The Left:

Making Sense of Murder Progressives shouldn’t avoid talking about rising homicides.

- Eric Levitz

AT ITS MOST PEACEFUL, the United States is an exceptionally murderous nation. In 2014, America recorded the lowest homicide rate in its history—and the highest homicide rate of any comparably prosperous country. That year, Americans were more than three times as likely to die by murder than Western Europeans were. Like most things in the U.S., this aberrantly high risk of homicide was not equally distributed. Residents of Washington, D.C., were murdered at eight times the rate of those in Iowa. Within the district, as in virtually all major U.S. cities, killing was largely quarantined to a select group of politically disempowered, economically dispossessed neighborhoods. Poor Black people did the bulk of the dying.

America’s distribution of violent death has changed little over the past seven years, but the sum total has risen considerably. In 2019, the U.S. murder rate was about 11 percent higher than it had been in 2014. We do not yet have an official body count for 2020. Preliminary data, however, suggest that, across major cities, homicides rose by an average of 30 percent last year—then jumped another 24 percent through the first few months of this one. If current estimates prove accurate, 2020 witnessed the largest single-year increase in homicides in U.S. history, and 2021 is on pace to see an even higher jump.