My new column totals up murders in 104 cities and finds homicides were up an enormous 37.9% in 2020, three times the biggest national increase in murders (12.7% in 1968) in the last 60 years. The final national number that the FBI will announce next September will likely be lower, say in the 25–30% range, but it will still shatter the record for the most massive increase in murders in one year.
This is not to say that the pandemic panic didn’t accelerate trends the Establishment wanted to do anyway, like letting more criminals out of jail. But the historical record shows that nobody noticed a big increase in criminal violence during the first ten weeks or so of the pandemic. News reports of huge increases in shooting and killing only started in June, following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020:
NYT: 5/26 v 12/29 — what a difference several thousand homicides makes in their trenchant analysis! pic.twitter.com/2ba4cvXL5z
— 𝙴𝚍𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍 𝙺. 𝙿𝚢𝚛𝚘𝚜 (@EdKPyros) January 6, 2021
Instead, what criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, in his study of weekly homicide totals in 20 cities, calls a “structural break” (the red line in this graph) occurred in the last week in May: i.e., about the time the mayor of Minneapolis let the mob burn down the police station.
A website called Mass-Shootings.info summarizes shooting incidents with at least four victims struck by bullets, whether killed or wounded. Here are their graphs for 2019:
And for 2020:
For example, April 2019 saw 45 mass shootings compared to only 27 in April 2020 during the pandemic. But in June, there were 59 mass shootings in 2019 compared to 106 in 2020 during the George Floyd Mourning Process.
Among 2019’s 424 mass shootings, 42% have been “cleared” so far. Among the cleared cases, blacks accounted for 68% of perpetrators, whites for 14%, Latinos for 14%, and Asians for 4%.
In contrast, among 2020’s 603 mass shootings, only 24% have been “cleared” so far. Among the cleared cases, blacks accounted for 73% of perps, whites for 13%, Latinos for 14%, and Asians for 0%.
L.A. Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside documented that unsolved shootings are usually black-on-black due to the snitches-get-stitches culture of impunity. All this implies that the black share of mass shootings is underestimated in a normal year like 2019, and that the growth in unsolved mass shootings in 2020 was largely due to blacks.
