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Re:Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike by enoch_r on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @12:31PM (#26016275)
> most homicide is domestic

This doesn't seem to be true. According to Wikipedia, there were 2340 domestic homicides in 2007.[1] There were 18,361 homicides that year.[2] So <13% of homicides were domestic. You may have read a statistic that most women killed in homicides are killed by romantic partners - but this is not true of men, who are the overwhelming majority of homicide victims.

Even if the rate of domestic homicides doubled it would mean only a 13% increase in the overall homicide rate, far less than what we've actually observed.

> people were home more and under a lot of stress.

This explanation does not seem to fit with the social mobility data presented. The pandemic struck in March, people were staying home far more in March/April/May than in June - but homicides did not rise until June. Why?

> An increase in murder can just mean the same number of people shooting each other as normal, but more of them died.

It could mean that. But no: shootings and shooting victims increased dramatically right along with murders:

- in Chicago: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shootings-2020-shooting-crim...

- in NYC: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-homicides-and-sho...

- in Portland: https://www.koin.com/news/crime/shootings-in-portland-more-t...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6203a28.htm?s_ci...

Re:Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike by nonameiguess on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @04:51PM (#26019635)
First off, thank you for posting this, but it should be clear that I was never trying to make the opposite argument that I personally have any special insight into why the murder rate changed. I just want an investigative article looking into this to address these questions and present more than just temporal correlation. It presumably didn't take you more than a few minutes to look this stuff up, so why didn't the original author of the headline article bother to do it?