Unlikely. Police mostly deal with consequences, they can’t stop everyone from doing what they have intended to do. And why would police suddenly become hesitant?
It is more likely that it is caused by pandemic situation where many people have lost jobs and homes. Also social conditions changed. All of that could attribute to agressive and reckless behaviour.
You can imagine that people in Ferguson might be unwilling to report petty crime until the police can’t do much about it as the punishment for stealing a low value item can be summary execution and you might not want that for the kid down the street who has gone off the rails a bit. So that probably affects the clear up rate.
The causes are likely many issues interacting in a complex manner. That said, yes, obviously locking people in a house with the person most likely to murder them, while simultaneously putting enormous financial strain on that household, is very likely a contributing factor. I don't think anyone is arguing that point.
> Further, given how culturally different those countries are, trying to compare the two would be ludicrous.
If the original post was making a comment about american culture (its "hyperviolence"), why wouldn't you compare it to a different culture? That is how comparisons work.
> why wouldn't you compare it to a different culture? That is how comparisons work.
Sure, yes. That's how comparisons work if you'd wanted to make that kind of comparison. Or you might want to compare to similar countries where you don't have to control for so many variables.
there is probably no similar country to US in this kind of regard, unless you start ignoring pretty important factors (high criminality rate, western democracy, prevalence of legal and illegal guns and so on)
But five million is not "a tiny country". It's the fourth decile or so. It's slightly larger than Los Angeles in population and apparently Los Angeles homicide rate has oscillated in the 5.0-6.3 per 100k region between 2010 and 2019, with annual ±10% fluctuations. That's way less than ±50% that you expect for the same population.
You do realize you're posting in a thread where someone just posted an article saying the number of homicides this year so far in Norway were 0? Last year they had 31.
If Norway had the same homicide rate as the whole of the US in 2019 (as it doesn't seem they've release the 2020 ones yet), according to the FBI[1] the homicide rate in the US was 5.0 murders per 100,000 people. Norway has a population of 5.4 million.
So for Norway, that would have been 270.
Does that seem like a fluctuation?
You're severely misrepresenting the facts as your figures are out by two orders of magnitude.
You do realize you're posting in a thread where someone just posted an article saying the number of homicides this year so far in Norway were 0? Last year they had 31.
That's an order of magnitude off from the homicide rate of the US, which you just quoted.
Why are you even using the US' homicide rate and applying it to Norway?
> Why are you even using the US' homicide rate and applying it to Norway?
because they are considered simarly developed countries, but as far as violence stats go (especially gun violence) USA is more comparable to developing countries.
But also a population 12 times larger than Norway (60 million people).
Los Angeles and Norway have a comparable population, in Los Angeles in 2020 there have been 300 homicides, a 20% increase over 2019, despite covid. It's more than the whole Italy that stopped at 271, 14% less than 2019 that ended with 315 homicides.
Los Angeles has the same size of Rome, in Rome there have been "only" 15 homicides in 2020, 20 times less than LA.
US is the outlier in the West, all the other developed countries have comparable homicide rates.
Japan has the lowest rates globally, in 2017 they had 56 times less homicides per capita than in USA.
> US is the outlier in the West, all the other developed countries have comparable homicide rates.
How developed is the US really? Here's a non exhaustive list of things I and people in my surroundings think moves the US closer to a developing country like India than a developed country.
Democracy wise: Broken voting system
Technology wise: Still using insecure CC and cash only
Healthcare wise: Insurance companies ripping you off
Infrastructure wise: Fiber optics still uncommon, train system is crap
Social security: Friends and family (hopefully) only
Legal system: Carreers are on the line with big cases, so rather than getting to the truth corruption takes over big cases
Freedom: You're free to carry weapons in town that could wipe out the entire mall. (But the government has nukes and tanks, thank god you can shoot them with an assault rifle now)
Education: Only if your parents planned ahead and can afford it, never ending cycle to keep poor people poor (I know there are grants and exceptions)
Religion: Still a significant percent following the person in the clouds.
