Why Violence Spiked in 2020, in One Graph

The Thanksgiving Edition!

Welcome to the Thanksgiving Edition of External Processing in which I tell jokes and share perhaps the greatest Ted Lasso video yet produced. But first, something serious to chew on.

Why Violence Spiked during COVID and Why Crime is Falling

Over the last three months, I’ve essentially quit social media. I had a fair-sized community on Twitter, but the algorithm has changed, and I am unable to reach my community and they are unable to reach me. What does reach me, I don’t have much interest in. I have little interest in reading polemics and self-affirmations of a rigid ideology. It’s super boring. Tell me something I don’t know, I’d like to read that.

I have also mainly given up reading the criminology literature, at least with respect to the Great American Violence Explosion of 2020.

If you are reading this essay, you probably know the contours of the data. The key statistic was a 28% surge in homicide from 2019 to 2020. How unusual was that increase? It was the largest one-year change i…