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FBI Statistics Show a 30% Increase in Murder in 2020. More Evidence That Defunding Police Wasn’t a Good Idea.
Sep 30th, 2021 5 min read
The surge in violent crime over the past year—murders in particular—has been astounding and historic.
The numbers back this up and paint a grim picture.
Property crime is generally down, but violent crime is way, way up.
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The murder rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020, more than any other time in the last half-century. This is according to recently released statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its annual report on crime.
The report shows that there were 4,901 more murders committed in 2020 than in 2019.
It’s the largest single-year increase—by a wide margin—in murder rate since the FBI began compiling these statistics in 1960.
“The Uniform Crime Report will stand as the official word on an unusually grim year, detailing a rise in murder of around 29 percent,” reported The New York Times. “The previous largest one-year change was a 12.7 percent increase in 1968. The national rate—murders per 100,000—still remains about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s.”
The total murder rate is still far away from its historic high, but the trend is unmistakable. It looks like 2021 will have similar numbers to 2020, with only a slight dip in the national rate of increase in murder.
Again, that’s a dip in murder rate, not total murders. The trend is still going up, but not quite as historically fast.
And in some places, like Portland, the rate of increase actually continues to climb. More on Portland in just a moment.
Of course, some on the left have been quick to conclude that the issue is guns or possibly even simply the pandemic itself.
These conclusions seem dubious. Violent crime has been falling for decades even as gun ownership in the United States remained high.
It’s also important to note that the murder increase didn’t really start until the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. This was after the pandemic began and the country went into various states of lockdown.
While there certainly could be a variety of factors involved in the murder surge, it’s hard not to see both the efforts to defund the police and—perhaps more importantly—the “Minneapolis Effect,” as driving factors.
Following Floyd’s death, many cities hopped aboard the “defund the police” movement. Los Angeles, Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis went through with this idea, often stripping millions of dollars out of their police budgets and directing them toward other social services.
Minneapolis is going even further and is looking to abolish its police department altogether.
This push to defund, which happened during a time of protests and increasing anti-police rhetoric from activists and lawmakers created what some have called the “Minneapolis Effect.”
This is similar to the “Ferguson Effect,” which was the violence that followed the fatal police shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
The effect of this phenomenon was described by Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah, on a Heritage Foundation panel in March.
Here I think we have anti-police protests surrounding George Floyd’s killing. As a result, police had to be redeployed away from their normal beats and high-crime areas to police the protests. And even extending beyond that, I think what we see has happened is a reduction in policing, particularly the kinds of policing that might be expected to have the most effect on homicides and shooting crimes.
Cassell’s research shows a strong connection between de-policing and anti-police rhetoric driving surges in shootings. The 2020 numbers strongly back that up.
Departments moved away from proactive policing, and now struggle to clamp down on violent crime as police officers leave the force and are not replaced.
Many of the cities that defunded their police departments in 2020—like Portland—have been among the hardest hit by shootings. Some of these same cities later tacitly conceded that the idea was a failure by re-funding their police departments and re-creating proactive policing programs under new names.
Unfortunately, the issue is not just with the police. How much does policing matter when the justice system intentionally fails to prosecute people for crimes committed?
A huge number of cities elected George Soros-backed, far-left district attorneys and have employed rogue prosecutors who’ve refused to prosecute criminals in the name of social justice.
It’s hard not to see this toxic stew of attitudes and policies as a massive contributing factor toward why we have such a violent mess on our hands now.
“No one factor explains this criminal surge,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board concluded. “But it’s no coincidence that the bloodshed increased as cities slashed police budgets, progressive prosecutors demanded leniency and eliminated bail for criminals, and jails and prisons released thousands of lawbreakers amid the Covid-19 outbreak.”
It’s ironic that many of the defund-the-police policies were putatively adopted to stop “systemic racism.” But as the murder numbers indicate, most of the victims of the violent crime surge have been black and Latino. According to the FBI’s data, over half of the murder victims in 2020 were black.
What’s being done in the name of Black Lives Matter is destroying countless black lives and making American cities a dangerous place to be.
This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal
In the 1980s, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union used the same “sniper” rifles.
Here’s What You Need to Remember: Why China didn’t produce a sniper round is uncertain, but perhaps the limited usage of 7.62x54R in the Chinese military, combined with the PLA’s drive for a new intermediate cartridge in the 1980s made developing an additional sniper round an unnecessary burden. The lack of integration of marksman and precision rifles also delayed the need for such a round, Type 79 and Type 85 rifles were not issued widely among regular troops, only finding use with special operations troops, police units, and border guards.