I've never been to the US, but these are things "Swedes" (My social circle) commonly joke about when talking about the US, seeing videos, news, articles from your media online.
I do realise i might come off as quite arrogant, but this is the picture the US presents, the list from above could probably quite easily be broken down by exceptions and differences between states, It's only there to reflect back what I/we see.
> or is this another aspect of the US's unexpectedly high violence
That's a steep drop of context. The US doesn't have abnormally high violence overall, as your blanket statement would imply. The US has a lower rate of violent crime than Europe does and that has been consistently true for 50 years.
The US has an unexpectedly high murder rate due to the mass proliferation of easy to get handguns in its inner cities. If you remove that single factor, the US murder rate drops to something comparable to Canada. It's obvious that the murder problem in the US is a handgun problem and the stats always bear that out year after year.
No, your post clearly lacks cites for your claims because you expect me to go look them up on my own. By your logic that's not logic.
The OPs claims were not flippant and are easy to verify. Erhk was being lazy and trying to pin that laziness on the OP. It's the very behavior LMGTFY was invented to expose.
Demanding citations for easily checked facts is one of the primary signs of bad-faith arguing.
I am not even arguing, as there is nothing to argue against. Get numbers and sources and then we can discuss.
> Demanding citations for easily checked facts is one of the primary signs of bad-faith arguing.
Not providing facts and then expecting people to do it for you is arguing in bad faith. Particularly when it’s trivial to find sources telling that the fact-free opinion is in fact wrong.
> The US has a lower rate of violent crime than Europe does and that has been consistently true for 50 years.
For a very specific definition of violent crime, I suppose. In the real world, homicide rates are not even close, regardless of any hand waving about guns. Same for rapes.
Crime rates are comparable if you put together robberies, assaults, murders, rapes and jaywalking, it does not mean that the rates of violent crimes are similar.
True for me. I enjoy walking in the evening and late at night. The only unpleasant encounter I've ever had in Romania was with a bear not a person. Quietly backtracking I got away with it.
While I can't speak for Europe as a whole, I do recall that violent crime comparisons twixt the US and the UK fall afoul of not measuring the same crimes.
The definition of "violent crime" in the UK covers much more than it does in the US.
"If you remove the murders, the US has a low murder rate" isn't helpful.
> It's obvious that the murder problem in the US is a handgun problem and the stats always bear that out year after year
Well, yes, but this runs into the "this is constitutionally guaranteed and we refuse to even contemplate doing anything about it" problem.
But the difference is huge. In the 1980s, Detroit was more lethal than Belfast, with regular bombs going off and troops shooting civilians in the streets.
If you remove cities like Detroit from US numbers, it's as safe as the Czech Republic and other Western countries. We don't have a gun violence problem, we have a dangerous cities problem. Poor management of inner city criminals.
But is US minus Detroit safer than Cz minus Prague, or UK minus London and Manchester? Most murder happens in cities. You can't just handwave the problem away and say it's not really America.
The US system of policing seems to be both repressive and ineffective.
Are you suggesting that that altercations that wouldn't result in death, did result in death due to hospital overload and as such trigger the murder/homicide stat?
He is suggesting that and it's wrong. Shootings are up by an even higher amount than deaths. The implications of that are left for the reader to figure out.
Yes, the line between murder and attempted murder can be very thin. The hospitals were overtaxed last year, leading to things like health care worker fatigue which would cause an increase in deaths in all areas they are involved with.
In actuality, there never was a "tremendous strain" on hospitals as a result of covid. Quite the contrary if you care to look at the facts and not the skewed numbers used to sensationalize and fear monger.
Also, these numbers have nothing to do with hospital occupancy.
