The Post-Pandemic Murder Wave Is Cresting

Newly released data are giving researchers a better picture of crime during the pandemic and the disturbances after the May 2020 death of George Floyd. The results are surprising. While murders increased significantly in 2020 and 2021, other violent crimes declined. And since murders are waning in 2023 (off 12% versus the same period in 2022), the chances of a long-term upswing in crime look slim.

That murders spiked in 2020 and 2021 isn’t news; it was widely noted. Usually, however, murder and violent crime rise and fall together. During the great crime tsunami of 1960-90, violent-crime rates rose 353% while murder rates leapt 84%. While the two increases weren’t commensurate, both murder and violent crime shared a common, sharply upward trajectory.

This didn’t happen in 2020-21. Rape, robbery and aggravated assault in particular declined. This assessment isn’t based on police data, which are limited to reported crimes, but rather on the National Crime Victim Survey, which interviews more than 200,000 people. They presumably have no incentive to misrepresent their victimization. As these data show, in 2017-19, the three years prior to the pandemic, violent-crime rates never went below 20 per 100,000 population, topping out at 23.2. But during the plague years, 2020-21, the rates never exceeded 16.5, a 29% fall-off.

Yet while most violent crimes were occurring less often, murders were becoming more frequent. This claim is based on death-certificate data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—probably the most accurate crime-related data set available. In the pre-pandemic years, fewer than 19,000 people were murdered annually; but in 2020 more than 24,000 were murdered, with a jump to 25,761 in 2021. The 2021 rate, 7.8 per 100,000 population, was a 37% increase over the pre-pandemic 2018 rate.

Not only did violent crimes other than homicide decline during the pandemic, domestic violence also diminished. Many thought that school lockdowns and work-at-home policies would intensify domestic strife, with couples and kids forced to endure one another day in, day out like never before. But domestic crime contracted. Household violence rates went from 4.8 per 100,000 population in 2018 to 3.1 in 2020, a drop of more than 35%.

So why was murder rising when other violent crimes were declining? The answer involves big cities, guns and young black men.

Consider first the firearm homicide situation. In 2020, 79% of all homicides were caused by guns, and 6 out of 10 firearm homicides occurred in large metropolitan areas. The rate of gun deaths in big cities that year rose 37% over 2019. Small and medium-size cities suffered only 28% of all gun deaths in 2020, and their annual rate of increase (32% over 2019) wasn’t as high as that of the big urban areas.

Race and age explain the rest. Black males 25 to 44 had disturbingly high firearm death rates before the pandemic: 67 per 100,000 in 2019. One year later, in 2020, the homicidal violence seemed to have spun totally out of control. Gun death rates for young black men leapt 36% to 91 per 100,000.

Things didn’t get much better in 2021. The firearm death rate for black men of all ages was 53 per 100,000, whereas for white and Hispanic males the rates were under 10 per 100,000. In other words, black males died from shootings at a rate roughly five times those of whites or Hispanics, and 35 times the rate of Asian males, who had the lowest gun death rates of any group—only 1.5 for every 100,000.

These data suggest that armed assaults, robberies, personal quarrels and gang combat among young black males in big cities drove up murder rates. But since robbery and assault didn’t escalate during the pandemic, gang wars and personal disputes were likely the principal drivers. Whatever the activity leading to death, however, the number of black homicides in big cities is shocking. In Chicago, 81% of all killings took black lives. In Baton Rouge, La., 79% of homicide victims were African-American men; in Louisville, Ky., 68%. In Baltimore, 92% of the homicide victims whose racial identities were known were black.

It is clear that the pandemic didn’t generate high violent crime in general. Rather, 2020 and 2021 were homicide spike years, especially among armed young black males in big cities. Did the pandemic cause this? Due to fear of Covid and the need to police the protests, plus police demoralization due to hostile attacks, law enforcement became less proactive and fewer arrestees were jailed or kept in jail. Such depolicing undoubtedly contributed to the murder spike, but it doesn’t explain the extreme numbers of black lethal shootings.

This is attributable to s subculture of violence among low-income male African-Americans. A propensity to resolve interpersonal conflict through violence traces back to the 19th-century South, where whites manifested similar behavior. Historians have dubbed it an “honor culture.” Blacks, overwhelmingly Southerners in the 19th century, adopted the white Southern subculture of violence and took it to Northern cities in the Great Migration.

That helps explain the elevated black-on-black violent-crime rates since the start of the 20th century and even into the 21st.

The combination of depolicing and the subculture of violence produced an explosion in black-on-black crime in 2020 and 2021—a social epidemic akin to the medical pandemic tearing through the U.S. at the same time. A social epidemic is, essentially, copycat behavior, in which friends and neighbors—especially youth—imitate the activities of their peers, including unlawful activities. The 2020-21 social epidemic, while perhaps not as damaging as Covid-19, was devastating to black communities across America.

Mr. Latzer is an emeritus professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “The Myth of Overpunishment: A Defense of the American Justice System and a Proposal to Reduce Incarceration While Protecting the Public.”