Crime & Justice
Why Does the U.S. Have More Gun Deaths?
Firearm deaths per 100,000 in the U.S. and twelve peers, split into homicide and suicide, and why the gap is a gun gap.
Crime & Justice
Which Side Commits More Political Violence?
Deaths and attacks by side in the counts of CSIS, Cato, New America and ADL, and what moves the totals.
Crime & Justice
Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime?
No one has shown that it does: the deterrence studies, their re-runs, and 203 death-row exonerations.
Did Police Funding Cuts Cause the 2020 Crime Surge?
Firearm homicides rose about 35% in 2020 and peaked in 2021. Some Republicans and pro-police groups blamed the calls that year to cut police budgets. This article checks whether budgets were cut, whether policing changed, and what else happened in 2020.
Jump to the verdict ↓
The short answer
No. Police budget cuts did not cause the 2020 surge. Budgets were not broadly cut: a study of 264 cities found no evidence that the 2020 protests led to defunding, and most cuts were small or soon reversed. The sharp rise in homicide also came in June 2020, before the budget votes. Officers did pull back, which is a different claim, and a four-city study found no clear rise in violent crime from it.
How far homicide rose, and how far it has fallen
The 2020 surge in homicide shows up in both of the nation's two measures of homicide. The two measures are police-recorded homicide counts and death-certificate mortality data, which share no common data pipeline. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) gathers the police-recorded counts in its Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. The death-certificate data come from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). When two separate systems using different methods agree, the signal is real.
Firearm Homicide Mortality (CDC/NCHS)
2019–2024
2019 (pre-pandemic baseline)
4.6 / 100k, 14,414 deaths
2020 (first surge year)
6.2 / 100k, 19,384 deaths
2021 (peak)
6.7 / 100k, 20,958 deaths
2023
5.6 / 100k, 17,927 deaths
2024 (latest final data)
4.7 / 100k, 15,364 deaths
Change 2019→2021
+46% age-adjusted rate
Source: NCHS Data Brief No. 526 (March 2025) for 2019 through 2023. The 2024 count and rate are from the mortality data in CDC WONDER (Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research). Rates shown are age-adjusted per 100,000 standard U.S. population. Age adjustment applies each year's death rates by age to the 2000 U.S. population's age mix, so changes in the population's ages do not move the rates. International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, codes *U01.4, X93–X95.
Data Brief 526 stops at 2023; the 2024 rate of 4.7 is CDC WONDER's age-adjusted rate as Pew Research Center reports it. CDC's FastStats gives 2024 a crude rate of 4.5 per 100,000, deaths divided by the whole population with no age adjustment, which cannot be read against the rates above. The 2024 count is directly comparable: firearm homicides fell to 15,364, close to the 14,414 recorded in 2019.
FBI UCR Police-Recorded Murder and Violent Crime
2019–2025
Murder/nonnegligent manslaughter change 2019→2020
+29.4%
Violent crime rate 2019
366.7 / 100k
Violent crime rate 2020
387.8 / 100k (rate +5.2%)
Murder/manslaughter change 2023→2024
−14.9%
Violent crime change 2023→2024
−4.5%
Murder/manslaughter change 2024→2025
−18.1%
Violent crime change 2024→2025
−9.3%
Murder rate 2025
4.1 / 100k, ties the 1955–56 record low
Violent crime rate 2025
327.6 / 100k (from 362.9 in 2024)
Source: FBI, Crime in the United States, 2019, and the FBI's release of its 2020 figures (Sep 2021); FBI UCR 2024 summary (Aug 2025); FBI Reported Crimes in the Nation 2025 (Aug 2026).
For 2020, the murder figure is a change in the number of offenses, and the violent crime figure is a change in the rate. The 2024 and 2025 changes are changes in the estimated number of offenses. The FBI computes each year-over-year percentage against a revised prior-year estimate, so 5.2% does not reproduce exactly from the two published rates above.
A caveat on the FBI's 2021 data
The surge against the early 1990s
In 2021 the FBI moved from its legacy Summary Reporting System (SRS) to collecting crime data only through the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). It then accepted SRS data again from 2022. This change creates comparability problems for the FBI's 2021 data specifically. The CDC mortality series, which is independent, does not share this limitation.
