Murders Are Spiking in America
What the data can’t tell us is why.
If 2020 was a year of death, COVID-19 was not the only culprit. Last year saw the largest increase in murders on record, according to new federal-government data.
There were some 21,500 murders in 2020—nearly 5,000 more than in 2019. That’s a 29 percent spike, far outpacing the previous record increase, 12.7 percent, set in 1968. Those numbers come from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, an annual report due out next week, whose numbers were posted online briefly this week and spotted by the crime analyst Jeff Asher.
The huge jump is not a