In the 1980s, the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union used the same “sniper” rifles, although these rifles would be more accurately described as designated marksman rifles in the West. The Soviet Union used the SVD, a gas-operated short-stroke 7.62x54R rifle that fed from a ten-round-box magazine and had an effective range of around eight hundred meters.
With proper Russian sniper ammunition, the SVD could achieve accuracy from 1-2 MOA. China made its own clone of the SVD after capturing a sample during the Sino-Vietnamese war called the Type 79, later refined into the Type 85. These were produced alongside copies of the Soviet PSO-1 4x optical sight. Apparently, China has problems copying the SVD as its gunsmithing industries were not quite mature. The cloned PSO-1 was not able to handle the recoil of the 7.62x54R cartridge in early versions, and issues were found with the metallurgy of the firing pin, which broke easily in the Type 79. According to sources in the CPAF, this was fixed by the Type 85.
The primary problem with the Type 79 and Type 85 was the lack of proper ammunition for them. Russia issued special 7.62x54R ammunition along with the SVD, the 7N1 and later 7N14 cartridges. China did not develop a version of this and simply issued machine gun ammunition with the Type 79 and Type 85. This resulted in the subpar accuracy.
Why China didn’t produce a sniper round is uncertain, but perhaps the limited usage of 7.62x54R in the Chinese military, combined with the PLA’s drive for a new intermediate cartridge in the 1980s made developing an additional sniper round an unnecessary burden. The lack of integration of marksman and precision rifles also delayed the need for such a round, Type 79 and Type 85 rifles were not issued widely among regular troops, only finding use with special operations troops, police units, and border guards.
While Russia still continues to use the SVD as the primary “sniper” rifle, China developed a replacement in the QBU-88 in the 1990s. Development started around the early 1990s, with the rifle completing trials in 1996 and first reaching service with the PLA’s Hong Kong garrison in 1997.
The real root of the project was in the development of the 5.8mm cartridge for machine guns. A 5.8mm round was developed that was found to perform better or the same as existing 7.62x54R rounds in Chinese inventory, so a specialized rifle was developed in that caliber for sniping purposes.
The QBU-88 or Type 88 is a relatively modern design, utilizing the bullpup layout to gain additional barrel length. Chinese sources state that the penetration and accuracy are higher than the Type 85. Modern techniques were used to manufacture the Type 88, including CNC milling and extensive use of polymer. A new phosphating process was used to apply the black finish to the metal. The design itself has some questionable aspects.
The bipod is attached directly to the barrel, which causes a point of impact shift when the bipod is used. The safety is also in a hard-to-reach spot behind the magazine well, requiring the shooter to move his support hand under the mag well to activate and deactivate the safety (with a 180-degree throw). Most western precision and marksman rifles use a thumb safety or trigger guard safety of some variety, allowing for faster actuation without moving the hand from the firing position. In an upgrade from the fixed 4x of the SVD, the QBU-88 utilizes a 3-9x variable zoom scope with a built in bullet-drop compensator in the reticle.
While the Type 88 and Type 85 are the most common rifles in use, there also are a myriad of other rifles for precision shooting and special purposes. For anti-material purposes there are the AMR-2 and the QBU-10, the AMR-2 being a bolt action magazine fed rifle, and the QBU-10 being semi-automatic.
Also of note are the CS/LR series of rifles, the real Chinese equivalents to western precision rifles such as the Remington 700 and Steyr SSG69. The CS/LR4 is the direct competitor, being chambered in the same 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge. It was developed from earlier designs and appears to take many cues from western rifles, from the front-locking Mauser action to the thumbhole stock.
They are not up to the standard or accuracy of western rifles, with stated accuracy being 2.9cm at 100m or more than 1 MOA. It also features a Picatinny rail forward of the scope so users can mount a night vision device in front of their optic. The CS/LR3 is the same gun, chambered in the standard 5.8mm cartridge used by the military. However, CS/LR rifles have seen more use with special-police units, which need increased precision.
Charlie Gao studied political and computer science at Grinnell College and is a frequent commentator on defense and national-security issues. This article was first published in 2018 and is being reprinted due to reader interest.
Columnist, The Daily Signal
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The murder rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020, more than any other time in the last half-century.
It’s hard not to see both the efforts to defund the police and—perhaps more importantly—the “Minneapolis Effect,” as driving factors.
What’s being done in the name of Black Lives Matter is destroying countless black lives and making American cities a dangerous place to be.