts have explained the rise in violent crime by mentioning this summer’s racial justice protests in relation to the death of George Floyd, which could have caused a rise in distrust of police and a drawback from the police, worried that they might step over the line. Yet another possibility is the large increase in the purchase of firearms, as Vox reported.

A bad economy and quarantine boredom have also been cited as possible reasons. 

While murders were up in the first half of 2020, overall crime and violent crime as a whole was actually down in the cities analyzed by Mr Asher. 

It’s possible that in such an unusual year that other kinds of crimes have also risen, but they’re simply going unreported. It’s also possible that with hospitals being overwhelmed during the Covid-19 pandemic, violent crime became deadlier as hospitals couldn’t deal with all the people hospitalized because of violence. 

These are all possible explanations, but more data and more time to analyze that data is required for more concrete conclusions.