Milwaukee homicides falling after record peaks during pandemic. What’s going on?

By The Badger Project on April 19, 2024 • ( Leave a comment )

After three years of progressively higher killings in the city, the number finally fell in 2023, and is on track to drop again this year.

Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel homicide database

By Hallie Claflin, THE BADGER PROJECT
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After three years of record homicides in Milwaukee, killings dropped last year and continue to fall this year. But the numbers still aren’t as low as before the pandemic.

Police recorded 190 homicides in Milwaukee in 2020, according to a database maintained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a sharp increase from the 98 recorded the year before. Theodore Lentz, assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at UW-Milwaukee, blames the spike on pandemic stressors and social unrest after the murder of George Floyd.

Theodore Lentz is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology at UW-Milwaukee.

“You have, in some ways, a perfect storm for violence in that case,” Lentz said. “There were higher levels of unemployment, people were out of work… there was a lot of financial strain, and there were interpersonal strains.”

These stressors are known to correlate with higher rates of violence, Lentz said.

The pandemic’s strain on the criminal justice system in 2020 may have also caused the uptick in homicides and violence in Milwaukee, Lentz said. Courts virtually stopped and cases piled up, leaving people stuck in jail. This may have led to even more protests and social unrest related to policing.

“When the legitimacy of the system is called into question, we have research that does link that sort of situation potentially to more violence,” Lentz said.

After increasing again slightly in 2021, the number of homicide victims in Milwaukee exploded to 224 in 2022, setting yet another awful record. That number dropped to 183 in 2023, but was still higher than pre-pandemic levels. There have been 36 homicides in Milwaukee so far this year, which is 23 fewer than this time last year. That number is on pace to be about 120 homicides this year.

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“It tends to be the case that the most populated area of the state tends to have more violence than other places, or crimes tend to be higher,” Lentz said.

While Milwaukee may be an outlier for violent crime in the state, it doesn’t stand out from other major cities in its recent homicide and violent crime trends, Lentz said. Other cities in the U.S. experienced similarly high rates of violence during the pandemic. Homicides in 32 American cities were down about 10 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, according to a report from the Council on Criminal Justice.

“Hopefully we’re returning to something that is more typical for Milwaukee,” Lentz said. “It’s somewhat of a sign that conditions are returning more to normal if we think pre-2020, pre-pandemic levels of violence. We’re moving towards that, and that’s promising.”