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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

So it's returned to a fairly stable pre-COVID level? To some degree, that's a somewhat noteworthy things only got somewhat worse in a very abnormal situation. On the other hand, it mostly means that things are just back to the status quo and aren't really getting better either.

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It’s still worth pointing out to counter a narrative. Since the onset of COVID we’ve had a new President from a different party and there’s been a lot of talk attributing bad crime figures to Democratic control.

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.

The president has virtually no impact on crime (not directly anyways - some research shows a hope factor can reduce violence in areas with a president that matches the area's party or demographic). The state and local leaders have a much higher impact since most crime is prosecuted at those levels.

Very few Americans blame crime on the president. More likely their mayor or police chief. Sometimes the sheriff, DA or governor. Occasionally they blame the criminal or victims too.

Where are you getting very few? I'd say pick 5 random Americans and at least 2 will blame the president for most problems.

My statement was mostly informed by my weekday mornings at the neighborhood rec center. Half of the geezers I talk to voted for Trump. The other half are so old they probably last voted for Bush — and I don’t mean W. They all talk shit about Biden; primarily about immigration. But when they go on about crime, it’s always local politicians they blame.

> Very few Americans blame crime on the president.

???

That just doesn't come _close_ to matching the reality I live in.

> Very few Americans blame crime on the president.

If they voted for him, otherwise they sure do blame.

I believe you're discounting the power of Fox News[0].

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...

Loosely related - I hate that people get the narrative in their heads (in itself isn't bad) but when presented with new info, won't let go of the flawed concept.

Yeah, it’s like if you had a commercial plane crash in 2024, and then none in 2025, writing an article about the precipitous decline in plane crashes. It’s like no, it was just that in 2024 there was a huge increase and we reverted to the norm.

The fact that you reverted to the norm *is* important and newsworthy. It's how you know that, in fact, 2024 was an *anomalous* increase, and not an important change in the base rate.

Sure, but it makes the headline here very misleading.

Nope. It's on its way down towards pre-covid levels, but still (by the article's estimate for 2023) 10% higher than pre-covid.

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.

I don’t know, I’m pretty excited about 6.8 to 5.5. What would you suggest/like to see?

Personally I would like to see us go below countries like Afghanistan (4.0), Argentina (4.6), Kenya (5.3), Iran (2.4), Israel (1.9), Palestine (0.9), or India (2.9). And preferably as low as, for instance, Spain (0.6), or even Japan (0.2).

Edit: Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...

You know how you get there? You go from 6.8 to 5.5 first.

Excuse me what? You’re claiming there are only 0.9 homicides per 100k people in Palestine? That’s so far from the truth I can’t begin to take you seriously.

That's the number Wikipedia gives for 2021. It's sourced from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Maybe the data is self-reported and Palestine fudged the numbers? Maybe it's accurate for the time period and just surprising?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...

At least 280 Palestinians were killed by Israelis in 2021. With a population of ~5,000,000, that alone accounts for 5.6 deaths per 100k lives.

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.

War deaths aren't criminal homicides, they are a problem but a different kind of problem, not something related to the crime rate in a country.

There was no war declared then. The actions were identical to Mexican immigrants coming over and going on murdering spees here. Would you not consider that an example of crime that should be accounted for?

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.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

How exactly would you strongman the claim that Palestine is a low crime area we should want to approximate?

Just ignore Palestine from original argument

The purpose of the argument was to present areas we innately consider “dangerous” and try to pretend like they are in fact safer than America by secretly disregarding all the deaths that happen at the hands of government agents. But it is those very deaths that make us consider those areas dangerous. This isn’t exclusive to Palestine, but it is the most egregious example.

This argument is disingenuous and should be called out at such.

Murders committed by people wearing cute badges in their arm are still murders.

I regret including Palestine and Afghanistan in my original comment. I didn't mean to be disingenuous. I should have included more countries like Argentina, Kenya, and India that aren't politically charged. My main point is that 5.5 should be seen as absurdly high for a first world country, and not just a little worse than usual.

I wonder how the long tail of murders per “neighborhood” looks in those other countries. It’s well-known that in America the vast majority of murders happen in tiny areas. And if one were to look at only the predominant race in America, the murder rate would match the best of the examples you just listed (3.0, the same as racially-homogeneous India).

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.

it seemed obvious from his comment? He wants a drop to BELOW precovid levels because covid was the correlated with a sharp increase and covids effects on society at large have now (mostly) subsided

Maybe around 2.0 where rial USA is?

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.

Of course, to the level of other saner countries?

Our drug economy alone is larger than a lot of “more civilized” countries. But we can’t talk about that. Only look at murder as some naturally occurring phenomenon.

It contextualized, of course.

<= 2019: 4.5-5.5 == 2023: ~5.5 (between: significantly higher, also COVID, probably not a coincidence)

0. We'd like to see 0

Yes, we should aspire to a murder rate seen only in the asteroid belt and other places uninhabited by humans. Recreating those circumstances would temporarily raise the homicide rate in a given year but it would drop to 0 in the next.

There’s always going to be a stabby techie taking you from 0 to 1.

What’s your plan for that? I was going to say maybe put every single American in prison, but even that probably wouldn’t work.

Homicide rates in jails or prisons are only slightly lower than the population in general.

> Homicide rates in jails or prisons are only slightly lower than the population in general.

That's concerning; if we're forcing people into each others space, we should at least prevent them from killing each other.

Check the charts since 1991. Homicides per capita have dropped by half.

A lot of US cities still had pretty bad violent (and property) crime rates going into the 1990s--and were still losing population. It's great that things are better than 1991 but the general consensus is that things were often pretty bad then.

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