The surge was severe, but it must be put in historical context. In CDC's data, firearm homicide was higher in 1993 than in any year since. It fell to a low of 3.5 per 100,000 in 2014, climbed back to 4.6 by 2016 and held near that level through 2019, then spiked sharply in 2020–2021. Even at the 2021 peak (6.7/100k), the rate was below the early-1990s highs. The narrative of an "unprecedented" crime wave is accurate only for the speed of the increase, not its absolute level.
How to read it: the line is the number of people killed by firearm homicide per 100,000, age-adjusted, each year from 2010 to 2023; the darker points mark 2020 onward. Source: CDC/NCHS Data Brief No. 526 (2025), Table 4, age-adjusted firearm homicide mortality rates.
| Year | Rate |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 3.6 |
| 2011 | 3.6 |
| 2012 | 3.8 |
| 2013 | 3.6 |
| 2014 | 3.5 |
| 2015 | 4.2 |
| 2016 | 4.6 |
| 2017 | 4.6 |
| 2018 | 4.4 |
| 2019 | 4.6 |
| 2020 | 6.2 |
| 2021 | 6.7 |
| 2022 | 6.2 |
| 2023 | 5.6 |
In January 2026 the Council on Criminal Justice published a compilation of monthly crime data across 40 large U.S. cities through December 2025. These cities are not necessarily representative of the nation, but they show the post-peak trajectory: in these cities homicide was 44% below its 2021 peak and about 25% below 2019.
−21%
Homicide rate in the 35 large cities reporting it, 2025 vs. 2024, representing about 922 fewer homicides. The decline is widespread, not confined to a few outlier cities.
−22%
Gun assault rate in the 11 cities reporting it, 2025 vs. 2024.
−23%
Robbery rate in the 34 cities reporting it, 2025 vs. 2024. Across multiple offense categories, the post-2021 decline appears durable rather than a short-term fluctuation.
Source: Council on Criminal Justice multi-city compilation, published January 2026. Note: offenses vary by city; incident data subject to revision.
The FBI's preliminary figures for the first half of 2026 show the fall continuing: murder down 23% and violent crime down 10.6% on the same period of 2025.
Were police budgets cut?
The claim that police budget cuts caused the 2020 surge requires that budgets actually were cut. A peer-reviewed study published in Social Problems examined police budget changes across 264 U.S. cities in the period surrounding the 2020 protests after George Floyd's killing. It found no evidence that the 2020 protests led to police defunding. In cities with large Republican vote shares, protest was associated with significant increases in police budgets.
Two other counts point the same way. A research note in Urban Affairs Review examined about 100 of the most populous cities and found no strong evidence of efforts to defund the police. Bloomberg CityLab's compilation of the 50 largest cities' budgets found police budgets for fiscal 2021 down 5.2% in aggregate, while the pandemic was cutting city spending more broadly. In the same compilation, police spending's share of city spending rose slightly.
Some cities made substantial cuts, as Austin did. In 2023 Republican Rep. Jim Jordan cited a list, compiled by his staff from 2020 news coverage, of 21 cities that proposed police cuts for fiscal 2021. But PolitiFact found that at least 14 of the cities scaled the cuts back before adopting their budgets or reversed them the next year.
| City | Claimed Action | Actual Budget Change | Sworn Officers Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minneapolis, MN | Pledged to "dismantle" the police department | 2021 budget cut nearly $8M of $179M; voters rejected replacing the department in 2021 | Staffing declined via attrition, not formal cuts |
| Los Angeles, CA | $150M redirect announced | Cut $150M to $1.71B for 2020–21; back above its pre-cut level by 2022–23 | Fell from 10,009 in mid-2020 to below 9,000 by mid-2023 |
| New York City, NY | $1B NYPD "cut" announced | $420M less than planned for 2021, mostly one-time overtime cuts; the promised school safety transfer was not in the plan | Attrition accelerated; retirements spiked |
| Austin, TX | $150M redirect | Some reductions real; subsequent years saw re-funding under state law | Fell from about 1,760 in 2020 to about 1,450 in 2023 |
| 264 large cities (Social Problems study) | N/A | No evidence protests led to cuts; half lowered the police share of their budget, half raised it | Not studied |
If budgets weren't broadly cut, budget cuts cannot explain a national trend.
