It's really the only variable differentiating the US homicide rate from other developed countries. The US homicide rate is 4 times the UK, 5 times more than Germany, 4 times that of France and thrice that of our neighbor to the north. While Mexico has a higher homicide rate, the gun crime rate in the US is 6 times higher. (All numbers are round approximations. Different sources and ways of calculating the data may result in variances but the relative rates don't change that much.)
Be very careful about comparative gun death statistics. Suicide by gun often gets wrapped into "gun violence" figures than make the US stats look worse than they actually are.
Guns are also more reliable with other methods having a less reliable outcome. Additionally, other methods may not be as convenient as “pull trigger and dead” (e.g. someone intentionally OD’ing & then having a change of heart & calling 911).
Can't you say the same thing about any violence? Guns don't cause the violence in the first place. If you didn't have a gun you'd be violent with a knife instead, if you'd already decided to be violent.
So how does 'suicide by gun often gets wrapped into "gun violence" figures than make the US stats look worse than they actually are', which is what this thread was about?
You should care less about the murder rate by nation and more by city or neighborhood. Chicago and Detroit are thousands of miles away from where I live - what relevance is the murder rates in those cities to me? Someone living in Alaska would have to cover a quarter of the surface of the globe to reach Key West Florida...why would they feel impacted by the crime rate there?
Go look at a heat map of per-capita gun homicides in the US. This is not a "national" problem. Communicating this has been very challenging for people who live in Chicago in particular - everyone thinks the entire city is a killzone, when in fact there are perfectly safe neighborhoods, and other neighborhoods that are a warzone. But if you were to only see the citywide statistics for Chicago murders, you wouldn't even leave the airport.
Perhaps worth considering is the rate of sexual assaults alongside the rate of violent crime.
It's a culture problem. America has a violent culture.
It's weird to me that we so often discuss firearm violence without also considering the prevalence of other forms of violence; these are symptoms of an underlaying concern.
The politicians talking about firearm violence don't actually care about fixing it, they just say things that their base wants to hear. For example, the democrat congressman from my district in MD sent out an email talking about trying to fight the epidemic of gun violence by banning assault rifles and high capacity magazines, even though pistols are used in the vast majority of shootings. A few years ago the MD state democrats also blocked some laws that would have imposed harsher punishment on people who use handguns in crimes because they said it would disproportionately affect minorities. They didn't want to look like they weren't doing anything about gun violence though, so they banned bump stocks, even though they have never been used to commit a crime in MD, and the ATF says the functionality can easily be replicated with a rubber band or belt.
Since gun ownership and the number of guns have both been rising continuously for years, you can correlate them to anything you like. Since the number of guns was over three hundred million when the murder rate was lower, we can also correlate a large number of guns in circulation to lower murder rates. Or rising rates, or dropping rates. No matter where the trend moves, as long as there are over three hundred million guns in the US, guns are basically as available as milk and gasoline and effectively a constant. Or do you honestly believe going from three hundred million guns to three hundred and one million guns is worthy of measure for correlation?
All of this is irrelevant in any case. 99.95% of guns are benign in the US. This isn't conjecture - its a clear ratio of total guns in circulation vs gun homicides. A law-abiding owner of a gun should be as concerned by a gun used in a murder as a chef would be concerned about someone being stabbed with a pearing knife.
If you want a more realistic answer, I would suggest both economic desperation (unemployment, inequality, need) and pressures due to a new and unnatural mode of living enforced on the population (lockdown). Or if you want to get political, all of the cities in the infographic are blue cities that moved to lax policing policies in 2020.
Sifting through all of the articles, we have about a 50% increase in homicides in US Cities in 2020, but only about a 15% increase in gun-related deaths, according to numbers from the anti-gun non-profit Gun Violence Archive...
If the correlation were strong, you would expect to see them increase similarly...
Keep in mind that GVA does not discount suicides from their report.
US gun ownership has been rising substantially, yet the homicide rate dropped by more than a factor of two between the 1990s and 2010s. In fact, the mid 2010s saw the lowest homicide rate in over 50 years.
