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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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/

> 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.

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/

Yeah but the majority of murders are not spousal.

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.

Less enforcement and reporting

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