At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander looks at the rapid rise in murders across the United States in early 2020, and considers the common explanation for the phenomenon:
In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and subsequent police pullback.
Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike. I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here’s why:
Timing
When exactly did the spike start? The nation shut down for the pandemic in mid-March 2020, but the BLM protests didn’t start until after George Floyd’s death in late May 2020. So did the homicide spike start in March, or May?
Let’s check in with the Council on Criminal Justice:
It very clearly started in late May, not mid-March. The months of March, April, and early May had the same number of homicides as usual.
[…]
Police Pullback
My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of:
- Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
- Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them.
- Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk.
- The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police.
I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back.
[…]
Victims
Who is being targeted in these extra murders?
The 2020 homicide spike primarily targeted blacks.
(there also seems to be a much smaller spike for Native Americans, but there are so few Natives that I think this might be random, or unrelated).
Most violent crime is within a racial community, and there was no corresponding rise in hate crimes the way I would expect if this was whites targeting blacks, so I think the perpetrators were most likely also black. This was a rise in the level of violence within black communities.
A priori there’s no reason to expect lockdowns and “cabin fever” to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group. But there are lots of reasons to expect that the Black Lives Matter protests would cause police to pull back from black communities in particular. I think this is independent evidence that the homicide spike was because of the protests and not the pandemic.
