My takeaways are: (1) The murder rate is way down - great progress is being made. And also, (2) in many cities, there is still a lot of work to do.
For example, Washington DC is much safer than it was in the bad old days of the 1990s, when 400+ murders a year was the norm. That is worth celebrating! But the murder rate (and the rate of violence generally) is still much too high for complacency. Boston wasn’t included in these charts, but I think it’s an interesting comparison. About the same population as DC, increasingly ethnically diverse, and with a large gap between rich and poor. Boston reported 31 murders last year while DC reported 187. I don’t know what accounts for the difference, but it’s dramatic, and it’s a real-world benchmark; I’m not comparing DC to perfection or a pure thought exercise. (Last year’s Boston number actually reflects an uptick - there were 24 murders in 2024, so that’s an even more ambitious goal….)
I’m sure you have a lot of projects lined up and plenty to do, but if you ever get interested in why Boston does so well and which of its strategies can be replicated by other cities, I’d love to read about it.
I don’t have a specific theory. In general, not specific to crime, if I was comparing a homogenous population to a diverse one, I would expect someone to pop up and say that’s a meaningful difference.
How could it matter? I’ll spitball. If there’s a difference between police force ethnicity and population, could that complicate policing in the unrepresented community? Or, if a population feels cut off from opportunity, could that affect crime rates? MA used to be overwhelmingly white - 95-6% as recently as the 1980s. It isn’t anymore. They’ve adapted, which might itself have useful lessons.
It may actually be that Boston has less crime, in part, because it has more immigrants.
OK, if I'm following you were primarily preempting a certain type of "Boston and DC aren't comparable" argument. Sorry I may have sounded cranky in my question. I guess a peeve of mine is diversity gets spoken about as either self-evidently good or bad, when it reality comes down to the specific details. Only thing I've noticed is the least diverse places are very often on either end of the safety scale, very safe or very rough, while diverse places are usually more typical.
I think the Boston crime decline story is basically just a typical "immigrant-led gentrification" story, which is the same thing that has pushed crime so much lower in previously higher-crime cities like NYC and LA. Neither the left nor right wants to focus on immigrants effectively pushing out higher-crime long term residents for obvious reasons, but the data makes it obvious that that's what's happened.
DC still has large swathes of highly violent communities mired in intergenerational poverty. And that's even more true of cities like Memphis, Chicago, St Louis. But most of the people who grew up in notoriously dangerous housing projects and hoods in LA, NYC and Boston can't afford to live there anymore, so they moved out and were replaced by immigrants. The broader American media tends to miss stories like this because the immigrants are often in the same census categories of the people they replaced, and American media discusses census categories much more than it talks about other important aspects of culture.
Thanks, that's very interesting. Could you point me to a scholar or an article/book that discuss the data on immigrants pushing out higher crime residents? I want to learn more about this.
I'm relying on primary data sources, although I think most academic research finds the same thing by focusing immigrant / crime research on lower-income neighborhoods. There's also a mechanical aspect to this: most serious crime is committed by repeat criminals who offend, go back to their neighborhoods, reoffend a bunch of times. But immigrants who do so are very likely to be deported.
For some years now every time I get interested in a topic I find primary data, run some analysis and then host the results on a simple website. Here's how I'd support my claim from the data there, if you're interested in following along.
Select Black from "Choose a demo for sorting and displaying on the map"
That will show you #1) clearly there's a strong connection with Black and homicide that doesn't hold for any other census category, and is so strong that it probably drives most statewide variation. #2) But Black homicide rates vary a ton by state, in a way that it doesn't for other categories. Note the states where the Black homicide victim rate is extremely high: (pretty much every state bordering the Mississippi river) and very low: Hawaii, Utah, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Massachusetts, New York
Select a statistic: Percent Births to an Immigrant Mother (last item in the dropdown).
This draws from CDC birth data and calculates the percentage of Black Mothers who happen to be immigrants, by state. Coincidentally, the age at which women become mothers (say 15-45) is roughly the same age men commit violence. Now look at the states where a very low percentage of new Black mothers are immigrants (pretty much the states along the Mississippi river) and those where it's very high: Massachusetts 65%, New York 38.8% (50% in NYC if you flip to county view), Rhode Island 49%, North Dakota 69%, Utah 61%.
The point of all that is just to establish that states where the younger Black population is apparently mostly immigrants have low Black homicide rates while those where they are not have Black homicides rates that are devastatingly high. Obviously the Black census category is only one portion of both the crime story and the immigration story. But it's an especially important one both because crime rates are so high in that segment and because our standard way of conducting the census means that if you look up census statistics from NYC it will look like the Black population has shrunk a modest amount, but if you realize what's happening in births you can see the population is actually being "replaced" by immigrants.
In other coastal cities it's more apparent that immigrants or children of immigrants are replacing long-time Black populations simply by looking at the numbers. Compton was roughly 75% Black, 20% Hispanic in 1980, now it's 75% Hispanic and 20% Black. Hispanic is a crude proxy for immigrants but such patterns repeat in enough places that it has to be a major part of the story.
I'm not a nihilist about policy-driven changes, prison reform, smart-policing or anything like that. Good decisions are probably making a difference in some places. But when we're trying to understand comparison questions like "why is crime in boston so much lower than crime in DC" you have to somewhat adjust for demographic differences and changes before being able to learn from the policy changes.
Thanks for that answer. I'm sure you're right that demography is important, and I hadn't realized how large the immigrant population in Boston is. I will watch for this more closely going forward. I hope that someday our national conversation about immigration and crime will be less blunt, and less hostile to immigrants.
Thanks for the articel. We witness something historical and not enough people are talking about it.
Thanks for the reminder, and the charts!
My takeaways are: (1) The murder rate is way down - great progress is being made. And also, (2) in many cities, there is still a lot of work to do.
