John Roman, a political scientist who studies crime control policies at NORC at the University of Chicago, said tensions rose in 2020 due to “a lot of concentrated trauma, a lot of ill will and resentments and unsettled disputes.” Because of lockdowns, “you’re home and idle, and the people you have disputes with are home and idle, and they’re right there, a couple blocks away.” Mentoring, counseling, prison and jail reentry programs and conflict mediation programs have scaled back, gone remote, or spent precious bandwidth filling other gaps like handing out PPE or passing out food. Schools, recreation centers and after-school programs have been shuttered in neighborhoods that need them most. Lost jobs or wages have been concentrated in communities of color when businesses shut down. “The multiple crises have exposed the public health gaps and the public safety gaps that have existed for generations.”Īs COVID-19 raged through Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native communities, the devastation went beyond the disproportionate death toll, experts said. “2020 was a tinderbox,” said Fernando Rejón, who heads the Urban Peace Institute, a violence prevention and social service organization in Los Angeles. Law enforcement officials and officers attribute the spike, in part, to a paralyzed criminal justice system and a shift in public attitudes toward policing that have made it harder to do their jobs. But experts say a strained social safety net, rising tensions, physical proximity and mistrust between police and communities of color played important roles in driving up murders last year. Violent crime can fluctuate from year to year, and it will take months or years to know whether the rise was temporary. It’s too soon to say whether the homicide surge in 2020 marks a turning point in that trend. Since the national homicide rate reached an all-time high in the 1990s, the rate has declined overall, eventually dropping by half of what it was almost three decades ago.
White neighborhoods in every city except Dallas also saw an increase in homicides.
In these cities, Black neighborhoods had the largest increase in lives lost - 406 more than 2019 - and Hispanic neighborhoods had almost 200 more homicides than last year. Analysis for Detroit's majority-Asian tracts were also excluded because the total population was under 5,000. * Some cities do not have any census tracts that are predominantly Asian or Hispanic.
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