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?
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...