Conservatives have it in their brain that Crime is out of control !!! they run on a pure reactionary drive that must manufacture the crime they imagine. When compared to other countries the death toll in America is wildly high. Americans should be more shocked at how bad our health outcomes are and the expensive they are compared to the world. highest child birth mortality rate, 100K dead every year from Drug OD's, 50K a year die from lack of healthcare, 40K are dead from guns and 1/2 of those are suicides... for fun I post clips of your articles on Next-door, and you would not belive the amount of people who respond! Crime is not lower a guy I know just got car jacked and the police man was shot 2 weeks ago in a different city last week....
The one tangential concern I have (which does not undermine your points here) is that I still haven't seen any good reason to trust the stats on most crimes besides homicide and auto theft, crimes which are subject to substantial undercounting or subjective determination of degree of offense or even whether any offense occurred at all. The incident where San Francisco shoplifting incidents doubled from one month to the next simply because a single Target started calling in all of their incidents is illustrative. It seems obvious to me that citizens' interest in reporting crimes would vary depending on both how aggressively law enforcement pursues such reports and how inconvenient law enforcement makes it to take a report to start with, and it would vary in a noisy but continuous way, so I would expect every little change to have some little effect on underreporting rates once the public gets the message.
(The NCVS victimization survey, which could serve as a check on police reports, is filled with questions that start out fairly well defined before lapsing into vagueness -- by asking about "attempts," for example, or specifying that incidents of unauthorized borrowing by household members are to be counted as theft -- which may or may not be criminal and in any case makes it very hard to objectively count discrete incidents. "Sis borrowed the car without permission again" does not deserve to be tallied in the same slot as "My car disappeared off the street and its gutted burnt remains were found two months later." I'm not saying such situations should be ignored, but including marginal and uncompleted crimes is detrimental to trying to get a reasonably objective and comparable crime count.)
I wonder whether the divergence between crime rates and homicide rates from the mid seventies to the late nineties was real (homicide rates plateaued, crime rates kept rising). I don't know, but the well-known more aggressive enforcement of the nineties could have just led to fewer undercounts and fewer offenses dropped into lower categories.
At the most zoomed levels I tend to think homicide is the single biggest indicator of whether other sorts of serious crime are happening, because homicide tends to be downstream of other crime.
A lot of homicides are the result of assaults, rapes, burglaries, robberies and major drug deals. And the sorts of people who are involved in assaults, rapes, burglaries, robberies and major drug deals are the same sorts of people who end up committing murder. It's hard to imagine any of the above categories of crime not also generating some murders to go along with them.
So the bottom line is unlike like in most disciplines where data has to be vetted and correctly interpreted our ability to do that for national crime statistics is severely hindered by many factors which leaves it open to misinterpretation and attacks? And the people who use it for their own ends can get away with it since the audience is never around for the fact checking part of the conversation. When I see a chart that shows crime climb from 1960s to the 90s and then start back down I never see the analysis of why it went up and what actions made it come back down. Isn't that the point of doing the tracking and analysis? The people in leadership and candidates never can explain the real root causes but want to claim success when it is coming down and blame others when it goes up. Ok...well that is nothing new.
The theory that leaded gasoline increased crime to *some* degree is one where the burden of proof is one the person making the argument, and I've never looked at the data all that closely. It sounds plausible that it had some impact.
The theory that leaded gasoline increased crime a *huge* degree is much easier to argue against because crime rates have risen and fallen in waves and spikes before gasoline was even invented, and there are clearly a host of other factors that have a big impact and confound the analysis. When I have looked into leaded gasoline theories, I've also looked at whether other violent or erratic behavior rose and fell at the same times, and usually I don't find that supporting evidence.
