Five Year Murder Rate Trends: COVID-19 Found To Be The Primary Driver of Murder Rates Nationwide

This is interesting:

"We're seeing really not just declines, but large declines and large across-the-board declines. I mean, it's everywhere," Asher says.

Researchers who study crime caution that no one thing causes violence to rise or fall, but Asher and other crime analysts have zeroed in on what they say is a primary driver of the rise and subsequent decline: the COVID-19 pandemic.

John Roman, who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at NORC, a research group at the University of Chicago, said they wanted to figure out why crime rose and then fell in recent years.

"The only thing that happened in America during this period that is of that same scale is the pandemic. And what the pandemic really did was it changed how you spend your day, what you do."
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https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s...ionwide-covid?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Maybe we need to update the number of people who died from COVID.

 

Lol, I don’t agree on that one. In multivariate analysis there can be several contributing factors with the primary factor having the strongest influence on the output variable. COVID-19 (and the draconian lockdowns, furloughing, social isolation, etc that went with it) appears to be the most significant factor in the rollercoaster type trend that went up in 2020 and 2021 and came down the past couple of years. The defunding the police movement happened right around the time the murder rate spiked, as did couping people up in their houses, and forcing social isolation upon them (except for BLM mass protests).

 

Again, multivariate analysis recognizes there can be multiple causal factors with degrees of influence on an output variable. People being shut-in and unemployed could certainly be a contributing variable, but there also could be other factors that contributed to the number of people who went out and protested with BLM. It is certainly possible social contagion and social media were other contributing factors alongside people being unemployed and isolated.