How bad is the rise in US homicides? Factchecking the ‘crime wave’ narrative police are pushing

Homicides were up across the US in 2020 and appeared to be primarily driven by rising gun violence, but other crimes fell

There's been a wave of media coverage this summer about an increase in homicides across the United States, with attention often focused on the same political question: will Americans still want to defund or even reform the police if violent crime" is on the rise?

Anxiety about violent crime is often used to win elections. Police and politicians routinely share misleading, out-of-context crime statistics to advance their agendas. Fearmongering about rising crime has also been used for decades to undermine Black Americans' protests for civil rights. So it's important to ask: is this homicide increase actually significant? And how much evidence is there for any of the explanations about why killings are going up?