The 2020 spike in urban homicides

I recently spoke to economist Robert Cherry of the Brooklyn College. One of the most troubling things we discussed was the 2020 spike in violent crime in American cities: in one year, homicide rates in the top 75 cities went up 35%.

We talked about the reasons for that, and for the disparity between homicide rates in Black and Latino communities.

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LOURY: We started out with you talking about how the crime problem is up 2020 over 2019, violent crime [and] homicide in particular. And a lot of cities around the country have a serious problem because it impedes economic activity and employment, and how that’s a vicious circle.

Talk to us a little bit about what's actually going on. You've been looking at the numbers. I saw one of your pieces where you had a table that had the top cities in terms of the proportionate increase in homicides, 2020 over 2019. 

There were a lot of big cities in there. A lot of cities had very substantial increases.

What's going on? What are the numbers saying? And why do you think that’s happening? 

CHERRY: I was able to cobble together the largest 50 cities, and 25 of the next 29, the homicides in 2020 versus 2019. Overall, in those 75 cities the increase was about 34%. Pretty striking. 

Whoa, whoa, hold on. Homicide in the top 75 cities in America is up 35% over a one year period of time? 

Yes. And I think shootings are up even more.

Is there any historical precedent for that, one year over the next, at least in the last hundred years? 

Well, I don't know, but it certainly hasn't been in the last 20. I don't know, in the 80s there might have been something. But now homicides in many cities are at levels that were reached 20, 25 years ago.

People should understand, there was a huge increase in violent crime in America going up through the early 90s, but then it tailed and fell off sharply over the last 25, 30 years. But it looks like we're seeing another resurgence comparable to what it is that we saw at the height of violence in American cities in the 1990s. Not quite. 

And if you just look at homicides of Black men, even before this year—I mean, I don't have numbers on this year, but I looked at numbers from 2005 to 2019—in 2005 and 2006, homicides of Black men were about 10 to 15% higher than the homicides of white men. It is now 60% higher. That is, for every 10 white men who are victims of homicides, there are 16 Black men who are victims.

Mind you, there have gotta be at least five times as many white men as Black men in the population. 

You've got that right. So it's an inordinate disparity. And this is the so-called Black-on-Black crime. These are not white vigilantes and white supremacists going into Black neighborhoods and killing people.

So you have, already before this year, increases in gun violence in Black neighborhoods. And I would expect it's even worse this year, where those increases are overwhelmingly of Black Americans.

Let’s give people some idea of how many people we’re talking about. Homicides in America in a year—like 15,000, 17,000, something like that?

Yeah, you’re actually right in there. 15,000-17,000. 

Black men killed in a year, an order of magnitude of like 8,000, something like that? 

7,000, yeah. Well, that's all Blacks that are killed, about 7,000 to 8,000 before this year. 

People, please don't get mad at me for saying this, but I want you to compare that to the number of unarmed Black men shot and killed by police officers, which you could probably measure on the digits of your hands and your feet.

Last year, it was actually 13. The year before it was 14.

Again, I’m not grinding an axe. Please don’t get mad at me out there. But I just want you to take on board what we're talking about here, the magnitude of the threat to the integrity of the Black body.

The risk of actually getting killed and losing your life if you're Black, it's orders and orders and orders of magnitude higher from the phenomenon of crime, civil society within African-American communities, than it is from police violence.

That should have a political implication, it seems to me. 

Well, the problem is there's no easy solution for this so-called Black-on-Black crime. And there's a fear that you are blaming the victims. Here you have Black men, who are growing up in neighborhoods where you have intergenerational poverty.

I mean, I have numbers. There are eleven cities that stand out in terms of the homicide rates. They are all cities where at least 36% of the population is Black, and it's just amazing the kinds of differences: these cities have three times the number of children living in high poverty, they have double the disconnected rate, double those living in extreme poverty. You know, there is one measure after another, when you look at those cities—and we know where they are, they’re Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland. 

St. Louis. 

St. Louis is just unbelievable.

They're really hurting, those cities. Something has to be done. And this idea that, well, it's much easier to focus on the excesses of police, because they're people we have some control over, and we can change their behavior, get them fired, get them this and that.

And it's true with police: it's more than just, how many do they kill? How many did they throw up against the wall? How many did they do other things to besides killing them? Certainly, we don't want to totally understate the concern about police behavior.

But as I’ve said before, it's not done in a balanced way. You know, there are good things they do, and the Black community wants more policing. 

That's a fact that deserves to be underscored. If you ask people on the ground in Black communities when they want, it's not an ideological, theoretical argument about white supremacy and systemic racism.

It’s that my car got jacked the other day, it’s that I'm afraid that somebody is coming in through my window in my bedroom, it’s that I heard gunshots the other night, it’s that my kid got rousted and mugged, et cetera. That's how they answer those questions.

I just wanted to say a couple of things. One of them is, you say, the number of children and families in poverty and whatnot in the cities where you see the high Black crime victimization rates—a lot of people would say, of course, exactly, that's what I'm saying, Poverty causes crime. Of course, if you don't do something about joblessness and poverty, you're gonna have these problems. 

But it’s not the whole thing.

I did some statistical work on these 75 cities. And poverty and employment do show up to be important predictors. But even after you take that into account, the share of the population of the city that's Black is still a strong predictor of crime. So there’s stuff going on more than poverty.

The other thing about poverty is there are a number of cities that are high poverty, but low homicide rates. They’re almost all cities that have a very large Latino population. Latino poverty doesn't lead to the same dynamics that Black poverty does. And there's a reason for that.

What is it, Bob? That's a very important thing to say. What is the reason? 

I was going to say, you know, Blacks have guns and Latinos have machetes, and you really can't do drive-bys with machetes.

But I think it's this intergenerational poverty. In the Black community, it's not simply that there are poor young men, but that their fathers and mothers were poor, and their grandparents were poor; whereas in the Latino community, even if they’re second generation, they're not wedded to this victimization and hopelessness that many young Black people become engendered with. They go out and work, they have networks for jobs. So there's still a hopefulness.

Now what happens, if, by the third generation, they’re still poor? Who knows. There may be something like the Black phenomenon.

But [Latinos] have a much more hopeful situation. They have much more of an employment network than young Black people have. So they don't get caught up in the same street corner dynamics and hopelessness that Blacks have.

And they also don't have the [sense of] victimization. One of the things I pointed out in the article that you read is these demonstrations in the late spring and over the summer that went on forever—how is that going to impact a young Black kid who is somewhat separated from employment, from school, and even their family? They’ve got a lot of anger. And these demonstrations and the notions of white supremacy, what does that do to those kids?

You don't have that in the Latino community. They don't talk about white supremacy. And they don't talk about that kind of victimization—you know, maybe in their home country, there was that.

So I think there are just different cultural dynamics among poor Latinos than there are among poor Blacks. 

That's a very controversial statement, Robert. It's one that I agree with whole-heartedly. But it's such a difficult matter.

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