Staffing, a separate issueEven where formal budget cuts were absent, police departments faced real staffing pressure after 2020 through accelerated retirements, resignations, and reduced recruiting pipelines. A 2021 survey covered 194 agencies whose chiefs belong to the Police Executive Research Forum. These agencies are not a nationally representative sample. In those agencies, the retirement rate in the year from April 2020 was 45% higher than in the year before, and the resignation rate was 18% higher. Filled sworn posts in those agencies fell by 1.6% on average.
However, attributing the surge in homicide to staffing attrition faces a key problem. The attrition was gradual and ongoing, while the surge in homicide was sharp and sudden: it occurred within 2020 itself, before most attrition effects would have fully materialized.
Did officers pull back, and did crime follow?
De-policing, a reduction in proactive enforcement, did happen, and it is measurable. It means fewer traffic stops, pedestrian stops, officer-initiated contacts, and arrests for low-level offenses. It is distinct from budget cuts.
The four-city studyA peer-reviewed study published in Perspectives on Politics measured what happened to policing and crime in four cities immediately after the onset of 2020 protests. The cities were Austin, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle, and the study used a regression discontinuity-in-time (RDiT) design, which compares daily records before and after the protests began. Key findings:
Finding
Policing activity fell sharply. Standardized effect sizes ranged across cities from −0.2 to −2.8 standard deviations (SD), a unit that describes how much a set of data, here the daily counts, varies. The study puts these falls at 10% to 100% of each city's average for that kind of stop before the protests. Across the four cities, the meta-analytic coefficient was around −1.5 SD. The decline was statistically significant and immediate.
Finding
Violent crime was not clearly impacted. Across the four cities, the meta-analytic estimate for violent crime is statistically insignificant (0.31 SD, standard error 0.26, p = 0.23). The p-value means that if the protests had no effect on violent crime, an estimate at least this far from zero would arise 23% of the time. Once weather, COVID-19 cases and non-emergency calls to 311 are adjusted for, the estimate is close to zero (−0.08).
By city
Los Angeles and Philadelphia showed rises in violent crime of 0.9 and 0.5 SD on the simplest specification that did not survive the robustness checks; Austin and Seattle showed none.
Finding
Arrest rates per stop rose in every city, so the stops that remained were less often fruitless.
Design quality
The authors chose this design because effects measured in the days around the protests are less likely to reflect slower changes in policing and crime. Placebo tests, alternative bandwidth specifications, and timing checks were conducted. COVID-19 policies began before the protests, which makes them less likely to explain changes in the days around the protests.
Caveat
The study covers four cities, not the nation. It uses a bundled treatment (protests + all contemporaneous events). How far its results apply to other cities and enforcement types is limited.
Denver
Some city-specific evidence does show associations between enforcement reductions and crime increases. One example is a separate study of Denver by Nix and colleagues (Criminology 2024). In Denver in 2020, police made half the usual number of pedestrian stops and 40% fewer vehicle stops than their 2016–19 average. Drug arrests were 62% below that average. Against its 2016–19 average, Denver's violent crime that year was 14.3% higher and its property crime 27.1% higher.
Denver, corrected
After the Denver study's authors corrected a data error in 2025, fewer pedestrian stops were linked to more violent and property crime across the city's 78 neighborhoods. But the links for vehicle stops and drug arrests no longer held, and fewer disorder arrests had no effect. A critic's reanalysis finds no link.
Download this conclusion: de-policing
This section as one image: the four-city study of police pullback and violent crime, and the Denver study that runs the other way.
What else changed in 2020
One of the clearest correlates of the 2020 surge in homicide is a historic surge in gun buying. Firearm background checks run through the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) jumped from about 28.4 million in 2019 to 39.7 million in 2020. The rise was 40% in a single year, and the 2020 total was the highest on record. Checks stayed elevated at 38.9 million in 2021 before falling to 31.6 million in 2022.
The CDC data provides critical evidence here: the 2020–2021 surge was almost entirely a firearm homicide increase. Non-firearm homicide did not rise proportionally. This pattern is what a weapon availability hypothesis would predict.
