So much knowledge of various places (downtown of my city, for example) is not first hand, but from (social) media.
I'm reminded of this video from Bowling for Columbine, where they stroll around South Central LA, and realize its pleasant and nothing crazy is happening.
Even without any nefarious motivations, simple survivorship bias will mean any form of media will report on the exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself. Don't substitute media input for first hand knowledge.
Since Covid+WfH, I've felt this acutely and had to remind myself online is not real life.
> So much knowledge of various places (downtown of my city, for example) is not first hand, but from (social) media.
> I'm reminded of this video from Bowling for Columbine, where they stroll around South Central LA, and realize its pleasant and nothing crazy is happening.
You might have a point, but:
1. A citation to a partisan propagandist shouldn't convince anyone.
2. The segment seems to rest on the fallacious assumption that dangerous areas can never be pleasant and will continuously have something "crazy" happening. I mean, there are literal warzones where you could probably manage to film a five minute stroll through some pleasant meadow (due to lulls in the fighting).
I think the truth is that it's just hard to get a true impression of a place without actually spending a lot of time there.
Much like inflation, people aren't great at estimating the precise year-over-year change, but the last 5 or 10 years shows some real reasons for concern.
In that imgur plot see it ending in 2022, and crime has barely bulged after exploding in 2020-21, where there was the largest increase in the entire time series.
We are basically back to 1995 homicide levels which is insane
> after exploding in 2020-21, where there was the largest increase in the entire time series.
The IMGUR link includes the text:
Due to the full transition to NIRBS and the lack of data for agencies that are not fully transitioned, the 2021 data year cannot be added to the 5-, 10- or 20- year trend presentations that are based in traditional methodologies used
That's a giant flashing warning sign to data nerds everywhere that some change in the gathering | reporting of data took place exactly right when things "exploded".
The question remains, did crime (actual homicide numbers) really explode or did national reporting of homicide numbers suddenly improve | include backlogs | etc?
> We are basically back to 1995 homicide levels ..
These are absolute numbers .. and the US population has grown in 25 years, given the change in national reporting the per capita homicides rates may be more stable than the graph indicates.
Maybe because in the places where most news are written (DC, NY, SF) crime has spiked drastically?
EG:
"D.C. Police have responded to 227 homicides so far in 2023. That's up 34% from the same time last year. It also tops 2021's total for the year, which was the highest since 2003. That means the homicide rate in the District is the highest it's been in 20 years, and climbing, with two months left in the year."
Homicide is a tiny fraction of all crime, and the numbers of homicides are low enough in large US cities that small changes can lead to fairly large percentages.
Nobody cares that it dropped in 2023. We care that it's worse than a decade ago, which it is. We hit a local minimum of 4.4 murders per 100k in 2014. It was 6.3 in 2022. That's a big difference.
Property crime goes unreported. It's not worth the trouble. I've had a dozen packages stolen, for example. My apartment building had 30 bikes stolen and hundreds more packages stolen. None of these will show up in the statistics. I have friends that have been carjacked or witnessed carjacking. Carjacking numbers are way up in my city compared to 10 years ago. Murders hit a low of 246 for us in 2013. The last 3 years were 499, 562, and 516, and they now cook the books by not counting suspicious deaths. We're down this year, which is great, but the past 5 years have been bloody as hell.
Major crimes dropping 8% from recent local maxima is not an achievement and doesn't mean people's perceptions of rising crime are incorrect. The past single year's delta alone is just not super relevant.
I don't trust the stats. Things that would have been reported as crimes 15 years ago aren't being called in now.
* Leaders inside the police force have incentives to make it look like their departments are effective and nudge the numbers.
* Elected officials, such as the mayor, have incentives to make it look like the police department is effective and reinforce the number nudgers.
* This has a reinforcing cycle where number nudgers are promoted and in turn promote other number nudgers until leadership is saturated. More creative accounting practices are encouraged as the environment becomes more competitive.
* Many District Attorney's are happy to prosecute lesser charges that are easier to convict on instead of more serious charges that more accurately reflect the reality of what happened.
Things like theft under $950 being classified as a misdemeanor in California (happened in 2021 IIRC), which makes it far less likely the cops will do anything about it, de-facto legalizing theft.
