Well, see, that's the subtle part. Is there really a crisis-level crime wave (in the US)? There was a sharp decrease in crime in the initial months after lockdowns went into affect, but a spike in gun purchases. As such, homicides, which in the US are overwhelmingly committed with guns, are definitely up. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/30/us-crime-rat...
But it's not anywhere near the historic rates of the '70s. You won't know that from reading the "violent crime collapse porn", which likes to point to absolute numbers (Most murders in 25 years!) while ignoring population and other factors.
So my contention is that the collapse has been embraced by the reactionary Law and Order types to sow fear and uncertainty. This is partly has a pushback against the attempts to reform police and partly as a way to push for economic austerity as well as a return to racist criminal justice policies of the 80s.
It's so hard to find good data on this in one place. On one hand there's a pandemic, on the other hand there's police protests, etc. Year by year numbers will be so lumpy that you could support tons of narratives, I bet.
Interestingly there, the biggest spike during 2020 happened in May 2020, so generally before the George Floyd killing and protests and "defund the police" movement.
Please be my guest, if you can find month-by-month shooting and/or homicide numbers for NYC/Chicago/LA/other cities that have seen big 2019->2021 homicide spikes. I spent a few minutes trying, but this one the only one I could find nicely broken down.
The coarse yearly numbers tell us these crimes have increased, they don't let us see how they play out with regard to the different things that changed in 2020.
looking at just 2019-2021 is cherry picking. Look back to the 70s and 80s if you really want to see that our current "crime wave" is nothing more than a made-up crisis for pushing a law-and-order agenda.
Looking at a potential inflection point where a trend reversed, to try to understand it (blip? new trend? change caused by change in underlying conditions?) is not cherry-picking. It's being responsible.
"It was worse in the 70s" is "the climate is always changing"-level deflection.
"It was worse in the 70s" is not a compelling argument for a political platform - having nothing meaningful to say in response to new events is exactly what would help "tough on crime" un-nuanced crackdown politicians elected.
The next mayor of NYC, Eric Adams, ran and won on a pro-police platform. He won in one the most diverse cities in the US, with the diverse bloc (his highest voter support was in majority black and hispanic neighborhoods) carrying him to victory. I wouldn't say this group is the law and order reactionaries you mentioned. Also, he is bringing back past policies that were labeled as racist. Why do you think he won with such a platform?
Here are some of those issues.
- Bringing back the plainclothes police unit that was famously disbanded last summer.
- Deploy more police to poor neighborhoods.
- Bring back a variation of stop and frisk (stop, ask questions and frisk).
How about ignoring the fact that a far higher percentage of shooting victims survive gunshot wounds now than they did in the 70's, which has a significant impact on lowering the number of gun deaths, while increasing the number of victims with lifelong impairments from their wounds.
Or the correlation/causation fallacy of assuming that new gun purchases (primarily in the suburbs) drove the spike in murders because it's politically inconvenient to assume significant departures of police officers in cities like Minneapolis might be a more potent correlating event to investigate?
50% of the gun murder victims in the USA are Black, and the vast majority of these murders (like all murders in the US) involve a perpetrator matching the ethnicity of the victim. The human beings who live in these neighborhoods feel like their safety has "collapsed", and they certainly aren't right wing reactionaries. They just don't want every summer holiday weekend to involve kids getting shot in crossfire between rival gangs. The polling data reveals this rather markedly.
Here's a Gallup poll (a few months after George Floyd's murder by Derek Chauvin) which shows that 81% of Black Americans want the police presence in their community to remain the same or be increased.
It's almost as if the ivory tower, academic egghead activists who CLAIM to represent Black Americans weren't elected and shouldn't be viewed as if they were.
We ALSO shouldn't ignore that behind the black murder rate is a pre-defund-the-police failure of the police, as a whole, to prioritize crimes against black victims in the same way they do against white victims.
"Get rid of police" can be a naive reaction to the newly-enabled broader exposure of police racism (violently racist cops are no new surprise to minorities!) at the same time as "actually, the police are good" can be a naive counter-reaction.
(And there are some very good ideas in the details of the general "defund" proposals - sending non-lethally-armed responders to handle non-violent interactions or traffic stops, say, is a good way to avoid needless escalation into someone's death, while in no way requiring us to get rid of cops that would investigate shootings.)
The ivory tower, academic egghead activists were elected by their own kind (ivory tower, egghead activists) via social media and mass media. Like most things related to minorities, it doesn’t matter what the actual minorities want (they’re brainwashed and have “internalized” their status or whatever) but rather what the majority can get using the minority group as a tool. In this case, it’s budgetary control via so-called police reform/defunding.
That is one city with its own very specific problems in a large country. Are we picking only the data that fit our narrative now? What about all the other big cities?
"The number of homicides in 2020 compared to 2019 rose by 25%, according to an FBI preliminary report. That represents the largest jump since the agency started releasing annual homicide figures in the 1960s."
If you really want to compare the so-called violent crime crisis with historical data, look back to the 70s and 80s, when crime was really bad. There's a ton of stuff out there looking back only two or three decades, which is like looking at global temperatures since the 90s and saying global warming is fake.
"The ideological movement that I favor triggered a rise in crime, so I'm going to minimize that rise in crime by comparing it to overall crime levels several decades ago, after I first denied the rise was occurring in the first place"
Like I always tell climate deniers, it's not the temperature, it's the rate of change that's the problem. The Earth was far hotter in the time of the dinosaurs, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem that it's getting hotter now. You sound like them, but with crime instead of climate.
Since the article doesn't support your thesis, feel free to denounce it as right wing propaganda, like you've done elsewhere in this thread. That's totally what CNN and the AP are known for, right?
I think it’s currently understood that crime rates in aggregate are down because people stayed home during the pandemic. So, burglary/mugging/drug dealing and other crimes that mostly take place when people are out have fallen. On the flip side, crimes driven by annoyances (for lack of a better term) or “fun” have gone up: murders, domestic violence, car jackings, commercial theft below the local prosecution limit, etc.
While drug related crimes have gone down, it’s likely that criminalized drug behavior has actually gone up but just moved off the streets into homes. Along with decreased enforcement in light of the current cop hatred, this all means that reported crimes are down but criminal behavior may actually be up.
Where I live, the murders are about social media and “the rap game”. It used to be about drugs but weed is legal now and there are enough junkies to go around.
The entire criminalization of drugs was invented by the Nixon White House as a pretext to oppress black people and “hippies”. There are official tapes and transcripts where it’s all described in great detail so this isn’t a conspiracy theory.
The war on drugs had the side effect of obliterating the credibility of the police. Because its motivations were so blatant and its punishments so harsh, the greater public (yes this includes white people) see the police as causing more problems than they solve. In my city, murder clearance rates are well below 50% because nobody talks to the cops. They’re not going to solve any more of them by having more cops on the street; we have to think about policing differently because the war on drugs has distorted it beyond recognition.
> The entire criminalization of drugs was invented by the Nixon White House as a pretext to oppress black people and “hippies”. There are official tapes and transcripts where it’s all described in great detail so this isn’t a conspiracy theory.
When I've looked into this in the past, almost everything points to an alleged quote from John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's advisors, with Dan Baum in 1994. The alleged quote wasn't published in Baum's 1996 book and only later appeared in 2016 for an article in Harper's Bazaar, 16 years after Ehrlichman's death. On its own it never seemed like compelling evidence, especially as Ehrlichman was dead when the quote was first published.
Are there any other sources you are familiar with?