There are reasons to be extraordinarily careful with these kinds of statistics - for example in germany the statistics are based on when the crime is reported, not when it occurred. We had one spike in germany between 2016-2018 when hundreds of potential cases attributed to a single serial killer entered the statistics. Most of these cases had been committed a decade earlier.
The numbers are hard to compare given they're not normalized. Murder rates are commonly given as murders per year per 100K inhabitants. Usually, countries with low rates have around 0.5-1.0 (like European countries), The States has around 5, the worst rates can be found in some Latin American countries in the 20-50 range.
Just to save someone else the time, “if we just banned guns literally no one would ever die! Look at Europe, the culture and societal mental health in $european_country is exactly the same as America! Guns are literally the only difference!”
We haven't had any surge in crime in the Czech Republic, a shall-issue country.
We also had no violent riots. It seems that a lot of people want to ignore the elephant in the room: unchecked or poorly checked riots increase the criminal fever of the nation.
America is probably comparable in violent crimes to more racially/religiously/culturally diverse countries in Europe. Like France, or UK. I'm just guessing though.
There's not much point listing homicide rates when it's so much easier to kill someone in America.
What's more interesting are cases of violent crimes.
Though considering how much more diverse the United States is, it's probably stupid for me to assume France/UK could compete with us on genericized "violent crimes" either.
If you remove the contribution of one specific demographic from gun violence statistics, the US rate of gun violence is one of the lowest in the world, despite one of the highest rates of gun ownership.
Cultural diversity is a strong factor, but not the only one: it depends which cultures are mixed up. For example Asians like Vietnamese etc. rarely cause any trouble. If so, it seems like they are the ones attacked (like now in the USA). Some other cultures seem much more bellicose. Finding the root cases of their resentment and eradicating them - without causing collateral damage - should be the main task of politicians, educators and society in general.
Would be nice if you could not guess (and post) something that takes as much time to google as it takes to post, especially when it's wrong... Not trying to be snarky, apologies in advance.
I think the Australian experiment in gun policy is pretty telling. It doesn't prove these policies work and have a major effect, but it sure is as compelling an argument as you can make.
From a quick Google search (not to be snarky) it seems like they only confiscated about 650,000 guns.
There's about 400,000,000 guns in America so I'm not sure how good of an argument that is.
In addition, Australia is essentially an island. The US is bordered above and below with other countries that also have guns. Not to mention the amount of lost guns due to "boating accidents" that would happen if there's a gun confiscation.
> In addition, Australia is essentially an island. The US is bordered above and below with other countries that also have guns. Not to mention the amount of lost guns due to "boating accidents" that would happen if there's a gun confiscation.
There’s always a reason not to try, right? It’s not like there are no illegal guns in public hands in Europe or Australia. But it’s not possible to walk in to a store and get an AR-15 on a driving license.
Yeah, but trying to do something in our case would have to be a damned convincing to a whole lot of people.
Take a wrong step and we might have a much worse capitol insurrection.
Personally I don't feel this is worth doing in America at this point. We already have very well established and optimized drug smuggling operations from Mexico that would benefit very well from a complete federal-level gun ban.
The actual criminals would love it being as easy to get an unregisted AR-15 as buying coke from their drug dealer. Meanwhile the private citizen in rural America would have to commit felonies to defend themselves, with the nearest police station half an hour away.
I guess it's important to keep in mind who are the people committing gun related crimes. Are there any good write ups / statistics one can recommend which could put things in perspective?
It always seems odd to me when people point out guns as being the difference when there are so many other differences between the US and other Western countries like poverty, access to health care, and social safety nets.
Do they really think if Western Europeans or Australians were given handguns they would start shooting each other?
Comparing Australia to the US is pretty silly on its face.
Population wise, Australia wouldn't even be our largest state. Their population isnt as diverse. They dont have to throw so much of their national budget into defense etc.
In fact none of the EU or other western countries budgets arent structured the same. Heck there was just a thread yesterday about Ukraine where some were admitting France and Germany realize in the wake of Trumps administration the US may not be the defender in a time of need they expect and probably should budget for increasing their defense.
