That was number 17. I'd link to it, but individual cards don't seem to be real URIs.
"The case against: The lead theory has the same problem as the abortion theory: in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes. That indicates that while lead exposure may well have been a factor, it isn't the "real answer" that it's often characterized as."
They're missing some corroborative evidence though: several other countries removed lead in different years, and in almost all of them crime dropped around 20 years later.
> in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes
Maybe people also just commit less crime as they age?
Or maybe it isn't just a matter of whether someone has been exposed to lead at all but a matter of how much and over what duration. Toxicology is all about the dose but the public (and apparently Vox writers) tend to think about chemicals in terms of exposed/not exposed.
A big point of evidence that I didn't see in the Vox or Mother Jones piece is that crime rates seemed to decline in different areas corresponding to when they stopped using leaded gasoline.
"Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.
Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at crime trends around the world (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries?
Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one.""
I agree, but the card 17 doesn't cite exposure to other harmful and poisonous elements (mercury, aluminum, among others) and we have strong scientific evidence that these elements trigger psychiatric disorders.
There are lots of studies on how environmental and chemicals causes these illness that criminals seems to share and they are related to undeveloped/malfunctioning control centres on the brain.
Government policies to avoiding population exposure to poison and at the same time psychiatric/neurologic advances on treatment and drugs makes a stronger case for that theory.
I think it's because we are more connected than ever. It's easy to get caught up in your reality, but the internet makes it more possible than ever to see what's out there and how things could really be.
Did everyone just finish watching the latest season of "Orange is the new black" or something?
(context: this freakonomics topic of the crime drop was referenced in the recently released season of the show, specifically relating to the increase in abortions idea)
What's the point of this comment? I wasn't trying to make a point I was answering the GP's question (which was a good question). The lead hypothesis is common and was examined in the article in more detail. The main reason I added the second link (which included the lead hypothesis) was because it contained the most data I could find - it went back to 1876. The fact it was graphed with lead exposure wasn't at all important, the murder rate data going back to the 1800s was the important part and it answered the question.
In The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker postulates that one likely reason for the increase in violent crime was the first set of baby boomers becoming teenagers, with rowdy young people outnumbering older ones who might control them by quite a large margin.
The best thing about this article is that it didn't try to push one reason over an other so it kind of gave you a run down of all the commonly cited factors which contribute to one degree or other to the reduction in crime. On the other hand it was pretty light.
What I'd like to see is each of those factors studied in other countries and their impact or non factor there to see if there is some commonality. Now, I understand that some factors are irrelevant in some places, but they're all relevant somewhere else too.
Take out the really bad apples at the bottom of the barrel that law enforcement normally can't reach because they are isolated by many layers or are hard to get warrants for and it has to have a magnified effect on crime in general.
edit: to the 3 downvotes in 3 minutes, just because you don't like it doesn't make it not so. Since CompStat has a measurable effect you can be sure that something with way more targeted information will also have even more effect.
I'm only familiar with parallel construction being used in reference to very recent events, so it's not clear to me what you are referring to.
Are you saying the evidence was there before, and they only started using parallel construction in the 90's? Or did new ways of getting evidence that required parallel construction appear?
Parallel construction is a recent term that describes the widespread use of unwarranted information. It seems reasonable to assume that beforehand there was less commonly used unwarranted information; in the 2000s they used it to arrest street gangs, in the 1990s they probably used it to arrest drug lords.
I don't think there's any one big reason for decrease in crime. I think it's all of those factors in the article working up to a perfect storm.
I do think young kids being inside home playing video games (hence less time out in the street, lowering chance of running into trouble) is another reason. Basically all those video games trapped potential criminals inside their home and they eventually 'matured' enough not to get into a life of crimes.
Indeed 'one big reasons' seem very pathological for me in popular science and even some serious science. I believe we are attracted to a single fact explaining a lot: it gives some weird satisfaction, like seeing a puzzle come together; while this can work for creating a mathematical theory or explain some basic physical phenomena, it doesn't bode well when applied to complex systems or people. I get impression it happens all the time with cancer; I think the bee collapse saw some of this effect too.