By comparison, contrary to popular belief, several European countries allow people to buy firearms with similar availability as the US. The main examples that come to mind are Switzerland, Serbia, and the Czech Republic. The last one also permits concealed carry of firearms - something several US states prohibit.
Widespread availability of firearms is likely a magnifying factor in areas with conditions that lead to crime, but plenty of areas with widespread gun ownership like much of rural America have low homicide rates.
Switzerland has 2 million private guns (excluding the guns for the militia) for a population of ~8.5 million. That’s about an arm rate of ~25% (not to mention that you need a permit for gun ownership & that’s tracked (with the Swiss voting in stricter gun tracking laws recently in 2019).
By comparison, America has an estimated 353 million civilian guns, netting to just over each man, woman, & baby having a gun. Additionally, the laws are extremely lax meaning the government has poor records, enforcement, & a hodge-podge of laws across state lines around gun ownership.
The type of superficial comparison that’s always trotted out in this kind of discussion is always so frustratingly predictable and superficial. Studies have repeatedly shown that in American society, increased gun availability directly tracks with homicides & mass casualty events. You can either regulate guns more akin to the nations you hold up as “exemplars” or make gun ownership less common. All attempts to regulate this situation in any way, shape, or form is regularly fought by Republicans, even for “common sense” legislation that has broad bipartisan appeal across party lines. Heck, often times people thing the government already does background checks for gun ownership without realizing the huge loopholes & intentional castrating of the background check process render the entire process a joke.
There has been a reduction in homicide in virtually all places in the world during the same time, including many places where gun ownership increased during the time frame. So I'm not sure that we can conclude that Australia's restrictions to gun ownership are the only/principle reasons that homicides went down.
Wyoming has one of the highest gun ownership rates 59% and one of the lowest murder rates 1 in 100k in the country. Maryland has 21% gun ownership rates, one of the lowest, and the fourth highest rate of homicides 9 per 100k.
I'm a proud 2A supporter, but I think this has more roots in HN being a strong "fuck the poor" community and the tenebility of that position usually involves some amount of gun ownership.
This sort of generalization is entirely in the eye of the beholder. HN is divided on divisive topics the same way that any large-enough population sample would be. Also, HN's community is only about 50% in the U.S. Your comment is already false about that half, but it would certainly be even more false about the international half, since people in other countries have totally different perspectives on guns.
I'm strongly against 2A, just want to be clear. It's just a topic that brings out all of the 2A folks in droves whenever it comes up here. I think the rest of the community generally shies away from the conversation for that reason.
I should made that clearer in my comment. Apologies.
The headline conflates two things into an unsupported conclusion. The original author actually said that the murder rate nationally may have risen more than any other year. They did not say that the rate increase in any given city was unprecedented in those cities.
<50,000 dead from corona under age 55. cdc stats. a whole country shut down results in political instability at every level. it will lead to war eventually. hundreds of millions will die.
I hate when these types of stories only report the percentage change of the incidents involved. Going from 1 murder to 2 murders is the same percentage change as 100 to 200, and in general they're dealing with so few events that it's hard to distinguish some meaningful change from expected variance.
Also, it's not as easy to track but it'd be interesting to see if attempted murders saw the same spike. This increase could merely be a result of overtaxed hospitals saving fewer people.
Unfortunately, every one of the cities here had significantly more than just one one or two murders.
At a glance at the linked source data, it looks like Seattle came in with the lowest values on this list, at 47 murders for 2020 vs 27 in 2019.
One thing of note is that some of the values appear to be for not quite the entirety of 2020.
The first sentence of the story's second paragraph includes a link to a Twitter post [1] from the person who compiled the data, which contains a second link [2] to the Google Doc that he created.
I wonder, is it lack of deterrence (police presence and follow through) due to SARS-CoV2 or due to side-effects of SARS-CoV2 (perh psychological effects)?
The explanation doesn't have to be so exotic. Millions of people in the US lost their jobs this year and the stress and financial difficulties from that increase the rate of all violent crime.
Right but murder is not something regular people decide they're going to do just because "things are difficult".
