The 2020 Arrest Trend
Some quick charts
A few days back I got into a discussion about whether the dropoff in policing in 2020 was just the pandemic, or included a second dip with the George Floyd unrest. I’d seen some city-by-city charts on stops and arrests (see here and here), but as far as I knew, no one had depicted trends for the country as a whole. I went ahead and made charts to contribute to an informal conversation because I am cool like that.
The FBI has a few different datasets that are of use here, though none of them are complete, since participation is voluntary. Here are the very quick graphs I whipped up, relying on the cleaned-up FBI files Jacob Kaplan provides over at Harvard Dataverse.
First, there’s the monthly arrest data,1 which I limited to departments reporting all 12 months. Arrests start recovering in May before dipping down again (Floyd’s death was May 25), though I suppose you can see May as a weird upward hitch instead.
You can also use the FBI’s incident-level data, which are more detailed but have lower participation. Here’s daily arrests2 for Group A (generally more serious) offenses, with a vertical line to mark May 25:
Pretty clear dip again. Here are Group B arrests,3 contained in a different file because they’re reported differently. It’s not surprising that less serious arrests saw more of a COVID drop-off, but I was surprised that these arrests more “stop rising” than “convincingly dip again” at May 25. Nonetheless, it paints a pretty similar picture of interrupted recovery:
I think it’s debatable how well variation in the arrest drop-off corresponds to the variation cities experienced in the 2020 homicide spike (a matter I discussed a bit in a recent brief), but it does seem clear that the Floyd unrest changed policing levels separately from COVID.
Kaplan, Jacob, 2025, "Summary Reporting System (SRS) - Arrests by Age, Sex, and Race (ASR)", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KFMHQE, Harvard Dataverse, V1. Monthly arrests for all crimes file for 2020, summing across the columns ending “_total_arrests.”
Kaplan, Jacob, 2025, "National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) - Arrestee Segment", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/ZULQVE, Harvard Dataverse, V1. 2020 file, subset to 2020 arrests (as it includes a few from other years).
Kaplan, Jacob, 2024, "National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) - Group B Arrest Report Segment", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CIQIVF, Harvard Dataverse, V2. 2020 file, subset to 2020 arrests.