The great crime decline is happening all across the country | Hacker News Reader

The great crime decline is happening all across the country

theatlantic.com

41 pointsandsoitis64 comments

Open articleView on HN

Would it kill (har har?) to include a chart in a story? https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-a...

~Half the murder rate now vs. 1990. Worrisome COVID murder increase is returning to average for the past 20 years.

Failure to prosecute crime leads to crime stat drops.

Are you claiming that’s what happening, or just engaging in ominous speculation?

I think we know the answer to that one...

Besides, GP is flat out wrong - not prosecuting crime does not result in reduced crime stats. The crime decline is led be a relatively huge 15% reduction in homicides. Even if those homicides remain unsolved or are not prosecuted, they still end up in crime stats. And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.

no, GP is right, and you say so after pointing to homicides then admit it's possible.

Homicides are the one thing that are hard to fudge the numbers with, although I am sure there are a number of deaths reported where there is not a homicide charge and there could of been, that is not the point.

I've seen the result of a city deciding to report less crime, it works. The stats go down, people from out of town find the place more attractive, real estate goes up. They argue nothing reduces crime like cranes gentrifying.

There is much more to the cycle of crimes not reported and/or not being prosecuted. It definitely works to bring down the numbers and exponentially.

Of course the long term thing of cranes coming in and pushing out the poor may be the lasting change. Although I believe the criminal element adapts as well and chooses things based upon repercussions, so the amount of petty crimes can go up while the cranes stamp out the larger noticeable ones.

> I've seen the result of a city deciding to report less crime, it works

Which city?

>And unlike other crimes where you may argue they go unreported, when someone ends up dead (by usually violent means in a homicide) it rarely goes unnoticed.

Unless they're just ignored as "missing persons".

You’re arguing people aren’t reporting homicides because they don’t think they will be prosecuted?

There are two major sources of crime stats: police data and a national survey that asks people whether they have recently been a victim of a crime. The latter is unaffected by prosecutorial discretion and it also shows declines.

https://archive.is/ofDew

Thanks OP

Cheap energy will do that, statistically. It won’t be cheap for much longer, so enjoy the reprieve.

It's gonna get cheaper.

Fossil EROI is steadily declining and renewable EROI isn’t as high, in fact it’s much lower when you include battery storage. It’s going to get more expensive.

Make sure you aren't comparing the wellhead to the outlet.

Good point, it looks like battery-backed PV is comparable when you factor that in. Non battery is definitely cheaper. I was not aware of that.

I guess it all depends on if EROI estimates hold up over time, how quickly we can scale up on renewables, and how much data centers and reshoring cut into available energy. There will still likely be a crunch going into next year, though.

Renewables are basically an industrial product at this point, they will get cheaper (raw material prices can throw that off, but technology will be working to make them cheaper no matter what).

The way I look at it, everyone being better off as far as energy in 2035 is a political and logistical problem, not a fundamental problem.

But political and logistical problems are real, and they have teeth. Some places will be better off if they can build out in the near future, but some places (including the US) may be too dysfunctional to make the required investment.

Right, I put it that way because they are real, hard problems.

Still, we've come a long way from impossible if we are merely looking at a hard problem.

It’s not impossible, I just don’t see it happening here before there’s a serious crisis.

I also think there’s a chance that costs of renewable construction and replacement go up as fossil fuels get more expensive. Right now most heavy industry and mining relies on fossil power due to portability, energy density, and preexisting equipment. It’s not necessarily going to be a smooth transition, especially in politically dysfunctional countries. The bottleneck period will be difficult.

Just like abortions in the 70's stopped the super criminals from existing in the 90's. Not having unwanted kids goes a long way to prevent crime. Now we are in the place where people want kids, but can't afford them so they aren't.

Children have never been more affordable than they are now. People's wants and expectations have changed.

might be craziest thing written here this month, I really hope you were being sarcastic

In the vein of ‘LLMs can now raise your children’

You should look at some actual statistics instead of vibes.

that is asking too much for this crowd ;)

In 2026 in the West, most correct ideas and understandings of things come across as crazy because the elite strata within Western societies promotes ideas and even entire epistemological frameworks which are abjectly and just simply wrong and often also insane

I'm pretty sure that one of the ideas that Western societies still promote is the notion that a claim should be consistent with the evidence, and that if it is not, it is probably wrong. And if it's very obviously inconsistent with the evidence, it may in fact be crazy. And there's a ton of evidence that raising a child in 2026 is substantially more expensive today than it was 75 years ago.

If you compared the costs of the items and services that people paid for for their children in the 1950s to the costs of those same exact items and services today I would bet they were the same or cheaper.

That's burying the fact that people have had done a lot more work that does not show up in pure econ stats. Care provided by stay at home primary caretaker or the offloading of that care to extended family those are huge things that you can't simply wrangle out of raw data.

More broadly there’s a lot of societal infrastructure in terms of just cultural norms that are no longer the same or intact at all. For example, grandparents are not really involved in child rearing anymore in the West. That’s why I just focused on the material costs, the issue is really not a material one but a cultural one or a matter of societal constitution.

