Murders in US very concentrated (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Murders in US very concentrated (2017)

crimeresearch.org

57 pointsComputerGuru56 comments

When you slice it even finer you find that 99.95% of people were murdered zero times, while 0.05% of people suffered 100% of the murders.

They try to make it sound like a statistic about geographical crime distribution, but it's mostly a statistic about sizes of counties.

What would the statistics look like if they used equal-area regions? And what would they look like if they used equal-population regions (maybe Congressional districts)?

I guess - mind, this is an uneducated guess - that population density is more of a marker here than sheer population. (Or area!)

After all, high population density leads to more interactions with other people, a small portion of which escalate to violence.

Also, if I was aiming for a career in violent crime, I'd pick a place with lots of potential victims. After all, mugging the other inhabitant of East Nowhere, Alaska pretty much means you've cornered that market and need to move elsewhere.

(The underlying assumption is that the percentage of people murdered by their partner or close friends is pretty much even across the country, and that what varies is the - hm - opportunistic murder rate.)

Population density being correlated with crime rate is more mysterious than it would seem at first. After all, people live in cities because many things benefit from economies of scale. Why doesn't policing?

First of all, it seems to make sense that crime also benefits from the same economies of scale. This could offset the improvement in policing.

Secondly, policing becomes harder in a city due to increased anonymity and the ease of hiding in plain sight. As a city grows, more and more people don't know each other. This reduces the effectiveness of social policing.

Is policing the thing that stops crime? There are obviously many parts to it including policing but a lot of things have gone wrong before the police were needed.

It's much less mysterious when you consider socioeconomic factors. In particular, they concentrate in neighborhoods which are vestiges of midcentury economies of scale (i.e. factory jobs), and are now hopeless. Urban police are pretty good at stopping violent crime from leaking into white professional neighborhoods, which is arguably city institutions' true priority.

Police tactics are only going to get you so far in communities that (justifiably) see the police as an oppressive enemy faction, where witnesses don't talk to detectives and juries don't convict.

> mugging the other inhabitant of East Nowhere, Alaska

You might also find yourself having an "accident" that makes you bear food pretty quick.

To your point, being a career criminal in a dense urban area also probably increases the likelihood you won't be caught after committing a crime and be able to go on to commit others.

Also, residents of East Nowhere tend to carry guns and shorten the careers of professional muggers dramatically.

Also, this looks like a case of Zipf's Law, which tends to crop up a lot if you express statistical distributions as rankings [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law#Statistical_expla...

FTA: In 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, 54% of counties (with 11% of the population) have no murders. 69% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country. The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders.

When you break it down that way it's a less strong correlation, but tends to support a model based on 'network effects' (opportunity) and/or social pressures (density).

It would be really interesting to slice things and compare relative rates for neighborhood level housing density, poverty/affluence, and education.

As a potential control study though, I'd like to propose focusing on quality of housing and 'tranquility' factors. How well does that housing prevent problematic interaction? (Noisy / smelly (air pollution of various kinds) / resource conflicts) My hypothesis is that higher quality housing and housing codes can contribute to decreasing stress. The need to build more housing to fulfill the more lofty living requirements would also have a positive effect on the affordability of housing (and naturally for the experiment would need to be targeted across all levels of need). Of course to eliminate the effect of housing merely being new at least some units would have to be new but built to the existing standard's minimums rather than the study's re-defined minimums.

Doing stats per county is useful when you have a gun control debate as gun issuance policy is specific to each county.

0.05% would be 1:2000, or 320M/2k = 160.000 murders a year. The USA is violent, but not _that_ violent. “4.4 per 100,000 people” is closer to 999.995% and 0.005%.

The peak counties (New Orleans, for example. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Hom...) do get that many murders.

That’s at least partly because “by population” isn’t a good metric. People who sleep or aren’t in the company of others don’t murder people, so you have to look where they are when they are awake and in the company of others; that happens at home, but also at work, in bars, on holiday, etc. and the latter predominantly is in larger cities.

