Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

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Chicago apparently has greater concentrations of poverty, particularly among African-Americans:

edit: forgot the URL for this story https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/why-is-new-york-so-much-safer...

> A 2015 study by Rutgers University public policy researcher Paul A. Jargowsky found that more than a third of all poor African-Americans in Chicago live in census tracts with poverty rates above 40 percent, compared with 26 percent of poor African-Americans in New York.

The headline news about Chicago homicides and shootigns (e.g. "WAR ZONE: 10 Killed, 28 WOunded in Chicago Over MLK Day Weekend [0]) don't convey how concentrated the violence is in specific areas of the city. I visit (middle-class) friends who live downtown and uptown (along the lake) and it feels as safe as any of the nice parts of Manhattan when I lived there.

Chicago Tribune does an excellent job tracking shootings [1]. You can easily see -- after zooming in a little -- on even their overplotted dot map that areas other than Chicago's west and south sides, shootings are virtually nonexistent:

[snapshot] https://imgur.com/gallery/uPfSG

FWIW, according to the Tribune's tracker: In Chicago, 3,543 people have been shot this year. That is 784 fewer than 2016.

[0] http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/dsp/search.htm?frompage=...

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-shooting-victims-...

Segregation is the key here, not poverty.

Poverty is nevertheless a factor, but it is usually a result of segregation. When public funding such as education, infrastructure, healthcare, and police are take away from these segregated, poor, high-crime communities to "safer, richer" communities, then gangs rise.

Popular culture portrays most gang members are African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, and whites are generally bikers (and they usually live in south/mid-west). That kind of stereotype only makes crime situation worse.

In NYC, at least from my experience, a diverse neighborhoods - influx of different cultures and races, different earning incomes, and different religious can help smooth out the tension. Diversity is not a magic bullet, and in some neighborhoods we don't see a big drop. Yet, a diverse neighborhoods have better chance in demanding for better resource distribution, so in the long-term the neighborhood will drive the bad out as the bad has little to feed on.

So the key is to remove segregation, have more diverse voice, and encourage neighbors talk to one another other.

Segregation seems like the most salient factor to me. NYC is seeing an almost unbelievable amount of re-integration of previously all-black areas. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the U.S. that's seen such a broad change in its black neighborhoods. In places like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Central Harlem, the white share of population has increased from 1-4 percent or so in 2000 (i.e. basically non-existent) to anywhere from 10-25% (depending on the exact area and how you break it up).

And growing.

Segregation has been a disaster for black neighborhoods. More than anything else, this change feels to me like a big one.

Right. I graduated from City College, which is located at 137th, basically Harlem for those that don’t live in NYC. There have been robberies and rapes near the school (145th and St. Nicholas Park), but generally, I felt very safe when I was a student there (I have walked north of Harlem and south to Columbia by myself before too). Crimes will never cease to happen, so one can only wish not not becoming that unfortunate target. However, the violence in the old days is pretty much non-existence. Some shootings every so often, but most arrests are probably robberies, sexual crimes and illegal drugs possessions.

Housing in Queens and Brooklyn are becoming less affordable. Then business owners like Chinese resturants and retail franchises are moving in to snatch the new population. The 1,2,3 trains are convenient to travel from and to Manhattan, so ideal for university students and young singles.

It's great that there's de-segregation and I agree with your sentiments.

On the flipside there's a backlash, in the form of a knee-jerk anti-gentrification sentiment that rapidly escalates on racial terms. Both politically (community board priorities and attitudes) and on the street - there's a lot of hostility towards newcomers.

That one's incredibly complex. What you laud as desegregation, many in Bed Stuy, etc. would call displacement.

> Yet, a diverse neighborhoods have better chance in demanding for better resource distribution

I think what you see when you have new populations come in (be they foreign or domestic) is "gentrification". The newcomers can instigate redevelopment and reinvigorate a neighborhood. Sometimes this result is not well received by some locals, but usually other locals with some interest in the community welcome the newcomers.