All this motivation for finding 'the explanation' does lead to discovering mechanisms though -- but I suppose we still need some more lucid 'integrators' to combine many effects into a strong enough causal system.
Plot crime rates and video game sales and there is a correlation between the decrease of crime and increase in games. (Though I am not implying a causal relationship in any way, just an observation)
Although Crime plummets... the interesting thing is, our perception of danger and our general sense of fear has increased by significant margin. We're more scared of things that have have an even less chance of affecting us than ever before.
The fear is an illusion. Our perception of the world is largely shaped by the media. The media magnifies dangers that are otherwise relatively improbable. The logical conclusion from this fact is this:
To find a culture that has no fear, look for cultures that are technologically backwards. Cultures that have very limited access to media and thus a more realistic perception of fear should be your chosen targets. In these settings, you will find entire societies where doors are left unlocked, children are allowed to roam the entire town unsupervised, and places where the concept of "abduction" is relatively unknown.
most probably and unfortunately, no. consequences can be felt in many places around the world.
Yes, I mean those frikkin' wars they wage here & there. From what I see, correct me if I'm wrong, many people in US still believe those wars are justified, soldiers are defending their homeland (in foreign countries half across the globe that didn't attack US anyhow imaginable), killing just few bad guys (and not creating many more by behaving like that-heck, if they would be killing my family and friends back home because of nothing, it would be hard to resist temptation to strike back somehow). And I could go on and on, you know the drill.
All this possible because of 9/11, relatively minor incident in terms of life loss/damage, but made look like Armageddon day by media. Not only, but mainly US residents scaremonged beyond belief my mass media (and I presume not many stood against it). Well, looking back, you were played damn well. Terrorist won by radicalizing you, all army-related companies won, and anybody who is on their payroll.
It's so much easier to control somebody who has fear, since they are already in irrational place to begin with. I am 34, and I don't think I'll live long enough to see US to become again "land of the free". From west european perspective, it's a sad joke for a long time.
> From what I see, correct me if I'm wrong, many people in US still believe those wars are justified, soldiers are defending their homeland (in foreign countries half across the globe that didn't attack US anyhow imaginable), killing just few bad guys (and not creating many more by behaving like that-heck, if they would be killing my family and friends back home because of nothing, it would be hard to resist temptation to strike back somehow). And I could go on and on, you know the drill.
Many people definitely still hold these views. It's actually kind of tragic, the impact it's had on the younger generation. I was 19 when 9/11 happened, but my ex was only 12. It, and her parents' reactions, have completely warped her understanding of the dangers in this world and the value/merit of the wars that followed. It doesn't help that she's a military brat (so am I, but my father, despite being in the military, was actually a pacifist; this has had a major influence on my view of things) who saw her neighbors going off to fight the wars. It had to be justified, otherwise she couldn't come to terms with the men and women that didn't come home, or didn't come home whole. If she'd been older, perhaps, she could've viewed it more critically and less emotionally.
I point to her as an example, but her stances and views on war and foreign policy, even for someone who's liberal [0], aren't that out of the ordinary. We've got a whole generation now that came of age in a period of (largely) media induced fear. As I said, tragic, and terrifying.
[0] US sense, not that liberal in the global sense.
The amount of fear is a function of risk * significance of loss. Crime is down, but we have more than ever to lose. That's why millennial parents are so fucking crazy. Much more to fear when you're investing a million into each of two kids than back when you invested a fraction of that over five kids.
Fear is less of a function of risk or loss and more of a function of the perception of risk.
IMO what has been magnified is not the significance of loss, but our perception of risk. If we perceive the world as a place constantly under threat by kidnappers, international terrorists, and criminals then we will be in fear. Who informs us about these threats? The media. It is the media that over reports and over-exaggerates danger, and this is what has changed over the past decades.
The birth rate in the US isn't any higher than it was when I was born (and until 2008 it was higher than when I was born). During the height of the baby boom it was only a tad over 3.5 - which is significantly less than your five children example. (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2012/world-popula...)
What has changed is 24/7 news. That makes the perception of danger all out of wack with actual danger. Media.