A lot of these EU social programs occur because the US carries the lions share of defense budget for them. And so when skirmishes happen near their borders, in Syria, in Libya, in the Ukraine etc they not only look to us, but push the US to lead these coalitions.
The US is a large union of somewhat individually governed states, with some larger Federal body managing some bigger common interest things like defense. Its more apt to compare a country like France to a single state. Even most our federal programs are nothing more than regulatory or budgetary incentives to gets individual states to work together (see: education, infrastructure/roads etc).
Comparing the US to a single European Union members and saying "see" the Czech Republic doesnt have this is crazy talk. I am willing to bet Iowa isnt have massive murder inceases.
Even in the US, over most counties dont even have a murder, where it would be odd to have multiples or even dozens.. But painting the entire country of 300 million people with such a broad brush and using random individual nations as a poster child is in no way honest.
The US saw a similar drop in the murder rate around the same time period, despite no action in terms of firearm policy. Declaring the policy to be effective based on a secular decline in murders seen broadly across the Western world seems rather disingenuous.
Taking HN threads into flamewar like this is somewhere between vandalism and arson. It's just the opposite of what we're trying for here. Please read the rules and follow them from now on.
Basically, a disproportionate number of the murders is done by blacks. Often the victim is also black, but blacks are much more likely to murder whites than vice versa.
Inequality is likely a major cause of crime as it creates more pressure/trauma on the poor.
A lot of people think that criminals are fundamentally different from them. More aggressive, less empathetic, etc... I'm pretty sure that essentially anyone can become a criminal. It's just a matter of how much trauma each person can take.
How in any way is this relevant? To anything? It's seeing this sort of spiked dialogue that just reinforces my belief that the US is on a downward spiral of naval-gazing self-destruction. One would hope the US had grown up by now. Gotten past the terrible teens. Sadly it hasn't.
It helps avoid the knee-jerk reaction of blaming it on the other side. You might think we don't need that stat because we're above it, but sadly we're not..
It feels like the US has less moderates every year. I don't have any data to back that up, just how it feels.
Your intuition is correct. This site [1] includes graphs covering political values of Americans from 1994 to 2017, and it's very clear that politics is much more polarized than in the past.
As an outsider to America, it looks like there's a moderate center-right party, and a batshitinsane far-right crazy party, and logically very few people between them, because either you believe obviously stupid delusional claims, or you don't.
Three-quarters of one side believe that the last election was stolen, despite the huge amount of evidence to the contrary. Very many of them believe that the climate emergency is a Chinese hoax, that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, that his wife is trans.
Why would there be any middle ground now, when one side has taken leave of their senses?
trying to understand what determines which city is aligned with each party? Is it strictly who the mayor is, city council, or both?
Plus the real issue is not percentage that the rate went up but how many people does that actually mean? Going up in Chicago is going to greatly dwarf most other cities and I am not sure they are very large Republican governed cities.
In effect, they are using statistics to attempt to make the issue seem less dire than it really is. The number of deaths is ridiculous so they don't want that number out there.
Furthermore, city boundaries are often gerrymandered to either turn their suburbs blue or be turned red by their suburbs so. Some cities absorb their suburbs, some don't. Then on top of that you've got moderate D's who can pass as an R if they shut their mouths on certain topics running on the R ticket because that's the only way to challenge the incumbent. So not only is the distinction needlessly divisive but it's such a high noise metric it's not useful for anything ever anyway.
Maybe is due to Biden effect. The border aliens spiked up since he is president. Also, most people I talked to no longer view law has any standings after seeing how SCOTUS behaves. Many law enforcers also lose a lot of respect since BLM mid last years.
That's a gross mischaracterization. He's an IQ and conscientiousness supremacist, which has the side effect of looking like white supremacy.
