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Lead(Pb) in the air maybe?

Yes. Lead moreso that other pollutants. Areas with higher concentrations of ground lead (older, poorer parts of cities) are pretty strongly linked with violent crime.

Pretty well documented, don't have the citations handy though. It's been thoroughly discuss on HN.

Rudimentary citation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

Interested - what would be causing the high lead levels in those areas, not that lead has been removed from petrol? Is it legacy contaminants or other ways that lead is released into the environment?

I was warned off eating the food I grew in my garden in London as historically people threw their ash into their gardens, so the soil their can be pretty polluted.

A lot of it is air pollution which settled into the soil decades ago. Hard to clean up

Lead is still present in Avgas.

100LL is used in such vanishingly small quantities compared to basically every other source of lead it may as well be rounding error.

Someone always brings this into any discussion of lead as though we should all be outraged that lead isn't technically banned in all fuel.

There was a time when they did put lead in petrol (i.e. gasoline) and that was then burnt by cars, which meant lead did end up in the atmosphere.

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