Fear is not rational. In general, people overestimate the risk of unlikely events and underestimate the risk of likely events. Case in point: nuclear power has killed less than 1 million people in all of human history (including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, which accounts for 90-99% of all deaths due to nuclear power), while the number of people killed in an automobile accident in a single year is about 1-1.5 million. Clearly, we should be more terrified of cars than we should be of nuclear power, but it is very much the other way around.
Although I think it's irrational to be afraid of flying, I disagree with your example.
I was under the impression that many people had the tendency to just ignore the possibility of terrible things happening, as in the black swan theory.
Perhaps nuclear power was safer than cars till now, but in my opinion it has the potential to be a lot deadlier if something really wrong happen (and Fukushima didn't happen in a 3rd world country with terrible infrastructures, how would it be if there were nuclear power plants everywhere in every country, no matter how corrupt it is?), so I find it rational to be more terrified of it than of cars.
But it's also a question of benefits, you can arguably replace a nuclear power plant with whatever technology you prefer, a car is harder to replace I think.
I am much more fearful of cars than nuclear. People are just so stupid behind the wheel, running up on cars tailgating, bobbing and weaving lanes...I've already lost several friends and family to stupid drivers. It disgusts me how one idiot is basically, with a simple test, given free exercise of a dangerous weapon in public.
Some potential reasons not mentioned in the article:
Electronics have become cheaper. Cars are harder to steal. Criminals can commit crimes online instead. We possess less objects as more things become digitized. Improved welfare programs. Improved forensic investigations.
You're spot on — our valuable items are becoming harder to steal and cheaper to purchase legally.
Criminals used to make off with your TV, whereas any TV worth stealing today is just too delicate to move in a hurry. We don't tend to have expensive VCRs either.
Remember when car stereos were stolen? Most modern cars have fully integrated head units and aftermarket alternatives are now niche and often worth very little. After that it was GPS units, but even they are now dirt cheap and not much of a theft target.
Mobile phones used to be an easy score. Today they're trackable and lockable, making the more desirable models — particularly iPhones — worth almost nothing. Criminals know this, which is why iPhone thefts have plummeted.
If I would be a car burglar today, airbags would be my target.
A pricy item, easy to (re)sell (= DIY looking for replacement parts), not trackable (serial numbers?), probably easy/quick to strip from a car if you know what your doing ...
Mobile phones used to be an easy score. Today they're trackable and lockable, making the more desirable models — particularly iPhones — worth almost nothing. Criminals know this, which is why iPhone thefts have plummeted.
A friend recently had her phone stolen right out of her hand. They police were able to catch the kid fairly quickly, and return the phone. They said that they call it 'apple picking', and it is fairly common. I was surprised because smart phones are so easily tracked/locked.
Co-worker had his stolen from the gym. Reported it stolen - and thus it locked itself. Got contacted from guy in Russia who was PISSED that the phone he paid $$$ for was locked. Co-worker said "no way in hell am I going to unlock" phone. Got pictures of smashed iPhone.
Granted, the "end user" got burnt, not the thief... but the end result is the stolen phone was worthless. Co-worker is out an uninsured, stolen iPhone... the purchaser is out a phone purchase on eBay (I presume).
The article explicitly focuses on the decline of violent crime. You can definitely argue that lower resale value of VCRs can cause a decrease in burglaries, however, it doesn't explain a similar decrease in the number of rapes.
Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature goes over all of the probably reasons for this in its general survey of the correlation between violence and civilization. And he's mentioned for the Leviathan theory, but that is only one of the areas he touches on. It's the most credible explanatory frameworks for violence that I've come across.
Yes, and the disconnect here as for what people believe, I think largely due to scaremongering to sell newspapers and ad time on TV, is interesting. Over here, I think we've never been as worried about pedophiles and rapists than now. It's rare to even see kids out and playing alone compared to when I was young, and the stories on America's Worst Mind comes to mind: http://theweek.com/articles/505724/last-word-advice-from-ame...
Great summary of the theories, with impressive breadth and depth of scholarship. This sort of article goes to show how complex the world is, and how hard it is to definitively prove sociological/economic theories. Even when one study seems to give very good evidence, another might come along and cast doubt on it.
