Also, it's not as easy to track but it'd be interesting to see if attempted murders saw the same spike. This increase could merely be a result of overtaxed hospitals saving fewer people.
At a glance at the linked source data, it looks like Seattle came in with the lowest values on this list, at 47 murders for 2020 vs 27 in 2019.
One thing of note is that some of the values appear to be for not quite the entirety of 2020.
The first sentence of the story's second paragraph includes a link to a Twitter post [1] from the person who compiled the data, which contains a second link [2] to the Google Doc that he created.
1 - https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905
2 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5D...
It's usually something people who are apt to do that do (I know almost self referential). But what I mean is, it's possible that people given to violence either didn't see the same deterrence so they acted, or as you are saying people who would be unlikely suspects were pushed over the edge and did this as a side-effect of the virus.
Also police are one of the few things that didn't have a big drop in the number of people working it this year so I'm not sure where the smaller deterrent would be coming from. There's very few people who are walking around thinking about killing someone that then see a cop are decide not to. A lot of murders aren't even premeditated they're short spur of the moment violent outbursts.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
I can see that the increased stress would correlate to a small rise in domestic violence, but remember also that for the first half of thr lockdown, people in the lower income tiers were getting more in unemployment (due to the extra 600 / week bonus) than they had been getting from their actual jobs.
I happen to know someone in that position who wasn't stressed, just bored.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/higher-temperatures-can-le....
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283093/homicides-in-the-...
The most obvious explanation is also the simplest: American cities spent most of 2020 attacking their own police forces, psychologically and financially.
The UK - and the rest of the developed world - did a lot more income support to the general public.
https://www.newsweek.com/heres-how-us-coronavirus-stimulus-p...
> Britain's government is issuing grants covering 80 percent of unemployed workers' salaries up to a total of £2,500 ($3,084) a month. The package also reportedly contains statutory sick pay for employees that have been told to self-isolate.
That's more per month than the US has given in total.
There is a recent shift of police and social resources away from "crime as usual" toward the handling of social unrest and crowds/mobs. Most departments try to anticipate such shifts, which strongly affect the size and allocation of manpower within the police department. A small police department can find itself unable to investigate serious crimes in times of social unrest. Anyone who is intelligent and who wants to commit a premeditated crime knows this and could be expected to take advantage of it.
The equivalent to the second is tossing heads every time. The equivalent to the third is tossing far more heads than tails when you toss many times.
From the chart apparently linked in one of the sources, half the cities listed had under a hundred. Only two had one a day, Chicago and Philadelphia. That's "a few" in this kind of statistics.
>Second, murders rising in ALL large cities by a large percentage is unlikely.
When ~10 events can constitute a large percentage, it's not that unlikely.
I won't say there wasn't something that was worse this year compared to most, I put forward my guess as to a primary cause in my first post. Using metrics like "percentage change" hide the actual events that happened, and makes the problem sound more terrifying than it actually is.
The number of tosses matters. As the number of tosses increases, it is increasingly unlikely to toss all heads and increasingly unlikely to toss a great more heads than tails. This is probability and the central limit theorem.