Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

I can be true that crime is WAY down form the ~1992 peak, and that it is way up relative to 2019. Crime can also be very localized, where a city wide increase in the rate of a particular crime might be 15% but for a few square blocks in Brooklyn it might be up 500%.

I'm a huge proponent of criminal justice reform. I hate cash bail, the drug war, over criminalization, and militarized policing. That said, NYPD needs to get off its collective ass on go solve murders, assaults, rapes, and grand larceny cases. The best deterrent for crime that we know of is the assurance that you will be caught.

There is simultaneously no reason that the NYPD should have a foreign intelligence unit and crime labs are underfunded.

View on HN

> I can be true that crime is WAY down form the ~1992 peak, and that it is way up relative to 2019

Why are we talking about crime in the early 90s? The original discussion started with nonethewiser saying "Not to mention crime has been increasing..." This statement doesn't have anything to do with crime in the 90s. ceejayoz then replied that rising crime is a media narrative and brought up crime in the 90s. This is a total straw man argument. No one is asserting that crime is as bad as it was in the 90s.

You need a substantial period of time to prevent localized events from affecting the numbers. COVID measures started 2 years ago, which could be involved. The "defund the police" movement caught wind within that period, it could be that crimes are being over-reported.

Analyzing crime rates over a couple of years is fraught with sampling bias. E.g. there was an 83% decrease in mass shootings between 2018 and 2020, does that mean those aren't a problem anymore?

> Why are we talking about crime in the early 90s

Because that's when violent crime peaked, and there's ongoing discussion now about moving back to criminal justice policies from that era. It's useful to compare current data to that time period to the uptick of the last 3 years and ask ourselves if we really want or need the same response today.

My point of view is that there are lessons to be drawn from the past.

OP expressed a concern about prison capacity, and I think the intent in referencing the 90s crime rate was to point out that Rikers has seen much higher crime rates that what we're currently seeing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com