COVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder
Restrictive policies in response to COVID-19 did a huge amount of damage to our liberty, prosperity, kids’ education, and even our sanity. But now there’s evidence supporting what many of us suspected: Lockdowns also contributed to a surge in crime that temporarily reversed a decades-long decline in homicides. According to a new Brookings Institution report, forcing young men out of work and out of school fueled a surge in violence. Worse, this outcome was predicted.
A Surge in Crime
It’s no secret that, after years of declining crime rates, crimes against people and property spiked in 2020 and for a period thereafter. Most concerning was the rise in murders, which had happily been dwindling since the early 1990s.
“In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country,” write Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings Institution published this week. “Across the nation, more than 24,000 people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before.”
They add that “homicides remained high in 2021 and 2022, but in 2023 they began to fall rapidly.”
The surge in crime has variably been attributed to efforts to defund or deemphasize policing that took off during the 2020 riots sparked by the killing of George Floyd, demoralized police officers resulting from those efforts, and the aftereffects of the social disruptions from lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acharya and Morris analyzed thousands of police records and examined the timeframe from which they were drawn. They find that the data best fits the last hypothesis.
Murderous Lockdowns
“The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas,” they conclude. “Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average. The persistence of these changes can also explain why murders remained high in 2021 and 2022 and then fell in late 2023 and 2024.”
Interestingly, they write, “the national homicide rate was already on track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was killed” and police defunding efforts gained traction.
Most violent crimes, Acharya and Morris point out, are committed by teenage boys and young men in their twenties. Dumping them out of jobs and out of classrooms, at loose ends and often without money in their pockets, was a reci
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