Another idea to add to the list: There are often a dozen murders a week in places like Chicago. How long is that sustainable? Maybe the gangs have killed their selves off?
A historical analogy is the decline of gunslinger/cowboy culture out west a bit more than a century ago.
Something to consider is 1000 equal competing gangs each fighting 999 equal competitors means quite an impressive body count, but once MS-13 or "whoever" takes over and there's only one operational gang, the body count will naturally implode. Note that you don't necessarily need only one gang, in fact you can operate quite well with the original 1000, what is necessary is a stable and predictable hierarchy. Without a stable hierarchy every competitor you shoot increases your overall systemic stability and finances. With a stable semi-formal hierarchy every competitor you shoot pisses off someone at a high level who used to have two workers and now has one dead worker and one malfunctioning worker, and thats not likely to turn out very well for the shooter. A cultural drift from equality to hierarchy needs to be considered along with the obvious economy of scale argument.
Why is cultural evolution never discussed as a possible reason?
We know cultures change. When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen. But when it's crime, we rack our brains looking for the one single physical reason crime dropped.
This is an important distinction. Tobacco usage has gone down. Electronic cigarettes, however, are booming among former tobacco users. Americans are also opening up to marijuana legalization.
> When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen.
We absolutely try to discover the causes of those shifts. There are similar articles about why those things are happening, too, in each case!
So, not necessarily this article, but I haven't seen much in sociological or economics literature that's put forth one single reason crime dropped. There's argument over primary causes, or how much each cause contributes to the drop, but not much about single unifying theories.
They missed a theory: fudging the stats and failing to report crimes. Excerpt from an interview with David Simon:
-----
They [the police department in Baltimore] cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.
"These trends aren’t caused by changes in our willingness to report crime to the police. We see an even more significant decline in violent crime in data derived from surveys asking people whether they’ve been the victims of certain crimes over the past year. The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault. This survey has nothing to say about the decline in homicide, for obvious reasons."
David Simon says that homicide is the hardest crime stat to fudge, since there's a body and the different rate changes between homicide and other crimes is actually used to try to measure how much the stats are being fudged.
Except that's a really serious felony far and above other statistics fiddling, Baltimore at its worst didn't go that far - you're making yourself an accessory to murder after the fact.
Not only would you have Federal authorities getting interested quickly but you have pesky family members raising queries about how their loved one shot themselves to death 34 times on a street corner.
Even in the darkest days of Baltimore I don't think there were allegations of homicides being declared as suicides.
Just to be pedantic: in it's darkest days the police in Baltimore commit murder. It's naive to think the police would never do something purely because it's really bad.
I will agree that from a practical standpoint it seems far fetched to think they could get away with mislabeling homicides on any significant scale.
You can sometimes report a homicide as a suicide. Not very often, given things like the relative unpopularity of multiple gunshot wounds from a moving car as a suicide method, and so on.
That's not true in all jurisdictions; I've seen several, e.g., with a sheriff-coroner's office, so that, where the sheriff's office is the applicable law enforcement officer, the coroner is not a separate office.
In this culture, if you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse some statistics. I learned as a reporter to start despising statistics, and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was pulling it out and using it.
As I got better as a reporter, I realized that as soon as any of our institutions create a means of measuring themselves in terms of quality, someone is running behind them in that institution to figure out a way of destroying that statistic as a meaningful measure of anything.
In education it's No Child Left Behind and standardized test scores. In the police department, it's crime statistics and clearance rates. In the journalism it's Pulizer Prizes.
These stats don't have to do with anything once the people looking to advance themselves and their agenda, and to protect their institution, get done with them.
...
It's not corruption in the sense of somebody thinking "I am here to make Baltimore worse", or "make the retaining walls in New Orleans collapse yet again". It's somebody thinking "I don't want it landing on me, I want my day to be easier than yours, and I want you to think well of me until I get out of this job".
...
You know how you unfound a robbery report? A guy comes in to report a robbery in a place like south-west Baltimore, you say, "are you sure the guy had bullets in the gun? Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn't just a larceny, are you sure he didn't just take your wallet from you? Oh, you're really insisting, he did have a gun, you saw the bullets, it was a real gun? Hold on, we've got to run a warrant check on you. We gotta see if there's any paper on you. You don't have any paper on you? Oh, by the way, door's over there."