It's usually something people who are apt to do that do (I know almost self referential). But what I mean is, it's possible that people given to violence either didn't see the same deterrence so they acted, or as you are saying people who would be unlikely suspects were pushed over the edge and did this as a side-effect of the virus.
I don't think it's a lack of deterrence. It's people who are between a rock and a hard place and lose it. Personally I don't know anyone who's died of the virus but I do know people who killed themselves last year because of the economic situation.
An important note is that despite the large increase from last year we're still way below where we were in the 90s.
Also police are one of the few things that didn't have a big drop in the number of people working it this year so I'm not sure where the smaller deterrent would be coming from. There's very few people who are walking around thinking about killing someone that then see a cop are decide not to. A lot of murders aren't even premeditated they're short spur of the moment violent outbursts.
I really hate this sort of hand-wavey explanation; pretending that all sorts of bad behavior is committed by Jean Valjeans who would be model citizens if only they had a job.
I can see that the increased stress would correlate to a small rise in domestic violence, but remember also that for the first half of thr lockdown, people in the lower income tiers were getting more in unemployment (due to the extra 600 / week bonus) than they had been getting from their actual jobs.
I happen to know someone in that position who wasn't stressed, just bored.
They're not directly but that doesn't mean they're not correlated. The same way murders don't actively cool you down but that doesn't mean heat waves don't cause higher murder and violent crime rates...
The most obvious explanation is also the simplest: American cities spent most of 2020 attacking their own police forces, psychologically and financially.
> Britain's government is issuing grants covering 80 percent of unemployed workers' salaries up to a total of £2,500 ($3,084) a month. The package also reportedly contains statutory sick pay for employees that have been told to self-isolate.
That's more per month than the US has given in total.
Job stress and financial difficulties don't turn a person into a murderer. Most murderers are psychopathic/sociopathic and predisposed to more serious crimes. That said...
There is a recent shift of police and social resources away from "crime as usual" toward the handling of social unrest and crowds/mobs. Most departments try to anticipate such shifts, which strongly affect the size and allocation of manpower within the police department. A small police department can find itself unable to investigate serious crimes in times of social unrest. Anyone who is intelligent and who wants to commit a premeditated crime knows this and could be expected to take advantage of it.
This take is just wrong statistically. First, there are far more than a few murders in large cities. Second, murders rising in ALL large cities by a large percentage is unlikely. Third, the total murders across the large cities rising by a LARGE percentage is unlikely.
The equivalent to the second is tossing heads every time. The equivalent to the third is tossing far more heads than tails when you toss many times.
> First, there are far more than a few murders in large cities.
From the chart apparently linked in one of the sources, half the cities listed had under a hundred. Only two had one a day, Chicago and Philadelphia. That's "a few" in this kind of statistics.
>Second, murders rising in ALL large cities by a large percentage is unlikely.
When ~10 events can constitute a large percentage, it's not that unlikely.
I won't say there wasn't something that was worse this year compared to most, I put forward my guess as to a primary cause in my first post. Using metrics like "percentage change" hide the actual events that happened, and makes the problem sound more terrifying than it actually is.
The definition of high percentage doesn’t matter much here just as it doesn’t matter much if a coin is a little head or a lot head. You can also measure the probability of murder doubling for each city using statistics if you are so inclined.
The number of tosses matters. As the number of tosses increases, it is increasingly unlikely to toss all heads and increasingly unlikely to toss a great more heads than tails. This is probability and the central limit theorem.
I have no idea what you're trying to say, as trying to compare these statistics to a 50% chance just doesn't work. Is the number of tosses the number of people or the number of murders?
Generally I'd agree, but it's pretty common knowledge that US homicide and gun homicide rates are already very high by world standards. So it's a spike on an already high rate.
Most shootings don’t end with the victim dying. Perhaps the marginal shooters were less likely to be familiar with their gun, or not shooting as intentionally.
I’m thinking about people getting frustrated and using their guns in a fight, rather than planning to and intentionally trying to kill an “enemy”.
~72% of murders are shootings [0], which makes the math on that pretty much impossible. Maybe the increase is all in wild shooting / firefights, while targeted and determined gun murders have stayed around the same level?
