The World Ahead 2022
America’s murder rate jumped in 2020
It is unlikely to decline as quickly
“ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK”, a futuristic film released in 1981 but set in 1997, stars Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, a former special-forces soldier tasked with rescuing a kidnapped president from Manhattan, which has been turned into a giant maximum-security prison. As with much science fiction, the film projected then-current anxieties into the future: in 1980 more people were killed in New York (1,814) than in any year since the police department began keeping track of such data in 1931. A decade later that number rose to 2,245.
By the early 1990s nearly 25,000 people were being murdered each year across America. But then something unexpected happened: the country began to get safer. Between 1993 and 2019, America’s violent-crime rate fell by nearly half. The reasons for this remain hotly debated. Possible explanations include punitive sentencing policies, which locked people up who would otherwise have been committing crimes; improved police tactics; decreased usage of cash, drugs and alcohol; and the end of leaded gasoline (lead exposure is correlated with aggression). What is less debatable is that homicides spiked in 2020—rising by almost 30%, an unprecedented rate—leading many to fear that the long crime decline is over, and is in the process of reversing.
Those who counsel calm point out that, even with the recent rise, America remains far safer than it was. In 1980 more than ten in every 100,000 Americans were murdered each year; in 2020 it was just over six, up from a mid-2010s nadir of less than five. They note that the spike occurred during a pandemic that closed schools, community centres and other social-service providers that would otherwise have provided somewhere for young men to go, and during a period of widespread protests, after a police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd (some argue that under such circumstances, police pull back). And they note that, overall, crime fell in 2020, though this is false comfort: the good news that, say, theft from cars fell does not offset the much worse news that murders rose.
Republicans are certain to make crime a central campaign issue in 2022
Yet the spike in 2020 was not an entirely isolated event. In some cities, homicides began rising before covid-19 struck, while in other places, particularly big cities, the murder rate remained elevated during 2021. This reveals an ominous trait of homicides: they are what sociologists call “sticky”. Murders often inspire retaliatory murders; the rising side of a murder spike may be quite steep, but declines rarely are. America got safer in the 1990s and 2000s not because everyone suddenly put down their guns, but because of steady, successive gradual declines. And speaking of guns, sales set a record in 2020, and guns, unlike butter, do not spoil. With more people carrying more deadly weapons, the odds of arguments escalating into killings shorten.
If crime—and, as important, the fear of crime—remain high, it will make its presence felt in politics. In some places, it already has. When crime rises, people get nervous, and they vote for candidates who make them feel safer. New York is a solidly liberal city, but in the Democratic mayoral primary in 2021 left-leaning voters, concerned about crime, chose Eric Adams, an ex-cop and former Republican running on a public-safety platform, over a field of progressive darlings.
Republicans, eager to take control of Congress in the mid-term elections in 2022, are certain to make crime a central campaign issue. Democrats will argue that violent crime soared everywhere: in big cities and small towns, and in places run by liberals and conservatives alike. That may be true, but truth alone does not always produce a politically convincing argument.
Over the past couple of electoral cycles, voters in a number of cities, including Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, have elected reformist district attorneys who advocated sending fewer people to prison. Such candidates may have a harder time winning when rates of violent crime are high. Perhaps crime will begin falling as the effects of the pandemic fade, and police forces continue to invest time and money in improving community relations. Or perhaps there is simply a natural limit to how low violent-crime rates can fall in a country in which there are more guns than people.
Jon Fasman: US digital editor, The Economist, New York■
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition of The World Ahead 2022 under the headline “The end of the crime decline?”