Robberies in the south-west district of Baltimore went down 70% in just one year.
When time came to reduce the murder rate, the same trick didn't work -- you can't hide the bodies, and it's the state Health Department which defines murders.
David Simon is talking about one particular administration, he later says in the same interview:
"And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that’s when Baltimore makes some progress."
Well rape numbers are not as high as they should be, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta isn't reporting them even at times when patients request it, either from misunderstanding new privacy laws in medical records or because of the rules.
Would you expect that amount of fudging to change over time? Arguing that fudging stats explains the drop in crime requires that you believe in the last 30 years police throughout the country have started undercounting the amount of crime in their areas by increasing amounts year after year.
- Because the US is all for individualism, so not enough protection nets.
- Because the US had tens of millions of black slaves it fred, people starting out from absolute poverty and had to face discrimination, Jim Crow laws, reduced opportunities and seggregation until the seventies (legally - in practice until today). Even poor white immigrants didn't have it bad like that.
- Because prisons create criminals, and the US prison system is the worst in the West.
You appear to be answering the question "Why is there a lot of crime in the US?". But the actual question is "Why did crime plummet -- I.e., rapidly decrease -- in the US?".
He describes them mostly in present-tense terms, and my reading of the point about slavery is that it's a past problem with effects persisting into the present.
And FWIW I wouldn't say that they have mostly been fixed now. It's true that racism's got a lot better, but the US is still very individualistic (for good and/or ill), there are still big racial differences in prosperity (whatever the causes), and the US still puts an awful lot of people in prison.
172 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] thread[1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...
"The case against: The lead theory has the same problem as the abortion theory: in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes. That indicates that while lead exposure may well have been a factor, it isn't the "real answer" that it's often characterized as."
Indeed! When you click on the target, you get this URL,
http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-dropcrime-rate-drop/lead...
But if you load that URL, either directly or by reloading, you get a 404.
http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-drop/lead-crime
> in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes
Maybe people also just commit less crime as they age?
A big point of evidence that I didn't see in the Vox or Mother Jones piece is that crime rates seemed to decline in different areas corresponding to when they stopped using leaded gasoline.
"Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.
Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at crime trends around the world (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries?
Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one.""
There are lots of studies on how environmental and chemicals causes these illness that criminals seems to share and they are related to undeveloped/malfunctioning control centres on the brain.
Government policies to avoiding population exposure to poison and at the same time psychiatric/neurologic advances on treatment and drugs makes a stronger case for that theory.
Update: missing 'c' in centres
http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...
(context: this freakonomics topic of the crime drop was referenced in the recently released season of the show, specifically relating to the increase in abortions idea)
Murder rates are plotted with lead exposure here - http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/us-murder-rate...
What I'd like to see is each of those factors studied in other countries and their impact or non factor there to see if there is some commonality. Now, I understand that some factors are irrelevant in some places, but they're all relevant somewhere else too.
Take out the really bad apples at the bottom of the barrel that law enforcement normally can't reach because they are isolated by many layers or are hard to get warrants for and it has to have a magnified effect on crime in general.
edit: to the 3 downvotes in 3 minutes, just because you don't like it doesn't make it not so. Since CompStat has a measurable effect you can be sure that something with way more targeted information will also have even more effect.
Are you saying the evidence was there before, and they only started using parallel construction in the 90's? Or did new ways of getting evidence that required parallel construction appear?
I do think young kids being inside home playing video games (hence less time out in the street, lowering chance of running into trouble) is another reason. Basically all those video games trapped potential criminals inside their home and they eventually 'matured' enough not to get into a life of crimes.
All this motivation for finding 'the explanation' does lead to discovering mechanisms though -- but I suppose we still need some more lucid 'integrators' to combine many effects into a strong enough causal system.
To find a culture that has no fear, look for cultures that are technologically backwards. Cultures that have very limited access to media and thus a more realistic perception of fear should be your chosen targets. In these settings, you will find entire societies where doors are left unlocked, children are allowed to roam the entire town unsupervised, and places where the concept of "abduction" is relatively unknown.
