The lockdowns caused reluctance to arrest since jails put a bunch of people in the same cell. And a trial is a form of public assembly. I vaguely recall that they were letting some people out of prison in order to get more social distancing.
This does feel a lot like a "both/and" situation to me, although I suspect the BLM aspect is the stronger of the two. Lots of people with nothing else to do does suggest there should be more murders, as we generally see during summer, but I am a little skeptical that the additional number of young men who weren't able to go into work are really making all the difference. I just have a hard time imagining that the sort of young men who wind up murdering someone when they are off work for a month or two are the sort of young men who are super attached to the work force and spend a lot of time working. I would wonder how much of a time difference it really was for them: were they full time 40 hour workers, or part time 10-20 hours? I can see that some young men might decide that leaning into the life of crime was a better way to make money, and that might lead to higher than expected violence than just two or three fewer days a week at work suggests.
On the other hand, belief that one will not see punishment for violence seems to be a massive incentive for behavioral changes, not just that one expects not to get punished for murders one already is tempted to commit, but also knowing that other people are more likely to murder you for the same reasons, and thus you are incentivized to get your self defense in first. The fact that almost everyone avoids murdering people even when they have lots of time off work and school suggests that free time isn't the decisive aspect. (Although, if you told me domestic violence spiked as people were forced to stay home with their spouses, I would be inclined to believe it.)
I'd be interested in analysis of 'severity of lockdown' vs deaths. You read about people who were locked down tight with someone, and then couldn't leave, take the kids to my parents, etc. Lockdowns turned a lot of people a little crazy, but some people just aren't safe to be with when they are a little crazy. Is this what we are seeing?
White folks don't have a good perspective on what was transpiring within marginalized communities during the lockdown. The LWWs were all disinfecting their countertops with bleach and glued to Facebook, but the marginalized communities were simply out of work/school.
Indeed. I doubt that accounts for the majority of the deaths, but I'd expect that there is a non-trivial increase there. A 20% increase in domestic violence? A 30% increase in divorce rate for a few months? I'd believe that.
Wow that is really surprising. I would have expected at least a little up and down noise. Being perfectly flat is almost suspicious itself. Good knew at least that people weren’t killing each other more due to being in close proximity to their spouses for extended periods.
Yeah it's been around a steady 0.7/100k for a decade at least. And I'll admit that while I didn't figure it was a significant portion of the increase, I expected at least some increase intuitively, much like you did.
My sense is that no fault divorce probably tamps this number down to be honest. We can argue whether no fault divorce is good or bad for society in general, or the birth rates, or such, but it probably helps keep the domestic homicide rate low regardless of its other effects.
That's a good point, I hadn't really considered how much no-fault divorce, and it being more socially acceptable, probably keeps that level low and steady.
Are you talking domestic violence (e.g. smacking each other around) or domestic homicide (e.g. smacking each other around with a poleax)? I am not so surprised if the homicide rate stays low, but the assault or violence in general rate I really did expect to go up.
I actually had not read that one. I do read SSC but not always, and sometimes I don't remember the ones I do read unless they're really well supported.
I drew my conclusions for similar reasons to Scott, but I find the Brookings analysis about timing to be convincing. Scott would seem to rebut Brookings by saying "yeah but that's still within normal variation," which might lead us to a combined conclusion:
1) the lockdowns pushed murder to the top of normal variation
2) the ACABs and Defunds pushed it past normal variation
Googled "decrease in violence prevention programs during covid lockdown" and got a pretty good AI summary of factors causing an increase in violence during the lockdown. Some of the violence prevention programs are quite effective. One excerpt:
"Reduced access to services: Community violence intervention programs faced financial cuts, staffing issues, and an inability to conduct in-person interventions due to restrictions on care. In schools, domestic and sexual violence prevention programs were radically altered or eliminated as educators were overwhelmed by the transition to virtual learning."
That's interesting, and I agree generally that violence prevention programs are both important and efficacious. But I do not think they're so efficacious that a sudden lack of them could be explanatory for a significant portion of the spike.
If you Google that phrase, and I did not see any articles that summed it up as well as good old AI, you see that decreased availability of shelters, fewer resources for victims of abuse, and curtailed outreach by schools and other organizations also contributed. It just occurred to me that there might have been a decrease in 12-step programs leading to increased alcohol and drug abuse, leading to more violence.
Did you consider that there were more black people who actually died of COVID? Or were you only using the murder rate? I know that folks (not you) had previously talked about gun deaths, including folks who had died by suicide. But when you took the suicides out, you got different views about what was actually happening.
Also, I compliment you on continuing to find additional data that shifts your perception about what was happening at the time. So often, we come to a conclusion and then only look for evidence that substantiates our view, not allowing other perceptions room to be considered.
