Interviewee 18 lost his job when his employer, a bakery, closed because of the pandemic. “Everything collapsed,” he told the interviewers who met with him in a Minnesota prison. With the loss of routine and stress of unemployment, he’d struggled with mental health. He stopped taking his schizophrenia medicine and began experiencing intense paranoia and hallucinations, to the point where he beat and killed his newborn child. Interviewee 8 dropped out of virtual school. Without “rules” and “routines,” his life felt “empty.” He felt lost. He planned a robbery of a drug dealer on social media, who he ended up shooting and killing.
For their newly released article, “Murder in a time of crisis: a qualitative exploration of the 2020 homicide spike through offender interviews,” two Minnesota criminologists -- James Densley from the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Metropolitan State University and Jillian Peterson from the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University, both in St. Paul, Minn.-- interviewed people who had been convicted of first- and second-degree murder or manslaughter for offenses that occurred in 2020 or 2021. Their hope: to understand the underlying mechanisms of the unprecedented 30% spike in homicides in 2020. Though much of the research on the pandemic-era increase in violence has looked at macro-level trends and aggregate data, the authors designed this study to be much more granular and personal, looking at individual experiences to reveal how the pressures of 2020 influenced personal trajectories toward crime.
What they found is that the external pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area compounded existing instabilities, amplifying strain and vulnerability. In those situations, some research suggests, criminal behavior is used as a “maladaptive coping mechanism.”
The 18 interviewees chosen for the study described lives marked by early instability, exposure to violence, and entrenched criminality before 2020. Their childhoods were often unstable, marked by parental addiction and incarceration. “I didn’t have any guidance; I did what I wanted to do,” Interviewee 3 told them, encapsulating the lack of direction many faced when young.
Overall, their early environments were also characterized by acute trauma and constant violence; they got in trouble in elementary school, were involved in the criminal-justice system early, used drugs and had easy access to illegal firearms. “By 2020,” the authors concluded, “many were already on precarious paths, shaped by adverse childhood experiences and longstanding systemic vulnerabilities.”
Then came the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Those early disadvantages compounded. They felt unsafe, unable to cope with instability and lack of routine. As Interviewee 9 told them. “You can’t ride the wave when the wave is riding you.”
“Rather than treating 2020 as a singular turning point, it is more accurate to view these events as amplifying pre-existing trajectories already influenced by structural inequity and personal instability,” the study concludes. To help interrupt pathways to violence and avoid reduce lethal outcomes in future societal disruptions, the authors contend, policymakers must help people in vulnerable communities regain control over their lives, by addressing the challenges faced in vulnerable communities – struggles with mental healthcare, housing, policing, poverty, and employment.
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