Conservatives have it in their brain that Crime is out of control !!! they run on a pure reactionary drive that must manufacture the crime they imagine. When compared to other countries the death toll in America is wildly high. Americans should be more shocked at how bad our health outcomes are and the expensive they are compared to the world. highest child birth mortality rate, 100K dead every year from Drug OD's, 50K a year die from lack of healthcare, 40K are dead from guns and 1/2 of those are suicides... for fun I post clips of your articles on Next-door, and you would not belive the amount of people who respond! Crime is not lower a guy I know just got car jacked and the police man was shot 2 weeks ago in a different city last week....
I think your analysis here is persuasive.
The one tangential concern I have (which does not undermine your points here) is that I still haven't seen any good reason to trust the stats on most crimes besides homicide and auto theft, crimes which are subject to substantial undercounting or subjective determination of degree of offense or even whether any offense occurred at all. The incident where San Francisco shoplifting incidents doubled from one month to the next simply because a single Target started calling in all of their incidents is illustrative. It seems obvious to me that citizens' interest in reporting crimes would vary depending on both how aggressively law enforcement pursues such reports and how inconvenient law enforcement makes it to take a report to start with, and it would vary in a noisy but continuous way, so I would expect every little change to have some little effect on underreporting rates once the public gets the message.
(The NCVS victimization survey, which could serve as a check on police reports, is filled with questions that start out fairly well defined before lapsing into vagueness -- by asking about "attempts," for example, or specifying that incidents of unauthorized borrowing by household members are to be counted as theft -- which may or may not be criminal and in any case makes it very hard to objectively count discrete incidents. "Sis borrowed the car without permission again" does not deserve to be tallied in the same slot as "My car disappeared off the street and its gutted burnt remains were found two months later." I'm not saying such situations should be ignored, but including marginal and uncompleted crimes is detrimental to trying to get a reasonably objective and comparable crime count.)
I wonder whether the divergence between crime rates and homicide rates from the mid seventies to the late nineties was real (homicide rates plateaued, crime rates kept rising). I don't know, but the well-known more aggressive enforcement of the nineties could have just led to fewer undercounts and fewer offenses dropped into lower categories.
At the most zoomed levels I tend to think homicide is the single biggest indicator of whether other sorts of serious crime are happening, because homicide tends to be downstream of other crime.
A lot of homicides are the result of assaults, rapes, burglaries, robberies and major drug deals. And the sorts of people who are involved in assaults, rapes, burglaries, robberies and major drug deals are the same sorts of people who end up committing murder. It's hard to imagine any of the above categories of crime not also generating some murders to go along with them.
Extremely helpful. On a different note, would you know if the FBI provides a consistent time series on violent crime from 2022 to 2023 and to 2024?
Wow. As a fan of Dispatch, it is pretty sad to see them make such glaring errors in there articles.
Excellent analysis. Many thanks.
So did you send your analysis to Jay Town? What is his response?
So the bottom line is unlike like in most disciplines where data has to be vetted and correctly interpreted our ability to do that for national crime statistics is severely hindered by many factors which leaves it open to misinterpretation and attacks? And the people who use it for their own ends can get away with it since the audience is never around for the fact checking part of the conversation. When I see a chart that shows crime climb from 1960s to the 90s and then start back down I never see the analysis of why it went up and what actions made it come back down. Isn't that the point of doing the tracking and analysis? The people in leadership and candidates never can explain the real root causes but want to claim success when it is coming down and blame others when it goes up. Ok...well that is nothing new.
Researchers can't usually agree on why it goes up or down, either.
I am partial to the hypothesis that removal of lead in gasoline reduced the crime rate. What are the arguments against that theory?
The theory that leaded gasoline increased crime to *some* degree is one where the burden of proof is one the person making the argument, and I've never looked at the data all that closely. It sounds plausible that it had some impact.
The theory that leaded gasoline increased crime a *huge* degree is much easier to argue against because crime rates have risen and fallen in waves and spikes before gasoline was even invented, and there are clearly a host of other factors that have a big impact and confound the analysis. When I have looked into leaded gasoline theories, I've also looked at whether other violent or erratic behavior rose and fell at the same times, and usually I don't find that supporting evidence.