I would take that bet. Let's start with housing, which has almost doubled as a share of income since 1960. (See e.g. [1]). Same thing with medical care (including insurance premiums, since more medical costs were out-of-pocket back in the 50s and 60s).[2] Groceries are a bit cheaper as a share of discretionary income, but only by a few percentage points.[3] And of course we're assuming no one goes to college, which wasn't true even in the 50s and 60s. College costs have soared since then.

1. https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18800

2. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...

3. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/food-expenditure-share-fa...

Exactly. If you want to bring up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s, it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today. No one wants to bring up kids that way, though.

But that environment also largely doesn't exist anymore that made that upbringing possible. Heck, parents are getting arrested and having CPS show up at their door for having their kids walk alone less than half a mile to the store.

Actually curious for someone to run the numbers on this.

>it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion, or are you relying on intuition here? A cursory search yields a number of references similar to this one---https://reno.nyloffices.com/resources/articles/starting-a-fa..., which indicate that the cost of raising a child has gone up significantly, at least in the last 40 years. And many of these references do not include the cost of college, which has skyrocketed. I'm not sure what you mean by "bringing up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s." They certainly had housing in the 50s and 60s, and that single expense alone is probably enough to make today's kids more expensive.

Even a cursory reading of that article is full of stat crimes. They denominate a single value for the past then a gigantic range for current times. But basic math shows no major increase for the bottom of their range in their own numbers.

I don’t have any intuition or stats either way but that’s a bad and biased citation.

Which is not surprising giving it’s selling something.

This is not complicated. Median household income in 1960 (in today's dollars) was about $58,000. Today it's about $88,000. You therefore have more inflation adjusted money available to spend on everything, including children.

The inflation adjustment includes everything: housing, education, and their proportion in the average US family's bucket, so calling out a specific item like education or housing doesn't change that data.

It doesn't include the non market services provided. And those are non trivial part of rising children. So both things can be true - median monetary income is higher and rising a child is more expensive.

That figure was created in 1963 by a lady who assumed that 3x starvation was thriving. Now may years later we claim ~34% of our population is now making up to $160k a year! we ended poverty, but they costs for an actual family of 4 starts at about $160k/yr. The figure shows that a huge amount of our population is still actually in poverty. You all just assume because the TV says so, it must be so.

Maybe you're confusing the terms "income" and "disposable income"? The latter would presumably include the items you mention, but the former does not. The (unreferenced) numbers you cite are almost certainly income, not disposable income. Or perhaps you're assuming that all costs have increased only by inflation, which is not true.

Median housing cost in 1960 was $11,900, which was about twice the median income at the time. Today it is nearly $400K, which is over 4 times as much as the median income. Medical and education costs have similarly risen faster than inflation (and faster than wage growth). You're right that it's not that complicated, though.

I meant income. I think you may be confusing what "real" income means. It adjusts for the typical bucket of goods and services Americans consume, and the deflator used to correct incomes over the years includes housing and education. After adjusting for the increases in these, the resultant real median household income today is $88,000 vs. $58,000 in 1960.

I know it doesn't feel that way, but that's because of the hedonic treadmill.

>I think you may be confusing what "real" income means.

Median income is exactly what it sounds like, the median income.

>The deflator used to correct incomes over the years includes housing and education.

That may be the intent, but it is clearly not working, because housing, medical, and education costs have in fact risen as a percentage of income.

Crime will surely go back in red states in a couple of decades due to the current return of the abortion bans in those states.

I’m not sure if either of you are being honestly factual or snarky, but I seem to recall this hypothesis is actually quite highly contested in social circles, and not at all as strongly supported as the parent seems to state it as fact

It is sufficiently detrimental in its predicted consequences that one would do well to heed it. Is it really worth the risk? It even is logical.

Seriously? It is also logical to kill anyone accused of a crime, in case they actually might have really committed it and might again. Is trial even worth the risk that one guilty man should go free?

I thought we were pretending it was lead?

What’s wrong with the lead hypothesis? It explains about 4 to 15% of the effect since 1990 [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10393136/

On the one hand, you have a meta-analysis estimating 7–28% of the U.S. homicide decline, depending on the model, after correcting for publication bias. That’s 4–15 percentage points of a 54% decline.[1]

On the other hand, you have the Dunedin study, where lead exposure was uncorrelated with measured socioeconomic status, which found weak links with offending overall and no significant link to violent crime.[2]

In any case, people talk about this like lead was the dominant factor in the violent crime decline, when these results don’t establish that. Even the meta-analysis leaves most of the homicide decline unexplained by lead.

[1] https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/332830/1/332830.pdf

[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Millenials / Gen Z KILLLED CRIME

Headlines often blame Millennials and Gen Z for "killing" traditional industries and social norms so why not this one too.

I ‘blame’ smartphones.

I think the effect is polycausal, but I think there's an important primary one that is often ignored: alienation crossing a threshold.

