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Comment by mandelbrotwurst | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, every one of the cities here had significantly more than just one one or two murders.

At a glance at the linked source data, it looks like Seattle came in with the lowest values on this list, at 47 murders for 2020 vs 27 in 2019.

One thing of note is that some of the values appear to be for not quite the entirety of 2020.

The first sentence of the story's second paragraph includes a link to a Twitter post [1] from the person who compiled the data, which contains a second link [2] to the Google Doc that he created.

1 - https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905

2 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5D...

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I wonder, is it lack of deterrence (police presence and follow through) due to SARS-CoV2 or due to side-effects of SARS-CoV2 (perh psychological effects)?

The loss of millions of jobs is likely to have played a role here.

The explanation doesn't have to be so exotic. Millions of people in the US lost their jobs this year and the stress and financial difficulties from that increase the rate of all violent crime.

Right but murder is not something regular people decide they're going to do just because "things are difficult".

It's usually something people who are apt to do that do (I know almost self referential). But what I mean is, it's possible that people given to violence either didn't see the same deterrence so they acted, or as you are saying people who would be unlikely suspects were pushed over the edge and did this as a side-effect of the virus.

I don't think it's a lack of deterrence. It's people who are between a rock and a hard place and lose it. Personally I don't know anyone who's died of the virus but I do know people who killed themselves last year because of the economic situation.

Suicides are not counted in the murder category though.

An important note is that despite the large increase from last year we're still way below where we were in the 90s.

Also police are one of the few things that didn't have a big drop in the number of people working it this year so I'm not sure where the smaller deterrent would be coming from. There's very few people who are walking around thinking about killing someone that then see a cop are decide not to. A lot of murders aren't even premeditated they're short spur of the moment violent outbursts.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...

I really hate this sort of hand-wavey explanation; pretending that all sorts of bad behavior is committed by Jean Valjeans who would be model citizens if only they had a job.

I can see that the increased stress would correlate to a small rise in domestic violence, but remember also that for the first half of thr lockdown, people in the lower income tiers were getting more in unemployment (due to the extra 600 / week bonus) than they had been getting from their actual jobs.

I happen to know someone in that position who wasn't stressed, just bored.

Receiving unemployment implies having employment. The poorest among us don't have steady jobs.

I was replying to "millions lost their jobs" as a reason for turning to violent crime.

Most homicide is not motivated by profit/revenue.

They're not directly but that doesn't mean they're not correlated. The same way murders don't actively cool you down but that doesn't mean heat waves don't cause higher murder and violent crime rates...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/higher-temperatures-can-le....

That's pretty clearly not it. The UK for example has seen no spike in murders:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283093/homicides-in-the-...

The most obvious explanation is also the simplest: American cities spent most of 2020 attacking their own police forces, psychologically and financially.

> That's pretty clearly not it. The UK for example has seen no spike in murders...

The UK - and the rest of the developed world - did a lot more income support to the general public.

https://www.newsweek.com/heres-how-us-coronavirus-stimulus-p...

> Britain's government is issuing grants covering 80 percent of unemployed workers' salaries up to a total of £2,500 ($3,084) a month. The package also reportedly contains statutory sick pay for employees that have been told to self-isolate.

That's more per month than the US has given in total.

Job stress and financial difficulties don't turn a person into a murderer. Most murderers are psychopathic/sociopathic and predisposed to more serious crimes. That said...

There is a recent shift of police and social resources away from "crime as usual" toward the handling of social unrest and crowds/mobs. Most departments try to anticipate such shifts, which strongly affect the size and allocation of manpower within the police department. A small police department can find itself unable to investigate serious crimes in times of social unrest. Anyone who is intelligent and who wants to commit a premeditated crime knows this and could be expected to take advantage of it.

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