If you’re a regular reader of HWFO or you follow us on X, you have probably seen many versions of this graph since 2018:
The graph shows that murder rates in the USA were low by our standards for the first 19 years of this century, but that changed in 2020 with an unprecedented spike. This spike was the steepest ever recorded, thankfully plateaued around our century average, and was then followed by the steepest ever recorded drop.
This spike was entirely due to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. I could use the historical context to make the case that the spike wasn’t actually that bad, but it was certainly bad for anyone who died in it, and was especially bad for black folks. How bad? Solid and easy mathematical analysis shows that the behavior of the Black Lives Matter protesters, and parallel media behavior, killed approximately 8,682 black people over a four year span.