How to read it: each bar is the number of firearm background checks run through the FBI's NICS system in that year, in millions. Source: FBI NICS firearm background checks, month/year totals. A check is not one-to-one with a gun sold: a single check can cover several firearms, and several states run permit checks through NICS that involve no immediate sale.
| Year | Checks (millions) |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 25.2 |
| 2018 | 26.2 |
| 2019 | 28.4 |
| 2020 | 39.7 |
| 2021 | 38.9 |
| 2022 | 31.6 |
| 2023 | 29.9 |
| 2024 | 28.1 |
The 2020 crime surge coincided with sweeping social disruption. Schools closed, courts halted in-person proceedings, outreach to people at risk of violence was curtailed, and economic stress peaked suddenly. Routine activities that structure social life (work, school, community organizations) were suspended or radically altered. The 2020 surge was also preceded by massive civil unrest: protests, fires, curfews, and the social and psychological aftermath of George Floyd's killing in late May 2020.
The Council on Criminal Justice's review of 34 cities found the smallest homicide increases of 2020 under the strictest lockdowns, in March to May. It pointed to the strain on at-risk people and on police, courts, hospitals and outreach groups. Homicide was above 2019 levels in every month of 2020 in the 34 cities. But the sharp, statistically significant rise came in June, coinciding with the protests and their aftermath.
The timing of the cuts and the rise
The causes side by side
If police budget cuts caused the surge, the surge should follow the cuts. But formal budget cuts, where they occurred at all, happened in city council votes between late June and December 2020. The sharp rise in homicide began in June 2020, before most budget processes concluded. The timing is more consistent with the simultaneous protests and social disruption as precipitating factors than with formal budget changes.
| Proposed Cause | Evidence Strength | Key Support | Key Problem |
|---|---|---|---|
| Police budget defunding | Not supported | Intuitive mechanism | 264-city study: no evidence protests led to cuts |
| De-policing / enforcement pullback | Weak–Moderate (localized) | The four-city study shows enforcement did decline | Same study finds no clear rise in violent crime |
| Firearm acquisition surge | Moderate | Firearm-specific homicide increase; NICS surge | NICS is imperfect proxy; causal channel uncertain |
| Pandemic social disruption | Moderate–Strong | National increase coincides with protests/disruption; broad-based | Hard to separate from simultaneous factors |
| Measurement artifact | Not supported for homicide | The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) transition is a real issue for 2021 | FBI and CDC both show 2020 increase; independent systems |
The best case for each side
The strongest version of this argument focuses not on formal budget cuts but on what followed George Floyd's killing and the protests. Disadvantaged communities, in this account, lost trust in police and relied on them less. The argument runs: even without formal defunding, officers reduced proactive activity, and the data confirms this.
Reduced deterrence and reduced clearance rates, which mean fewer killers are apprehended, would be expected to increase violence. The Ferguson Effect (reduced policing following high-profile use-of-force controversies) has some supporting evidence from earlier years. The timing of the sharp rise in June 2020 is consistent with a change in officer behavior rather than a budget change alone.
Best evidence
Proactive enforcement demonstrably fell post-protests in multiple cities. After two decades with little trend, the national homicide clearance rate fell from 61% in 2019 to 54% in 2020. Reduced clearance rates potentially reduce deterrence. The Denver study links fewer pedestrian stops to more crime, though a critic's reanalysis disputes it.
Rebuttal
The four-city study directly measures both enforcement decline and crime outcomes and finds no clear causal link. The firearm-specific nature of the surge is better explained by weapon availability. The rapid post-2021 decline occurred without a reversal of the underlying policing controversies.
The strongest version of this argument is that the pandemic, not policing, was the dominant driver. COVID-19 disrupted courts, schools, outreach and jobs all at once, and gun background checks rose 40%. These shocks overwhelmed normal social controls with no connection to police behavior. The rapid decline after 2021, while policing controversies continued, suggests the pandemic-era shocks were temporary rather than policing-related.