This isn't the only place it's happened, it's just the one that got the most visibility.
As discussed in the bullet points, those incentives create a sort of natural selection which changes how the statistics are reported over time.
It's not like we are measuring length or temperature. The data has a degree of human subjectivity when being recorded. It seems normal for that subjectivity to shift over time, especially when we are taking about different humans over timespans of decades.
The question isn't whether it is or isn't rising, but what voters consider acceptable. If voters find the current level of crime unacceptable, it doesn't matter what the broader trend is.
I personally find the concept of open air drug use, retail theft, and shit on the street unacceptable, I could care less what the numbers say and will vote based off of what I see with my own eyes. And whether or not that's "statistically sound", I could care less. Crime is decreasing? Okay, I guess it isn't decreasing quickly enough
Whose facts? Who do you trust and is it a source I do, too? What's included their data and what isn't? How recent is the data they're using?
If I go by the FBI a few months ago, crime is down. But the data is only up through 2022, so someone using another source will say the FBI info is inaccurate.
> Actual reality is still very much the question for a lot of people
Maybe those people don't realize that even science is our best understanding given current data. Or that our "truths" are often hazy statistical models. A sure recipe for falsehood is seeking simple answers.
What are you arguing? That we're can't know anything ever? That's not very useful in any kind of practical sense.
Figuring out what's going on from statistics isn't that hard if you understand how those statistics are being collected.
But they sure beat whatever you, a single person, happens to see with your own eyes. Your personal experience is an almost infinitesimally small random slice. It's just not statistically significant.
Statistics may always have error bars, but the errors bars around your personal sampling of one will always be incomparably larger.
No need to believe me when you could have spent this same amount of time just researching it for yourself. It's probably the first thing anyone talks about when they seriously discuss reducing crime rates.
tl;dr If you put enough people in prison for long enough, you will naturally reduce the crime rate because such a huge number of people are incarcerated. That doesn't justify things like life sentences for possession of marijuana.
But overall, you don't reduce an individual's likelihood to commit a crime either before or after their time in prison using longer sentences.
> Kind of hard to believe really, you think the Code of Hammurabi didn't work?
I've noticed a general pattern on HN, and I think this thread exemplifies it: If the research confirms someone's personal experience, then they don't question the research methodology. On the other hand, if the research contradicts their experience, they look deeper into the methodology to find flaws in it. It's just a more intellectual form of confirmation bias.
Not all research is equal and it's often heavily biased by who is funding and promoting it. If research doesn't validate some interest groups talking point, we don't even hear about it.
Crime is such an immensely local and personal phenomenon. Statistics are abstract until you're the one getting carjacked by 5 guys or getting punched in the face during a home burglary.
This would make sense since the Gallup survey is based on people's perceptions based on social & traditional media that they see regularly. People remember notable events or shocking things, no one remembers the regular days where everything just went as normal - and the media doesn't cover such things since they are looking to grab attention with headlines.
The article mentions this at the end as outlier incidents, but just giving people the overall statistics may not help change their mind either because of what they perceive from other media sources.
They probably think it's rising because it rose substantially in 2020/21 and is nowhere close to returning to the typical levels of the 20 years prior.
St Louis should have all-time low total homicides, it's experiencing terminal population collapse. There are American suburbs similar in population to St Louis. So much of this article is just contrarian clickbait.
On the other hand, Detroit feels significantly safer than it did 10 years ago. It's still desperately poor, but it's a pleasant place to visit now. It's pretty, and it has clung onto its culture and history. For better and worse, these things tend to come back around. That doesn't happen if we pretend nothing is wrong.
I think "news" entertainment has painted this situation as a return to '70s-'80s violence, and that's not even close to reality. I'm not fleeing to the burbs, or going outside with a bulletproof vest. There's a problem, but it's solvable, and it won't take decades to fix.
I had to get someone to unlock a case the other day to buy underwear at Target. Other times it's been toothpaste or deodorant. Someone want to explain to me why these things are locked up now, but they used to not be? Someone want to explain to me why I see videos of people stealing without consequence while security looks on powerless to do anything? Someone want to explain to me why there are open air markets for stolen goods on the streets? Yeah, I'm sure crime is down. That sounds right.
Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?