You're right, I dropped a zero.

Except that over half of those 0.05% of murder victims lived in close proximity to one another Uber similar socioeconomic conditions. It is very much correlated with geography, which is why people pay absurd prices to live in areas with reduced crime.

This is almost meaningless in terms of statistics. It's like saying that 99.99% of the schools had zero murders in them.

That number seems a little high for USA schools. 95% maybe.

So almost 7000 murders IN SCHOOLS?

That’s a ridiculous statement.

Even if it were the same schools, year after year?

The man behind this "research center" is John Lott.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lott

Feel free to skip to the hefty controversy section.

Ad hominem much?

I have no problem calling out a guy whose pattern of behavior includes twisting data to come to false conclusions, losing data related to controversial studies and pretending to be other people to make his studies look better.

If that's ad hominem I'm 100% ok with that.

Yes, it is ad hominem, in the same way it's ad hominem when you are positively prejudiced towards the medical opinions of doctors, or how may be bigoted and discriminatory towards the medical opinions on Yahoo answers.

One-line arguments about ad hominem, bandwagon, or appeal to authority, are all lazy arguments.

Most people are positively prejudiced towards their doctors because they're trained for 8 years to deal with medical issues. I'm positively prejudiced to the advice of my tax lawyer because he has spent 30 years working with tax forms. Doctors and lawyers make mistakes and give ignorant advice. Just because sometimes I find better information on google than through a doctor doesn't mean the entire professional system is bullshit.

edit: In fact this exact conversation is an interesting example. John Lott is a highly decorated academic and has received praise from notable academics. In this case I used google to discover his history of deception. So in a way I'm using "yahoo answers" to argue against the phd. With John Lott the criticism is coming from enough sources I feel confident trusting they're true.

No, I'm telling people to stop using one-line arguments from the "logical fallacy" bag.

Well I guess that means I'm just gonna keep committing logical fallacies then if that means pointing out when the author of a study has a pattern of lying and deception.

Hacker news will have to suffer for it.

Black Mirror did an episode on the consequences of voting for truth. Or was that The Orville? In any case, Lott is using data to support the unpopular side of the gun control debate. It is not surprising to find a gazillion hit pieces undermining his character and credentials. None of which erodes his data.

His research was one of the reasons I moved my family to the suburbs where violent crimes are excessively rare and committed predominantly by visitors from the urban centers.

The gun control debate and politics in general don't really mean much to me. What I'm concerned about is Lott's deceptive use of statistics to come to questionable conclusions.

If you read his entire wiki there are just a stunning number of red flags (the whole thing even, not just the controversies section). In this HN thread alone people have casually pointed out some obvious flaws. At the very least he's putting a lot of effort into spreading FUD about violent crime.

I really don't see how you can take him as a useful and objective source on these issues unless you're already coming to the conversation with some kind of anti-urban prejudice.

In some ways it reminds me of the conversation about child rapists and pedophiles. People lose their mind over the safety of their children when exposed to the community while ignoring that most of these crimes happen within their own families. It all just smells of a general fear of the vague and dangerous "other."

Do you live in a high crime area? Your argument stinks of many degrees of separation between what you speak of and what you know.

Besides being lazy, it's also a fallacy of it's own to dismiss an argument just because it contains a fallacy.

But it didn't just contain a fallacy. It only had one premise which was a fallacy.

Location of murders isn't indicative of much beyond "lots of people tend to be here most of the time".

So what if more people own guns in the suburbs? They can take them outside of the area to shoot people. It doesn't mean "owning guns is safe".

Owning guns is not inherently unsafe. The rate of incident is per gun is very low.

In other news, about 2% of the US counties have about 51% of the population.

The problem isn't the distribution, it's the rate of murders when compared with other industrialised states.

Relevant xkcd making this point:

https://xkcd.com/1138/

Agreed, this statistic is meaningless[1]:

Los Angeles County, California population: 10,137,915

Kalawao County, Hawaii population: 88

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_statistics_of_the_Unite...