But nobody's going to edit Wikipedia to characterize him as an "East Asian/Ashkenazi Jewish/Brahmin Hindu Supremacist", which would still be wrong, but at least be far more accurate.
It doesn't just look like white supremacy, it has the same effects and acts as a convenient cover for actual white supremacy. The difference is really splitting hairs in my opinion.
this is not interesting? hes comparing raw murder numbers. differences of 150 murders to 160. what WOULD be interesting is the change in murder rate per capita, and compare that over a longer period of time to see if that number has actually increased significantly in the wider picture, not just for the dates that were cherry picked here
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadIt is more likely that it is caused by pandemic situation where many people have lost jobs and homes. Also social conditions changed. All of that could attribute to agressive and reckless behaviour.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect#:~:text=The%....
Don’t physically fight with police, and you’ll be fine. Simple as that.
Link me some examples. There are so many that it cannot be counted, and so surely it should be easy for you to send me a dozen examples.
But what about the rest of the world?
"No one has been murdered in Norway so far this year"
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-norway-year.amp
You'll have trouble finding statistically significant trends there year-to-year, yet alone in a few months.
Further, given how culturally different those countries are, trying to compare the two would be ludicrous.
If the original post was making a comment about american culture (its "hyperviolence"), why wouldn't you compare it to a different culture? That is how comparisons work.
Sure, yes. That's how comparisons work if you'd wanted to make that kind of comparison. Or you might want to compare to similar countries where you don't have to control for so many variables.
That's why you compare the crimes commited per capita. The demographics of Norway and that of the USA is nothing alike.
So yes I was comparing per-capita. However Norway is so tiny that fluctuations of even +/- 50% year-to-year are likely to be just noise.
A tiny country may have one homicide one year, then three the next. Or as a journalist would put it: "Murders in Norway skyrocket. Up 200%."
I don't think it's a fair comparison just because absolute population is similar.
If Norway had the same homicide rate as the whole of the US in 2019 (as it doesn't seem they've release the 2020 ones yet), according to the FBI[1] the homicide rate in the US was 5.0 murders per 100,000 people. Norway has a population of 5.4 million.
So for Norway, that would have been 270.
Does that seem like a fluctuation?
You're severely misrepresenting the facts as your figures are out by two orders of magnitude.
[1]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-....
That's an order of magnitude off from the homicide rate of the US, which you just quoted.
Why are you even using the US' homicide rate and applying it to Norway?
because they are considered simarly developed countries, but as far as violence stats go (especially gun violence) USA is more comparable to developing countries.
But also a population 12 times larger than Norway (60 million people).
Los Angeles and Norway have a comparable population, in Los Angeles in 2020 there have been 300 homicides, a 20% increase over 2019, despite covid. It's more than the whole Italy that stopped at 271, 14% less than 2019 that ended with 315 homicides.
Los Angeles has the same size of Rome, in Rome there have been "only" 15 homicides in 2020, 20 times less than LA.
US is the outlier in the West, all the other developed countries have comparable homicide rates.
Japan has the lowest rates globally, in 2017 they had 56 times less homicides per capita than in USA.
How developed is the US really? Here's a non exhaustive list of things I and people in my surroundings think moves the US closer to a developing country like India than a developed country.
Democracy wise: Broken voting system
Technology wise: Still using insecure CC and cash only
Healthcare wise: Insurance companies ripping you off
Infrastructure wise: Fiber optics still uncommon, train system is crap
Social security: Friends and family (hopefully) only
Legal system: Carreers are on the line with big cases, so rather than getting to the truth corruption takes over big cases
Freedom: You're free to carry weapons in town that could wipe out the entire mall. (But the government has nukes and tanks, thank god you can shoot them with an assault rifle now)
Education: Only if your parents planned ahead and can afford it, never ending cycle to keep poor people poor (I know there are grants and exceptions)
Religion: Still a significant percent following the person in the clouds.
