Opinion | Why Are So Many Americans Killing One Another?

Balko believes this can help explain why murder — which tends to be fueled by domestic violence, gang conflicts and drug trading — increased while other crimes more dependent on public interactions fell. “Officials in cities that saw some of the largest murder surges in 2020 and 2021 — including Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles and others — all have said much of the spike could be attributed to drug- and gang-related murders,” he writes. “So the events of 2020 produced conditions that both encouraged turf wars and gang rivalries, and at the same time undermined the single biggest deterrent to public violence — the presence of witnesses, whether they were police or bystanders.”

General anomie. Another theory about the rise in murders contends that the pandemic accelerated (but did not necessarily initiate) an unraveling of the social contract. Murder is on the rise, but so too are other, less extreme manifestations of antisocial behavior, like reckless driving, aggression from airplane passengers and disruptive conduct in schools.

Aside from the pandemic, the proposed causes for anomie are legion, including the decline in church and union membership, the rise of social media and deepening socioeconomic inequality in a diminished welfare state. Whatever the reason, the Times columnist David Brooks concludes that “over the past several years, and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more antisocial and self-destructive ways.”

What’s to be done?

If pandemic-related factors are to blame, the problem may partly resolve itself as the pandemic wanes and employment levels rise, Anthony Barr and Kristen Broady of the Brookings Institution write. Similarly, if the decline of “sentinels” in public space was a major contributor to the murder spike, “we should see the numbers come down as the country returns to normal,” Balko predicts. “And indeed, the homicide surge appears to be slowing, and even reversing in some cities that have opened up, such as New York and Boston.”

But if changes or deficiencies in policing are to blame, the solutions are less obvious. One idea, which President Biden himself has embraced, is to invest more money in police departments and to hire more officers. While the relationship between police staffing levels and crime is still debated, there is a fairly robust body of research that shows a salutary effect.

• One recent working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, estimated that each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. (The researches noted, though, that the reduction was much less pronounced in cities with large Black populations.)

• Another widely cited study found that every $1 spent on extra policing generates about $1.63 in social benefits, primarily through fewer murders. (When conducting cost-benefit analyses of public safety investments, many federal and state agencies value the average life at around $7 million.)

“I’m as much a reformer as anybody, but the short-term solutions around high violence are mainly punitive,” John Roman, a researcher at the University of Chicago, told Lopez. “There’s no getting around that.”

[“The case for hiring more police officers”]

But many disagree with an exclusively police-intensive approach. In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, about two-thirds said that increasing police budgets would improve public safety. But 85 percent said — and with greater confidence — that increasing spending on housing, health and education would also do so.