The most under-reported news of 2020 is that we set a national record for single-year increase in murders.
Prior to last year, the largest year-over-year rise was recorded in 1968, when murders increased by 12.7 percent. FBI data through September show murders to be up 21 percent overall, and up 29 percent in cities over 1 million population.
That translates to the new worst murder increase record, shattering the old by 65 percent.
And those average numbers pale against the astonishing increases in individual cities. Murders through October 2020 compared to the same period in 2019 were up more than 50 percent in Chicago and Seattle, more than 60 percent in New Orleans, more than 80 percent in New York, nearly 100 percent in Minneapolis, more than 150 percent in Omaha, and almost 190 percent in Spokane.
Record homicide counts were set in Wichita, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, Knoxville, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Memphis and many more cities large and small. A tragic asterisk in several cities was a pronounced rise in victims under the age of 17--in some cities as many as one in four murder victims were children.
Failed murders fall into the category of aggravated assaults, which also include less-than-lethal shootings. Skimming through headlines across the nation reveals a "same song, different verse" chorus about violent-crime escalation in 2020: Nonfatal shootings tripled in Virginia Beach and doubled in Denver, and Philadelphia's 2,240 shooting victims were 40 percent more than ever recorded.
In some Columbus, Ohio, neighborhoods, the odds of being shot in 2020 were one in 59. For context, the average American's lifetime odds of dying in a car crash is one in 106.
"Unprecedented" is the word used repeatedly by law enforcement and civic officials to describe 2020's murderous violence, and yet even as statistics skyrocket, authorities struggle to find answers or solutions.
It's not all pandemic-related--a number of cities were already in crime crisis mode by the time the coronavirus picked up enough steam to result in social restrictions--though marked surges in domestic violence are likely linked to lockdowns.
Criminal apologists have lamely cautioned it might be an anomaly, and are quick to point out that even though murder rates have spiked, they're still well below the national levels of the 1990s--but also still well above the 1960s levels.
It's time to consider that America has a systemic violent-crime problem.
A common lamentation is that we put too many people behind bars for a civilized country. But "too many" is a contextual adjective. Whether or not the correctional population is too high or too low depends on the volume of crimes committed and citizens victimized.
The correctional population in the United States, depending on the data collection source, is approximately 6.5 million. That's a lot of folks locked up or out on parole or probation. But there are approximately 10 million to 13 million crimes across the seven FBI categories committed annually, depending on the measurement method. The Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey reports 5 million violent-crime incidents.
Suddenly that 6.5 million suddenly doesn't seem like such a "too high" number; it rather seems a little low.
Or, thinking more holistically, maybe it seems indicative of a systemic situation in which the clearance rate can simply never catch up with the quantity of criminality. Crime has become a way of life for far too many in this country, its ruinous effects have become far too acceptable, and political impotence on the issue has peaked.
Criminal trials will never solve systemic lawless behavior because they only adjudicate individual incidents. The real work of tackling systemic crime warrants much more discussion and much more research and data analysis. And yet precious little discourse exists, and the itty-bit that does gets drowned out in tsunami fashion.
For example, a Google News search for the phrase "systemic racism u.s." returns a little more than 2.5 million results. However, searching the phrase "systemic violent crime u.s." returns exactly one result. If the phrase's generality is expanded to "systemic crime u.s.," the Google News results grow to 124.
That's a 20,000-to-one disparity ratio in the world's largest search engine. And I don't recall ever seeing the phrase "systemic crime" pop up on a social media feed on my phone or laptop.
Whatever relevance one thinks systemic racism deserves in the national conversation, it shouldn't be 20,000 times that of a persistent crime problem that destroys people, careers and neighborhoods day in and day out, year after year.
Our attention span as a citizenry, and our governmental bandwidth at all levels, needs restorative balance on the issue of crime. Every moment that we allow our focus to be hijacked on the sensationalized, special-interest outrage du jour, someone is hurt or killed by a criminal.
Catching that criminal (which often happens only half the time or less) can't even repair the harm, much less solve anything systemic. The social factors and reforms necessary to fix a systemic crime problem need serious investigation and study.
Perhaps the horrific 2020 crime numbers will finally bring some about.
Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.