This is purely an analysis of murder rate differential. The black mortality rate for covid was also higher, but that was attributed by most sources to the rate of comorbidities, since most covid deaths themselves were tied to comorbidities.
It's also important to realize that lockdowns were never a preventative measure. They slowed the spread of the disease, they didn't protect anyone from the disease. The disease was novel, and the black folks who died of Covid were going to die whether the lockdown happened or not.
The original point of the lockdown was "two weeks to flatten the curve" or three or whatever, and that made sense because you weren't trying to avoid covid deaths, you were trying to avoid other deaths that would come from overloaded hospitals not being able to save non-covid related cases. An overloaded hospital would turn a treatable non-covid death into a death.
Once the curve was flattened, the scientific case for lockdowns evaporated, but the scientists under pressure from their political tribe changed their minds, bait and switching the public, destroying the economy, creating the inflation, wiping any hope for Millenial first home buyers, and creating a slug of children inside a 2 or 3 year window which were mentally damaged that are now entering high school. Talk to teachers about it. They can tell which students were impacted by the lockdowns, in the same way they used to be able to identify crack babies. It's bad.
I think graphs are simply a look at 2020 and the decade prior. Though now I want to see the chart showing the number of people with dyed blue hair and also having septum rings.
Perhaps there are other urban problems getting worse, such as water quality or food quality.
Looking at arrest images anywhere, a large proportion of arrested people look like they've had nutritional or other problems that made their heads form incorrectly. And almost all Western people have this problem, if you believe Weston Price's analysis of dental problems 100 years ago. We should be able to routinely have straight teeth without braces.
Chicago today is on track to post one of its lowest murder totals in its entire history. This is a return to a very low baseline that was trending down. The spike in murders is obvious, and it came in 2020, and we're the only country that had it.
The problem with using statistics to try to find cause is that you can find data for everything and anything that correlates with the thing you're trying to find cause for - and then provide a very convincing explanation for those correlates-as-cause and we all nod our heads smugly and say, "Yes!"
So, please forgive me for being the contrarian pointing out no one's proven anything, HWFO... And maybe it was uptake of the jabs?
Not true - the Mandates didn't start until 2021, but the EUA mRNA gene-therapies were out in December 2020. You could take them "voluntarily" then.
Dec. 11, 2020: FDA issues an EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2).
Dec. 14, 2020: The first doses of BNT162b2 were "deployed" and administered in the U.S.
Dec. 18, 2020: The FDA issues an EUA for the Moderna COVID-19 "vaccine."
Dec. 21, 2020: The Moderna vaccine rolls out.
Feb. 27, 2021: The Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) COVID-19 vaccine was granted an EUA. And on it went.
Mandates came after the phony licensure PsyOp on Aug 23, 2021, followed by Military mandate on Aug 24, 2021, then the "lose your job or govt contract" mandate followed. But you can go back and look and see they were pushing these things HARD by end of 2020 and early 2021 - which sits at the fat spot of your death spike.
I don't think murder maps to knitting as well as you might think. Even the worst murders only really do it a few times before they're either dead themselves or out of circulation. I don't view murder as a skill, or even as a practiced behavior, which means there's not a lot of actual "learning" to do.
I don't know the rates of general abuse, but the rate of domestic abuse *homicide* didn't change during the lockdowns. It's also a diminishingly small ratio of the total homicide number. Domestic homicide rates are pretty steady at around 0.7/100k net, which is between a sixth and a tenth of total homicides.
That was the groundwork, certainly. But in my view the biggest difference in 2020 was the media behavior, which led them to scour the country for any example they could twist into causing another riot. Kenosha.
Kenosha wouldn't have happened in 2019 because the media behaved differently in 2019.
I live in Atlanta. We had the great week long Burnt Wendys Fiasco where a cop got fired for doing his job. If that same event had transpired a year prior, people in Atlanta of all races and creeds would have pointed at the guy who got shot and said "damn what a dumbass." But in 2020 it was different, because largely of the media treatment of these events.
The lockdowns caused reluctance to arrest since jails put a bunch of people in the same cell. And a trial is a form of public assembly. I vaguely recall that they were letting some people out of prison in order to get more social distancing.
Your recall is accurate. Some states specifically released prison inmates based on COVID.
Well-written article, BJ.
This does feel a lot like a "both/and" situation to me, although I suspect the BLM aspect is the stronger of the two. Lots of people with nothing else to do does suggest there should be more murders, as we generally see during summer, but I am a little skeptical that the additional number of young men who weren't able to go into work are really making all the difference. I just have a hard time imagining that the sort of young men who wind up murdering someone when they are off work for a month or two are the sort of young men who are super attached to the work force and spend a lot of time working. I would wonder how much of a time difference it really was for them: were they full time 40 hour workers, or part time 10-20 hours? I can see that some young men might decide that leaning into the life of crime was a better way to make money, and that might lead to higher than expected violence than just two or three fewer days a week at work suggests.