It seems like this is geared toward an argument that gun laws should be locally based and not federally managed.

From that perspective, it does make the point visually. There is a argument to be made that a small county in Nebraska probably should not have the same gun restrictions as in Los Angeles County.

I am not sure that I totally agree because of how easy it is to transport guns, but it is probably worth discussion.

It's interesting that in my various travels California was the only state where (at the time) as a military service member, occasional pistol instructor, and qualifying officer for use of deadly force; I did not find it (edit:relatively) trivial to obtain a concealed carry permit, and professional friends told me it might be safer to leave my firearms collection in storage in another state, (I did). In fact it was the one place where the common knowledge confirmed by my experience was I'd have to be law enforcement, or a professional bodyguard, instead of a service-member to get one.

Edit: Trivial here being fingerprints, background check, lots of paperwork, show proof of safety training or spend a a good part of the weekend and ~$100 total on paperwork training ect.

The article seems to be trying to make some point about gun ownership, and it’s leaves out a significant issue we have with guns. It does not address accidental shooting injuries or suicides, it also does not address shootings where there is no death, but maybe that’s outside the scope of the article since it’s focused on murder.

> Despite lower gun ownership, urban areas experience much higher murder rates.

A gun advocate may say the rates are lower because more people own guns. Probably false, but the whole article seems quite flawed.

Recently I watched Louis Theroux' documentaries about violence in the US. It was mentioned that certain areas (in particular Milwaukee) shooting spiked right after the gun laws loosened.

On the other hand, for the longest time both DC and Chicago virtually banned guns and yet had atrocious violent crime rates.

There’s an abundance of evidence (e.g. [1]) that nearby states with more lax controls produce a flow of black market guns toward states with tighter controls, and that with increased legal availability the price of a black market gun declines[2].

1: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffi...

2: http://www.ibtimes.com.au/cost-illegal-firearms-australia-ha...

I like that it’s a very convenient argument that rationally culminates with “so the only way it can work is for everyone to ban guns everywhere.”

Not necessarily. It only leads there if the flow has to be zero - reducing the flow and/or making black market guns more expensive than alternatives would still be worth doing (it would have a significant effect on armed crime long before the number of available black market guns reached zero), and could be achieved through some degree of owner responsibility (e.g. requiring guns be in a safe, have trigger locks, be kept separately from ammunition, limit the volume of ammunition stored at home). Better still, that doesn’t even have to require legislation!

Some of those steps would also most likely reduce the number of unpremeditated killings, e.g the freak accidents where babies shoot parents with the gun in their mother’s bag, kids shoot each other with a gun taken from a nightstand etc.

Of course, the usual response to this is some variation on a theme of the fear of crime, to which the only response is that violent crime has been declining for years and the people making most noise about it are frequently invested in the weapons industry.

I don't have a problem with Chicago enacting gun free zones and stopping all people and vehicles entering the city for cavity searches to stop the flow of weapons. I think it would be an illuminating experiment.

I suspect people might still find a way to smuggle things through the roadblocks but they could always build a wall.

And then there is the possibility that murder rate has no connection to gun control..

Did UK murder and violent crime decline after gun control? And if so, was gun control the cause?

https://mises.org/blog/gun-control-fails-what-happened-engla...

That’s an intersting source that appears to have an agenda. The opposite side of the equation is probably something like this https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2...

Open page... start reading. Popup takes over page. Close page.

I'm sure the content is interesting... but throwing intrusive popups in my face is a quick way to get me off ones site.

uMatrix is your friend.

Let me guess: 80% of murders happens in 20% of counties? Or make it 90-10.

As others in this discussion have pointed out the sensationalist (and technically correct but meaningless) headline isn't based on data corrected for the distribution of population.

Another reply elsewhere did point out that even corrected as such there was still an elevated chance (but not anywhere near as sensational of one) with denser areas of the population.

The problem here is that everything is balkanized now in the US. Nobody wants a strong federal government but more central control means enforcing a minimum standard, which we clearly do not have.

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