Small arms gunshots are surprisingly survivable if you can get to an ER in time. The victim will probably have permanent nerve and/or organ damage to the point of being crippled, but they're still alive.
Turns out when you defund the police and disband special units murders go up.
From the linked article:
> New York's homicide count went up by nearly 40 percent with Mayor Bill de Blasio stating that the figures should worry all New Yorkers and it has to stop.
Numbers started to rise after this:
> The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothe...
The other cities mentioned had similar decisions that seem to have backfired spectacularly.
alternately, de-emphasiing intervention and prevention and focasing on enforcement also doesnt work. Omaha didnt "defund the police and disband special units" yet saw 61% increase.
- do you have a finer grained (month by month, for example) break down to support your assertion of the correlation in timing of the NYPD disbanding the "anti-crime" units and the homicide rate?
- if so, is there something indicating there is causation rather than a coincidence?
That's not a meaningful statistic in itself -- you need to exclude shootings within the Autonomous Zone, where the team would have been unable to operate anyway.
People care about the murder statistics because they don't want to get murdered. If you're trying to use them to measure the performance of the police force, that might make a small amount of difference, but for the way most people are using these stats arbitrarily excluding a whole bunch of murders because they occurred due to the wholesale, officially sanctioned breakdown of law and order would be very misleading.
Please don't post flamewar comments like this. You've done it repeatedly in the past, and that's not ok here. Fortunately most of your comments are much better.
Obviously you can disagree with the GP, but please do so within the site guidelines. If you'd review and follow them from now on, we'd be grateful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Note these ones:
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
How does that change in June explain rising homicides in the first half of the year? And how does this New York policy explain homicides in 52 other cities? Including, by the way, the likes of Tulsa or Omaha[0] which I suspect aren't sharing too many policy prescriptions with NYC?
> Turns out when you defund the police and disband special units murders go up.
Turns out - correlation doesn't equal causation.
From my criminology 101 class - crime goes down when the likelihood of being arrested/convicted of a crime goes up. The problem is that the likelihood of being arrested/convicted is a complex system whereby no one single factor can affect it.
Especially last year you had several huge sociological factors that likely played into this: social reactions to BLM, riots, domestic terrorism, record high unemployment, mental health contributions due to stay-home regulations, AND defunding of the police.
To pretend that one factor is the only contributing factor to a complex system is a fool's errand.
It should be noted that nearly the entirety of the increase in murders happened after the BLM protests began in May [1]. Before that, 2020 was on track to be an unremarkably violent year.
Given that this is exactly what happened in Ferguson and Baltimore after those cities’ riots, the increase was sadly predictable. Baltimore’s experience bodes especially poorly for the country; its homicide rate has stayed elevated ever since.
The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters.
> The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters.
How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
>>> The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters.
>> How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
> Here's a brief summary of violence that occurred in one day of BLM protests in the state of New York:
> 3 Buffalo cops run over ...
> Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.
So you're saying the increase in homicides is BLM protesters (or hangers on) murdering cops?
> By that logic, you should be blaming the police. Why did you stop tracing back once you got to BLM?
Police are a controlled variable, they existed in 2019, 2018, 2017, etc...
BLM protests and the associated violence that occurred during the summer months directly coincides with a spike in 2020 murder rates. These protests turned brutally violent after dark; to not acknowledge this is troublesome. While this conclusion may not be in vogue, it maps with the data.
And to round this out, COVID and unemployment are likely also factors here... but I'm merely responding to your initial question below.
>>>How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
Please don't perpetuate political flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. If another comment is egregious, the site guidelines ask you to flag it rather than feeding it by replying.
Also, please don't use HN primarily for political battle. It looks like you've been coming close to that line lately, and that's the line at which we start banning accounts. We have to, because otherwise this place will just turn into a political flamewar site, and we can't allow that. I've written many explanations about this if you (or anyone) cares to read them.
It's against the HN guidelines to post flamewar comments like this and the other ones you've been posting in this thread. Swipes like "intentionally thick headed" and "you're being intentionally disingenuous" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25855275) are particularly not cool.
