Photographer: Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images

When 2020 began, Julius Thibodeaux was feeling good about the trajectory of violent crime in Sacramento, California. 

For the past two years, his nonprofit group Advance Peace had been organizing interventions with young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods and trying to steer them away from violence. They held career mentorship programs for young people from rival communities, bringing them together in a neutral setting to get to know their potential antagonists. It felt like progress: There hadn’t been any juvenile homicides in Sacramento for the previous two years. Though the city’s homicide rate remained higher than the state or the nation, it had fallen since the Great Recession. 

“Then Covid hit,” says Thibodeaux. 

Though some Advance Peace programs were able to continue over Zoom and outdoors, Thibodeaux’s in-person anti-violence work shrank radically in scope. “Now we don’t have life skills classes, we don’t have transformative travel, we don’t have the workshops,” he says. “We don’t have anything where we’re dealing with these young men and women in a group setting.” 

Violence exploded in Sacramento. Homicide went up 26% in 2020 compared with 2019, and four people under the age of 18 were killed.

Many other cities have also reported rising violent crime numbers during the pandemic. A study by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice found that murders increased by 30% across 34 large U.S. cities. Although the murder rate is still well below the highs of the 1980s and early 1990s, the year-over-year increase has been troubling. The trend is similar in cities as varied as Chula Vista, California — where homicide increased by 150% between 2019 and 2020, rising from 4 murders to 10 — and Chicago, where 780 people were killed in 2020, a 55% increase from the 502 deaths in 2019. 

What’s not clear is why violence in so many American communities surged in 2020. Comparable previous calamities did not seem to trigger similar spikes. The flu pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression and the Great Recession were all associated with declines in violence. Academic criminologists tend to be a scrupulously modest bunch, especially in the short term, and few make strong cases for any single reason for year-to-year fluctuations in crime. There isn’t even a widely accepted reason for the great violent crime decline of recent decades, when the murder rate fell by half between its early 1990s peak and 2014. 

One popular explanation for 2020’s violence places some causation  on the protests for racial justice that erupted in many U.S. cities in June, after the police killing of George Floyd, which further delegitimized law enforcement in many communities. The so-called Ferguson Effect suggests that protest activity either results in fewer calls to the police to report crime and moderate disputes, or in police pulling back from their street-level duties. But the fact that several other categories of crime went down in 2020 complicates that narrative, as CityLab’s Brentin Mock wrote in September. And NCCCJ commission director and study co-author Thomas Abt has instead cited a “perfect storm” of factors driving the 2020 homicide trend, rather than one major trigger. 

Bloomberg CityLab talked to a variety of experts and practitioners about what drove the rising homicide rates of the past year — and 2021 so far as well. They offered multiple observations and possible theories — including some surprisingly counterintuitive ones — for the deadly turn that 2020 took. 

Social order, under strain

When Covid-19 hit the U.S. in March, the lockdowns upended already fragile institutions in many communities. Schools and libraries closed, youth sports leagues were canceled, and social services and programs that were forced online struggled to adapt.

“When a local social order is disrupted, it creates the conditions where violence can rise,” says Patrick Sharkey, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. “It’s partly about the institutions that [those at greatest risk of gun violence] interact with, including places like summer jobs, community centers, schools, as well as institutions like the police. [All of that] was destabilized.”

Relationships with law enforcement grew especially frayed. The police first pulled back for fear of infection, and then in many places faced a profound legitimacy crisis after the killing of George Floyd. That fueled what scholars call “legal cynicism,” the idea that those who do not trust the criminal justice system will not call the police to resolve disputes. In Black neighborhoods where the police were known for aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics and doing little to solve homicides, the fallout from the protests over Floyd’s death could have made many residents even more skeptical about relying on, or cooperating with, law enforcement. 

“Legal cynicism means, at the margins, if there’s a dispute and there’s anything that discourages people from letting the legal system intervene it's going to contribute to self help,” says Jeffrey Adler, professor of history at the University of Florida. “And self help is a formula for violence.”

Fear itself 

While unemployment surged in 2020 and in the poorest communities may still be over 20%, there is little research that connects that kind of abrupt economic suffering directly with a rise in crime. But last year, many Americans were afraid in new and confounding ways — that uncertainty, and the inequality with which it was experienced, could be a driver of violence. 

“Much of the literature says that what triggers things like child abuse in a downturn is not unemployment, it’s fear of unemployment, fear of what’s going to happen,” says Randolph Roth, a history professor at Ohio State whose book American Homicide tracked the history of murder in the U.S. from colonial times through the 21st century. “That’s when you start to see the rise in child abuse, and rises in violence. Homicide is about emotions, it’s about feelings and beliefs. It’s not a rational response to reality.” 

