Black Lives Matter Killed 8,682 Black People

Approximately

If you’re a regular reader of HWFO or you follow us on X, you have probably seen many versions of this graph since 2018:

The graph shows that murder rates in the USA were low by our standards for the first 19 years of this century, but that changed in 2020 with an unprecedented spike. This spike was the steepest ever recorded, thankfully plateaued around our century average, and was then followed by the steepest ever recorded drop. 

This spike was entirely due to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I could use the historical context to make the case that the spike wasn’t actually that bad, but it was certainly bad for anyone who died in it, and was especially bad for black folks. How bad? Solid and easy mathematical analysis shows that the behavior of the Black Lives Matter protesters, and parallel media behavior, killed approximately 8,682 black people over a four year span. 

Let’s begin.

2020

Murder rates rose in the United States by 30% in 2020, which was the largest single-year rise on record. “Experts” have refused to take public positions on why, because they’re afraid of getting kicked out of their neighbor’s cocktail parties. We can easily infer that it was not due to the COVID pandemic, because crime and murder fell globally in 2020 in basically every other country impacted by COVID-19. The murder hotbeds of South America saw some of the greatest drops, with a 24% drop in Rio de Janeiro and a 29% drop in Cali Colombia. The USA was basically the only outlier, and our rate increase was massive.

What else was going on in the United States in 2020 that could have caused the 30% year-on-year spike? Major League Soccer canceled its season, and Major League Baseball shortened its season to 60 games. That probably wasn’t it. 

There was an election, but we just had another one of those this month with no murder spike.

The weather was relatively mild, so that probably wasn’t it.

We had nationwide riots and protests against the police in the wake of the George Floyd killing, with 5000+ demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrested, $2 billion in insured damages, an average of $100 of insured damage per protester, at least one burned police station, the founding of an anarchist autonomous zone, and a several month long siege at a court building. This included a number of protesters larger than the entire population of New York State chanting “All Cops Are Bastards” and “Defund The Police.” This in turn caused the total number of people willing to be police officers to shrink for two straight years, only stabilizing in 2022. So that could have been it.

There is a known scientific correlation between increased police presence and decreased crime. It is impossible to prove causation for a murder spike like this because murder is a multivariate problem, but there are no other reasonable causes I can identify, and if you can find a cause that’s more compelling than unwashed hordes of angry protesters burning police stations down domestically while the rest of planet Earth didn’t, please post it in the comments. 

Excess Murder

To calculate how many extra murders happened due to the BLM movement, we first need a baseline, and the best baseline to use is the prior decade based on the graph above. From 2009 to 2019 the murder rate only exceeded 5.0 per one hundred thousand twice, in 2016 and 2017, and it dropped in 2018. The average across this span was 4.9 per one hundred thousand, so it seems reasonable to start there. 

(for numbers prior to 2009, check the first graph in the article)

Every year inside the decade prior to 2020, homicide rate fluctuated within 0.5 dead humans of 4.9 per 100,000. This was pretty regular, and you can see it looks fairly flat in comparison to the century trends in the first graph of the article. But when we add the BLM spike, the graph looks like this.

The two prior years had a homicide rate of about 5 per 100,000, so if we use that as the expected value of homicides for the following years then we can calculate excess victimization rate due to BLM, and from that, excess dead people. And from that we can calculate excess dead black people.

Let’s walk through this briefly. We take the measured homicide rate of the past few years, subtract 5/100k since we figure that’s “normal,” and get a number that gives us an estimate of what’s abnormal due to 2020 behavior. The population multiplied by that rate yields a number of dead people. That number times the relative ratio of black murder victims gives us the total number of black people killed in excess of what we expect should have happened with no BLM riots. 

Be clear about what this calculation says. 8,682 is not the total number of black murder victims - that number is much higher. This number estimates how many black people died purely because of the increase in murder that followed BLM. This estimate might even be too low. If for instance the main driver of the murder spike was police choosing to not work black areas of town so they don’t get filmed on Worldstar Hiphop and strung up by a media engine Jonesing for police misbehavior to feed their clickbait addiction, then the true number could be much higher than 8,682.

Implications

One out of every 5,500 black people in the USA lost their lives due to the excess murders from the protests over the four-year span above. For every 2,300 BLM protesters, one black person died because of the real world ramifications of ACAB and Defund. If you protested with BLM you shortened the life of a black person by 11 days on average. That’s the true magnitude of the impact of the Floyd protests on black lives themselves. 

If I were one of the people who promulgated this problem in 2020 I think I would look in the mirror, consider my own contribution to the deaths of black folk in the USA, and “do better” by not doing that again, and trying to keep my friends from doing it either. But I wasn’t. I do not know what we, as a society, should do with this implication, nor do I know anything I can personally do with it. Ultimately, the decision about how the protesters of 2020 will behave in the future rests in their own hands, and I hope they make less harmful life choices in the future. 

But I do know this. If I were a black man, and I saw a bunch of white college students marching down my street who looked like this:

I’d punch one in the face, in the name of Black Lives.