Moreover, we ban accounts that use the site primarily for political battle, regardless of their politics. We have to, because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to be for.
Your account has been using HN primarily for political battle and just slid significantly downward toward flamewar hell, so I briefly just banned it, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt instead, and assume that you didn't know what the rules are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended in the future. That means thoughtful conversation on a variety of intellectually curious topics, no flamewar, and not using the site primarily for political arguments.
Seems strange that the source data doesn't also include per capita numbers. Sure Seattle went from 27 to 47 but with a population of 700,000+ that's a much lower per capita number than say Cleveland going from 121 to 175 with a population of only 380,000+.
Hey! Can everyone remember that 2020 was a crazy year with many different big things happening. Stop zeroing in on your favorite cause and blaming only it.
At the very least acknowledge a few confounding factors if you really insist on making a case for your selected reason.
I'll throw a theory out there - less recreational drug use due to lockdown (especially cocaine). What was a massive industry last year is now orders of magnitude smaller, with the same violent groups fighting over this much-reduced pie.
105 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadThis should be plainly obvious.
What point are you making? Other than perhaps unintentionally backing the pro-gun lobby idea that guns are just tools.
That if you're worried about the harmful effects of guns, don't discount suicide just because those people aren't harming you.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Homicide rate in EU is 1.7, US is 5.8 or 4.3 (Firearms only).
Go look at a heat map of per-capita gun homicides in the US. This is not a "national" problem. Communicating this has been very challenging for people who live in Chicago in particular - everyone thinks the entire city is a killzone, when in fact there are perfectly safe neighborhoods, and other neighborhoods that are a warzone. But if you were to only see the citywide statistics for Chicago murders, you wouldn't even leave the airport.
It's a culture problem. America has a violent culture.
It's weird to me that we so often discuss firearm violence without also considering the prevalence of other forms of violence; these are symptoms of an underlaying concern.
All of this is irrelevant in any case. 99.95% of guns are benign in the US. This isn't conjecture - its a clear ratio of total guns in circulation vs gun homicides. A law-abiding owner of a gun should be as concerned by a gun used in a murder as a chef would be concerned about someone being stabbed with a pearing knife.
If you want a more realistic answer, I would suggest both economic desperation (unemployment, inequality, need) and pressures due to a new and unnatural mode of living enforced on the population (lockdown). Or if you want to get political, all of the cities in the infographic are blue cities that moved to lax policing policies in 2020.
If the correlation were strong, you would expect to see them increase similarly...
Keep in mind that GVA does not discount suicides from their report.
In USA there are more non-gun murders per capita than total murders in Australia.
By comparison, contrary to popular belief, several European countries allow people to buy firearms with similar availability as the US. The main examples that come to mind are Switzerland, Serbia, and the Czech Republic. The last one also permits concealed carry of firearms - something several US states prohibit.
Widespread availability of firearms is likely a magnifying factor in areas with conditions that lead to crime, but plenty of areas with widespread gun ownership like much of rural America have low homicide rates.
By comparison, America has an estimated 353 million civilian guns, netting to just over each man, woman, & baby having a gun. Additionally, the laws are extremely lax meaning the government has poor records, enforcement, & a hodge-podge of laws across state lines around gun ownership.
The type of superficial comparison that’s always trotted out in this kind of discussion is always so frustratingly predictable and superficial. Studies have repeatedly shown that in American society, increased gun availability directly tracks with homicides & mass casualty events. You can either regulate guns more akin to the nations you hold up as “exemplars” or make gun ownership less common. All attempts to regulate this situation in any way, shape, or form is regularly fought by Republicans, even for “common sense” legislation that has broad bipartisan appeal across party lines. Heck, often times people thing the government already does background checks for gun ownership without realizing the huge loopholes & intentional castrating of the background check process render the entire process a joke.
https://knoema.com/atlas/Australia/Number-of-homicides
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-australias-gun-laws-r...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081QFZDM8
https://www.armedwithreason.com/shooting-down-the-gun-lobbys...
