Homicide Rate Spike In NJ In 2020, Federal Report Says

ASBURY PARK, NJ — A rise in homicides in New Jersey contributed to a staggering nationwide spike in 2020, marking the most significant 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 New Jersey, the homicide rate increased from 3.4 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 4.4 in 2020.

Provisional estimates are based on complete death records received and processed by the National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

National estimates include deaths occurring only within the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Estimates are figured using records for most 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 the 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, which is what sets it apart from homicide.

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

The previous largest year-to-year spike was a 20 percent increase from 2000 to 2001, driven largely by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when nearly 3,000 people perished.

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 vast difference in homicide rates based on geography.

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

The states with the most significant 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 have 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.”