We found increased drug use and gun buying, downtowns with a sense of pandemic emptiness, opening an opportunity for violence, and, most frequently, escalating personal disputes that turned fatal. “There’s not a simple answer to any of this.” “I think the pandemic is just revealing a greater set of issues,” Paul Pazen, the police chief in Denver, said. Even if it is impossible to definitively establish a link between the pandemic and the increase in homicides, its disruption to American lives, routines, schools, workplaces and relationships has been undeniable. Still, this last year and a half, there was one persistent, unmistakable factor: The continued destabilizing effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Nashville and Los Angeles have all seen year-to-date increases. And although some places, including New York City and Dallas, have seen slight improvement this year, many others have not. Homicides also constitute a tiny percent of overall major crime, which last year continued to drop as theft and burglaries fell.īut in many large cities - including Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia - the number of homicides this year is on track to surpass last year, leaving the public unnerved and injecting the politics of crime into local elections around the country, as various state and mayoral candidates promise they can restore a greater sense of safety. On a national scale, the murder rate is still far below its height in the 1990s, and in some places the spike seen in 2020, when murders rose by almost 30 percent, has already begun to slow.
A new mother shot by a stranger in a random act of extreme violence.Įach one of these scenes was fatal, and each became a tragic data point in a surge in homicides that has swept across the country, touching not only the largest cities in America but suburbs, small towns and even remote rural places that rarely see a murder. A young man caught up in drugs passing through a shabby motel. A woman whose quarrel with a trusted friend took a heartbreaking turn. 15, 2021Ī hot dog vendor walking out of a downtown ballpark, where gunfire pierced the night after the home team won a game. Photographs by Adria Malcolm, Mason Trinca, Cydni Elledge and Stephen Speranza Nov. By Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith, Neil MacFarquhar, Tim Arango and Chloe Reynolds
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