The relationship between poverty and shooting deaths is very strong though.
Bullets; and by extension guns.
TFA doesn't go into detail (that I could find) about the cause of deaths that occurred in the mentioned 'violent deaths'.
I should made that clearer in my comment. Apologies.
you will obey.
Also, it's not as easy to track but it'd be interesting to see if attempted murders saw the same spike. This increase could merely be a result of overtaxed hospitals saving fewer people.
At a glance at the linked source data, it looks like Seattle came in with the lowest values on this list, at 47 murders for 2020 vs 27 in 2019.
One thing of note is that some of the values appear to be for not quite the entirety of 2020.
The first sentence of the story's second paragraph includes a link to a Twitter post [1] from the person who compiled the data, which contains a second link [2] to the Google Doc that he created.
1 - https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905
2 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z9b5mIwztAwmEHJW7Q5D...
It's usually something people who are apt to do that do (I know almost self referential). But what I mean is, it's possible that people given to violence either didn't see the same deterrence so they acted, or as you are saying people who would be unlikely suspects were pushed over the edge and did this as a side-effect of the virus.
Also police are one of the few things that didn't have a big drop in the number of people working it this year so I'm not sure where the smaller deterrent would be coming from. There's very few people who are walking around thinking about killing someone that then see a cop are decide not to. A lot of murders aren't even premeditated they're short spur of the moment violent outbursts.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
I can see that the increased stress would correlate to a small rise in domestic violence, but remember also that for the first half of thr lockdown, people in the lower income tiers were getting more in unemployment (due to the extra 600 / week bonus) than they had been getting from their actual jobs.
I happen to know someone in that position who wasn't stressed, just bored.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/higher-temperatures-can-le....
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283093/homicides-in-the-...
The most obvious explanation is also the simplest: American cities spent most of 2020 attacking their own police forces, psychologically and financially.
The UK - and the rest of the developed world - did a lot more income support to the general public.
https://www.newsweek.com/heres-how-us-coronavirus-stimulus-p...
> Britain's government is issuing grants covering 80 percent of unemployed workers' salaries up to a total of £2,500 ($3,084) a month. The package also reportedly contains statutory sick pay for employees that have been told to self-isolate.
That's more per month than the US has given in total.
There is a recent shift of police and social resources away from "crime as usual" toward the handling of social unrest and crowds/mobs. Most departments try to anticipate such shifts, which strongly affect the size and allocation of manpower within the police department. A small police department can find itself unable to investigate serious crimes in times of social unrest. Anyone who is intelligent and who wants to commit a premeditated crime knows this and could be expected to take advantage of it.
The equivalent to the second is tossing heads every time. The equivalent to the third is tossing far more heads than tails when you toss many times.
From the chart apparently linked in one of the sources, half the cities listed had under a hundred. Only two had one a day, Chicago and Philadelphia. That's "a few" in this kind of statistics.
>Second, murders rising in ALL large cities by a large percentage is unlikely.
When ~10 events can constitute a large percentage, it's not that unlikely.
I won't say there wasn't something that was worse this year compared to most, I put forward my guess as to a primary cause in my first post. Using metrics like "percentage change" hide the actual events that happened, and makes the problem sound more terrifying than it actually is.
The number of tosses matters. As the number of tosses increases, it is increasingly unlikely to toss all heads and increasingly unlikely to toss a great more heads than tails. This is probability and the central limit theorem.
Any idea why the difference?
I’m thinking about people getting frustrated and using their guns in a fight, rather than planning to and intentionally trying to kill an “enemy”.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Also people miss a lot.
From the linked article:
> New York's homicide count went up by nearly 40 percent with Mayor Bill de Blasio stating that the figures should worry all New Yorkers and it has to stop.
Numbers started to rise after this:
> The New York police commissioner announced on Monday that he was disbanding the Police Department’s anti-crime units: plainclothes teams that target violent crime and have been involved in some of the city’s most notorious police shootings. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/nypd-plainclothe...
The other cities mentioned had similar decisions that seem to have backfired spectacularly.
[https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/omaha-saw-a-61...]
