The FBI has made it official: 2020 saw the biggest spike in murders in American history—30 percent. The year that saw Black Lives Matter-inspired racial turbulence on a scale that hadn’t been seen since 1968 blew past that year’s previous record murder spike of 12 percent.
That is an extra 5,000 Americans killed in 2020, a majority of them African-Americans, as they make up 53 percent of homicide victims. All told, this brings the number of extra Americans murdered since 2014—the year Black Lives Matter’s founders gathered with other far-leftist groups in the city of Ferguson, MO, to organize a nationwide movement with revolutionary demands—to perhaps more than 11,000.
The New York Times wrote about the FBI report last week after its eagle-eyed crime writer Jeff Asher noticed that the FBI had posted the information online briefly before being taken down. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report, where the information was contained, was published on Monday, Sept. 27. The Atlantic and other publications followed the Times’ lead.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1 The FBI has made it official: 2020 saw the biggest spike in murders in American history—30 percent.
2 That is an extra 5,000 Americans killed in 2020, a majority of them African-Americans, as they make up 53 percent of homicide victims.
3 The reason for 2020’s extra deaths, as Bader said, was that, “incarceration rates fell, police manpower shrank, and anti-police protests spread across the nation.”