Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Dude, no it’s not. Everyone is parroting the “crime dropped from 2023” line, but nobody mentions that the 2023 spike pushed DC’s murder rate to as high as Haiti. Not Haiti normally, but the recent events in Haiti where gangs took over the country, causing the homicide rate go spike from about 10 per 100k normally (safer than DC has ever been) to about as bad as DC in 2023.

Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline? And 2024 as the year to use for reference (it is the last year for which complete data is available, after all).

And as for NYC, that wasn't dealt with on the Federal level but on the state and city level. And it left a power vacuum in the crime world that was soon taken up by others, which should have been dealt with rather than ignored. Who knew that policing cities of millions of individuals over decades is hard? Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.

As for the comparison with Haiti you make (and not to mention Iraq, as you did elsewhere in this thread): countries, especially countries at war and places like Haiti do not excel in record keeping. As such you probably should take the numbers reported from those countries as somewhat polished before being presented.

> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?

Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.

1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.

> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.

That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.

So, your answer to cherry picking - by your claim - is more cherry picking?

> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.

Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.

> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.

Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.

Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.

'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!

Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.

Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.

Both can be true. Ostensibly, reducing poverty-related crime would allow resources to be effectively deployed against the remainder.

There’s no such thing as “poverty related crime.” My dad’s village in Bangladesh is dirt poor, but has very little crime.

You keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.

I assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries.

And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?

Wealth disparity drives crime

No, that’s absurd. When poor people kill other poor people, this is not a fault of rich people who happen to live nearby.

They didn't say that at all. They didn't say killing, they didn't say fault and they didn't say anything about people "nearby".

Statistically they are right, inequality correlates heavily with crime.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/06/07/the-star...

No, the claim was that inequality drives crime, and all you’re showing is correlation. As I’m sure you’re aware, correlation is not causation.

That's fine to say when there is another cause you can identify. For social statistics, most of the time it's people attributing two things together when the underlying cause is money.

In this case that's just a rationalization for what you want to be true.

There are too many articles on inequality driving crime. Here's the first that popped up on google: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80897-8

Even just applying basic logic to it suggests it is true. You arguing against it is absurd

This paper is literally just authors coming up with some model and simulating it, without any real world evidence whatsoever. It’s an argument from fictional evidence. Is this the best you can do?

Ha, they're creating an explanatory model for why income inequality drives crimes.

That was literally the first article that came up on Google, and you clearly did not read it or go through its references, so here is the second article that came up: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/073401689301800...

There is a huge wealth of research on this topic, even if you want to reject it. Do you need a third, fourth, hundredth paper? Try reading past the abstract (and comprehending it)

Again, this paper just looks at the correlations, and does not touch causation at all. You can run a hundred studies, each of them finding high correlation between wet streets and having rained recently, but you cannot conclude from that that the wet streets caused the rain to fall.

Hi, all causation can be doubted- that's a key aspect of skepticism, and in general, is important for philosophical development. In this case, it's clear that it is not a substantive objection to these papers or others. It is clear that you have set out this discussion with prior belief and are trying to reject that wealth disparity drives crime. You're not acting in the spirit of skepticism (and only are applying skepticism selectively here, because you think it sounds smart).

Read the papers. Apply your logic evenhandedly. Follow the leads and research on your own. It may be scary- you may discover things that force you to change your life (or you may learn something about yourself you dislike).

Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.

(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)

For more info on the historical context of this, check out this Cogito Episode[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sPRFvWOBwo

The criminals all have guns in Bangladesh and India too, and all over Africa.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com