Killings in the U.S. are dropping at a historic rate
latimes.com
latimes.com
It's entirely possible that homicide has fallen back to the pre-Covid level, but pettier crimes are on the increase, and not being recorded due to lighter-touch policing as cited earlier in the article.
With that said, theft seems to be getting worse in many places and that is probably a direct result of lighter sentencing for petty theft.
Then it stands to reason that reporting on crimes in this or that city is mostly nonsense reporting, it doesn't convey any information that's useful to anyone.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/11/3/23438739/right-wing-n...
As crime was dropping precipitously since the 2000s people continued insisting crime was increasing.
More broadly violent crime has been falling for literally thousands of years. There’s various short term bumps in the rate, but the general trend is down across all societies. The past was simply vastly more dangerous than we are used to.
Your proposal around light property crime is simply wrong. You don’t need to trust police statistics for validation pickpockets used to be endemic in NYC to the point where people chained their wallets to their pants. Things have fallen so far we see cultural norms changing.
That isn’t to say every city or every year sees an improvement but the long term trends are really clear. Granted the existence of cellphones means they get stolen, but that’s more than offset by car radio theft practically disappearing.
I really wish I could find data prior to 1960, but I guess you probably end up with a poor signal:noise ratio at some point. Those data are all from the same source, so have meaningful comparability. In any case, the long term trends are anything but clear. Crime rates currently look something like an eccentric sine wave.
People in 200 years sure will have it easier, data wise.
Historically you can do numbers of thefts vs numbers of cars but that’s not a great. There was 61.7m passenger cars + 12.7m commercials vehicles in the 1960’s vs 140.7m passenger cars + 42.8m commercials vehicles by 1988. An increase dramatically faster than population.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246890/vehicles-use-uni...
From 1990, the numbers increase roughly with population which is why many comparisons start in 1990: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle...
328,200 / (61.7m + 12.7m) = 0.44% of vehicles stolen in 1960. 1,635,900 / 193.1m = 0.85% in 1990 is a big jump. But that then falls all the way to 2019’s 721,885 / 276.5m = 0.26% in 2019 sitting just over half of 1960’s rates.
PS: It’s perfectly reasonably to argue that what matters is rate over the population, but including non owners in the population is IMO misleading.
Historically what happened is that crime started rising in the mid 60s and then reached catastrophic levels in 80s-90s to the point that many were predicting the complete collapse of society. This is what drove all of the 'tough on crime' rhetoric and legislation of that era, or a certain politician's choice of referring to a certain demographic group as 'super-predators.' Crime rates then began plummeting over the next 30 years into modern times. And now we're back to seeing a rise in many forms of crime. What remains to be seen is whether it's noise, or whether we're headed 'into the 80s' again.
Or maybe 30 years from now we'll learn that we've all poisoned ourselves inadvertently, again.. The lead-crime hypothesis [1] is one explanation for the absurdly high rates of crime in the 80s-90s, and then it's subsequent collapse.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
Murder per 100k. 1960 5.1, 2014: 4.5, 2019 5.0. Go back to 1950: 5.3, 1940: 6.3 and it hit 9.5 in 1934.
PS: Lead is one factor post 1960’s, but changing demographics is another. The post war baby boom adds a lot of kids who aren’t killing anyone as preteens/young teens but average into population statistics. The low point of births during WWII is especially important when those years line up with older teens more likely to commit crimes. Add in a good economy and it’s a perfect storm for low crime.
Yeah the vehicular ownership rate only increased from 80% or whatever in the 60s to about 90% now a days. But I'm not saying that's why the increase in vehicles probably isn't a big factor. What I'm saying is that vehicular theft is a very intentional crime. Crimes like phone theft are highly opportunistic - somebody sees a fancy phone somebody forgot, and just decides to pocket it. So more people have more phones means more crime due to more random opportunity. But car theft is overwhelmingly a targeted crime, so changes in the number of cars is going to have a pretty negligible effect above some baseline point. It's like bank robbery - you're not going to just inherently have more bank robberies per capita because there are more banks.
Here’s one scholarly analysis, but I don’t want to get into various assumptions underlying such extrapolations: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2061893?x=-53.76031957390146&y=...
Households generally hold multiple people, a spouse, teen, or grandparent without a car can’t have their car stolen.
As to car theft being targeted, chop shops can only sell parts to people repairing actual cars which promotes theft based on the number of cars. Similarly local communities don’t represent the demographics of the entire country. Poor communities in 1960 had vastly fewer cars than they do today.
