Axios: “If the FBI data released next week shows what’s expected – that 2020 saw the highest single-year spike in U.S. murders in at least six decades – experts say the sudden job losses, fears and other jolts to society at the start of COVID-19 will likely have been the overwhelming drivers. Many Democrats already feared that rising crime could hurt their party in the 2022 midterms.”
“Even with such a spike, the murder rate would remain far lower than it was through much of the 1980s and 1990s. But a historic single-year spike in the same year that some Democrats called to redirect police funding because of the killing of George Floyd and other examples of systemic racism could be an easy, if misleading, campaign argument for Republicans to make. The New York Times first reported Wednesday that the FBI’s early data shows a 29% spike in murders last year. That would be the biggest single-year increase since national record-keeping began, in 1960.”