What sort of investigation do you think they'll do? My experience is the cops aren't able to do much, and won't investigate for something equivalent to taking toothpaste from a Target.
When someone did a dent-and-run into my car in a parking lot, the police didn't investigate. I got an incident report from them, to send to my insurance. In that case the police report gives the insurance company a way to handle possible fraud on my part.
During the night someone went down the street and poked a hole in car tires, including one of mine. I didn't bother calling the police since I didn't think they could do anything. I needed to get going, so put on the spare and left.
You think a police investigation could have done something?
Flipping it around, when I was a kid on a bike I ran into someone's side view mirror and knocked it off. I was so scared about getting punished by my parents that I left. If the police investigated, they never caught me, and more importantly, my parents never found out.
The only time we ever called the cops was when visiting friends in a small town. I came out to find a car window had been shattered, and we found a BB among the broken glass. The cops came for that one. Turns out some bored teens were going around shooting things with a BB gun. That one actually went to trial and I got court-ordered compensation.
But that was car damage plus serial gun crime, and not typical car damage.
I gave police the license # of the truck that hit me, but they said it was an out of state plate so they said there was "nothing they could do." Translation being that they didn't feel like dealing with it.
Police is funded with the local taxes: business, property and sales. Your articles show no evidence of Walmart not paying those, just the US taxes, which do not fund the police (at least directly, there are some federal grants to local police forces but those are: a) small fraction of the budget b) are given to pushing the federal partisan polices and not the actual enforcing of the laws).
They also don’t seem to make an effort to actually stop shoplifting. They take out regular check out lanes and replace them with self check outs that are unbelievably frustrating to use and make it very easy to shoplift accidentally. One time I apparently shoplifted an item by accident while using the self checkout lane, the only reason I realized is because I went back to return the item and it wasn’t on the receipt. The clerk helping me with the return just laughed and said it happens all the time.
If their only response to shoplifting is to just jack up prices and then go on TV and blame democrats for “crime” while doing literally nothing to stop shoplifting then I have little to no sympathy for them.
That article does not say that Walmart does not pay local taxes but suggests that it should not have used legal allowances it was given and pay more than it should by law. Your shopping experience in Walmart does not seem to be relevant at all, if you don't like it - don't go there, it in no way justifies allowing crime against Walmart to go unpunished.
Are you really so focused on just this one sort of crime, or does your opinion extend equally to all other crimes?
We accept that some crimes go unpunished, yes? We don't hire enough traffic police to detect and punish all speeders, even though that's a crime, and that's only one of many crimes I can think of which are underprosecuted. Nor is there much of a cry to increase the number of traffic police and bring traffic speed down to the posted limits.
So why must all shoplifting by punished, with the police doing most of the work at the store?
We've long said that if an organization needs a higher level of security they can have their own security force, which may be private guards or a private police force, as with some campus police, transit police, and railroad police forces.
Just like there is no law saying a store must pay more than is legally required, there is also no law saying the government is required to supply a police force for the store.
Nor does it make economic sense for broadly trained police to handle a specialized task like providing security for a store.
We know Walmart has committed that crime. ("According to a 2018 report by Good Jobs, between January 2000 to 2018, Walmart paid over $1.4bn in fines and settlements over wage theft violations, FedEx paid over $500m during the same period, and Bank of America paid over $380m." - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-u... ).
Will these police officers assigned to Walmart also be charged with investigating and preventing wage theft at those stores?
No, of course that hasn't been part of the general discussion.
What, in your opinion, justifies allowing wage theft by Walmart to go unpunished?
>Are you really so focused on just this one sort of crime, or does your opinion extend equally to all other crimes?
In the US, there are thousands of crimes on the books, which are not enforced and are ridiculous [1]. So no, I do not think that all crimes should be punished.
>So why must all shoplifting by punished, with the police doing most of the work at the store?
This is a loaded question. I don't think the police should be doing most of the work at the store, but I think the police should take the apprehended criminals from the store when called. And DAs should prosecute those, and the judges should try them, that's all. Nothing of this happens right now. This is why stores do not try to apprehend criminals as the same police, DA and judges will happily go after the business and its employees if the criminal is hurt in the process or claims to be hurt[2].
