Crime in COVID times

An increase in violent arguments and gun carrying during the COVID-19 pandemic combined to create a historically unique two-year surge in murders in the United States that ebbed as the pandemic ebbed, suggests a paper to be discussed at the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) conference on September 24.

Murder rates rose by around one-third from 2019 to 2021 and then declined almost as rapidly, according to the paper by Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago. The rate in 2019 was just under 6 per 100,000 people, jumped to nearly 8 per 100,000 in 2021 and by 2024 was back to about 6 per 100,000.

“Never has the national homicide rate changed so much over such a short period of time,” the author writes. Although many explanations for the dramatic changes in the murder rate have been advanced, “the most plausible (and most obvious) root cause was the pandemic and its aftermath,” he writes.

According to Ludwig, the pandemic increased stress, which acts as a mental “bandwidth tax” that compromises decisionmaking quality. That in turn increased violent arguments leading to homicides, and other “deaths of decisionmaking” like drug overdoses, fatal car crashes, and suicide. The increase in gun carrying made fights more lethal. (The increase in gun carrying may be due in part to some combination of an increase in gun sales during the pandemic, as well as a large decline in police stops.) Levels of distress seem to have ebbed as the pandemic began to ebb; increased behavioral health treatment, including telehealth, may also have played a role, according to the paper.

Thus, behavioral factors explain the rise and fall in COVID-era murders better than the conventional view that ascribes changes to shifts in the fundamental benefits and costs of crime (for example, changes in criminal justice penalties, or changes in economic conditions that lead people to turn to crime). Although homicide rates spiked during the pandemic, property crimes declined.

Broader social trends, such as declines in religiosity and in two-parent families, don’t fit the sharp rise and fall in murders. They “tend to move slowly and in just one direction,” Ludwig writes.

The May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer seems to have played a secondary role, the paper notes, partly by reducing the level of police activity and contributing to higher handgun sales. But it also notes that the rise in murders was similar across cities with different levels of protest activity.

According to Ludwig, his findings suggest behaviorally informed strategies would more effectively reduce murders than conventional policy solutions aimed at reducing the benefits and increasing the costs of crime, such as either attempts to transform large-scale “root causes” (such as unemployment or poverty) or move further in the direction of tougher prison sentences. Conventional strategies have left the murder rate per capita at about what was back in 1900.

“The data suggest there would be high returns from … preventing people from making regrettable decisions in high-stakes moments, and reducing the consequences of such decisions when they do happen,” he writes. “… Reducing gun carrying reduces the risk arguments end in deaths.”