Best evidence
Firearm homicide rose far faster than homicide by other means, consistent with weapon availability, not policing changes. The surge was rapid and then partly reversed while police staffing in cities such as Los Angeles and Austin kept falling. Cross-system evidence (FBI + CDC) shows the same pattern regardless of reporting method.
Rebuttal
This case does not explain why homicide rose far more in some cities than in others, and fell in a few. The pandemic alone does not explain why firearm homicide specifically spiked so much more than homicide by other means.
The verdict: what the evidence shows
No. The 2020 surge was real, and police budget cuts were not its cause. The firearm homicide rate rose 46% from 2019 to its 2021 peak. Death certificates and police counts alike show the rise, so it is not in dispute. But budgets were not broadly cut, and the sharp rise in homicide came in June 2020, before the budget votes that did cut.
De-policing, a reduction in proactive enforcement, did happen. In the four-city study it brought no clear rise in violent crime. In the Denver study, the authors' corrected results link fewer pedestrian stops to more crime, which a critic disputes. Neither study covers the nation. The evidence fits a pandemic-era explanation better. Nearly all the extra killings were shootings, during a record surge in gun buying, and the fall after 2021 came while the policing controversies went on. This verdict does not mean policing is irrelevant to crime; decades of research show it matters.
Five common claims, against the evidence
Claim“Defunding police caused the 2020 crime surge.”
Not supportedA study of 264 cities found no evidence that the 2020 protests led to police budget cuts, and budgets in many cities increased. The sharp rise in homicide came before the budget votes.
Claim“Policing pullback contributed to the surge.”
Possible locallyPolice made fewer stops after the 2020 protests. A four-city study found no clear rise in violent crime; Denver's corrected study links fewer pedestrian stops to more crime. Neither shows a national cause.
Claim“The 2020 crime surge was unprecedented.”
Partly trueFor homicide, partly: murder rose 29.4% in 2020, per FBI, but the murder rate stayed below its early-1990s levels. False for overall violent crime, which remains well below 1990s levels.
Claim“The spike was just a measurement artifact.”
FalseThe increase appears in both FBI police-recorded data and CDC mortality data, which use entirely separate reporting systems. Both can’t be an artifact simultaneously.
Claim“Crime is still out of control.”
FalseIn the FBI's national data, murder and violent crime rates fell 18.5% and 9.7% in 2025, the largest one-year declines since the FBI began national estimates in 1936. The 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 ties the 1955 and 1956 record low.
Download the conclusion
The verdict above as one image, with the firearm homicide rates from 2019 to 2023 as its chart. It is 1,080 by 1,350 pixels, and anyone may download it and post it.
What would change this conclusion
This article concludes that: (1) police budgets were not broadly cut in 2020, and a study of 264 cities found no evidence that the protests led to cuts; (2) the sharp rise in homicide came in June 2020, before the budget votes; (3) de-policing happened, and its effect on violent crime is unclear: no clear rise in the four-city study, a link for pedestrian stops in Denver's corrected results; (4) the evidence fits a pandemic-era explanation better than a policing one: the rise was almost entirely in gun homicide, during a record surge in gun buying.