When I set up a public-facing web server, I take every precaution to make theft of my data (and my customers) as difficult as possible for thieves. Firewalls, frequent security patches, defensive programming, etc. Walmart and others seem to do the opposite. They fire cashiers and install self checkout lanes that are so hard to use that even honest people end up shoplifting accidentally, I can’t even imagine how much theft dishonest people are able to get away with. They have the antitheft alarms at the exits but whenever they go off, 90% of the time there’s no security guard to deal with it or employees just don’t care. So, it’s clear they don’t take it seriously.
I don’t run my servers on Windows XP and allow anyone in the world to connect on any port and leave my database open with no authentication controls and then complain when the police aren’t arresting every person who is stealing my data.
I am pretty sure Walmart does the same with their webservers. I am also pretty sure that your home is less secure than a Walmart store, for one Walmart has armed guards and your home does not. Will you apply your reasoning to yourself and won't complain when your home is robbed eventually?
As I said in another reply, there is nothing a store can do against theft if the police, DA and courts do not enforce the law. Private business cannot arrest and punish criminals.
I don’t leave my front door wide open and let people walk out with my TV while the alarm goes off and don’t even try to stop it from happening…so no, I am not expecting to get robbed. I have cameras at every entrance and window and always keep my doors locked.
The point is, they don’t make a serious attempt to stop shoplifting, because they want it to be as frictionless as possible for their customers. In theory they could lock up every item in the store and require an employee to unlock a cabinet every time a customer wants something, but obviously that creates so much friction that it would greatly reduce sales. So it’s a trade off. They’ve chosen the end of the sliding scale where almost all merchandise is freely available for customers to take off the shelves with very limited oversight, coupled with self check out lanes so they don’t have to hire as many cashiers. They know full well that some people are stuffing merchandise into their pockets and not scanning everything at the check out lanes and that tradeoff is clearly working for them because their annual profit is higher than ever:
So no, I don’t think Walmart and others have any problem with shoplifters whatsoever, and I certainly don’t think that my tax dollars should go towards trying to catch every last person who steals a tooth brush from Walmart when they have little to no interest in making any kind of investment in curtailing shoplifting themselves.
It sounds like you’re in favor of Walmart maximizing their private profits by making it as easy as possible to buy their merchandise (so easy in fact that you can find yourself stealing something accidentally!), making no effort whatsoever in theft prevention in their stores, and then putting the burden of enforcement on the public dime, which is a curious position - are you a large Walmart shareholder?
If there’s a particular store that is having too much stolen from them by shoplifters, they are more than welcome to shut it down and make way for a local business who I can assure you will be way more careful with its merchandise. I am 100% in favor of that.
When we’ve solved every murder and violent crime, then we can get to Walmart shoplifters.
Since I meant to be serious, and not present a sophomoric straw man, let's narrow things down to a specific example I gave:
Which should police investigate more - shoplifting from Walmart or wage theft at Walmart, and why?
My question is meant to probe what goes into your decision to prioritize investigating two related types of crime which can both take place at Walmart. It is meant to be more head-to-head than jliptzin's series of questions early in this thread "Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?".
How is your [2] at all related to shoplifting? It feels like you are trying to raise the emotional level by switching to manslaughter.
> I don't think the police should be doing most of the work at the store, but I think the police should take the apprehended criminals from the store when called.
Right, but the top-level topic centers more about Target is locking things up, and how shoplifters can grab-and-run, and why Walgreens seems to only have "one security guard in their entire store".
Larger companies already expect "shrink" (theft by employees and customers) and factor it into their calculations of how much staff to have, how much security to have, the effect of locking up particular items, the use of self-checkout vs. cashiers, etc. They have long ago figured out how to maximize profit in the face of shoplifting.
In your terms, Walmart already allows crime to go unpunished because they don't want to spend enough to identify those crimes.
The police response - no matter how good! - is rather useless if over-worked employees don't notice the shoplifting so never contact the police, or if the police physically can't arrive until many minutes after the thieves have left.
Low wage employees of large companies, as a general rule, do not get paid to risk bodily harm to stop thieves. Your [2] is a rare exception, ... and also not an employee of a large company.
In general discussion, the argument is the city should direct the police to do more to help prevent shoplifting. Which means the big companies will go to their spreadsheets and figure out how to spend even less money on security and staff, ending up with more profit as the government ends up subsidizing their security.
