Murders in US cities were near record highs in 2021
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6 min read . Updated: 07 Jan 2022, 12:29 PM IST - The surge of killings that began after the pandemic in 2020 remains, though it eased a bit
U.S. cities are facing a sustained surge in homicides, as police departments and mayors’ offices tally up crime statistics for 2021 and launch 2022 programs designed to curb gun violence.
Several cities set new records for murders last year. Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., Louisville, Ky., and Albuquerque, N.M., had their deadliest years on record. Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth-largest city, had 562 homicides surpassing its previous high of 500 set in 1990. Criminologists and local law-enforcement officials don’t agree on the reasons for the surge in violent crime. Some cite stress from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Some point to what they see as frayed relations between law enforcement and Black communities after police killings, such as that of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Others blame bail reform and moves in some cities to bring fewer prosecutions. Homicides rose by 4% in 22 major American cities through the third quarter of 2021, according to a study by the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank focusing on criminal-justice policy and research.
The rise followed one of the most violent years in decades. In 2020, murders in the U.S. rose nearly 30% from the prior year to 21,570, the largest single-year increase ever recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The rate of 6.5 per 100,000 residents was the highest since 1997 but still below historic highs of the early 1990s.
The total was estimated based on 85% of the nation’s 18,623 law-enforcement agencies submitting crime data. The FBI breaks down the victims by race and ethnicity, though its numbers are incomplete. In 2020, at least 9,941 were Black, 7,043 were white, 511 were of other races and 320 were unknown, according to the FBI. By ethnicity, 2,851 were Hispanic, according to the data. While elevated, the increase in the murder rate slowed in some cities.
New York City, which recorded a nearly 45% increase in 2020, had a 4% murder rise through Dec. 26, 2021, when compared with the same period the prior year. Chicago, which had a 55% increase in 2020, had a 3% rise in 2021. And in Dallas, murders were down 13% in 2021 after the city had its highest murder total in more than 15 years in 2020. A key to driving down the murder rate in Dallas last year was getting police officers re-engaged, said Eddie Garcia, the Dallas police chief.
“Our police officers nationally have felt unappreciated, they felt under fire," said Mr. Garcia. “That’s led to disengagement in our communities where we need to engage even more." Mr. Garcia, who took the helm in early 2021, said the department tracks crime trends in tiny geographic areas and deploys officers to areas that have spikes in violence. New mayors were elected in major cities last year with tough-on-crime messages.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a retired New York Police Department captain, promised to reinstate a plain-clothes anticrime unit that was criticized as being too aggressive in the past. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens promised to hire hundreds of new police officers. In Minneapolis, the birthplace of the movement to defund the police, residents voted down a measure to replace the city’s Police Department amid rising crime.
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Voters in Chicago and Philadelphia re-elected progressive prosecutors in 2020 and 2021 who promised to fight crime while also reducing the number of people behind bars. “The overarching explanation for the increase in violence over the last two years is the pandemic," said John Roman, a senior fellow in the Economics, Justice and Society Group at NORC at the University of Chicago.
“People who live in places that have high levels of violence were disconnected from anything positive in their lives: School, churches, mentors, counseling, everything." In Los Angeles, where homicides were up 12% through Dec. 25, the pandemic led to a pause in gang intervention and other programs targeting the people most likely to be involved in violent crime. That contributed to an increase in gang shootings, according to police officials and gang-intervention workers.
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis who co-wrote the study for the Council on Criminal Justice, predicted that murder rates will drop back down to pre-pandemic levels in coming years.
“Some of the acute conditions that gave rise to the increase we saw last year have begun to subside in many places," he said. Time has passed from the onset of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, he said.
Some law-enforcement officials say that a police pullback has been a factor, too, in cities like Portland, Ore. The city’s 90 homicides surpassed an all-time high of 70 in 1987. Portland, which has had sustained late-night street violence downtown, struggled in 2021 to find enough cops willing to join a police unit focused on fighting gun violence.
Officers said they were reluctant to sign up for the once-prestigious job due to increased public scrutiny, department and police union officials said. In other cities, police officials blamed bail-reform measures for not keeping more criminals behind bars.
In Chicago, a 7-year-old girl was killed in a McDonald’s drive-through in April by someone who police said had been let out on electronic monitoring. At a news conference this week, Chicago Police Chief David Brown urged the news media to tell the stories of homicide victims and their families to “break hearts of these judges so that they can’t…with a clear conscience let these people back into these neighborhoods at these bail hearings." Progressive prosecutors take the approach of not prosecuting some low-level offenses like drug possession.
In Philadelphia, for example, cases brought by the district attorney’s office from 2018 through 2021 dropped by nearly 30% compared with the prior four years. This week, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner defended progressive prosecutors while promising to tackle gun violence at the swearing-in ceremony for his second term.
“We believe that we need to focus on the most serious crimes and put less focus on the things that do not make us safer," Mr. Krasner said. Americans also bought a record number of guns. There were 21 million background checks for gun purchases in 2020, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry trade group.
Early studies of the gun-buying boom haven’t found a clear association with the rise in violence. But federal data shows that new guns are showing up more frequently at crime scenes than in the past. Police recovered almost twice the number of recently purchased guns in criminal investigations in 2020 than they did in 2019, according to the data.
Cities have been working to address the increase in killings, with some reversing cuts to police departments made in 2020 in response to the defund-the-police movement. In Philadelphia, Mayor Jim Kenney said the city spent a record $155 million to reduce and prevent violence in 2021.
Police are focusing on taking illegal guns off the streets and were on track to seize about 6,000 crime guns before the New Year, a 40% increase from two years ago, he said.
“There is no greater priority for our administration than to reduce violence and create safer communities and a more just city for everyone," the mayor said.
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