These conclusions would be falsified by:
• City homicide counts showing that cities with the largest police budget or staffing cuts in 2020 and 2021 had the largest homicide increases (the 264-city study measured budgets, not homicide)
• Daily city records showing that drops in stops or arrests came before homicide rose in the same neighborhoods, with no such pattern before 2020
• Data from other countries showing that those which cut police budgets in 2020 had homicide surges while those which did not were spared
• A multi-city study, registered in advance, linking changes in policing that did not come from the cities' own crime trends to later homicide increases
• City police data showing that homicide clearance fell sharply before homicide rose, city by city
• State-by-state studies of gun buying that find no link between the 2020 surge in purchases and firearm homicide
Sources
Ebbinghaus, Bailey & Rubel. The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How "Defund the Police" Sparked Political Backlash. Social Problems, vol. 72 no. 3 (2025), 1198–1215. Source for the 264-city analysis, the finding of no evidence that protests led to police defunding, the finding that half of the cities lowered the police share of their budgets from 2019–20 to 2020–21 and half raised it, and the finding that in cities with large Republican vote shares protest was associated with significant increases in police budgets. academic.oup.com
Curtin SC. Trends in Death Rates for Leading Methods of Injury: United States, 2003–2023. NCHS Data Brief No. 526, March 2025. Table 4 is the source for the firearm homicide counts and rates from 2019 to 2023 and for the chart series: 14,414 deaths at 4.6 per 100,000 in 2019, 19,384 at 6.2 in 2020, 20,958 at 6.7 in 2021, 17,927 at 5.6 in 2023. Table 1 is the source for the overall homicide rate, 6.0 in 2019 rising to 7.8 in 2020. cdc.gov
CDC WONDER / NCHS FastStats. Underlying cause of death, firearm homicide, 2024. Source for the 2024 count of 15,364 firearm homicides and for CDC's crude 2024 rate of 4.5 per 100,000, which cannot be compared with the age-adjusted rates elsewhere in this article. cdc.gov
National Center for Health Statistics. About NCHS; Health, United States, Sources and Definitions: Age adjustment, and Rate. CDC WONDER, General Help. Source for the National Center for Health Statistics as part of the CDC; for age adjustment, which applies age-specific rates to a standard age distribution, here the 2000 U.S. standard population; for a crude death rate as deaths divided by the whole population; and for the full name of CDC WONDER. cdc.gov cdc.gov cdc.gov wonder.cdc.gov
Gramlich J. What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S. Pew Research Center, 28 April 2026. Source for the 2024 age-adjusted firearm homicide rate of 4.7 per 100,000, CDC WONDER's figure as Pew reports it. pewresearch.org
Simon TR and colleagues. Notes from the Field: Increases in Firearm Homicide and Suicide Rates, United States, 2020–2021. MMWR 71(40), 7 October 2022. Source for the firearm homicide rate rising nearly 35% from 2019 to 2020, and for the 2021 rate being the highest since 1993. cdc.gov
Roman, Fredriksson, Cassella, Epp & Walker. The George Floyd Effect: How Protests and Public Scrutiny Changed Police Behavior. Perspectives on Politics 23(4), 2025, 1250–1270. The regression discontinuity-in-time study of Austin, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Seattle. Source for the policing decline of 0.2 to 2.8 standard deviations, equal to 10% to 100% of each city's average for that kind of stop before the protests, the meta-analytic coefficient of 1.5 standard deviations, and the finding that the authors could not reject their hypothesis of no change in violent crime. The meta-analytic violent crime estimate is 0.31 SD, standard error 0.26, p = 0.23. cambridge.org
Terms in the four-city study's results. CDC, Principles of Epidemiology, Lesson 2, Section 7, for the standard deviation as a description of how much a set of data varies; Wasserstein RL, Lazar NA. The ASA's Statement on p-Values: Context, Process, and Purpose. The American Statistician 70(2), 2016, 129–133, for what a p-value means; and the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (NANPA), Abbreviated Codes, for 311 as the number for non-emergency police and other government services. archive.cdc.gov doi.org nanpa.com nanpa.com