For example, Washington DC is much safer than it was in the bad old days of the 1990s, when 400+ murders a year was the norm. That is worth celebrating! But the murder rate (and the rate of violence generally) is still much too high for complacency. Boston wasn’t included in these charts, but I think it’s an interesting comparison. About the same population as DC, increasingly ethnically diverse, and with a large gap between rich and poor. Boston reported 31 murders last year while DC reported 187. I don’t know what accounts for the difference, but it’s dramatic, and it’s a real-world benchmark; I’m not comparing DC to perfection or a pure thought exercise. (Last year’s Boston number actually reflects an uptick - there were 24 murders in 2024, so that’s an even more ambitious goal….)
I’m sure you have a lot of projects lined up and plenty to do, but if you ever get interested in why Boston does so well and which of its strategies can be replicated by other cities, I’d love to read about it.
"increasingly ethnically diverse" why would that even matter?
I don’t have a specific theory. In general, not specific to crime, if I was comparing a homogenous population to a diverse one, I would expect someone to pop up and say that’s a meaningful difference.
How could it matter? I’ll spitball. If there’s a difference between police force ethnicity and population, could that complicate policing in the unrepresented community? Or, if a population feels cut off from opportunity, could that affect crime rates? MA used to be overwhelmingly white - 95-6% as recently as the 1980s. It isn’t anymore. They’ve adapted, which might itself have useful lessons.
It may actually be that Boston has less crime, in part, because it has more immigrants.
OK, if I'm following you were primarily preempting a certain type of "Boston and DC aren't comparable" argument. Sorry I may have sounded cranky in my question. I guess a peeve of mine is diversity gets spoken about as either self-evidently good or bad, when it reality comes down to the specific details. Only thing I've noticed is the least diverse places are very often on either end of the safety scale, very safe or very rough, while diverse places are usually more typical.
I think the Boston crime decline story is basically just a typical "immigrant-led gentrification" story, which is the same thing that has pushed crime so much lower in previously higher-crime cities like NYC and LA. Neither the left nor right wants to focus on immigrants effectively pushing out higher-crime long term residents for obvious reasons, but the data makes it obvious that that's what's happened.
DC still has large swathes of highly violent communities mired in intergenerational poverty. And that's even more true of cities like Memphis, Chicago, St Louis. But most of the people who grew up in notoriously dangerous housing projects and hoods in LA, NYC and Boston can't afford to live there anymore, so they moved out and were replaced by immigrants. The broader American media tends to miss stories like this because the immigrants are often in the same census categories of the people they replaced, and American media discusses census categories much more than it talks about other important aspects of culture.
Thanks, that's very interesting. Could you point me to a scholar or an article/book that discuss the data on immigrants pushing out higher crime residents? I want to learn more about this.
I'm relying on primary data sources, although I think most academic research finds the same thing by focusing immigrant / crime research on lower-income neighborhoods. There's also a mechanical aspect to this: most serious crime is committed by repeat criminals who offend, go back to their neighborhoods, reoffend a bunch of times. But immigrants who do so are very likely to be deported.
For some years now every time I get interested in a topic I find primary data, run some analysis and then host the results on a simple website. Here's how I'd support my claim from the data there, if you're interested in following along.
Go to: https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/regional_dod
Select homicide from "Choose a cause of death"
Select Black from "Choose a demo for sorting and displaying on the map"
That will show you #1) clearly there's a strong connection with Black and homicide that doesn't hold for any other census category, and is so strong that it probably drives most statewide variation. #2) But Black homicide rates vary a ton by state, in a way that it doesn't for other categories. Note the states where the Black homicide victim rate is extremely high: (pretty much every state bordering the Mississippi river) and very low: Hawaii, Utah, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Massachusetts, New York
Open up another tab and go to: https://theusaindata.pythonanywhere.com/segregation_births
Select a census category: Black
Select a statistic: Percent Births to an Immigrant Mother (last item in the dropdown).
This draws from CDC birth data and calculates the percentage of Black Mothers who happen to be immigrants, by state. Coincidentally, the age at which women become mothers (say 15-45) is roughly the same age men commit violence. Now look at the states where a very low percentage of new Black mothers are immigrants (pretty much the states along the Mississippi river) and those where it's very high: Massachusetts 65%, New York 38.8% (50% in NYC if you flip to county view), Rhode Island 49%, North Dakota 69%, Utah 61%.
The point of all that is just to establish that states where the younger Black population is apparently mostly immigrants have low Black homicide rates while those where they are not have Black homicides rates that are devastatingly high. Obviously the Black census category is only one portion of both the crime story and the immigration story. But it's an especially important one both because crime rates are so high in that segment and because our standard way of conducting the census means that if you look up census statistics from NYC it will look like the Black population has shrunk a modest amount, but if you realize what's happening in births you can see the population is actually being "replaced" by immigrants.
In other coastal cities it's more apparent that immigrants or children of immigrants are replacing long-time Black populations simply by looking at the numbers. Compton was roughly 75% Black, 20% Hispanic in 1980, now it's 75% Hispanic and 20% Black. Hispanic is a crude proxy for immigrants but such patterns repeat in enough places that it has to be a major part of the story.
I'm not a nihilist about policy-driven changes, prison reform, smart-policing or anything like that. Good decisions are probably making a difference in some places. But when we're trying to understand comparison questions like "why is crime in boston so much lower than crime in DC" you have to somewhat adjust for demographic differences and changes before being able to learn from the policy changes.
Thanks for that answer. I'm sure you're right that demography is important, and I hadn't realized how large the immigrant population in Boston is. I will watch for this more closely going forward. I hope that someday our national conversation about immigration and crime will be less blunt, and less hostile to immigrants.