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Comment by cratermoon | Hacker News Reader

> What spike in crime?

Well, see, that's the subtle part. Is there really a crisis-level crime wave (in the US)? There was a sharp decrease in crime in the initial months after lockdowns went into affect, but a spike in gun purchases. As such, homicides, which in the US are overwhelmingly committed with guns, are definitely up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rat...

But it's not anywhere near the historic rates of the '70s. You won't know that from reading the "violent crime collapse porn", which likes to point to absolute numbers (Most murders in 25 years!) while ignoring population and other factors.

So my contention is that the collapse has been embraced by the reactionary Law and Order types to sow fear and uncertainty. This is partly has a pushback against the attempts to reform police and partly as a way to push for economic austerity as well as a return to racist criminal justice policies of the 80s.

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It's so hard to find good data on this in one place. On one hand there's a pandemic, on the other hand there's police protests, etc. Year by year numbers will be so lumpy that you could support tons of narratives, I bet.

I couldn't find month-by-month numbers quickly for some of the cities in that article like Chicago or NYC, but Baltimore has some: https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2020

Interestingly there, the biggest spike during 2020 happened in May 2020, so generally before the George Floyd killing and protests and "defund the police" movement.

That's a pretty cherry you've picked.

Please be my guest, if you can find month-by-month shooting and/or homicide numbers for NYC/Chicago/LA/other cities that have seen big 2019->2021 homicide spikes. I spent a few minutes trying, but this one the only one I could find nicely broken down.

The coarse yearly numbers tell us these crimes have increased, they don't let us see how they play out with regard to the different things that changed in 2020.

looking at just 2019-2021 is cherry picking. Look back to the 70s and 80s if you really want to see that our current "crime wave" is nothing more than a made-up crisis for pushing a law-and-order agenda.

Looking at a potential inflection point where a trend reversed, to try to understand it (blip? new trend? change caused by change in underlying conditions?) is not cherry-picking. It's being responsible.

"It was worse in the 70s" is "the climate is always changing"-level deflection.

"It was worse in the 70s" is not a compelling argument for a political platform - having nothing meaningful to say in response to new events is exactly what would help "tough on crime" un-nuanced crackdown politicians elected.

The next mayor of NYC, Eric Adams, ran and won on a pro-police platform. He won in one the most diverse cities in the US, with the diverse bloc (his highest voter support was in majority black and hispanic neighborhoods) carrying him to victory. I wouldn't say this group is the law and order reactionaries you mentioned. Also, he is bringing back past policies that were labeled as racist. Why do you think he won with such a platform?

Here are some of those issues.

- Bringing back the plainclothes police unit that was famously disbanded last summer.

- Deploy more police to poor neighborhoods.

- Bring back a variation of stop and frisk (stop, ask questions and frisk).

How about ignoring the fact that a far higher percentage of shooting victims survive gunshot wounds now than they did in the 70's, which has a significant impact on lowering the number of gun deaths, while increasing the number of victims with lifelong impairments from their wounds.

Or the correlation/causation fallacy of assuming that new gun purchases (primarily in the suburbs) drove the spike in murders because it's politically inconvenient to assume significant departures of police officers in cities like Minneapolis might be a more potent correlating event to investigate?

50% of the gun murder victims in the USA are Black, and the vast majority of these murders (like all murders in the US) involve a perpetrator matching the ethnicity of the victim. The human beings who live in these neighborhoods feel like their safety has "collapsed", and they certainly aren't right wing reactionaries. They just don't want every summer holiday weekend to involve kids getting shot in crossfire between rival gangs. The polling data reveals this rather markedly.

Here's a Gallup poll (a few months after George Floyd's murder by Derek Chauvin) which shows that 81% of Black Americans want the police presence in their community to remain the same or be increased.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

It's almost as if the ivory tower, academic egghead activists who CLAIM to represent Black Americans weren't elected and shouldn't be viewed as if they were.

The ivory tower, academic egghead activists were elected by their own kind (ivory tower, egghead activists) via social media and mass media. Like most things related to minorities, it doesn’t matter what the actual minorities want (they’re brainwashed and have “internalized” their status or whatever) but rather what the majority can get using the minority group as a tool. In this case, it’s budgetary control via so-called police reform/defunding.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/instead-of...

We ALSO shouldn't ignore that behind the black murder rate is a pre-defund-the-police failure of the police, as a whole, to prioritize crimes against black victims in the same way they do against white victims.

"Get rid of police" can be a naive reaction to the newly-enabled broader exposure of police racism (violently racist cops are no new surprise to minorities!) at the same time as "actually, the police are good" can be a naive counter-reaction.

(And there are some very good ideas in the details of the general "defund" proposals - sending non-lethally-armed responders to handle non-violent interactions or traffic stops, say, is a good way to avoid needless escalation into someone's death, while in no way requiring us to get rid of cops that would investigate shootings.)

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