I've never been to the US, but these are things "Swedes" (My social circle) commonly joke about when talking about the US, seeing videos, news, articles from your media online.
I do realise i might come off as quite arrogant, but this is the picture the US presents, the list from above could probably quite easily be broken down by exceptions and differences between states, It's only there to reflect back what I/we see.
That's a steep drop of context. The US doesn't have abnormally high violence overall, as your blanket statement would imply. The US has a lower rate of violent crime than Europe does and that has been consistently true for 50 years.
The US has an unexpectedly high murder rate due to the mass proliferation of easy to get handguns in its inner cities. If you remove that single factor, the US murder rate drops to something comparable to Canada. It's obvious that the murder problem in the US is a handgun problem and the stats always bear that out year after year.
The OPs claims were not flippant and are easy to verify. Erhk was being lazy and trying to pin that laziness on the OP. It's the very behavior LMGTFY was invented to expose.
Demanding citations for easily checked facts is one of the primary signs of bad-faith arguing.
> Demanding citations for easily checked facts is one of the primary signs of bad-faith arguing.
Not providing facts and then expecting people to do it for you is arguing in bad faith. Particularly when it’s trivial to find sources telling that the fact-free opinion is in fact wrong.
(The US seems to be ahead of most european countries.)
For a very specific definition of violent crime, I suppose. In the real world, homicide rates are not even close, regardless of any hand waving about guns. Same for rapes.
Crime rates are comparable if you put together robberies, assaults, murders, rapes and jaywalking, it does not mean that the rates of violent crimes are similar.
Heck, Romania is 10 times poorer than the US and it's still safer. And it's not even the safest country in Europe.
The definition of "violent crime" in the UK covers much more than it does in the US.
Here's an old piece about it: https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checki...
> If you remove that single factor
"If you remove the murders, the US has a low murder rate" isn't helpful.
> It's obvious that the murder problem in the US is a handgun problem and the stats always bear that out year after year
Well, yes, but this runs into the "this is constitutionally guaranteed and we refuse to even contemplate doing anything about it" problem.
But the difference is huge. In the 1980s, Detroit was more lethal than Belfast, with regular bombs going off and troops shooting civilians in the streets.
The US system of policing seems to be both repressive and ineffective.
The original post contained no data about shootings, and even if US shootings were also higher my statement could still be true.
Also, these numbers have nothing to do with hospital occupancy.
For the UK it was a high year, but that's partly because the ONS are counting homicide, which in this case includes the death of 39 people in the back of a lorry in Essex. (https://news.sky.com/story/essex-lorry-deaths-two-men-found-...)
So its either up 8% including these people in the back of the lorry, or 1% if you exclude it.
nowhere near the 39% quoted in OP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Czech Republic: -10% murders between 2019 and 2020.
Certainly these departments won’t announce the official policy, the same way they didn’t for all their other polices.
But it seems like there are a number of police departments that have less money to operate.
We haven't had any surge in crime in the Czech Republic, a shall-issue country.
We also had no violent riots. It seems that a lot of people want to ignore the elephant in the room: unchecked or poorly checked riots increase the criminal fever of the nation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
What's more interesting are cases of violent crimes.
Though considering how much more diverse the United States is, it's probably stupid for me to assume France/UK could compete with us on genericized "violent crimes" either.
Please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That doesn’t mean US is bad overall, you take the good with the bad.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Murder...
By the way, I did mean "violent crime" and not homicides/murders.
There's about 400,000,000 guns in America so I'm not sure how good of an argument that is.
In addition, Australia is essentially an island. The US is bordered above and below with other countries that also have guns. Not to mention the amount of lost guns due to "boating accidents" that would happen if there's a gun confiscation.
There’s always a reason not to try, right? It’s not like there are no illegal guns in public hands in Europe or Australia. But it’s not possible to walk in to a store and get an AR-15 on a driving license.
Take a wrong step and we might have a much worse capitol insurrection.