>> Chicago apparently has greater concentrations of poverty, particularly among African-Americans

So how does that explain Detroit, which has more poverty than Chicago, but also has a NYC-like downswing in homicides?

In metro Detroit, 49% of African Americans who are poor are living in census tracts where at least 40% of the residents are poor, the highest rate among the Top 25 metro areas

Detroit's homicide rate is consistently in the top 3 in America -- 45 per 100,000 people in 2016:

http://www.fox2detroit.com/news/local-news/fbi-detroit-has-n...

For comparison's sake, Chicago's homicide rate in 2016 is 27.8:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-homicide-spikes-c...

It's true that Detroit's homicide/violent crime number is at historic lows, but that tracks with the rest of the country.

https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/MI8...

While Chicago has notably huge upticks from 2014 through 2016, they're also still at relative historic lows compared to past decades. And even with the dramatic upticks in 2015 and 2016 (crime rates appear to drop in 2017), Chicago is still well below Detroit's rates:

https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/explorer/agency/ILC...

I'm sure poverty and demographics, nor the police force and policy, aren't the only factors when comparing NYC and Chicago, although they are easier to quantify.

I strongly suspect you need more than poverty or racial ghettos to get a crime epidemic. You need a culture of criminality combined with one or more criminal industries to make it a viable "career choice."

I really wish crime statistics would be broken down by apparent motive (if known). That might actually tell us something.

Why would you want to have strong suspicions on such a complex topic?

One of the reasons racial ghettos have such an effect on crime is that violence can be driven by young people who can see opportunity near them, and who believe they don’t have access to those opportunities.

Understandable don’t you think? And it doesn’t require a culture of criminality. Just visibility into a differential of access.

As a side note, I hear this “culture of criminality” idea a lot, but I haven’t seen any science around it. Can you point me in the right direction?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Detroit

"Detroit has the second highest murder rate in the United States"

violent crime is down everywhere in the US, so it is still useful to see the relative ranking to other cities

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...

Yeah, if I were him, I definitely wouldn't use Detroit as an example of a low crime rate.

"In 2015, Detroit had its lowest number of criminal homicides in 40 years"

is the point.

Their current population is half that of 40 years ago. Rates matter more than absolute numbers.

most cities are reporting this trend

Except Chicago isn't, which was the whole point of bringing up Detroit

And yet that specific metric for Detroit -- "lowest number of criminal homicides in 40 years" -- is virtually useless as it doesn't account for Detroit's massive population decline.

Via the FBI's UCR tool which has data from 1985-2014: https://www.ucrdatatool.gov/Search/Crime/Local/RunCrimeJuris...

Unfortunately I can't deeplink to pages so here are screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/LGgJh

- Detroit having ~300 homicides is very good compared to the ~400 homicides it had in 2000. However, that doesn't quite match up to its population decline. The homicide rate in 2000 was ~41.6 per 100K, compared to 43+ in 2014 (and 2015 and 2016 I think).

- Meanwhile, Chicago's 2014 homicide rate was 15.2. In 2015, it was 17.5. And in 2016, it jumped to 27.8 [0]

That jump is a huge jump compared to historic trends. But still a relative low for Chicago when considering 1990-forward. According to the Tribune's homicide tracker, the number of homicides in 2016 was 792 [1]. In 2017, it's tracking to be 664 homicides, which would be a rate of ~23/100K. Still not great but seems too early to say that Chicago is on an unchanging course of increasing crime. And it doesn't make much sense to argue but what about Detroit? when comparing Chicago to NYC.

https://imgur.com/a/LGgJh

[0] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/data/ct-homicide-spikes-c...

[1] http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/homicides

It is a two year trend. Sure, it needs to be explained, but it isn't like some Chicago is some hellhole as it is often portrayed by certain media outlets and politicians. If you look at the 2014 crime statistics, Chicago has a lower crime rate than Minneapolis. Chicago was like #20 in crime rate.

> greater concentrations of poverty

Aren't there numbers to suggest that poverty itself is negatively correlated with both violent and property crime?

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