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Comment by WheatMillington | Hacker News Reader

>People are murdering less than a few decades ago

Check your stats, this is quickly becoming outdated. Murder rates are back up where they were in the 90's in many parts of the USA.

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Yeah, source? There is very much political "out of control crime" narrative from certain players, but fairly often it has zero to do with reality.

But, the fear got some innocent door ringers killed already, so if the fear goes up, we might get there.

To be fair, the person you're replying to did specify "some parts" of the US. While you are correct the homicide is clearly down across the US, compared to the peaks in the 90s, there are also places where it is creeping back to 90s levels. Philadelphia and Chicago are two 'random' cities I just checked the statistics for and their murder rates are either at or close to the rates in 90s, and way up from the rates in the 2010s.

I'm guessing the rates are up in the cities, and down in the rural areas. And there's a good reason for this: there's fewer and fewer people in the rural areas and small towns, and the ones there are getting old. All the younger people are in the cities, and murders aren't normally committed by retired people.

I'm guessing the rates are up in the cities, and down in the rural areas.

It's more complicated than that. New York and Houston, for example, are way down from their peaks, and no one would consider those rural.

This source sorta confirms it: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...

where's the post-2020 data?

for major cities it is here: https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CCJ%E2%80...

a personal anecdote on issues with crime data:

the old truck i've got got broken into and the ignition got punched out and someone tried to steal it, but even though it is a 2000 it has an immobilizer so they weren't successful. i didn't bother reporting it. it was way under my insurance deductible and the cops aren't going to do anything due to a few hundred bucks of property damage. that incident won't appear in any statistics.

declining levels of relatively minor crime may reflect growing awareness that reporting it to the police is just a waste of everyone's time.

Source?

You can use CDC WONDER[1] and the FBI's statistics[2] to check it. In terms of homicide, in raw numbers we are at 90s levels, but per-capita it's significantly down.

1) https://wonder.cdc.gov/Deaths-by-Underlying-Cause.html 2) https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/

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