Personally I don't feel this is worth doing in America at this point. We already have very well established and optimized drug smuggling operations from Mexico that would benefit very well from a complete federal-level gun ban.
The actual criminals would love it being as easy to get an unregisted AR-15 as buying coke from their drug dealer. Meanwhile the private citizen in rural America would have to commit felonies to defend themselves, with the nearest police station half an hour away.
Comparing Australia to the US is pretty silly on its face.
Population wise, Australia wouldn't even be our largest state. Their population isnt as diverse. They dont have to throw so much of their national budget into defense etc.
In fact none of the EU or other western countries budgets arent structured the same. Heck there was just a thread yesterday about Ukraine where some were admitting France and Germany realize in the wake of Trumps administration the US may not be the defender in a time of need they expect and probably should budget for increasing their defense.
A lot of these EU social programs occur because the US carries the lions share of defense budget for them. And so when skirmishes happen near their borders, in Syria, in Libya, in the Ukraine etc they not only look to us, but push the US to lead these coalitions.
The US is a large union of somewhat individually governed states, with some larger Federal body managing some bigger common interest things like defense. Its more apt to compare a country like France to a single state. Even most our federal programs are nothing more than regulatory or budgetary incentives to gets individual states to work together (see: education, infrastructure/roads etc).
Comparing the US to a single European Union members and saying "see" the Czech Republic doesnt have this is crazy talk. I am willing to bet Iowa isnt have massive murder inceases.
Even in the US, over most counties dont even have a murder, where it would be odd to have multiples or even dozens.. But painting the entire country of 300 million people with such a broad brush and using random individual nations as a poster child is in no way honest.
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
But I will comment on the murder rate in Philadelphia. Good lord that's a lot of murders per capita (NYC has 5x the population of Philadelphia)
Without the location's demographics you can't conclude nothing. Or maybe that's the point.
How else can you tackle the causes of crime if all you have is a number and don't know who exactly is committing them?
A lot of people think that criminals are fundamentally different from them. More aggressive, less empathetic, etc... I'm pretty sure that essentially anyone can become a criminal. It's just a matter of how much trauma each person can take.
Stress and trauma are very bad for the brain.
How in any way is this relevant? To anything? It's seeing this sort of spiked dialogue that just reinforces my belief that the US is on a downward spiral of naval-gazing self-destruction. One would hope the US had grown up by now. Gotten past the terrible teens. Sadly it hasn't.
Can't say or do anything without someone wondering whether you have "an agenda".
It feels like the US has less moderates every year. I don't have any data to back that up, just how it feels.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
Three-quarters of one side believe that the last election was stolen, despite the huge amount of evidence to the contrary. Very many of them believe that the climate emergency is a Chinese hoax, that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, that his wife is trans.
Why would there be any middle ground now, when one side has taken leave of their senses?
Plus the real issue is not percentage that the rate went up but how many people does that actually mean? Going up in Chicago is going to greatly dwarf most other cities and I am not sure they are very large Republican governed cities.
In effect, they are using statistics to attempt to make the issue seem less dire than it really is. The number of deaths is ridiculous so they don't want that number out there.
The right question to ask is why and the next what to do about it if this trend is not desirable.
It's not.
Furthermore, city boundaries are often gerrymandered to either turn their suburbs blue or be turned red by their suburbs so. Some cities absorb their suburbs, some don't. Then on top of that you've got moderate D's who can pass as an R if they shut their mouths on certain topics running on the R ticket because that's the only way to challenge the incumbent. So not only is the distinction needlessly divisive but it's such a high noise metric it's not useful for anything ever anyway.
But nobody's going to edit Wikipedia to characterize him as an "East Asian/Ashkenazi Jewish/Brahmin Hindu Supremacist", which would still be wrong, but at least be far more accurate.
Based on the comments it looks like we’re at the denial phase. Maybe another year or two until we wise up and restore the budgets.