On the other hand, belief that one will not see punishment for violence seems to be a massive incentive for behavioral changes, not just that one expects not to get punished for murders one already is tempted to commit, but also knowing that other people are more likely to murder you for the same reasons, and thus you are incentivized to get your self defense in first. The fact that almost everyone avoids murdering people even when they have lots of time off work and school suggests that free time isn't the decisive aspect. (Although, if you told me domestic violence spiked as people were forced to stay home with their spouses, I would be inclined to believe it.)
I'd be interested in analysis of 'severity of lockdown' vs deaths. You read about people who were locked down tight with someone, and then couldn't leave, take the kids to my parents, etc. Lockdowns turned a lot of people a little crazy, but some people just aren't safe to be with when they are a little crazy. Is this what we are seeing?
White folks don't have a good perspective on what was transpiring within marginalized communities during the lockdown. The LWWs were all disinfecting their countertops with bleach and glued to Facebook, but the marginalized communities were simply out of work/school.
Indeed. I doubt that accounts for the majority of the deaths, but I'd expect that there is a non-trivial increase there. A 20% increase in domestic violence? A 30% increase in divorce rate for a few months? I'd believe that.
Domestic violence had a 0% increase in 2020. Trends on that were completely flat.
Wow that is really surprising. I would have expected at least a little up and down noise. Being perfectly flat is almost suspicious itself. Good knew at least that people weren’t killing each other more due to being in close proximity to their spouses for extended periods.
Yeah it's been around a steady 0.7/100k for a decade at least. And I'll admit that while I didn't figure it was a significant portion of the increase, I expected at least some increase intuitively, much like you did.
My sense is that no fault divorce probably tamps this number down to be honest. We can argue whether no fault divorce is good or bad for society in general, or the birth rates, or such, but it probably helps keep the domestic homicide rate low regardless of its other effects.
That's a good point, I hadn't really considered how much no-fault divorce, and it being more socially acceptable, probably keeps that level low and steady.
Are you talking domestic violence (e.g. smacking each other around) or domestic homicide (e.g. smacking each other around with a poleax)? I am not so surprised if the homicide rate stays low, but the assault or violence in general rate I really did expect to go up.
I presume you've seen it, but Scott Alexander did a pretty good analysis which strongly favours your explanation over Brookings':
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9
I actually had not read that one. I do read SSC but not always, and sometimes I don't remember the ones I do read unless they're really well supported.
I drew my conclusions for similar reasons to Scott, but I find the Brookings analysis about timing to be convincing. Scott would seem to rebut Brookings by saying "yeah but that's still within normal variation," which might lead us to a combined conclusion:
1) the lockdowns pushed murder to the top of normal variation
2) the ACABs and Defunds pushed it past normal variation
Yeah, it's really hard to avoid the "Por que no los dos?!" conclusion. It would actually be somewhat surprising if they *didn't* both feed into it.
Googled "decrease in violence prevention programs during covid lockdown" and got a pretty good AI summary of factors causing an increase in violence during the lockdown. Some of the violence prevention programs are quite effective. One excerpt:
"Reduced access to services: Community violence intervention programs faced financial cuts, staffing issues, and an inability to conduct in-person interventions due to restrictions on care. In schools, domestic and sexual violence prevention programs were radically altered or eliminated as educators were overwhelmed by the transition to virtual learning."
That's interesting, and I agree generally that violence prevention programs are both important and efficacious. But I do not think they're so efficacious that a sudden lack of them could be explanatory for a significant portion of the spike.
Clearly there were a number of factors.
If you Google that phrase, and I did not see any articles that summed it up as well as good old AI, you see that decreased availability of shelters, fewer resources for victims of abuse, and curtailed outreach by schools and other organizations also contributed. It just occurred to me that there might have been a decrease in 12-step programs leading to increased alcohol and drug abuse, leading to more violence.
I commented on the last post saying this exact thing
Did you consider that there were more black people who actually died of COVID? Or were you only using the murder rate? I know that folks (not you) had previously talked about gun deaths, including folks who had died by suicide. But when you took the suicides out, you got different views about what was actually happening.
Also, I compliment you on continuing to find additional data that shifts your perception about what was happening at the time. So often, we come to a conclusion and then only look for evidence that substantiates our view, not allowing other perceptions room to be considered.
This is purely an analysis of murder rate differential. The black mortality rate for covid was also higher, but that was attributed by most sources to the rate of comorbidities, since most covid deaths themselves were tied to comorbidities.
