Last year was exceptionally deadly in more ways than one. According to the latest statistics from the FBI, the homicide rate soared almost 30% in 2020, the biggest year-on-year increase since the agency started keeping national records in the 1960s, the Hill reports. The overall violent crime rate was up 5.6%, while property crimes were down almost 8% from 2019, marking the 18th consecutive year-on-year drop, according to an FBI release. The FBI says there were more than 21,500 murders last year, up nearly 5,000 from 2019.
That's the highest total since the mid-1990s, CNN reports, though the US population has increased significantly since then and the 2020 murder rate of 6.5 per 100,000 people is still around 40% below the rates seen in the 1980s and 1990s. Almost 77% of homicides in 2020 involved firearms—the first time the figure has been above 75%. The FBI says its Uniform Crime Reporting program received data from 15,897 of the 18,619 federal, state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies eligible to participate. The FBI's figures include estimates for the agencies that did not submit data.
Data consultant Jeff Asher tells NPR that the FBI report shows that the problem is now more of a nationwide issue than it was in the '90s, when New York and Los Angeles accounted for 13.5% of the nation's homicides. The figure is now under 4%. Asher says the FBI figures show that the murder rate rose more in in cities with a population between 10,000 and 25,000 than in cities with a population of 250,000 to 1 million. "It was up over 30% in both, so neither was good, but it was worse slightly, percentage-wise in smaller cities," he says. "It was bad everywhere. There's not a good murder takeaway there." (More homicide stories.)
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