Similarly on the car stuff, I do agree with you. You can't strip cars for profit unless there's a minimally large number of people using cars, but we were obviously well beyond that point by 1960! 80% of households had cars! It's not like there was a shortage of people needing/wanting parts. That's far more than enough to create all the sort of venues necessary to be able to comfortably resell parts (or even entire cars, as occasionally happens).
> It’s not like there was a shortage of people needing/wanting parts
The problem here is you get a lot of different parts from a single stolen car. Steal 10 Honda Civics and you might be able to use almost every part from the first car, but by the 10th only those parts you have 10 buyers for are valuable.
The equilibrium is a function of the number of cars people own and the percentage of mechanics willing to use stolen parts. So even if a handful of people can steal an arbitrarily larger number of cars the limiting factor is mechanics willing to use stolen parts. Total number of mechanics scale with number of cars, but the percentage of those that are criminals can vary through time.
On the car thing, I think you made some good points. I regret dragging us down this line of argumentation which has been pretty strained, though informative! You were talking about light crime in general, and I voluntarily picked cars. That was pretty stupid. Anyhow, it's been fun meeting another impassive argumentative data whore. May our kind spread! And may we disagree again, soon!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...
Paying $500-$1000 would not be "minor" to me, but is minor in a crime sense.
I'm stating that these two variables (insurance claims) and (police reported crimes) aren't independent variables but actually closely linked.
El Salvador is such an extremely interesting study in violent crime. Until recently El Salvador had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. In recent times it has plummeted precipitously (>90% over the past decade) and in 2023, they may very well end up with a lower overall homicide rate than even the US.
What happened was a complete crackdown on gangs. [1] After declaring an emergency scenario, their government 'temporarily' suspended certain rights, and greatly empowered law enforcement. Anybody who even looked like a gang member was rounded up and thrown into prison. And instead of placing gang members together where they often manage to conspire even within prison, they eliminated all mobile service in the prisons and locked down the cells with members of different gangs placed in cells together. Happy times ensued, undoubtedly.
In short it's been the effective end of civil and human rights, yet it's been extremely effective at lowering crime. This system is far from ideal, because there's zero doubt that some, more or less, innocent individuals have suffered severe consequences at the hands of the government. Yet the overwhelming majority of criminals are also being eliminated, saving their innocent would-have-been victims. And, in the past, this sort of treatment of antisocial elements would have been perfectly normal.
When you look at studies of violent crime in the past, the evidence is hazy at best. You can find studies to say whatever you want, and then other studies to point out the flaws in those studies. Ultimately I think the vivid imagery we have, of the past as being especially violent, is because it's a set piece of practically all 'historic' media we consume. But the factual and logical support for it seems far less clear.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_gang_crackdown
What I can see causing a drop in reported crime is a lack of trust between police and a community - people may choose not to get the police involved out of fear they will make the situation worse, overreact, or may deem the punishment too harsh.
It’s possible to even go to the station, speak with the on duty officer, find out that they’ll basically do nothing and decide to not waste any more time on that. Such a conversation will not show up in any statistics, ditto an equivalent phone call.
For substantial losses, insurance claims make more sense. If it’s something that’s close in cost to the deductible and you expect your insurance premiums to go up after a claim, most people would not even submit that - there is not much pay off and higher premiums to worry about. So a lot of these costs are basically absorbed by the victims and statistics end up looking better than they should.
In my general area, 20-30 years ago, I’d sometimes forget to close the front door when I left (as in wide open, visible from the street). Nothing ever happened. A year ago, I forgot to lock the car at night - interior got ransacked and turned upside down. There wasn’t anything of value in there, but it sure left me feeling a lot less safe…
Because your insurance demands a formal report (because if you lie to the police it's a marginally more serious crime than if you lie to your insurance agent).
I’d trust auto theft and homicide and ignore the rest.
Understanding context around police reporting is key.
> The decline goes beyond homicides: Violent crime overall ticked down in 2022 across the country, the FBI numbers showed, returning the U.S. pretty much to the level of 2019, before the COVID-19-era increase.
It looks like the original survey was asking about whether there is anywhere near the respondent's home where they'd be afraid walk at night. That sounds to me like it's very much a question about perception rather than statistics. Of course, people rarely base that kind of belief on hard evidence: a single incident that happened to a friend of a friend might be enough to make you say "I'm never walking in that neighborhood at night".
Wouldn't the perception track the statistics in the scenario you've lined out? More people being stabbed, for example, results in more friends and friends of friends being unwilling to take a walk in that area.