You are using the term "straw man" but I don't think you understand what it means.
The discussion so far: "Why police should prosecute theft in Walmart?", "Because Walmart pays taxes", "Are you sure (some examples of Walmart avoiding paying some federal taxes)", "Yes, these examples are irrelevant". Now enter you "There are other crimes that are not prosecuted, tax avoidance, wage theft blah blah blah" and then you proceed to accuse me in straw-manning, from what I understand. You might be serious in your mind but you are not making such an impression on me, sorry.
Ahh, I see. You read jliptzin series of questions:
> Someone want to explain to me why my tax dollars should go towards protecting target and Walgreen’s inventory? When they have one security guard in their entire store? When police could instead be spending that time finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away?
As saying the police should not prosecute theft in Walmart at all.
That seems an extreme and unjustified reading - a "straw man", if you will.
I read it as a complaint that these stores are not paying enough for their own security, so why should should cops help Walgreen’s inventory when they don't even help "finding the driver of the truck that smashed into my car and drove away" even after "I gave police the license # of the truck that hit me, but they said it was an out of state plate so they said there was "nothing they could do."" (quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38763356)
jliptzin pays taxes, so should get support from the police for property damage on the order of hundreds of dollars, just like Walgreens/Walmart can get support from the police for shoplifting something which costs a few tens of dollars, right?
I also wanted to focus on the question "probably more than you do?" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759837 . In terms of "taxes per acre", jliptzin almost certainly pays more than Walmart. Choosing to prioritize total tax revenue vs. taxes per acre gives a very different metric about which of those two crimes - car crash or shoplifting - to prioritize.
Larger stores, compared to smaller stores, have access to more methods to reduce their tax burden.
For example, they have the capital to build a dedicated store for their needs, then place deed restrictions on resale use to prohibit competition, and to have those former sites - which essentially always pay lower tax rates - included as comparables for tax assessment purposes. Eg, https://ilsr.org/dark-store-tax-tactic-makes-big-box-stores-... .
For another example, a store with the name "PandaMan" may not actually own the trademark to "PandaMan" but instead pay "PM Trademark Holdings", a Delaware LLC, for trademark use. This is a business expense, which reduces the local taxes, and the choice of state LLC can be chosen to reduce overall taxes. Delaware does not charge income tax on royalties. https://troyandschwartzlaw.com/2020/09/holding-companies-str...
These are called "loopholes" and are of course completely legal.
As a result, big box stores pay far than smaller stores in mixed-use areas , when measured in net tax revenue acre. ("Net" is important since it costs the government money to provide the roads, water, sewer, etc.)
> When left to the market to allow developers to build what they build,” the result is strip centers, he says. “Even nice retail, like the Target on the west side, generates a half million in assessed value per acre.” Stand-alone office buildings generate $1 million to 1.5 million in assessed value per acre, he explains.
> “Then you look at redevelopment projects that the mayor and council have done together,” he says. “Instead of a million or a half million per acre, we are netting $23 million in assessed value per acre, $20 million in assessed value per acre. Twenty times the assessed value from redevelopment projects. That locks us into a positive tax generating position for the next hundred years. This is smart planning.”
This has been true for a long time, like this 2008 summary of a report from 2003, at https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/bbtk-factshe... , which shows a net-negative revenue for big box stores, due to the lower tax revenue per acre and higher infrastructure costs than specialty retailers, which had a net positive tax revenue.
So maybe the government should say the existing costs to subsidize Walmart are high enough, that government-provided police protection is too much, and if Walmart's business model can't afford additional internal security then it's time for Walmart to leave the area, and let the government support other businesses which both need less subsidizes and provide higher tax revenue.
I am not even sure what is the point you are trying to make. "Loopholes" is just reddit-speak for paying taxes. Do you take deductions on your own taxes? Do you challenge assessments on your property? Have any pre-tax deductions from your pay (FSA, 401K etc?) Congrats, you are using the loopholes to pay less taxes.
You seem to be hung up with something I did not say.
I am fully aware that tax avoidance is legal. My Dad taught me the key part of Gregory v. Helvering when I was about 12 - "the legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted."
