“Some have hypothesized that the rise in homicide rates is specifically a result of the June 2020 protests,” Chalfin and MacDonald wrote, but “theories about the role of the protests must contend with several challenges. Violence typically climbs during the summer, and in 2020, that happened to correspond not only with the protests but also with an end to the most intensive Covid lockdowns in many cities — making it hard to pin blame on any one cause without more examination.”
In a 2020 article, “Explaining the Recent Homicide Spikes in U.S. Cities: The ‘Minneapolis Effect’ and the Decline in Proactive Policing,” Paul G. Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, saw a clear relationship between the protests, the police reaction to them and the rising homicide rate:
Crime rates are increasing only for a few specific categories, namely homicides and shootings. These crime categories are particularly responsive to reductions in proactive policing. The data also pinpoint the timing of the spikes to late May 2020, which corresponds with the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis and subsequent anti-police protests — protests that likely led to declines in law enforcement.
Cassell wrote that his thesis “is that the recent spikes in homicides have been caused by a ‘Minneapolis effect,’ similar to the earlier ‘Ferguson effect’.” If this thesis is correct, he continued, “It is reasonable to estimate that, as a result of depolicing during June and July 2020, approximately 710 additional victims were murdered and more than 2,800 victims were shot.”
Thomas Hargrove, the founder of the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project, which tracks unsolved homicides, made a detailed argument for a strong link between the protests, depolicing and the increase in homicides in an August 2022 essay, “Murder and the Legacy of the Police Killing of George Floyd”: “What is beyond debate is that homicides increased dramatically in 2020. Murders surged nearly 30 percent, the largest one-year increase on record.”
When weekly homicides are studied, he continued, citing data from the Center for Disease Control,
a very clear pattern emerges. Although social and economic disruption caused by Covid began in early 2020, it wasn’t until the week ending May 30 that weekly homicides topped 500 for the first time in many years. Although unemployment caused by Covid surged in April, there was little if any increase in murders at that time. Homicide began the historic hike exactly in the week when George Floyd was murdered.
“There may have been several contributing factors to the surge in U.S. homicides,” Hargrove concluded, “but George Floyd’s murder was the very specific spark that lit the fuse to an extraordinary increase in fatal violence.” He added, “Law enforcement is learning from this experience. Police officers must be trained to avoid unnecessary deaths like George Floyd’s, acting as guardians of society and not as anticrime warriors.”
Patrick Sharkey, a Princeton sociologist who writes about policing and crime, provided a nuanced response to this issue by email:
There are plausible reasons to think that the movement to change the way police carry out their work in Black communities and to end police violence against Black Americans has created real changes with tangible consequences. In cities where the police have been asked, for decades, to dominate public spaces by force and then are required to change the way they do their job — whether by public protest, local mobilization, public opinion or court order — there is often a destabilization of the local social order that can result in multiple shifts.
In this changed environment, Sharkey continued, “Police may no longer get involved in incidents where they have discretion, residents may no longer provide information to police or ‘go along’ with the way things used to work, and guns may start to circulate more widely.”
But, Sharkey stressed,
This doesn’t mean that Black Lives Matter protests cause police killings to fall and other forms of violence to rise. It means that when cities rely primarily on the police to deal with violence and all of the other challenges that come with extreme inequality and then the role or practices of the police begin to shift, there are often clear impacts on police killings and other forms of violence. The key challenge is how to develop a new model that confronts violence without the costs that come with aggressive or violent policing and mass incarceration. That is the challenge that every city should be grappling with.
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