Or go back to the US in the 1980s. You will find the exact same society. Listen to this podcast to learn more about the United States during this time and the nature of fear: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&i...
Yes, I mean those frikkin' wars they wage here & there. From what I see, correct me if I'm wrong, many people in US still believe those wars are justified, soldiers are defending their homeland (in foreign countries half across the globe that didn't attack US anyhow imaginable), killing just few bad guys (and not creating many more by behaving like that-heck, if they would be killing my family and friends back home because of nothing, it would be hard to resist temptation to strike back somehow). And I could go on and on, you know the drill.
All this possible because of 9/11, relatively minor incident in terms of life loss/damage, but made look like Armageddon day by media. Not only, but mainly US residents scaremonged beyond belief my mass media (and I presume not many stood against it). Well, looking back, you were played damn well. Terrorist won by radicalizing you, all army-related companies won, and anybody who is on their payroll.
It's so much easier to control somebody who has fear, since they are already in irrational place to begin with. I am 34, and I don't think I'll live long enough to see US to become again "land of the free". From west european perspective, it's a sad joke for a long time.
Many people definitely still hold these views. It's actually kind of tragic, the impact it's had on the younger generation. I was 19 when 9/11 happened, but my ex was only 12. It, and her parents' reactions, have completely warped her understanding of the dangers in this world and the value/merit of the wars that followed. It doesn't help that she's a military brat (so am I, but my father, despite being in the military, was actually a pacifist; this has had a major influence on my view of things) who saw her neighbors going off to fight the wars. It had to be justified, otherwise she couldn't come to terms with the men and women that didn't come home, or didn't come home whole. If she'd been older, perhaps, she could've viewed it more critically and less emotionally.
I point to her as an example, but her stances and views on war and foreign policy, even for someone who's liberal [0], aren't that out of the ordinary. We've got a whole generation now that came of age in a period of (largely) media induced fear. As I said, tragic, and terrifying.
[0] US sense, not that liberal in the global sense.
IMO what has been magnified is not the significance of loss, but our perception of risk. If we perceive the world as a place constantly under threat by kidnappers, international terrorists, and criminals then we will be in fear. Who informs us about these threats? The media. It is the media that over reports and over-exaggerates danger, and this is what has changed over the past decades.
What has changed is 24/7 news. That makes the perception of danger all out of wack with actual danger. Media.
Perhaps nuclear power was safer than cars till now, but in my opinion it has the potential to be a lot deadlier if something really wrong happen (and Fukushima didn't happen in a 3rd world country with terrible infrastructures, how would it be if there were nuclear power plants everywhere in every country, no matter how corrupt it is?), so I find it rational to be more terrified of it than of cars.
But it's also a question of benefits, you can arguably replace a nuclear power plant with whatever technology you prefer, a car is harder to replace I think.
Electronics have become cheaper. Cars are harder to steal. Criminals can commit crimes online instead. We possess less objects as more things become digitized. Improved welfare programs. Improved forensic investigations.
Criminals used to make off with your TV, whereas any TV worth stealing today is just too delicate to move in a hurry. We don't tend to have expensive VCRs either.
Remember when car stereos were stolen? Most modern cars have fully integrated head units and aftermarket alternatives are now niche and often worth very little. After that it was GPS units, but even they are now dirt cheap and not much of a theft target.
Mobile phones used to be an easy score. Today they're trackable and lockable, making the more desirable models — particularly iPhones — worth almost nothing. Criminals know this, which is why iPhone thefts have plummeted.
A pricy item, easy to (re)sell (= DIY looking for replacement parts), not trackable (serial numbers?), probably easy/quick to strip from a car if you know what your doing ...
Ebay even has a "Replacement Air Bag Buying Guide": http://www.ebay.com/gds/Replacement-Air-Bag-Buying-Guide-/10...
A friend recently had her phone stolen right out of her hand. They police were able to catch the kid fairly quickly, and return the phone. They said that they call it 'apple picking', and it is fairly common. I was surprised because smart phones are so easily tracked/locked.