1) I described "loopholes" in this context as a completely legal way to reduce the amount of taxes paid, so of course it can mean to pay taxes.
The term as I described it is quite common. Wikipedia uses it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance in "Other multinationals, such as Apple for example, also exploit fiscal loopholes, diverting profits from high tax countries into others with lower corporate tax rates." -- Apple exercised their right to use a loophole to pay lower taxes. Not illegal, and yes, the still paid taxes.
This isn't reddit, I am not a redditor, I don't know reddit vocabulary, so don't use your reddit blinders when you read what I wrote.
2) I said that larger organizations have greater ability to use said completely legal and economically justified loopholes (I gave two such examples).
3) As a result, when measured by tax revenue per acre instead of tax revenue per entity like you suggest, big box stores bring in less than other forms of retail -- and sometimes even negative tax revenue if infrastructure costs are fully included. (I provided sources).
4) Thus, if tax revenue guides where local government should direct tax money, they should give less support to big box stores than, for example, downtown retail shopping.
Taxes are not fees for service, local governments though should be aware that if they suppress their major tax payers they should expect their tax revenue to decrease. It's counterproductive for them and the community to chase away large taxpayers. Not to mention it's illegal: one is still entitled to the protection of law even when not paying any taxes, see the Constitution, 14th Amendment.
It should be on tax revenue per acre, which for Carmel resulted in a 10x improvement over big box stores on greenfield sites, for reasons given in that link.
Your "major tax payers" needs further qualifiers. If the major tax payer is a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, that's far different than if it's a big box store.
"Who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?" The issue is that the stats don't tell the whole story. Most states/cities have simply decriminalized behavior that was previously considered 'crime' so that's why people think crime rates are rising when they see more open drug use, brazen theft like shoplifting or car break ins, and prostitutes walking around in public in their underwear--so people rightfully feel like crime is increasing because they see all this happening around them. Alas, the media and politicians say 'nothing is happening' because now prostitution, theft, and drugs are decriminalized. I am only in my mid 30s and have lived in California my entire life and I've never seen more open drug use, more theft/shoplifting, and prostitution is now more flagrant than it's ever been. Things really seem to accelerate into a free fall after prop 47 was passed.
I keep posting this because there’s always this comment.
There’s been a pretty standard way used for decades to determine whether crime is actually rising or increasing in the US that’s immune to reporting, legislative, etc changes.
Look at homicides. Dead bodies do not get hidden in the US.
1) It's great that homicides are decreasing. But while homicides are one way of measuring crime, there are others. I think many people are saying that the divergence is increasing between homicides and other crimes. Would you agree with the GP that "crime" can be increasing even if homicides are decreasing?
2) While it's rare, there are some well documented cases where "dead bodies" get hidden in the US by unscrupulous police trying to look better in statistics. Here's Chicago from a decade ago: https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/chicago-crime-st...
I live in Seattle. We just set a new record for homicides. I think an all-time high.
Also, I don’t think homicides is necessarily that accurate a metric. It’s immune to many things. But it isn’t immune to advances in trauma treatment. I’ve always wondered if cell phones reduced homicides by reducing response times.
I’d love to know shooting victim statistics. But that’s not as complete and comprehensive as homicide counts.
It would be reassuring if the proportion of murder to other, more common and visible crime was constant. But it's not. You may still get decrease in murders while having 10 fold increase in theft.
Yes, that's great and all, but that doesn't change the fact that all of the car windows are smashed, and you regularly see people, sometimes the same people, smashing the windows in person.
Quoth Jeff Bezos: "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."
What you say is technically true but also highly misleading. You're cherry-picking points to put together a narrative that is not the obvious shape of the data.
Peak homicides over the past 10 years are nowhere near the peak in the 90's.
And they trended downward in 2022, and mid-year 2023 estimates were downwards another 9.4% relative to 2022:
What I said is true, and what the op said is false and the stats you posted show this. What is actually misleading is saying something outright false like the OP. The homicide rate is higher than it has been since the mid 90s. People are worked up about crime increases because they have lived through the past 4 years and feel the tension.