I mean, you can have an outlier, a very popular person who triggers more friends/friends of friends, but on average, it seems like perception wouldn't be the worst way to measure this under the scenario you've laid out.
But, like, wouldn't a neighborhood with a lot of muggings be more likely to have more people doing that?
> So for instance when a group of well off people move into a depressed neighborhood, there might be the same number of muggings, but 10 times as much talk about it because these people go to the police and write to the paper about it.
That seems like a valid explanation for a single neighborhood that just started gentrifying, but seems unlikely to be common enough to disrupt the correlation that I'm talking about globally.
1. "Dropping at a historic rate" is such a weird thing to brag when it's just falling back to the pre-Covid level.
2. The centrepiece of this article is basically "people's feelings are wrong, the government's numbers are right".
You've mixed up the current level with the rate of decline. The article is pretty clear about it.
I didn't mix up anything. Covid is a very abnormal event, and seeing the numbers go back to pre-Covid quickly after Covid is more or less expected. It's a good thing (if it's true), but not that newsworthy.
It may be expected, but I disagree that it's not newsworthy. If a sharp-rise is newsworthy, then it's also important to inform people of the sharp-drop. Even if it makes sense to expect a sharp-drop after an anomalous sharp-rise, if you only report the sharp-rise then you leave people misinformed about the current situation.
I think it's fine to complain about the framing of the article, but I think the fact itself is newsworthy.
True, but such patronizing statements are pretty much what mainstream media has consisted of since at least 2016. There is a vast movement across most media outlets to push the narrative that 'the people' cannot be trusted and need oversight and control. It's probably the most significant anti-democratic wave in several generations, and ironically the perpetrators are mostly those who constantly accuse others of anti-democratic tendencies.
Not even El Salvador which is apparently a right-wing dictatorship where no one has rights has anything close to resembling North American rules.
When I hear mass shootings happen in Bernal and near 24th, and my street gets looted several times -- but crime is actually down and I'm safer than ever according to the stats -- something just doesn't add up to me.
I don't think there were more murders in SF, that kind of thing gets picked up and reported - but I don't think that the number of traffic incidents per murder has dropped 97%. Therefore, I also don't think the number of property crimes per murder has dropped, or car jackings, etc. I have no basis to work from, nothing to anchor my personal perceptions of safety.
I mean ffs SF boarded up downtown for the elections in 2020. That's some failed state shit. I've got my plywood all set for 2024.
The number of killings has never been high in my recollection. Dropping by some percent, large or small, doesn't impact my personal perception of safety. But all sorts of other things do.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/traffic-citations-san...
I do agree that traffic citations going down is an indicator of less citations rather than better traffic... but while you can avoid reporting on minor crime like speeding to some degree, it's quite a bit more difficult to stop tracking murder, which is what the original article is about.
They could both be wrong.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/new-fbi-report-shows-us...
The problem here is that they're citing this one guy as an authority on unpublished stats for 2023.
I'll say that, in the case of Seattle, I don't believe overall stats show the region is less safe than, say, the 90s. The 90s were sort of peak crack cocaine and street gangs. Having lived through that time and remembering the crimewave, I think the issue now is that crime back then was mostly in bad areas and didn't affect most middle or upper class folks. Now, especially after the gentrification and return to downtowns, middle and upper class folks are more exposed to crime. The meth and fentanyl epidemics are also helping to push crime into more suburban areas.
With all that said, and hopefully not to ruin my other points, I'll say I am leaning more conservative these days after seeing what has become of western cities(from San Diego to Seattle, I've visited them all fairly regularly over the past few decades). I don't think every problem is fixable via public policy, but damn, we're doing something wrong here.
Particularly Rio, Buenos Aires, and Asuncion.
Rio is don’t take your phone out if you don’t want it to get stolen.
BA is you might get mugged at night.
Asuncion is you can forget your phone at a cafe and someone will run after you to give it to you but don’t go to the bad areas or you’ll get killed.
Oddly Asuncion is the poorest city of them all, but also by far the most conservative. In Rio the women will rob you, in Asuncion not even the Venezuelans who live on the street will rob you.
What would you say has become of Seattle?
I have a relative in public safety(fire) who deals enough with cops to know that the problems are not coming from cops feeling spurned. A combination of lax laws and an almost pro-crime judiciary sent things into a spiral. Things finally got bad enough that PNW liberals are becoming more pragmatic and it looks to be improving. Time will tell.
Along the same vein, “What has become of western cities” is “rich and expensive”. And if by conservative you mean “want less government regulation against building homes” then I think you’re right.
