Michael Ejercito
2024-12-20 15:33:34 UTC
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PermalinkCOVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder
Researchers find that pandemic policies sparked a wave of violent crime.
J.D. Tuccille | 12.20.2024 7:00 AM
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AI-generated image of an armed robber in profile, against the backdrop
of a line graph illustrating rising crime rates. | Illustration: Lex
Villena; Midjourney
(Illustration: Lex Villena; Midjourney)
Restrictive policies in response to COVID-19 did a huge amount of damage
to our liberty, prosperity, kids' education, and even our sanity. But
now there's evidence supporting what many of us suspected: Lockdowns
also contributed to a surge in crime that temporarily reversed a
decades-long decline in homicides. According to a new Brookings
Institution report, forcing young men out of work and out of school
fueled a surge in violence. Worse, this outcome was predicted.
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A Surge in Crime
It's no secret that, after years of declining crime rates, crimes
against people and property spiked in 2020 and for a period thereafter.
Most concerning was the rise in murders, which had happily been
dwindling since the early 1990s.
"In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate
of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country," write
Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings
Institution published this week. "Across the nation, more than 24,000
people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before."
They add that "homicides remained high in 2021 and 2022, but in 2023
they began to fall rapidly."
The surge in crime has variably been attributed to efforts to defund or
deemphasize policing that took off during the 2020 riots sparked by the
killing of George Floyd, demoralized police officers resulting from
those efforts, and the aftereffects of the social disruptions from
lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acharya and
Morris analyzed thousands of police records and examined the timeframe
from which they were drawn. They find that the data best fits the last
hypothesis.
Murderous Lockdowns
"The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local
unemployment and school closures in low-income areas," they conclude.
"Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen
boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and
early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that
year, on average. The persistence of these changes can also explain why
murders remained high in 2021 and 2022 and then fell in late 2023 and 2024."
Interestingly, they write, "the national homicide rate was already on
track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was
killed" and police defunding efforts gained traction.
Most violent crimes, Acharya and Morris point out, are committed by
teenage boys and young men in their twenties. Dumping them out of jobs
and out of classrooms, at loose ends and often without money in their
pockets, was a recipe for disaster. In a focused look at Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, they find similar surges in violent crime in that city after
Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and following a massive flood in 2016, both of
which displaced students from schools and closed many workplaces.
What's especially frustrating about the Brookings study is that we were
warned that disrupting our society with lockdowns and mandatory closures
would do serious social harm.
Ignored Warnings
"I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health
consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and
businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and
calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself,"
David L. Katz, former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research
Center, wrote in The New York Times in March 2020. "The unemployment,
impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health
scourges of the first order."
As I noted in a column that same month which quoted Katz, the
International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency,
quantifies the degree to which shutting down economies damages societies.
"For example," a 2013 report from the ILO emphasized, "a one standard
deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest by 0.39 standard
deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth
reduces social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations."
"Why would economic shutdowns lead to social unrest?" I commented at the
time. "Because, contrary to the airy dismissals of some members of the
political class and many ivory-tower types, commerce isn't a grubby
embarrassment to be tolerated and avoided—it's the life's blood of a
society. Jobs and businesses keep people alive."
Likewise, education keeps teenagers engaged—or at least off the streets.
Lockdowns killed jobs and closed schools, handing young men and teenage
boys a great deal of frustration and free time.
"The shocks of teen boys and young men being pushed out of school and
out of work in low-income neighborhoods occurred across the country just
before murders began to rapidly increase, and those baleful educational
and economic conditions lasted for the same period of time that
homicides remained elevated," add Acharya and Morris.
The Mistakes of the Past
These disruptions are a replay of events during past disease outbreaks.
"The number of murders and of mass shootings have both increased
dramatically," Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president
of the RAND Corporation and author of Plagues and Their Aftermath: How
Societies Recover from Pandemics, commented in a 2022 piece about the
impact of COVID-19. "These last two years have resembled the disorders
seen during the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War and the
Black Death in the Middle Ages." He quoted Thucydides' observation that
"Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of lawlessness."
So, what to do? Acharya and Morris propose several anti-crime
interventions, but the fact is that the damage has been done and we're
now recovering to the extent we can. Murder rates have resumed their
previous decline as teens go back to school and young men regain
employment. But that's cold comfort for the families of those killed or
otherwise victimized by the crime surge. They can't regain what they
lost; they can only move on.
The best thing to do, then, is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the
past. We need to minimize social disruptions and certainly not permit
government officials to close businesses and schools by decree. A free
and prosperous society, it turns out, is a much happier and peaceful one
than what results from the authoritarian whims of public-health officials.