Pretty clearly the inflection is at 2020. It was flat before that, so sure, you can draw a "trend" upwards since the lowest point in 2014 or so, but that's just playing games with curve fitting. I can equally tell you, with the same kind of support, that clearly the trend is downward from 1991 to today. "Just look at the numbers!"
And more importantly, the rapid rise in 2020-21 is dropping rapidly now.
That chart shows exactly what I said, we have the highest rates since the mid 90s and there is a clear upward trend since 2014 (ten years ago now). Thats not "playing games"---its a lot more true than what the OP said.
Just to emphasize, indeed "look at the numbers". The gap between 2014 and 2022 is about 2/100,000--that is over 6000 people. This isnt some statistical anomaly---it is a real increase. Crime is going up.
Why 2014 and 2022 and not 1991 and 2022? Or 2020 and 2022? Other than one confirms your prior and the other two refute it?
And regardless, the fact that the first derivative is negative clearly makes "crime is going up" a lie. Crime is going DOWN right now, as measured. You need to be more specific: "Crime over the past 9 years is going up" would be true (but again, not if you replace 9 with 2 or 30!).
What about overdoses which are at all time highs? Also, there are crimes beyond murder that affect quality of life. It seems like a fallacy to argue that because murders are down that all crime is down...
It seems like this effect should be measurable in some kind of principled way.
Also, there are some crimes that haven't been decriminalized and are hard to
sweep under the carpet (murder, manslaughter, etc). Are there trends for those crimes?
Edit: The article does say that murder is down in big cities, but there is some weasel text in there about it being down "since the pandemic" which leaves me wondering whether it's up or down since, say, 2017.
Homicides per 100k population hit a low of 1679 in 2019 and bounced up to 2206 in 2022. I don't know the numbers for 2023 yet, but that does suggest the original article is misleading. I would note, though, that this is against a rate of 3530 in 1995.
Recently in 2020 homicides peaked in the aftermath of the “mostly peaceful protests” and the subsequent law officer retreat to the donut shop. Traffic deaths also surged due to depolicing.
It’s good though that we’re still down from the bloody heights of the ‘90s era crack/cocaine wars!
When I had a hit and run on my parked vehicle in front of my house, the 911 operator told me to call 311 to file a police report even though I could see the person driving away... I have a feeling the stats are being significantly massaged to come to the conclusion that crime is not rising. 30 years ago when I was growing up, I never saw open drug use or prostitution but now that is common and accepted. I don't remember the level of theft/car break ins either. Something has definitely changed for the worse.
> Rockville, Maryland, ranked No. 1 for having the largest percentage of Airbnb properties without security cameras
isn't that... a good thing? i feel like not having security cameras usually means you don't feel like you need to have an eye on everything... and privacy at an airbnb is quite nice. might find a reason to visit rockville!
> Newark, Delaware, ranked No. 1 for Google searches related to holiday security
i feel like the only relation to actual safety here is the word "security" in this sentence.
I have a some personal anecdotes from the past few years living in Los Angeles that might help explain the discrepancy between people's perceptions and the crime data.
A couple years ago two cars pulled up in front of the house across the street from mine, four people got out and started trying to break in by throwing a rock through the front window. The noise was loud enough to alert myself and a couple other neighbors on the street who came out to see the burglars fleeing back to their cars after the homeowner scared them away with a gun.
I called 911 and waited on hold for 2 hours for someone to answer only to tell me that the only the people who had their house broken into could file a report and to have them call back. When I went to tell this to the neighbor it turned out that he did try to report it but gave up after waiting on hold for an hour. In the end this home break in was never reported and did not make it into the crime data.
Last year, living in a different part of Los Angeles, I woke up at 4am to the sound of people yelling and bottles breaking outside. There was a group of very noticeably drunk people sitting on the hoods of their cars drinking in the street. I watched them long enough to determine they were all wasted, at least one of them would be driving, and if any of them drove they'd be a danger to themselves and others. Again I called 911, waited a half hour, and was told they'd dispatch someone. A half hour later they all got into separate cars and did indeed drive away, leaving empty beer bottles next to where their cars had been. It's hard to know if LAPD actually came to check because this all happened on the street adjacent to the back gate of the Hollywood police department and around 6am it gets a lot of traffic from police cars heading back to the station at the end of the shift. As far as I can tell this crime was never reported and did not get included in the data.
