In 2020, major cities across the country suffered dramatic spikes in homicides and shootings. One hypothesis for explaining these spikes is de-policing: the idea that anti-police protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis led police across the nation to pull back from some forms of proactive policing. The basic idea is that anti-police protests in the wake of George Floyd's killing in Minneapolis led police across the nation to pull back from some forms of proactive policing. The possible consequence, according to this hypothesis, was an increase in homicides and gun violence. This thesis, which I have called the "Minneapolis Effect," continues to warrant research and investigation. It remains a strong candidate for explaining a significant part of the nation's homicide and shooting spikes in major cities in 2020.
My chapter in a forthcoming book on violent crime argues that more research should be conducted to specifically examine the relationship between de-policing and firearms offenses. As I explain in the chapter, it is well known that, in 2020, many major cities across the country suffered from dramatic spikes in homicides and shootings. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the homicide rate in the U.S. increased from 6.0 homicides in 2019 to 7.8 per 100,000 in 2020. This was the largest one-year increase in homicide rates ever recorded. Similarly, a major analysis of a sample of 34 cities by Professor Richard Rosenfeld et al. for the Council on Criminal Justice reported that homicides in 2020 were 30% higher than in 2019. The study also found that a structural break occurred in the homicide trends in June of that year, indicating large, statistically significant increases in homicide rates after adjusting for seasonality and long-term trends. Nationally, nearly 5,000 more Americans died that year due to the increase in homicides. And much of the increase in homicides was concentrated in the nation's major cities, apparently in impoverished areas.
While explaining trends in homicide rates in general is a long-debated topic, explaining why thousands of additional victims were killed in a recent year remains a discrete issue that would seem to be within the ken of modern social science.