Granted, the "end user" got burnt, not the thief... but the end result is the stolen phone was worthless. Co-worker is out an uninsured, stolen iPhone... the purchaser is out a phone purchase on eBay (I presume).
Violent crime, not really, and that's what the article is mostly about. But you're right that the shift to online crime seems often to be missed or ignored. For example: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/05/crime-statistics-a...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...
Recommended read by Gates and Zuckerberg.
Something to consider is 1000 equal competing gangs each fighting 999 equal competitors means quite an impressive body count, but once MS-13 or "whoever" takes over and there's only one operational gang, the body count will naturally implode. Note that you don't necessarily need only one gang, in fact you can operate quite well with the original 1000, what is necessary is a stable and predictable hierarchy. Without a stable hierarchy every competitor you shoot increases your overall systemic stability and finances. With a stable semi-formal hierarchy every competitor you shoot pisses off someone at a high level who used to have two workers and now has one dead worker and one malfunctioning worker, and thats not likely to turn out very well for the shooter. A cultural drift from equality to hierarchy needs to be considered along with the obvious economy of scale argument.
We know cultures change. When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen. But when it's crime, we rack our brains looking for the one single physical reason crime dropped.
Tobacco.
We absolutely try to discover the causes of those shifts. There are similar articles about why those things are happening, too, in each case!
-----
They [the police department in Baltimore] cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...
---
"These trends aren’t caused by changes in our willingness to report crime to the police. We see an even more significant decline in violent crime in data derived from surveys asking people whether they’ve been the victims of certain crimes over the past year. The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault. This survey has nothing to say about the decline in homicide, for obvious reasons."
You will have an increase suicide rate, but it won't effect the criminal rate.
Even in the darkest days of Baltimore I don't think there were allegations of homicides being declared as suicides.
I will agree that from a practical standpoint it seems far fetched to think they could get away with mislabeling homicides on any significant scale.
http://davidsimon.com/portfolio-item/the-audacity-of-despair
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/CexR...
Simon says:
In this culture, if you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse some statistics. I learned as a reporter to start despising statistics, and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was pulling it out and using it.
As I got better as a reporter, I realized that as soon as any of our institutions create a means of measuring themselves in terms of quality, someone is running behind them in that institution to figure out a way of destroying that statistic as a meaningful measure of anything.
In education it's No Child Left Behind and standardized test scores. In the police department, it's crime statistics and clearance rates. In the journalism it's Pulizer Prizes.
These stats don't have to do with anything once the people looking to advance themselves and their agenda, and to protect their institution, get done with them.
...
It's not corruption in the sense of somebody thinking "I am here to make Baltimore worse", or "make the retaining walls in New Orleans collapse yet again". It's somebody thinking "I don't want it landing on me, I want my day to be easier than yours, and I want you to think well of me until I get out of this job".
...
You know how you unfound a robbery report? A guy comes in to report a robbery in a place like south-west Baltimore, you say, "are you sure the guy had bullets in the gun? Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn't just a larceny, are you sure he didn't just take your wallet from you? Oh, you're really insisting, he did have a gun, you saw the bullets, it was a real gun? Hold on, we've got to run a warrant check on you. We gotta see if there's any paper on you. You don't have any paper on you? Oh, by the way, door's over there."
Robberies in the south-west district of Baltimore went down 70% in just one year.
When time came to reduce the murder rate, the same trick didn't work -- you can't hide the bodies, and it's the state Health Department which defines murders.
It's a really powerful piece.
"And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that’s when Baltimore makes some progress."
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/fulton-rapes-go-unrep...
The logic is that, from the perspective of the law, the threat of violence is close enough to an act of violence to be considered violent.
- Because the US had tens of millions of black slaves it fred, people starting out from absolute poverty and had to face discrimination, Jim Crow laws, reduced opportunities and seggregation until the seventies (legally - in practice until today). Even poor white immigrants didn't have it bad like that.
- Because prisons create criminals, and the US prison system is the worst in the West.
And FWIW I wouldn't say that they have mostly been fixed now. It's true that racism's got a lot better, but the US is still very individualistic (for good and/or ill), there are still big racial differences in prosperity (whatever the causes), and the US still puts an awful lot of people in prison.