Also within the last year, on the same street adjacent to the police station, a homeless man seemingly in a manic episode was vandalizing parked cars while screaming about killing people of a certain protected group. This time I called 911, waited 20 minutes and told the operator what I saw. Because the homeless man had wandered to a different street and I couldn't see him anymore I was told it's not an ongoing crime and to call the LAPD non-emergency line so they can take the report. I called the non-emergency line and reached their voicemail. This is another crime that wasn't reported and didn't get included in the data.
The crime statistics are only as good as the data being collected. From personal experience I've witnessed 3 crimes which should have contributed to crime statistics but didn't. My suspicion is that cities across America are having similar problems simply taking in and documenting reports of crime. It could very well be that crime is actually rising, people are correctly perceiving that crime is rising, yet the data to substantiate the rising crime rate isn't getting recorded.
There is a growing consensus that there is no point in reporting a crime to the police in most instances since it will take up your time doing so and either the police either won't even try to catch the perp or will fail to do so--and even if they do he will not receive a significant sanction.
Have a friend who is in security, when they have to cuff someone and call 911, they often get sent to voicemail. 10 minutes later 911 calls back and if the issue isn’t live anymore they refuse to send anyone.
Had another incident personally where the police never came.
Several friends have had similar experience, while not scientific it indicates there is at least a local problem.
The other cities I look at seem to have similar issues in the news. There is no way crime is getting better right now.
For a while now, there has been complete suppression/derision of people who use their own life anecdotes to come to conclusions about society. The church of only using rigorous statistics to draw conclusions is a method of thought control.
Here's an anecdote: I haven't been the victim of any type of crime for the last 15 years, whereas I had multiple break-ins and near violent encounters in the 00s and 90s. My neighborhood and city (I live in Northeast Minneapolis) feels dramatically safer than it did when I was younger. My relatives in the burbs think it's some sort of crime infested hellhole. I'm inclined to think that a actually, crime IS dropping and that people who think that it isn't watching and reading a lot of media that is filling their heads with nonsense.
No, I'm pretty sure gp means drawing conclusions based off of lived experience instead of more general statistics. Or at least, not putting so much faith in statistics to allow them to cancel personal experiences which are opposed to them
Maybe an argument for that could be that statistics are normally framed in a certain way, or may obscure certain things, or may be inconclusive. Statistics can be gamed, sometimes common sense is more trustworthy
And I don't think flagging is an appropriate response to gp either, there's definitely room to discuss that type of perspective
No one is going to argue against using common sense to validate statistics and their underlying assumptions.
But replacing statistics with “common sense” is just nonsense. Humanity has come to the point it is now, not by following “common sense” but by following science. And that’s more often than not basically statistics.
> Humanity has come to the point it is now, not by following “common sense” but by following science
What do you mean by "following science" here? As in, making your own observations, testing your own hypotheses? I'm not arguing against that, if anything I'm arguing for making that the norm
If you're saying "give other people's statistics prevalence over my own recorded ones", why call that science if it isn't anywhere in the scientific method? Why hijack the phrase? Why not call it "trust in authority" or something less dishonest?
Asking this not because I disagree with you, but because I want to know more about your perspective: what is your opinion of people who are skeptical of/hesitant towards vaccines?
Having no opinion is a lost art. I’m also not sure what you mean by “skeptical of vaccines.” Skepticism means doubting knowledge claims, so you’ll need to put forth some claims to have a real discussion here.
True, my question was vague. I know people who believe various things related to their health that the medical system says aren't real, empirically, like autoimmune issues triggered by mrna vaccines, long-term effects of lyme disease, and severe reactions to birth control. I've found that I react really differently to generic versions of the same medicine produced by different manufacturers, which many pharmacists say isn't possible. I'm curious whether you'd say that the "church of only using rigorous statistics" is a problem in scientific contexts as well as social issues.
I'm reminded of this video from Bowling for Columbine, where they stroll around South Central LA, and realize its pleasant and nothing crazy is happening.
https://vimeo.com/39131010
Even without any nefarious motivations, simple survivorship bias will mean any form of media will report on the exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself. Don't substitute media input for first hand knowledge.
Since Covid+WfH, I've felt this acutely and had to remind myself online is not real life.