It's also important to realize that lockdowns were never a preventative measure. They slowed the spread of the disease, they didn't protect anyone from the disease. The disease was novel, and the black folks who died of Covid were going to die whether the lockdown happened or not.
The original point of the lockdown was "two weeks to flatten the curve" or three or whatever, and that made sense because you weren't trying to avoid covid deaths, you were trying to avoid other deaths that would come from overloaded hospitals not being able to save non-covid related cases. An overloaded hospital would turn a treatable non-covid death into a death.
Once the curve was flattened, the scientific case for lockdowns evaporated, but the scientists under pressure from their political tribe changed their minds, bait and switching the public, destroying the economy, creating the inflation, wiping any hope for Millenial first home buyers, and creating a slug of children inside a 2 or 3 year window which were mentally damaged that are now entering high school. Talk to teachers about it. They can tell which students were impacted by the lockdowns, in the same way they used to be able to identify crack babies. It's bad.
Lots of schools down here are banning cel phones, and that seems to be helping some.
That chart on its own isn't super convincing. Would have been nice to see more years to better understand the variability.
I think graphs are simply a look at 2020 and the decade prior. Though now I want to see the chart showing the number of people with dyed blue hair and also having septum rings.
Century of homicide rate is here:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-gun-homicide-epidemic-isnt
Perhaps there are other urban problems getting worse, such as water quality or food quality.
Looking at arrest images anywhere, a large proportion of arrested people look like they've had nutritional or other problems that made their heads form incorrectly. And almost all Western people have this problem, if you believe Weston Price's analysis of dental problems 100 years ago. We should be able to routinely have straight teeth without braces.
Chicago today is on track to post one of its lowest murder totals in its entire history. This is a return to a very low baseline that was trending down. The spike in murders is obvious, and it came in 2020, and we're the only country that had it.
I agree with you, thank you for the reply!
I'm curious what a "one-factor issue" would look like. Perhaps cutting illegal drugs with something bad?
Defund the police
The problem with using statistics to try to find cause is that you can find data for everything and anything that correlates with the thing you're trying to find cause for - and then provide a very convincing explanation for those correlates-as-cause and we all nod our heads smugly and say, "Yes!"
So, please forgive me for being the contrarian pointing out no one's proven anything, HWFO... And maybe it was uptake of the jabs?
Jabs weren't until a year later. :)
Not true - the Mandates didn't start until 2021, but the EUA mRNA gene-therapies were out in December 2020. You could take them "voluntarily" then.
Dec. 11, 2020: FDA issues an EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (BNT162b2).
Dec. 14, 2020: The first doses of BNT162b2 were "deployed" and administered in the U.S.
Dec. 18, 2020: The FDA issues an EUA for the Moderna COVID-19 "vaccine."
Dec. 21, 2020: The Moderna vaccine rolls out.
Feb. 27, 2021: The Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) COVID-19 vaccine was granted an EUA. And on it went.
Mandates came after the phony licensure PsyOp on Aug 23, 2021, followed by Military mandate on Aug 24, 2021, then the "lose your job or govt contract" mandate followed. But you can go back and look and see they were pushing these things HARD by end of 2020 and early 2021 - which sits at the fat spot of your death spike.
The murder spike started right when the lockdowns did.
Perhaps the urban hospitals used more ventilators, more giving up on people, less antibiotics.
You're totally right! Thank you so much for the reply. I was mistaken.
This is not appropriate discussion for this comment feed.
I don't think murder maps to knitting as well as you might think. Even the worst murders only really do it a few times before they're either dead themselves or out of circulation. I don't view murder as a skill, or even as a practiced behavior, which means there's not a lot of actual "learning" to do.
> I don't think murder maps to knitting as well as you might think.
Then you just had the wrong knitting instructor, my friend. ;)
I don't know the rates of general abuse, but the rate of domestic abuse *homicide* didn't change during the lockdowns. It's also a diminishingly small ratio of the total homicide number. Domestic homicide rates are pretty steady at around 0.7/100k net, which is between a sixth and a tenth of total homicides.
We want to find one reason for the spike, when there may have been several reasons for it. Reasons might have been interlocking or not.
That was the groundwork, certainly. But in my view the biggest difference in 2020 was the media behavior, which led them to scour the country for any example they could twist into causing another riot. Kenosha.
Kenosha wouldn't have happened in 2019 because the media behaved differently in 2019.
I live in Atlanta. We had the great week long Burnt Wendys Fiasco where a cop got fired for doing his job. If that same event had transpired a year prior, people in Atlanta of all races and creeds would have pointed at the guy who got shot and said "damn what a dumbass." But in 2020 it was different, because largely of the media treatment of these events.