The lived reality is that the city stopped making even the pretense of enforcing the law. Theft and assaults regularly happen in broad daylight and law enforcement mostly doesn’t bother. The prosecutors won’t prosecute much short of attempted murder these days; no point in arresting people if they are going to be immediately released. People stop reporting crime because at best their insurance premiums will increase and at worst they will be loudly accused of oppressing the downtrodden or some such twaddle. There is no ROI. Many women who have lived in these communities a long time no longer feel safe.
Anecdotally, this is driving a lot of people to move into the high rises with real security from high-density neighborhoods like Capitol Hill where having your building invaded by miscreants happens surprisingly often. People put a lot of value on being able to live in a place where they feel secure, and so anyone that can afford it is retreating behind secured walls.
I also happen to follow court data and the idea that 'they won't prosecute much short of attempted murder' is just ludicrous.
Hmm, sentence seems a bit light, no?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago
[2]: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Chicago-carjack...
So I think you have to be specific about where but people in Chicago had a valid claim about the perception of crime increasing. These are major crimes so it's also possible reported major crimes have decreased across the country but are increasing in some areas.
e.g. in Germany you are saver now, then 30 years ago
but perception, especially in certain groups, is that crime got way worse
(I'm intentionally using a 30 year comparison to avoid any short term up-down's around covid.)
I live on a street that sees almost daily crime (smash and grabs from car windows, bike theft, delivery theft). The police usually don't even bother coming to check things out because they're so routine and the police are so busy. So it does feel a bit useless reporting them to the police, and eventually you become a bit numb to it all as crime becomes normalized.
Can that then explain why crime perception can be high while crime reports come down?
We often compare the difference in crime between US and Europe, or US and Canada as a direct result of the gun policy (even this article mentions this). But there are many differences between these regions. Canada and European countries all have much stronger social safety nets and typically a more close society in general (not trying to make a race homogeneity argument but one of walkability). I wish more conversation would revolve around this, but I'm afraid of the complexity in this (because you have to solve a lot of problems) makes this unattractive. But if the problems were simple to solve they probably would have been solved. Everything is highly multifactored these days.
There has actually been a large trend of decreasing crime since the 90's, when politicians talked about "super predators." A lot of research has been done on this and there's been been discussions if it is things like the decrease of lead in the air, abortions, or other things, but generally it doesn't seem that "tough on crime" was the dominating factor.
Another interesting statistic is that most Americans believe crime is increasing year over year despite the reverse happening. It's a good example of perception bias and probably is one of those factors mentioned above.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/11/20/facts-abo...
On the contrary, COVID-19 didn’t suddenly reintroduce lead, ban abortion (that came a few years later, in only a few places, setting up a natural experiment we haven’t yet seen the results of), or do anything more than shut down schools and shatter the police-public relationship.
Post-Ferguson we knew what happens after anti-police protests (more murders).
https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...
(To be precise, -300 police killings +1000 to +6000 community-based killings)
The current trend looks like Ferguson effect followed by cities suddenly deciding to take murder seriously again. Portland is having success with focused deterrence and cure violence/credible messengers. Hard to say if that’s diverging from nationwide trends because loads of other cities are taking the same approach.
None of that challenges the idea that post-90s crime declines were fueled by more intensive policing.
From the FBI's own data[1], which is used as the main citation of this post, these were the homicide rates per 100k for the past eleven years:
2012: 4.7
2013: 4.5 (-0.2)
2014: 4.4 (-0.1)
2015: 4.9 (+0.5)
2016: 5.4 (+0.5)
2017: 5.3 (-0.1)
2018: 5.0 (-0.3)
2019: 5.1 (+0.1)
2020: 6.5 (+1.4)
2021: 6.8 (+0.3)
2022: 6.3 (-0.5)
Using this data, the same headline could have been run in 2018. This number is +1.2 pre-pandemic.
[1]: https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
Such a bad headline. Look at the raw data at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
Pre-covid, around 4.5 - 5.5 per 100k ppl per year.
2020 jumped up to 6.5
2021 up to 6.8
2022 down to 6.3 - AMAZING DROP!
2023 ~5.5 (based on estimated 12% drop)- AMAZING DROP!!! WHY AREN'T PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT HOW MUCH CRIME IS GOING DOWN!?!?!
Hard to tell how much of this is simply inept journalism, and how much is fed by a broken incentive system.
That's concerning; if we're forcing people into each others space, we should at least prevent them from killing each other.