In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive. One can't hurt the tribe without also hurting yourself, so while individual interests may not coalign, the overall goals do: the health of the people and therefore the self.

As population increases, that coalignment becomes more nebulous, and the individual can more easily gain while hurting the other. This is partly why crime increased as the species civilized, created cities, and exploded the population. This, as an isolated factor, might've increased forever, and most dystopian fiction from the 20th century assumed it would.

However, alienation then largely became complete, thanks to technology. This had the contrary effect, because the public surface became a smooth wall, removing much of the opportunity for anti-social behavior. The alienated man now lives in his bubble, without connectivity to the outside world of other individuals. Human emotion, as a pre-req for the anti-social behavior we classify most crime as, required an other, someone to direct it against. It's harder (though not impossible) to get angry at abstract social megastructures like corporations and governments, and even when you do, what are you going to do about it? You can't stab Google, you can at best post something unkind about them (on your Android phone) and the algorithm (your actual interface to the entity you may despise) ignores it. Most of us realize this and don't even bother getting angry. Thankfully, these same non-human entities provide the products we need for emotional regulation. Feeling lonely, bored, understimulated, sexually frustrated? There's a product that will safely mediate those desires and get you back into a metastable, yet ever more alienated, state.

So great, we have less crime, sure, but it required the social neutering of the species.

> In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards, because the tribe and the individual are coextensive

Source? Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature had lots of issues. But its core observation that one’s homicide hazard rate has almost monotonically fallen across human history would imply that small, ancient group were way more violent than our modern societies are.

In this context, simply killing other humans, or any violence, is not equivalent to crime. Crime is dependent upon a collective interpretation of any act, not necessarily whether it's objectively destructive. A tribe may decide to wage war upon neighbors, sacrifice virgins, or what have you, but they do so under the impression that it's perceived to be in their coaligned interest.

This is relevant because the metric we're measuring now is exactly that: crime, not violence. WWIII could break out tomorrow, billions could die, and crime could still go down.

> A tribe may decide to wage war upon neighbors

Lots of the deaths appear to be separate from war [1]. We have lots of evidence of violent crime in non-state socieities [2].

Where you might have a point is in the reduction of anonymous property crime. But that's just because small societies don't tend to have privacy. The property crime may still happen, it will just be resolved comunally or bilaterally using violence.

[1] https://historyandarchaeologyonline.com/bog-people-criminals...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279610323_Violence_...

Having had the fortune to travel to many places, one thing I've learned is that crime stats tell you nothing by themselves. For instance there are many countries that have homicide rates comparable to, or even higher than the US, but where you could feel completely safe alone just about anywhere at any time, whereas in many parts of the US, or some other countries lower crime rates - that's certainly not the case.

So for instance a big one is interpersonal 'justifiable' crime, versus random crime. There are places where if you insult somebody's integrity, they will kill you. Add some alcohol into the mix and these sort of places can have some rather high homicide/assault/etc rates. But on the other hand in these very same places, your chances of falling victim to random crime is basically zero, so they feel extremely safe in spite of having many crime rates comparable to places that feel extremely unsafe.

And data about the nature of crime in the past is strongly suggestive that it also had a similar character. People would not hesitate to use violence in the case of interpersonal conflicts, but the chances of falling victim to random crime was likely significantly lower than it is today. And I think these are the sort of crimes that people mostly care about, and it being a result of social alienation does seem like a perfectly valid hypothesis, though I'm not sure if in present times South America and others would falsify it. From an outsider's perspective, they seem quite socially cohesive, yet have exceptionally high rates of criminality.

> your chances of falling victim to random crime is basically zero, so they feel extremely safe in spite of having many crime rates comparable to places that feel extremely unsafe

Where are you thinking of? What I've seen, more commonly, is societies with lots of crime having ways for the wealthy to insulate themselves for it and then, acting against a background that has normalised high crime, feeling very safe. Versus societies where everyone is more mixed together where folks are constantly paranoid about vanishingly-infrequent crimes.

One typical example would be Thailand. Its homicide rate is quite close to the US, yet the nature of crime in the country is very different. Your chances of running into any sort of random violent crime is basically zero. It also even challenges the economic integration argument since it's also atypical there as well - poor households being right next door to a luxury condo is quite common.

That's a fair one. I'll note that there is a fair amount of property crime in Thailand, though those do seem to prey on tourists more than locals.

WWII involved a lot of crime - straightforwardly illegal acts. And I don't mean just "hiding jews" ethical crime (which was super rare), but crime crime like murder, stealing, frauds, rapes. Both by soldiers and civilians.

Yeah, but historians took a lot of issue with his claims.

Historians of violence have a ton of criticisms of that book. But they also agree with the general claim that violence today is much lower than in almost all times throughout the past.

> In a tight-knit (below Dunbar's number) society, crime is largely non-existent by our standards,

Dude, tight-knit societies produce crime, it is just that everyone ends up enabling the biggest abuser, rapist and what not there. So it ends up tolerated. We know, because those things come out after decades when people eventually feel safe to speak.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com