Despite Calls To 'Defund' Police, They Got More Money in 2020. Homicides Spiked.

ILLINOIS — A rise in homicides in Illinois contributed to a staggering nationwide spike in 2020, marking the biggest one-year increase in more than a century, according to new federal data.

The National Center for Health Statistics recently released its provisional quarterly estimates detailing how the homicide rate changed from 2019 to 2020. While the overall increase was not unexpected — the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report had documented a similar increase just days earlier — federal analysts still called the spike “remarkable.”

“We’re usually talking about relatively small increases in mortality or small decreases in mortality. We don’t normally see these big jumps,” Robert Anderson, chief of the NCHS mortality statistics branch, said in an agency interview. “As we go and as we calculate the official mortality statistics for 2020, we’re going to have a lot more work than we normally have to describe what’s going on.”

In Illinois, the homicide rate rose from 8.1 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019 to 11.2 in 2020, about a 38 percent increase.

Notably, even as violent crime increased across Illinois and nationwide, property crime rates fell. Burglaries, vehicle thefts and arson dropped 8.1 percent in the state from 2019 to 2020, according to FBI crime data.

Those trends hold true both in the cities and states that cut police funding last year — and in those that gave more money to police.

In 2020, for example, Chicago's police budget increased 6.4 percent, from about $1.66 billion in 2019 to about $1.76 billion in 2020, according to the city's Office of Inspector General. That accounts for 37 percent of the city's entire budget — about $620 per resident. Despite that, homicides spiked more than 50 percent in that city alone in 2020.

Statewide, public safety spending increased about 6.9 percent, from $1.735 trillion in 2019 to $1.855 trillion in 2020, according to the state's fiscal year 2020 operating budget book.

RELATED: FBI Crime Report 2020: See Trends In Illinois

The provisional estimates include deaths occurring within the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia and are based on records processed by the National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Estimates are figured using records for most types of homicides, some of which don’t necessarily equate to murder. The National Center for Health Statistics defines homicide as a death resulting from injury inflicted by another person with intent to injure or kill. If a death is classified as a homicide, that doesn’t necessarily mean the killing was unlawful.

Murder, on the other hand, is by definition unlawful.

The newly released provisional estimates do not distinguish between homicides and murders.

Previously, the largest year-to-year spike was a 20 percent increase from 2000 to 2001, driven largely by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

While the 2020 homicide rate was likely the largest percent increase in history, the number of homicides per 100,000 has been higher in previous years.

“If you go back to the early 1980s and actually in the 1970s, you had rates of higher than 10 per 100,000, so at those times you had a higher homicide rate,” Anderson said. “Not the big increases or big decreases at that time, but the overall level was much higher.”

The new data for 2020 also shows a wide difference in homicide rates based on geography.

The District of Columbia had a higher homicide rate than any state. The states with the highest homicide rates were Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Tennessee and Maryland.

The states with the biggest rate increase in 2020 were Montana, South Dakota, Delaware and Kentucky, while only two states, Alaska and Maine, had definitive declines in homicide rates.

It’s unclear at this point what role the pandemic may have played in the spike in homicides; however, one psychiatrist told U.S. News & World Report that he believes COVID-19 fears and lockdowns played a key role.

"This volatile combination of emotional, financial and physical stress, combined with substance use and the too-ready availability of handguns in our society, which has been shown to increase the likelihood of shooting deaths associated with intimate partner violence,” Dr. Timothy Sullivan, chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Staten Island University Hospital, told U.S. News.

This, Sullivan said, “could understandably lead to an increased homicide rate.”