Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike

This is a woefully incomplete analysis. This is likely largely the fault of poor reporting of homicide details or at least no uniform data structure that makes it easy to aggregate categories between cities, but most homicide is domestic. The obvious hypothesis as to why homicides increased while burglary decreased is people were home more and under a lot of stress. Thus, they're less likely to be burglarized because their houses aren't empty all day, but they're also more likely to murder each other. Proactive policing can't stop this unless the police are randomly going into people's houses.

This isn't necessarily the actual explanation, but you can't decide between this and competing hypotheses without analyzing the nature of the homicides that happened. Were the increases mostly due to gangs and ruffians shooting each other on the street? Or were they mostly due to people at home shooting their spouses and kids?

Don't forget the huge jump in unemployment as well. Unemployed people tend to commit more crimes. So why not burglary? Well again, if people are home, it's a lot harder to burglarize them. Why not drug crime? A whole lot of drug use was legalized in the past year, so you don't want to look at drug crime, you want to look at drug usage.

There's also hospital overcrowding. An increase in murder can just mean the same number of people shooting each other as normal, but more of them died. Did attempted murder also increase? I don't even see that question asked.

I obviously don't have any answers because I haven't done the analysis either, and I'm not going to because I'm not a journalist or analyst and already have a job, but the people whose job is to do this kind of analysis should at least do it correctly.

"To save lives in 2021, we need urgent action to restore proactive policing to its pre-protest levels."

So we're at stop-and-frisk again. Without a thought of examining the expansion of social services before subjecting communities to police forces which have been infiltrated by white supremacists.[1]

The report also does not address the impact of job losses and mental health deterioration that is no doubt tied to the increase in violent crime. These arguments are so tiring and just plain wrong [2]

[1] https://theconversation.com/capitol-siege-raises-questions-o...

[2] https://longreads.com/2017/04/06/the-bitter-history-of-law-a...

I’m really interested in analyses like this.

I’d like to compare the rates of policing to murders and shootings in more metro areas to confirm, but if they match the ones shown it seems like the homicides are due to police response to the protests more than the protests themselves.

The fewer pedestrian stops in LA seems to show that there were just fewer cops out and about. So this somehow resulted in more murder. I want to investigate other crime as well.

I think there’s likely some other benefits to having fewer police stops, but it seems, despite the errors and prejudice shown during many stops, that they reduce crime.

I was surprised with the increase murder because I expected it to go down due to everyone being cooped up. I expected domestic violence and suicide to rise, but murders and property crime to drop just due to fewer human interactions.

Changes in category would explain it too. E.g. if deaths that used to go reported as accidents, are now verified as murders.

Changes in living conditions make such shifts seem likely - increased observation of everybody in close quarters.

this is kinda one of those captain obvious articles.