Nix, Huff, Wolfe, Pyrooz & Mourtgos. When police pull back: Neighborhood-level effects of de-policing on violent and property crime, a research note. Criminology 62(1), 2024, 156–171; corrigendum, Criminology 63(1), 2025, 294–297. The Denver study referred to in the de-policing and steelman sections. Source for the 2020 rises of 14.3% in violent crime and 27.1% in property crime and for the falls of 50% in pedestrian stops, 40% in vehicle stops and 62% in drug arrests against the weighted 2016–19 average, as given in the authors' preprint. The corrected results are as the authors report them on the lead author's site (8 November 2024) and in The Criminologist (May/June 2025): fewer pedestrian stops linked to more violent and property crime, and no link for vehicle stops, drug arrests or disorder arrests. The same issue of The Criminologist carries Jacob Kang-Brown's reply, whose reanalysis finds no link. onlinelibrary.wiley.com osf.io jnix.netlify.app asc41.org
Akinnibi F, Holder S, Cannon C. Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise. Bloomberg CityLab, 12 January 2021; and Hoang BL, Benjamin A. "Defund" or "Refund" the Police? City Council Responsiveness to the Black Lives Matter Protests. Urban Affairs Review, 2023. Sources for the 5.2% aggregate reduction in the 50 largest cities' fiscal 2021 police budgets, as PolitiFact (18 June 2021) and Sinclair Broadcast Group (12 April 2021) report Bloomberg's figures; for police spending's share of city spending rising slightly, as Sinclair reports it (PolitiFact calls the share stable); and for the finding of no strong evidence of defunding in about 100 of the most populous cities. bloomberg.com politifact.com abc6onyourside.com mavmatrix.uta.edu
Reyes Y. U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan's list of cities that 'defunded' police doesn't account for reversals. PolitiFact, 1 February 2023. Source for the list of 21 cities that proposed police budget cuts for fiscal 2021, which Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, cited in January 2023 and his staff compiled from 2020 news coverage, and for at least 14 of them scaling the cuts back before adopting their budgets or reversing them the next year. politifact.com
Associated Press. Homicides are up, but GOP misleads with claims about blame. 10 June 2021. Source for some Republicans and pro-police groups blaming the 2020 calls to cut police spending for the rise in killings, and for the cuts being "mostly modest". mprnews.org
Police Executive Research Forum. Survey on Police Workforce Trends, June 2021. Source for the 194 responding agencies, whose chiefs are PERF members; the 45% rise in the retirement rate and the 18% rise in the resignation rate from the year beginning April 2019 to the year beginning April 2020; and the 1.56% average fall in filled sworn positions from 1 April 2020 to 1 April 2021. policeforum.org
Minneapolis row of the table. MPR News, Veto-proof majority of Minneapolis council members supports dismantling police department (7 June 2020); Mpls. City Council cuts police budget, but leaves staffing levels alone (10 December 2020), for the cut of nearly $8 million from a $179 million budget with the authorized force kept at 888 officers; Associated Press, Minneapolis voters reject replacing police with new agency (2 November 2021); and MPR News, Minneapolis officials say police force numbers are starting to rebound (30 August 2024), for more than 800 sworn officers at the start of 2020 and 570 in August 2024. mprnews.org mprnews.org pbs.org mprnews.org
Los Angeles row of the table. LAist, City Council Votes To Slash LAPD Budget By $150 Million (1 July 2020), for the 12–2 vote and the expected fall from 10,009 officers; Los Angeles Times via Governing, Los Angeles Will Increase Police Department Funding (21 May 2021), for the $1.71 billion approved after the cut; LAist, LA City's $11.2 Billion Budget Boosts LAPD Spending And Dedicates $1 Billion For Homelessness (2 June 2021), for $1.76 billion in 2021–22; City News Service, Mayor Garcetti signs revised $11.8B LA budget for 2022-23 (2 June 2022), for a further $115 million; and LAist, LAPD gets major increase for salaries (23 August 2023), for sworn ranks below 9,000 at the start of the 2023–24 fiscal year. laist.com governing.com laist.com spectrumnews1.com laist.com
New York row of the table. NYC Independent Budget Office, How Much Did the 2021 Adopted Budget Reduce Spending for the New York City Police Department? (18 August 2020), for the Mayor's "$1 billion in cuts and cost shifts", the $420 million reduction from the April plan, the one-time overtime savings, and the school safety transfer that did not appear in the financial plan; and ABC7 New York, NYPD officer retirements increase during COVID pandemic, anti-police protests (25 May 2021), for retirements rising from 1,509 in 2019 to 2,600 in 2020. ibo.nyc.ny.us abc7ny.com
Austin row of the table. KUT, Last Year Austin Cut Its Police Budget By Millions. A New State Law Means It'll Likely Reverse That Move This Week. (11 August 2021), for the cut of roughly $150 million and the state law, House Bill 1900, that led the city to restore about $130 million; and Austin Police Department, Recruiting & Retention (2 June 2025), whose yearly authorized positions and vacancies give about 1,760 sworn officers in 2020 and about 1,450 in 2023. kut.org austintexas.gov
