"A Failing Regime"

With the DAs that have been installed in the major cities, things aren't going to be getting better any time soon. Homicide Rates in 2020 Surged to a 24-Year High. It's Another Sign of a Failing Regime. | Mises Wire

In case you doubted that things were bad...

With full-year data for 2020 now available on the FBI’s Crime in the United States report, we can see that those predictions were right. According to the report, the homicide rate in the United States rose to 6.5 per 100,000 in 2020, which is the highest rate reported since 1997—a twenty-four-year high.

We can debate the issue of "Why," but it is clear that this is an historic increase in the murder rate.

There is significant disagreement over the measurement of homicide rates in the early twentieth century, and data is especially spotty before the FBI established the Uniform Crime Report system in 1930. There is much more consensus, however, that homicide rates were high by today’s standards during the early 1930s. These rates began to decline rapidly after 1934, and this began a long downward trend in homicide that lasted until the late 1950s. This trend bottomed out at 4 per 100,000 in 1957. By 1965, homicide rates had begun a rapid ascent, climbing from 4.6 per 100,000 in 1963 and peaking at 9.8 per 100,000 in 1980. Homicide rates remained at elevated levels throughout the 1980s, but went into steep decline after 1993, reaching 4.4 per 100,000—a fifty-one-year low—in 2014.

So of course, as we were experiencing a 50-year-low in homicides, it was time to abandon some of the policies, like Broken Windows, that drove those rates down. Because those policies were unfair. Who is all this crime unfair to? Who benefits?

On the other hand, the magnitude of 2020’s increase is sizable and alarming. Measured as a percentage increase, 2020’s increase is simply the largest ever recorded.

As I said, I expect things to get worse before they get better.