COVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder

Researchers find that pandemic policies sparked a wave of violent crime.

Restrictive policies in response to COVID-19 did a huge amount of damage to our liberty, prosperity, kids' education, and even our sanity. But now there's evidence supporting what many of us suspected: Lockdowns also contributed to a surge in crime that temporarily reversed a decades-long decline in homicides. According to a new Brookings Institution report, forcing young men out of work and out of school fueled a surge in violence. Worse, this outcome was predicted.

A Surge in Crime

It's no secret that, after years of declining crime rates, crimes against people and property spiked in 2020 and for a period thereafter. Most concerning was the rise in murders, which had happily been dwindling since the early 1990s.

"In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country," write Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings Institution published this week. "Across the nation, more than 24,000 people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before."

They add that "homicides remained high in 2021 and 2022, but in 2023 they began to fall rapidly."

The surge in crime has variably been attributed to efforts to defund or deemphasize policing that took off during the 2020 riots sparked by the killing of George Floyd, demoralized police officers resulting from those efforts, and the aftereffects of the social disruptions from lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Acharya and Morris analyzed thousands of police records and examined the timeframe from which they were drawn. They find that the data best fits the last hypothesis.

Murderous Lockdowns

"The spike in murders during 2020 was directly connected to local unemployment and school closures in low-income areas," they conclude. "Cities with larger numbers of young men forced out of work and teen boys pushed out of school in low-income neighborhoods during March and early April, had greater increases in homicide from May to December that year, on average. The persistence of these changes can also explain why murders remained high in 2021 and 2022 and then fell in late 2023 and 2024."

Interestingly, they write, "the national homicide rate was already on track to reach a peak far above the previous year even before Floyd was killed" and police defunding efforts gained traction.

Most violent crimes, Acharya and Morris point out, are committed by teenage boys and young men in their twenties. Dumping them out of jobs and out of classrooms, at loose ends and often without money in their pockets, was a recipe for disaster. In a focused look at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, they find similar surges in violent crime in that city after Hurricane Katrina in 2006 and following a massive flood in 2016, both of which displaced students from schools and closed many workplaces.

What's especially frustrating about the Brookings study is that we were warned that disrupting our society with lockdowns and mandatory closures would do serious social harm.

Ignored Warnings

"I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself," David L. Katz, former director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, wrote in The New York Times in March 2020. "The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order."

As I noted in a column that same month which quoted Katz, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency, quantifies the degree to which shutting down economies damages societies.

"For example," a 2013 report from the ILO emphasized, "a one standard deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest by 0.39 standard deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth reduces social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations."

"Why would economic shutdowns lead to social unrest?" I commented at the time. "Because, contrary to the airy dismissals of some members of the political class and many ivory-tower types, commerce isn't a grubby embarrassment to be tolerated and avoided—it's the life's blood of a society. Jobs and businesses keep people alive."

Likewise, education keeps teenagers engaged—or at least off the streets. Lockdowns killed jobs and closed schools, handing young men and teenage boys a great deal of frustration and free time.

"The shocks of teen boys and young men being pushed out of school and out of work in low-income neighborhoods occurred across the country just before murders began to rapidly increase, and those baleful educational and economic conditions lasted for the same period of time that homicides remained elevated," add Acharya and Morris.

The Mistakes of the Past

These disruptions are a replay of events during past disease outbreaks.

"The number of murders and of mass shootings have both increased dramatically," Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation and author of Plagues and Their Aftermath: How Societies Recover from Pandemics, commented in a 2022 piece about the impact of COVID-19. "These last two years have resembled the disorders seen during the Plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War and the Black Death in the Middle Ages." He quoted Thucydides' observation that "Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of lawlessness."

So, what to do? Acharya and Morris propose several anti-crime interventions, but the fact is that the damage has been done and we're now recovering to the extent we can. Murder rates have resumed their previous decline as teens go back to school and young men regain employment. But that's cold comfort for the families of those killed or otherwise victimized by the crime surge. They can't regain what they lost; they can only move on.

The best thing to do, then, is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. We need to minimize social disruptions and certainly not permit government officials to close businesses and schools by decree. A free and prosperous society, it turns out, is a much happier and peaceful one than what results from the authoritarian whims of public-health officials.