That’s one of the clear lessons of 2021. Numerous American cities were devastated by violent crime, which rose sharply after protests stemming from the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
In 2020, the United States nationally saw its highest-ever increase in homicides by many measures. Official FBI crime statistics indicate that 2020 saw the largest increase in homicides since the bureau began tracking those numbers in the 1960s.
“The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29 percent,” The New York Times reported of the 2020 surge. “The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. The national rate—murders per 100,000—still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.”
