In 2021, Chicago’s dispatchers were sending police to more than two murder sites a day—797 homicide cases in total. That was 299 more than in 2019. The Chicago Police Department couldn’t keep up—and the clearance rate, measuring how many of those crimes they solved, showed it. But last year, the number dropped to 617.

During the pandemic, violent crime spiked in America. The murder rate, in particular, rose 29 percent between 2019 and 2020—the largest single-year increase in more than a century. But since then, it’s gone down—and in the first quarter of 2024, dramatically: Violent crime in the U.S. fell by 15 percent in the period of January through March compared with the same period in 2023, while murder, specifically, fell by more than 26 percent.

Murder is up in a few cities, it's true—Los Angeles, for example, or Atlanta—but violent crime overall has plummeted across the country. And in Washington, D.C., where murder was up by 35 percent last year, it was back down by 25 percent this year.

What’s going on? 

Tracey Meares is a professor of law at Yale University. As she explains, the rise and fall of violent crime in America can be traced to what went wrong during the pandemic. With people home isolating, authorities couldn’t run anti-violence programs. Now, those programs are working again. But as crime falls, people’s perceptions of crime don’t necessarily keep up with reality. That’s partly because crime is a highly political issue—and we live in a highly polarized time. But perhaps more fundamentally, it’s because official statistics leave out so much of what people care most about when it comes to crime and their safety …

Jönsson: Why exactly did violent crime peak around the time of the pandemic?

Richard Horne

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