<= 2019: 4.5-5.5 == 2023: ~5.5 (between: significantly higher, also COVID, probably not a coincidence)
Edit: Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
Here's a list of those killed: https://israelpalestinetimeline.org/2021deaths/. Pay special attention to all the women and children.
This is not a country to we should aspire to match murder rates.
And the falseness of that distinction is exactly my point. Nobody watches their baby get murdered and says "Well at least it was at the hands of a government agent! My country is still a very safe place to live!". Yet if you were to believe those stats that's exactly what they're claiming: deaths at the hands of government agents "don't count" when considering the safety of an area.
This argument is disingenuous and should be called out at such.
Murders committed by people wearing cute badges in their arm are still murders.
That’s not to say that minority murder means less in any way, but on the contrary to question whether America records it to an extent other countries might not. I do not know if this is the case or not, and I don’t know how one might be able to tell. But I’ve personally been in slums of third world countries that the police would flat out refuse to answer calls to, and I can’t imagine anyone there was taking the time to report each death to the United Nations when even their own local police couldn’t give enough of a shit (/were too scared) to show up.
We know largely who is committing murder, we know who they are murdering, we know basically down to the blocks where it is happening, and we know why…
These things are all ignored because no one actually wants to do anything about it or they don’t like the ideas.
Who is out there advocating for the national guard to deploy in Riverdale, Englewood, Pullman… or Monroe, Opelousas… or Newark by itself?
No one. Definitely not the repeatedly elected governments there.
It’s a poverty and drug problem and we know we don’t solve those.
If it’s reverting to pre-COVID levels that seems like a much stronger suggestion that it has very little to do with who is in charge.
Those comments could be troll farms, or real people, no idea. But, a non-trivial portion of America thinks like this. Ignore/discounting this group is actually how Trump won the presidency. Progressives got ahead of themselves (ourselves?) and got blind-sided.
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/americans-murder-capital-gr...
???
That just doesn't come _close_ to matching the reality I live in.
If they voted for him, otherwise they sure do blame.
I don't have any knowledge of what a "reasonable" homicide rate is, but that seems extraordinarily low for anywhere in any point in history.
If London had the same homocide rate per capita as Seattle, that would equate to 1459 homocides in the same period.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/22860/london/population#:....
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/862984/murders-in-london....
2018 - 17k
2022 - 21k
"Pinker was included in the flight log for Epstein’s plane, which was dubbed the “Lolita Express,” for example, in 2002. He was photographed with him at a gathering in 2014. And he shared an affidavit from the case via Twitter in 2015."
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinker...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37970943 - 1 day ago (4 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37958979 - 2 days ago (15 comments)
Perhaps homicides are rapidly decreasing overall. Meanwhile in Seattle surpassed 2022’s record setting homicide count with 3 months to spare.
Seattle has roughly 2x the pre-pandemic homicide count. And roughly triple the count from 10 years ago.
Is the rate declining nationally? Maybe! Is that going to impact news coverages in areas where it is not decreasing? Absolutely not. Should it? Obviously no.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/seattle-homicides-set-record-bu...
https://www.elmundous.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/ErvchOb...
Is there a strong association between local crime rates (and/or direction of change) and local perceptions though? As far as I can tell, it’s quite common among New Yorkers to think crime is rising too, even though it really is falling in NYC, unlike Seattle and DC. But I have not seen a quantitative study correlating these. Are people who live in areas where crime actually is rising more likely to think it is?
Homicides are well tracked. They’re either up or down. It varies by locale.
Petty theft and similar isn’t tracked. Everyone in a city knows the police can not and will not do anything about it. Small crimes simply are not reported. It’s a waste of time. The only data we have is anecdata.
If someone uses stats to claim non-violent crime is down they’re full of shit. They don’t know. If someone says it’s up they’re relying on anecdotes. So maybe true, maybe false.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics. :(
https://static.abcotvs.com/kabc/images/cms/rp8MS-homicides-i...
Why not look at those one by one?
Guns last basically forever, so I don't see how a spike in purchases followed by a drop in purchases would explain a spike and then a drop in crime. The guns are presumably still around.
Next, a pull-back in policing in 2020 may have reversed somewhat by now. A bad DA in SF was recalled. It's plausible that this explains at least a part of the spike followed by the drop.
I'd be interested in hearing other explanations. Maybe the criminals are busy with other things (jobs, etc.)? Maybe the free flowing pandemic cash drying up means less money to fight over? Maybe criminal-enablers (drug users, etc.) are busy with other stuff?
Sort of disappointing.