The Surge: Violent Crime and the Collapse of Urban Safety

← Back to All Articles

Between 2019 and 2020, homicide rates in major American cities surged by approximately 30% — the single largest one-year increase in recorded American history. The surge was real, it was documented, and it fell disproportionately on the communities that could least afford it. What followed was a years-long national debate about what caused it, what to do about it, and whether the data could be trusted — a debate in which the victims themselves were often afterthoughts.

The Numbers That Don’t Lie

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and independent criminological research agree on the basic facts. Homicides in the United States increased by roughly 29% in 2020 — from approximately 16,400 in 2019 to over 21,500 in 2020. Cities across the country saw their murder rates reach levels not seen since the 1990s. Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, Houston — virtually every major American city experienced significant violent crime increases, with homicides leading the surge.

The increase was not evenly distributed. It was concentrated in neighborhoods that had already been struggling — predominantly Black and Latino urban communities where decades of disinvestment, concentrated poverty, family breakdown, and reduced institutional presence had created conditions in which violence spreads most readily. The surge was most severe and most deadly in the communities that had the fewest resources to respond to it and whose victims received the least national attention.

What Actually Caused the Surge

The debate over the causes of the violent crime surge became immediately politicized, with each side emphasizing the factors that fit their preferred narrative. The actual research suggests multiple contributing factors operating simultaneously. The pandemic disrupted the informal community networks and institutional activities — schools, youth programs, community organizations — that historically suppress violence. Police departments in many cities pulled back from proactive policing in response to protests and policy changes following the killing of George Floyd. Court systems were backlogged, reducing the deterrent effect of consequences. And the social and economic stress of the pandemic itself created conditions historically associated with violence spikes.

“The people who paid the price for the policy decisions made in 2020 were not the people making those decisions. They were mostly Black men in neighborhoods that were already struggling. Their deaths were real. Their names deserved to be spoken.”

Who Bears the Cost

The moral accounting of the violent crime surge must include an honest reckoning with who died and who didn’t. The victims of the surge were overwhelmingly Black Americans — disproportionately young Black men — in urban neighborhoods that have been the subject of decades of rhetoric about justice and equity but that continue to experience violent crime at rates that would produce immediate national outcry if they occurred in wealthier or whiter communities.

A Black man in the United States is approximately eight times more likely to be a homicide victim than a white man. In the surge years, that disparity widened. The Moral Decay Index tracks this not to assign blame, but because a society’s willingness to tolerate violence in some communities while protecting others from it reveals something fundamental about its actual, as opposed to stated, values.

The Policy Failure

American cities have tried many approaches to violent crime over the past several decades. Some have worked. Broken windows policing, hot-spots policing, and focused deterrence strategies have demonstrated effectiveness in peer-reviewed research. Community intervention programs that work directly with at-risk individuals have shown promise. What has not worked is the approach that became dominant in many cities in the early 2020s: reducing police presence without providing alternative mechanisms for public safety, while simultaneously reducing the consequences for violence through bail reform, prosecutorial discretion, and sentencing changes.

What This Means for the Index

The violent crime surge is a direct indicator of social decay — of the breakdown of the community institutions, family structures, economic opportunities, and effective governance that keep violence contained. It is also a test of a society’s moral seriousness: whether it responds to violence with honest analysis and effective policy, or whether it prioritizes ideological consistency over the lives of the most vulnerable. Too often in recent years, the latter has prevailed. The victims paid the price.