Are Republicans Right About America’s Crime Wave? Let’s Look at the Data
The big increase in murder rates during the pandemic is reason enough for alarm, and now other crime seems to be rising.
Murder rates are up.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Crime has become a big issue in the US midterm elections. That seems fair, given that incidence of the most serious and most reliably measured crime — homicide — went up an estimated 31% in 2020 and another 3% in 2021, resulting in the highest national homicide rate since the 1990s.
While murder is down 5% so far this year in the 91 cities tracked by crime analysts Jeff Asher and Ben Horwitz, that still leaves it very high. Overall violent crime didn’t spike upward in 2020 the way that murder did, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data, and property crime seems to have fallen. But those FBI statistics are far from complete, plus the pandemic put a damper on certain crimes that local data from some cities indicate may be rebounding this year.