Homicides are plummeting in American cities | Hacker News Reader

Homicides are plummeting in American cities

wsj.com

47 pointsbirriel53 comments

> The declines so far in 2024, on top of last year’s drop, mirror the steep declines in homicides of the late 1990s.

These sorts of articles (there have been more than a few) usually say "wow, homicide rates are down last year", but don't always connect the dots by noting that homicide rates have been going down since 1991, and now they are returning to that trend after the aberration of the pandemic years. The interesting question—this articles touches on a theory about it—is why they went up for a few years, not why they're going back to doing what we expect them to be doing.

There are a lot of interesting questions. Why did it go up in the first place during the pandemic. We didn’t see this trend in other developed countries. Also, why has crime gone down so much since the early nineties? More police? More incarceration? Abortion? Lead? There are so many theories.

There was a fair bit of civil rights activity, vigilantism, defund the police initiatives, and riots that coincided with this period that almost certainly was exacerbated by Covid mandates. We also lack social services other Western nations have and homelessness spiked in big cities coinciding with loss of employment.

I hid out in the Denver Lodo area by the main train station in a luxury building doing my cushy remote software gig while right outside my building were bands of homeless teens doing hard drugs in broad daylight. Occasionally assaults happened, sometimes for seemingly no reason. There was a citizen patrol group formed by homeowners to help keep the area safe by working with the police until permanent encampments were set up. Some homeowners were irate about what police would and wouldn’t do. It was a weird time.

I hate saying this as I’m firmly on the left and this stuff is a bogeyman of the right, but I imagine it must play a role if we’re trying to ask what was unique about US culture during this period.

I had a coworker whose remote job in the suburb didn’t protect him and he became one of the pandemic murder statistics after his wife shot him in the head. I doubt the increase in murders was driven by random street violence; murder had almost always been amongst people known to each other.

Not murder, but the divorce rate supposedly boomed in China as people were stuck in apartments with their SOs. China's lockdown was much more harsh than the USA's, however.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/divorces-...

Intimate partner homicide seems like it would be a major factor, but that apparently wasn't the case.

"There was no significant change in intimate partner homicides during shutdown months and victimization survey reports of intimate partner violence were lower".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9343070/

Also annecdotal, we had a few random murders in Denver in public places at the time in the news shortly after I arrived.

I hadn't even been there a week and there was a manhunt with about a dozen police cars outside my building. Someone shot someone point blank at a supermarket just a few blocks away. I can't underscore enough how nice that area I was staying in, it was one of the most expensive places in the whole city... my landlord sold the 1 bedroom condo I lived in for $675k after I left in 2022.

On the ground the answer feels like 'culture'. People worship violence a lot less. Maybe that has other causes, but maybe not

I horrified my wife a while ago by telling her about how we would "call each other out"* after school, last century in the States.

She replied that, yes, boys at her school would get mad at each other and start fighting, but none of them would have even thought of making appointments to punch each other in cold blood.

* is this still a thing in the Old Country?

I can verify this happened as late as 2002 in Canada as well. I am kind of conflicted about its apparent demise because on one hand it is kind of barbaric and not fair since some got singled out more than others, on the other hand the percentage of 20 somethings i have interviewed in the last five years where i cant help think the problem with the person is they didnt get punched in the face enough by their peers growing up is probably a high single digit percentage...

Probably still in some places, but not in the world I live in.

> Why did it [murder rate] go up in the first place during the pandemic.

One easy hypothesis is that a) we know you’re most likely to get murdered by your spouse, this is true for both men and women and b) we know lockdowns forced people into 24/7 sharing space with their partners.

So I think it would be interesting to see how much of that homicide increase was from domestic violence incidents. And whether domestic violence overall showed an increase.

Yeah but the majority of murders are not spousal.

Surprisingly not a factor.

"There was no significant change in intimate partner homicides during shutdown months and victimization survey reports of intimate partner violence were lower".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9343070/

Less enforcement and reporting

The article doesn't cover how this is concentrated locally (shoving incidents in the NYC subway - to the tracks) vs. state-wide, or how the 2 databases the Federal government maintains and uses, have been redefined, and with unreliable reporting by the states due to the lag in the new reporting format of the federal government, doesn't allow for a like comparison over previous datasets. I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn during the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, and yes, homicides are down. I think it was around almost 3k per year for NY then, and is a factor of 10 less now. But we had things like Son of Sam, FALN bombings in NYC (49 of them in the 70s), hijackings at the NY airports (137 in the US alone in the 60s to 70s), etc...

