As part of my obsession with being the real-time historian of the 2020s, the huge increase in African American Deaths of Exuberance (murders and car crashes) in the spring of 2020 sure looks primarily like the effects of depolicing in the wake of George Floyd’s demise, according to this CDC data by week.
Coming up on three years into the “racial reckoning” after George Floyd’s death 35 months ago on May 25, 2020, it looks like we are up to at least an incremental 15,000 black deaths due to homicides and traffic fatalities over the 2018-2019 trend line. That would be twice all the black deaths in the Vietnam War and four times the black deaths due to all the lynchings in American history.
I haven’t looked into it closely, but incremental non-black deaths are likely not insignificant either.
