US homicides rise nearly 30 percent in 2020: FBI

WASHINGTON - Homicides in the United States rose nearly 30 percent in 2020 from 2019, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s Uniform Crime Report for 2020 published on Monday.

"In 2020, there were an estimated 1,277,696 violent crimes," the agency said in a statement. Among them, 38,520 reported cases were homicides. The homicide rate per 100,000 people in the country was 6.5 in 2020.

The 2020 jump in homicides marked the "largest single-year increase" that the FBI has seen since it began collecting the data in the 1960s, according to a CNN report.

There were more than 21,500 murders in 2000, the biggest number since the mid 1990s, said the report, noting the murder rate in 2020 was about 6.5 per 100,000 people, about 40 percent below what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when homicides peaked in the country.

Violent crime in the United States went up by 5 percent from 2019 to 2020, while overall crime fell 6 percent during the same period, the FBI data showed.

It's the first time in past four years that the estimated number of violent crimes in the United States increased from the previous year, said a The Hill report.

The estimated number of robbery offenses fell 9.3 percent and the estimated rape offenses decreased 12.0 percent last year in comparison with 2019, the agency added.

About 85 percent of FBI agencies that were eligible to participate in the report submitted data, according to the FBI. Cities that did not submit data included New York, Chicago and New Orleans, CNN reported.