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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> so far in 2021 there have been more homicides in Portland than there were in 2017 and 2018 and we are on track for over 100 homicides this year

Out of curiosity, have any other items than "defund the police" happened in, say, March 2020 through the present, that might've affected crime rates?

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Yes, the gun violence reduction team was disbanded. Since then the number of shootings has skyrocketed. Police are in such disarray and completely disrespected that they don't even go into certain neighborhoods anymore.

I'll be a bit more direct.

Claiming "defund the police" is the obvious cause of an increase in crime while completely ignoring the global pandemic and its economic/employment effects and their resulting impact on crime is confirmation bias.

OK, well reducing the police is hardly an appropriate action in the middle of a crime spike. Ted Wheeler said the shootings started trending up a few months before the disbanded the gun violence reduction team...so is that better or worse? The team was disbanded because the stats came out that almost half the people pulled over by the team were black...so it's immediately racist. However half of the shooting victims are black and more than half the suspects are black. The shootings occur in primarily black neighborhoods...which is where the team focused their efforts. I guess to avoid the perception of being racist they would rather get rid of something that was working and let people be killed.

Yes. High poverty is directly linked to an increase in crime. High unemployment leads to that.

Poverty is actually a quite weak predictor of crime rates once you condition on demographic factors such as percent single-parent households.

Thank you. Some of the poorest people I know are deeply moral. Indeed a poorly run home is the largest predictor - and too little (or too much) money does magnify the problem, poverty isn’t synonymous with crime.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/google-shadow-bans-sear...

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