US: Guns and anger fuel record rise in murders

America has suffered the greatest surge in murders since its records began 60 years ago, eclipsing historic rise seen in year of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Gun rights activists hold their annual rally outside the Michigan state capital building in Lansing on Thursday. Picture: AFP

America has suffered the greatest surge in murders since its records began 60 years ago, eclipsing the historic rise seen in the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, according to the FBI.

Murders rose by 29 per cent in 2020, more than double the 12.7 per cent of 1968, the previous record. That year included the murders of King and Robert Kennedy. The murder rate is now the highest since the 1990s.

The bureau’s Uniform Crime Report said that there were almost 21,500 murders, nearly 5000 more than the previous year. While this raw figure was less than the tolls seen in the early 1990s the sudden rise has alarmed pundits, who blame the strain of the pandemic and mistrust between the public and police in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, which triggered Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and a crackdown by the security forces.

A surge in gun ownership in many cities has also been ascribed to the turbulent final months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Some 23 million Americans bought a gun in 2020, an annual rise of 64 per cent. Three quarters of murders, or 77 per cent, were with guns last year, the highest level recorded, and up from 67 per cent a decade ago.

Big cities such as New York and Chicago had dramatically more murders than the year before, but even in towns with fewer than 10,000 residents, murders were up by 31 per cent. St Louis in Missouri had the worst rate, with 87 per 100,000 people, according to local reports. The national average is just over six. In the UK it is just over one.

“It likely takes more than one factor to create a spike of this size. That means it wasn’t just the pandemic, or police violence, or more guns, it was all of these things happening simultaneously and perhaps more,” Thomas Abt, director of the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, and co-author of its report of 2020 crime trends, told The Intercept news organisation.

Lack of policing

Police representatives have blamed declining recruitment, driven in part by the public vitriol. “Policing is to blame, or rather the lack of it,” Jason Johnson, a former deputy police commissioner in Baltimore, one of America’s most violent cities, wrote in USA Today.

The FBI data gives no indication of whether officers have left the force as a direct result of the public backlash that crystallised around the BLM movement, however, and total employment at police departments across America remains broadly unchanged. The pandemic may also have contributed to difficulties in hiring recruits to replace departing officers in some cities.

The murder rate had been rising less steeply before the pandemic but received little attention. After a lengthy decline since the 1990s, the murder rate rose 13 per cent from 2014 to 2019. It accelerated during the early phase of the pandemic, then surged through the summer. Violent crime rose by about 5 per cent last year.

Other observers have blamed the “defund the police” movement that accompanied the BLM protests. Minneapolis itself and Portland, Oregon were among a handful of cities that made significant cuts to policing and then suffered a surge in violence. Several cities that made no cuts to police funding also witnessed similar spikes, however.

Abt suggested the collapse in trust in the authorities meant civilians were less likely to seek help. “Ultimately that means fewer violent disputes being solved through the formal criminal justice system, and more of them dealt with informally through retaliation.”

The Times