- do you have a finer grained (month by month, for example) break down to support your assertion of the correlation in timing of the NYPD disbanding the "anti-crime" units and the homicide rate?
- if so, is there something indicating there is causation rather than a coincidence?
Another example:
Portland defunded the Gun Violence Reduction Team at the beginning of July.
28 shootings in July of 2019. 99 in July of 2020. The police chief said it was because of a lack of resources.
Obviously you can disagree with the GP, but please do so within the site guidelines. If you'd review and follow them from now on, we'd be grateful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Note these ones:
"Don't be snarky."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
How does that change in June explain rising homicides in the first half of the year? And how does this New York policy explain homicides in 52 other cities? Including, by the way, the likes of Tulsa or Omaha[0] which I suspect aren't sharing too many policy prescriptions with NYC?
[0]: https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343950694672379905/...
Turns out - correlation doesn't equal causation.
From my criminology 101 class - crime goes down when the likelihood of being arrested/convicted of a crime goes up. The problem is that the likelihood of being arrested/convicted is a complex system whereby no one single factor can affect it.
Especially last year you had several huge sociological factors that likely played into this: social reactions to BLM, riots, domestic terrorism, record high unemployment, mental health contributions due to stay-home regulations, AND defunding of the police.
To pretend that one factor is the only contributing factor to a complex system is a fool's errand.
Given that this is exactly what happened in Ferguson and Baltimore after those cities’ riots, the increase was sadly predictable. Baltimore’s experience bodes especially poorly for the country; its homicide rate has stayed elevated ever since.
The slaughter of an extra 3000-4000 people in the span of seven months is a colossal tragedy. I hope that the cheerleaders of future racial reckonings will do all in their power to prevent similar disasters.
[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2020/12/shootings-data-philadelphia...
*country wide protests that result in the burning city blocks, murders, and looting do not happen all the time...
I'm not sure why you're being intentionally disingenuous here.
How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
Here's a brief summary of violence that occurred in one day of BLM protests in the state of New York:
3 Buffalo cops run over
1 Bronx cop run over
2 NYPD officers assaulted
https://www.syracuse.com/state/2020/06/suv-rams-police-in-bu...
When looting and vandalism are allowed to reign supreme, the atmosphere alone sets the stage for more violence.
Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.
>> How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
> Here's a brief summary of violence that occurred in one day of BLM protests in the state of New York:
> 3 Buffalo cops run over ...
> Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.
So you're saying the increase in homicides is BLM protesters (or hangers on) murdering cops?
>> When looting and vandalism are allowed to reign supreme, the atmosphere alone sets the stage for more violence.
>> Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.
>> Violence begets violence, whether it's committed by BLM protesters or a mob of Trump supporters.
By that logic, you should be blaming the police. Why did you stop tracing back once you got to BLM?
Police are a controlled variable, they existed in 2019, 2018, 2017, etc...
BLM protests and the associated violence that occurred during the summer months directly coincides with a spike in 2020 murder rates. These protests turned brutally violent after dark; to not acknowledge this is troublesome. While this conclusion may not be in vogue, it maps with the data.
And to round this out, COVID and unemployment are likely also factors here... but I'm merely responding to your initial question below.
>>>How exactly do you think the BLM protesters are responsible for these murders, or could have acted to prevent them?
Cheers amigo!
Also, please don't use HN primarily for political battle. It looks like you've been coming close to that line lately, and that's the line at which we start banning accounts. We have to, because otherwise this place will just turn into a political flamewar site, and we can't allow that. I've written many explanations about this if you (or anyone) cares to read them.
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Moreover, we ban accounts that use the site primarily for political battle, regardless of their politics. We have to, because it destroys the curious conversation that HN is supposed to be for.
Your account has been using HN primarily for political battle and just slid significantly downward toward flamewar hell, so I briefly just banned it, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt instead, and assume that you didn't know what the rules are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended in the future. That means thoughtful conversation on a variety of intellectually curious topics, no flamewar, and not using the site primarily for political arguments.
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At the very least acknowledge a few confounding factors if you really insist on making a case for your selected reason.