My intuition is that this trend will continue, there are likely many parameters, but one of largest is the proportion of young males with unfair prospects.

The unfairness is not changing much, but demography is, and we have threshold (cascading) effects.

I'm not quite sure how to address the fact that in society various biases cloud our perception of safety despite statistics to the contrary.

It’s a hard problem. One avenue of improvement that I think about frequently is re-socialization of suburban and rural dwellers to urban life: it’s a lot easier to convince non-urban dwellers that our cities are lawless warzones when their only experiences of their local city are the news or through the windshield of their car. I think re-densification and mass transit will (if we ever manage to do them) do wonders to counter the shrinkage of social spheres/spheres of participation that suburbanization has caused.

Bring back leaded gasoline!

Oh, sorry, we were supposed to be solving problems.

Banning condoms/p-pills etc would be a good bad idea too with about the same effect on crime.

"Womens right" and "eco friendly" policies seems to have had the greatest effect to reduce crime, which I guess is purely incidental.

I wonder what could be done about the crime rate if you'd put the EPA in charge ... the people that self select for fighting crime at the political policy level seems bad at it. Maybe literal carrots in schools would help more then 1000 prisons. Who knows.

While we're at it, get rid of the condoms and pregnancy tests in all the vending machines!

Oh, sorry, we were supposed to be talking about the US.

Good safety statistics is an outcome that is obtained because everyone is paranoid about safety. :)

What good statistics, by the way? I don't see that in the article, which clearly says that killings are plummeting, but from a spike that occurred during the pademic, and have not recovered to the pre-pandemic level.

The news is the problem. Crime gets reported and published in newspapers and on news sites. A peaceful day without crime is inherently not news worthy. This clouds people's perception more than any biases do.

Perhaps because statistics themselves often also carry biases, with reality being contrary to what they show.

There's a reason for the quip "lies, damn lies, and statistics".

Because people have real life experience and will always put that above some abstract statistics that can be gamed in a hundred different ways. Ask almost anyone in NYC, for example, and they'll tell you that the city feels less safe than it a decade ago.

>Ask almost anyone in NYC, for example, and they'll tell you that the city feels less safe than it a decade ago.

"The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it". —Jeff Bezos <https://sports.yahoo.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-explains-2123...>

Eh, there is so much that can be gamed here that any simple statement made about this is probably bullshit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic are prime examples of this. If you get the news (and now social media) blasting a message that you are in danger 24x7 it will have a very stressful effect on a large number of people putting them in a heightened state of fear even when the rate of underlying incidences has not changed. Moreso, because people are afraid and suspicious their average interactions with other people will amplify this effect.

People are weird social creatures and by just hearing stories we can fall into harmful lines of behavior. Suicide contagion for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/.

It feels about the same to me. I've lived here my whole life. One notable change is how much expectations of "safety" in the city have expanded: there are neighborhoods my family would not have gone to as a kid that are now considered trendy or even wealthy. The city's progress there has not been uniform (and in many ways continues to punish the city's neediest demographics), but that alone is a substantial factor in the overall feeling of safety.

(NYC's blessing and curse is that literally anything out of the ordinary to ever happen gets recorded. This results in paradoxical motion: the crime trendline has consistently gone down decade-over-decade, but there's more public evidence of those crimes for real-time news to report on.)

Compared to 30-40 years ago, sure, but where is trendy now that you wouldn't go in 2014? I can't think of anywhere that's dramatically improved in that time. The southernmost parts of The Bronx, maybe?

The transition in Gowanus has been pretty dramatic, as has LIC. Bushwick and Ridgewood (to a lesser extent) were already gentrifying by 2014, but the pace in both in the past 5 years has been dramatic. Further out/deeper in, I think I can say the same about PLG and Flatbush.

