Keep in mind that a lot of crime never gets reported to the police — as many as 3.3 million cases per year — so these statistics undercount crime and may even be unrepresentative. For violent crime, the most reliable figure is for homicide, mainly because dead bodies eventually come to the attention of the authorities. One shortcoming of this metric is that murders don’t happen that often — a good thing for society, not so good for crime analysis.
Six of the nine cities had higher homicides in year-to-date 2020 than in the same period in 2019. Nashville went from 14 murders last year to 27 this year, a 93 percent jump. San Francisco saw a 50 percent spike, from 8 cases to 12. Two cities, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., were unchanged, with 90 and 44 homicides, respectively. New York, with one of the highest virus rates in the nation, was the only city of the nine with fewer homicides this year.
Based on the preceding, I would say that violent crime probably increased during the worst of the coronavirus, and obviously there is little to support the conclusion that it diminished.