Roth argues that violence is usually not planned, and that calculated responses to material circumstances are not generally what drive people to kill. Instead, he sees violent crime as a reflection of a broader social unease about what’s ahead — something that 2020 delivered in spades. “I want to disentangle the material circumstances that people are in, and how they feel about the future,” Roth says. 

How the Covid recession was different

Back in Sacramento, Thibodeaux brings up an unusual possible factor in that city’s crime spike. In January, California’s Employment Development Department (EDD) verified that $11.4 billion in dispersed benefits since the beginning of the pandemic involved fraud, and that a further $19 billion may have been tainted as well. Thibodeaux believes an infusion of illicit funds from the unemployment program could be fueling violence. He says he’s seen young men displaying large amounts of cash on social media, resulting in sometimes deadly cycles of robbery and retaliation, and that gun purchases have become more common among those he works with. 

“We’re talking about new money, we’re talking about people getting stimulus checks, getting all these different scams,” says Thibodeaux. He says that the younger people he’s worked with have never had access to the kind of cash that some of them have recently acquired. “These are people who’ve never really had money before, so they are flashing it.”

This line of reasoning mirrors a theory put forward by historians of homicide like Eric Monkkonen, who speculated that it is not a lack of resources alone that drives violence. In an environment where the underground economy is prevalent, and the rule of law is not firmly entrenched, sudden inflows of cash can stoke conflict, especially a society like the U.S., where guns are easily obtained. (Nationwide, gun sales shot up during the Covid crisis in 2020, as did deaths by gunshot.)

Research backing this theory comes from a National Bureau of Economic Research paper that estimated that Missouri’s crime rate fell by almost 10% after the state began to deliver welfare benefits on debit cards in the 1990s, instead of checks that had to be cashed, in part because people were no longer being targeted for robbery because they were not carrying a large amount of physical currency. 

The theory also intersects with the idea that homicide is not usually the product of hierarchical criminal organizations or carefully orchestrated murder plots, like on TV. Most killings are conflicts over social respect or a romantic relationship, which are more likely to be inflamed by intoxicants and access to weapons. In economic hard times, violence involving these factors can go down, not up, because, according to Monkkonen’s theory, “you can’t afford to go to the tavern, the strip club,” says Roth. “You can’t afford to go to the places and do the things that normally would cause trouble.”

But while murders directly associated with stimulus checks have made headlines recently, the connection between the surge in violent crime, the Covid pandemic, and the availability of relief funds and income supports during 2020 is not proven by any stretch of the imagination. Roth is skeptical that Monkkonen’s theory still holds. Guns and drugs are more expensive than a drink at the tavern was in the early 20th century, where Monkkonen focused much of his research, and yet deaths from both gun violence and overdoses are way up: “Where are people getting the money to buy the drugs to kill themselves at these rates?” 

Additionally, the EDD scandal in California is not representative of how unemployment systems functioned in other states, but murders increased sharply over 2019 levels almost everywhere. It’s also worth noting that the Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice study shows murder rates in the early months of 2020 — before the coronavirus pandemic, unprecedented government relief, or the George Floyd protests — were still higher than the previous year.

It’s a little bit of everything

There are also strong arguments that income supports, under normal circumstances, should ease violence. Author Jill Leovy finishes her influential book Ghettoside with an argument that a 2005 rule change that allowed people released from prison to access Supplemental Security Income (SSI) helped keep recipients from re-offending. The funds gave them the autonomy to abstain from the conflicts endemic to the underground economy. 

David Muhammed of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform points to the effectiveness of programs his group developed in cities like Oakland and Richmond, California, that have offered cash incentives to those who hit certain milestones, like passing a class or getting a job. But he is also based in California and has similarly been hearing about conflicts stoked by EDD funds and money from other forms of aid; he talks about cash being flashed on social media and other forms of ostentatious display, which attract robbery and then retaliation. That’s not the main reason for the violence, he says, but he believes it’s a factor.

“If everything else were the same, but you were getting these huge payments, I don’t think it would have this impact,” says Muhammed. “Meaning if you don’t have all the other despair, economic downturn and lack of things to do around you, I don’t think these payments would have this effect.”

Thibodeaux doesn’t want anyone to mistake his belief that EDD fraud and other payments is fueling some street violence with an argument that government assistance is counterproductive. As Leovy, Muhammed, and Thibodeaux argue, the issue is not government assistance — it's whether people have the autonomy to move away from the underground economy and the relationships that get them in trouble. Perhaps that kind of escape was uniquely difficult in a year where it was harder than ever to go anywhere. 

“Just know that the population that’s driving gun violence was already desperate,” says Thibodeaux. “Covid heightened their sense of insecurity. I know it’s a tough sale for people who don’t have a boots-on-the-ground perspective, but the answer is to invest in these young people and to give them alternatives.”