(As I said, I think the feeling of safety is not very different between 2014 and 2024. What's changed is that the city's "zone of interest" wherein people expect to walk around uneventfully and with things to do has expanded significantly.)

an overworked Emergency Room medic quickly commented here in a major gun violence area in US West Coast -- ER medicine is so much better now, fatality from gunshot wounds has gone down because people are saved in the ER.. secondly lots of thugs shoot to wound not kill.. it happens daily.. most gunshot victims are not listed in the news at all, it is so common.

>not listed in the news at all,

A lot of people miss that the news is generally a very poor representation of what's occurring around you, especially in larger cities. A middle class person getting shot/killed can hold the news cycle for a week. Meanwhile a dozen poor people could get killed without a mention in a paper.

Bias in reporting (this is on air time for particular kinds of incidents) dramatically shapes the publics view on the world around them and distorts the actual reality of what happens every day.

compare https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/coverage-2

> Conclusion: In the future, there will be one final violent death, which will be covered forever, non-stop, by every news network.

Any good websites with up-to-date historical USA crime-per-capita graphs?

I'm tired of looking at 2-year-old data, or manually stitching together quarterly UCR crime counts [1] with population estimates.

[1] https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...

Not that murderers are necessarily rational, but it is virtually impossible to not be caught in 2024. Between everything being on video, DNA, license plate tracking, mobile phone geolocation, web search history, tons of other databases, it's pretty rare for a major crime to be a mystery. At some level, the near-certainty of getting caught must have some deterrent effect.

I thought unsolved homicide percentages are going up. If I remember correctly from NPR it used to be 10% in 1960s and now it is around 50%.

NY is becoming more and more surveilled. I just watched Demolition Man again for the third time in 30 years. Great movie!

Fewer murders are “solved” today which suggests the opposite.

The existence of things like DNA tests causes people to want more evidence today before they’re willing to convict resulting in fewer dubious arrests. Which may mean we’re simply catching the wrong person less often, but we could also be letting more guilty people go. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

I believe the Atlantic had an article about this awhile back and made a plausible case that a rising proportion of gun murders probably lowers the solve rate. Basically anything that puts some distance between the victim and perpetrator tends to obfuscate evidence.

>but we could also be letting more guilty people go.

Yes, this is how the US legal system is designed.

>want more evidence today before they’re willing to convict

This is why you should be completely suspect of the data from the past. Law enforcement is great at going out, grabbing the usual suspects, then pinning some evidence on them. This is great for LEO. They get a win, the public feels safe, and they get reelected. It's unfortunate the actual killer is still on the street because it's a lot easier to frame someone than it is to do real (expensive) police work.

https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Morton_(criminal_justi...

Yes that’s what I was suggesting. However, it’s worth remembering that some people kill quite often so there’s real costs to having extremely high standards.

Which doesn’t mean we should do the old convict a random drifter in the area, just acknowledge there’s real negative consequences in both directions.

I live in Chicago and we've got an 8% clearance rate for murder. Its virtually impossible to be caught here.

yeah but they never stop looking. so given a long enough time I am sure this figure goes up

(We do not appear to have an 8% clearance rate).

Look at a graph. Homicide rate in 2014 was lower. Even after this "record" drop it's higher than a decade ago.

I am looking. They are still dropping. That's the only way to get from bad to better.

If you zoom out on the graph, 2014 was a local low point, then it recovered a bit, then it fell a bit. It feels like we are trying to find a new equilibrium that is not as bad as the 90s but not as good as the time between 2005-2015.

Continuing the 30 year trend in decreasing violent crime that only briefly pushed back up during the start of the pandemic, ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Cri... . Nowhere near the highs of the late 1970s/1980s/very early 90s. Unfortunately this WSJ article is behind a paywall.

Or the 300 year secular trend: ...violent crime in the United States has been in decline since colonial times. The homicide rate has been estimated to be over 30 per 100,000 people in 1700, dropping to under 20 by 1800, and to under 10 by 1900.

Credit to WSJ for include some charts and tables in this article, but the whole article could've been replaced with a time-series chart of total homicide rates and some small multiples for cities.

Its lead. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...

I remember going to elementary school in the 70's, and teachers were always berating us as the worst class they had ever seen. They said that kids behavior was just getting worse and worse.

They were not wrong. Funny thing is that when people tried to ban lead gas, they thought that pc, woke, effort was part of the general decline of western civilization too. Communists trying to weaken the U.S. (there were communists back then).

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