As we puzzle through gun violence spike, is it too soon to hope a decline is already starting?

German Lopez has this useful new piece at Vox headlined "Murders are up.  Crime is not.  What’s going on?".  I recommend the extended article in full and here are some excerpts (with my highlighting to help account for the optimism in my post title, and just a few of many helpful links retained):

Last year, the US saw the biggest increase in the murder rate in decades.  The estimated total number of homicides rose to levels not seen since the late 1990s, even as the overall crime rate declined.  So far, the spike has continued into 2021: Murders are up nearly 15 percent so far this year compared to the same period last year, based on data from US cities collected by crime analyst Jeff Asher.

That’s what we know. What we don’t really know yet is why....  Year-to-year fluctuations in crime and violence can and do happen. But the size of the murder spike has led to broader national attention.  The increase is now part of an ideological proxy war — leading to conflicting opinions even within political parties on what to do about the increase in murders, and plenty of finger-pointing over whether the pandemic, protests over police, or guns are to blame.

We don’t really know, with certainty, what’s behind the rise.  All three of those factors likely played a role.  And there may even be some unknown factor that researchers won’t notice for years; the theory that higher levels of lead in the environment caused higher crime and violence from the 1960s to 1990s took decades to get widespread national attention....

The increase in murder appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon.  While murder rates rose in some developed countries last year, like Canada and Germany, the increases are far below the double-digit spikes America is seeing. That’s especially notable because the United States already had a higher baseline of murders, after controlling for population.  Despite claims that Democratic mayors or progressive criminal justice policies are driving the increase, it also appears indifferent to the political party in charge: As Asher and criminal justice expert John Pfaff have shown, murder rates increased in cities run by Democrats and Republicans, progressive and not.

The good news is there is a lot more agreement among experts about how to bring down the spike than there is about what caused it.  But the best evidence suggests stopping murders in the short term will require more and better, though not necessarily more aggressive, policing — a controversial proposal on the left. “I know people don’t want to hear this, and I empathize with that,” Anna Harvey, a public safety expert at New York University, told me. “But at least as far as the research evidence goes, for short-term responses to increases in homicides, the evidence is strongest for the police-based solutions.”

The [murder spike] data is preliminary; final official numbers for 2020 will be out later this year.  But the findings have been backed by multiple sources, including the FBI, Asher, separate reports from the Council on Criminal Justice, and the University of Pennsylvania–run website City Crime Stats.  A consistent finding in these analyses: The spike is truly national, showing up in every region of the country and most of the cities with available data.

Some other kinds of crime also increased, according to this early data, including shootings, aggravated assaults, and car thefts.  Still, violent crime in general went up at much lower rates, if at all, compared to murders, and overall crime declined, driven in part by a drop in the majority of property crimes.  The split between murder rates and crime rates might seem odd, but there’s good reason to believe the divergence is genuine and not an artifact of underreporting.  There were fewer opportunities to commit property crimes last year with businesses shut and people staying home....

Based on Asher’s analysis of major US cities, the murder spike has continued into 2021 but likely decelerated.  There also seems to be more variation: More cities, including Chicago, are reporting a decrease or at least no increase in murders so far this year....

The closest to a consensus I’ve been able to find in talking to experts about the cause of the murder spike: It’s complicated.  Experts have rejected some possibilities.  Given that murders rose in both Democrat- and Republican-run cities, as well as places that adopted criminal justice reforms and those that didn’t, partisanship and criminal justice reforms don’t seem to be a cause.  Three plausible explanations, none of which exclude the others, have come up repeatedly:

1) The Covid-19 pandemic....

2) The US protests over police brutality...

3) America’s gun problem....

Perhaps the best explanation: All of these factors played a role.  There are many ways all these explanations could have interacted.  As one example: Covid-19 and protests both fueled a sense that the social fabric was unraveling, and more people — particularly in the worst-off neighborhoods — felt they had to fend for themselves.  They equipped themselves with guns to act on their own if they felt a threat.  And this made any given conflict more likely to escalate to deadly violence.

I have been keeping a particular eye lately on this webpage in which Jeff Asher has compiled a "YTD Murder Comparison" for 73 cities.  On July 12 in this tweet, Asher noted that the "change in murder relative to last year is dropping in cities with data.  A few weeks ago it was +22%, last week it was +18%, now it's +16%.  Largely reflects cities entering the time last year when murder surged (murder is down in Chicago, for example)."  And, now of July 21, Asher's data shows we are under a 15% year-to-date increase, providing further reason to be hopeful that the homicide spike may already be ending. 

Of course, given last year's significant increases, just having little or no increases in murder is not something to celebrate robustly.  But if these encouraging trends continue and we end up seeing declines in homicides nationwide in the coming month, perhaps the criminology question could soon become what explains the end of the homicide spike starting in mid 2021 rather than what explains the spike starting in mid 2020.