FBI. Crime in the United States, 2019, Table 1 overview; the FBI's release of its 2020 crime statistics, 27 September 2021; UCR Summary of Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024 (August 2025) and 2025 (August 2026). Source for the 2019 violent crime rate of 366.7 per 100,000, the 2020 rate of 387.8, the 29.4% rise in murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2020, the 2024 declines of 14.9% and 4.5%, the 2025 declines of 18.1% and 9.3% in offenses and of 18.5% and 9.7% in rates, the 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000, and the preliminary first-half 2026 figures (murder down 23%, violent crime down 10.6%). The 2024 summary is also the source for the agency's full name and its Uniform Crime Reporting Program. ucr.fbi.gov fbi.gov cde.ucr.cjis.gov cde.ucr.cjis.gov
FBI. Reported Crimes in the Nation 2025 FAQs; Crime in the United States, 2010, Table 1. Source for the 2021 move to NIBRS-only collection and the return of SRS data from 2022, and for the violent crime rates of the 1990s, from 758.2 per 100,000 in 1991 to 523.0 in 1999. cde.ucr.cjis.gov ucr.fbi.gov
FBI. NICS Firearm Background Checks, month and year totals. Source for the background check chart: 25.2 million in 2017, 26.2 in 2018, 28.4 in 2019, 39.7 in 2020, 38.9 in 2021, 31.6 in 2022, 29.9 in 2023, 28.1 in 2024. The 40% single-year rise from 2019 to 2020 is also given in Congressional Research Service report IF11781 (updated 3 October 2022). The FBI's month/year totals by state and type, which mark checks with "more than one type of firearm" and list permit checks separately, are the source for the caption's note on what a check counts and for the system's full name. fbi.gov fbi.gov everycrsreport.com
Rosenfeld R, Abt T, Lopez E. Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities: 2020 Year-End Update. Council on Criminal Justice, January 2021. Source for the 34-city finding that homicide was higher in every month of 2020 than in 2019, with a statistically significant rise in June, for the smallest increases in March to May, for the strain on at-risk people and on police, courts, hospitals and outreach groups, for the 30% rise the authors call without modern precedent, and for the account in which disadvantaged communities drew away from police after losing trust in them. counciloncj.org
Cook PJ, Mancik A. The Sixty-Year Trajectory of Homicide Clearance Rates: Toward a Better Understanding of the Great Decline. Annual Review of Criminology 7 (2024), 59–83. Source for the homicide clearance rate of 61% in 2019 and 54% in 2020, and for the two decades with little trend before it. doi.org
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Proactive Policing: Effects on Crime and Communities. 2018. Source for the research showing that some policing strategies, such as hot spots policing and focused deterrence, reduce crime. nap.nationalacademies.org
Sources for the disruption of 2020. Zviedrite N and colleagues, COVID-19-associated school closures and related efforts to sustain education and subsidized meal programs, United States, February 18–June 30, 2020 (PLoS ONE, 2021), for the closure of all but one public school district by 30 March 2020; Ballotpedia, Coronavirus daily update: April 9, 2020, for in-person court proceedings suspended statewide in 34 states and locally in 16 by that date; the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate, 3.5% in February and 14.8% in April 2020, as published on FRED; and NPR, Violence Erupts As Outrage Over George Floyd's Death Spills Into A New Week (1 June 2020), for buildings set afire and curfews in dozens of cities. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov news.ballotpedia.org fred.stlouisfed.org npr.org
Lopez E, Boxerman B. Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Year-End 2025 Update. Council on Criminal Justice, January 2026. Source for the 40-city compilation and the changes from 2024 to 2025: homicide rate down 21% in the 35 cities reporting homicide, representing 922 fewer homicides; gun assault down 22% in 11 cities; robbery down 23% in 34; and homicide 44% below its 2021 peak and about 25% below 2019. counciloncj.org
Note on two different measures. The overall homicide rate and the firearm homicide rate moved by different amounts in 2020. CDC recorded a rise from 6.0 to 7.8 per 100,000 in the overall homicide rate, about 30%, and from 4.6 to 6.2 in firearm homicides specifically, about 35%. The same distinction applies to the FBI figures: its 29.4% for 2020 is a change in the number of murders, while its 5.2% is a change in the violent crime rate.
Cite this article
TruthBased.org. “Did Police Funding Cuts Cause the 2020 Crime Surge?” Updated November 2026. https://www.truthbased.org/did-police-funding-cuts-cause-the-2020-crime-surge