If they're claiming the risk is too great, I'm skeptical. Policing isn't nearly as dangerous a job as you'd think, and deaths in the line of duty are actually rarer than in many manual labor jobs.
According to this[1] (pro-cop) website, the entire state has had only 7 line-of-duty assault or gunfire deaths in the past decade, and two of those were dogs.
I also feel like it is a bit weird to compare the risk when I try and put myself into the respective shoes of the people doing the job. I feel that if I found myself working as a lumberjack, I could be extra careful and follow all of the rules and baring equipment failure (and I assume checking equipment status is part of the safety rules) I should be fine. I don't 100% know for sure, but having worked in an auto mechanics shop, I can tell you that safety compliance is a bit of a joke, at least with the mechanics it was. On the other hand, as a cop I would be in an adversarial situation in which I am interacting with another human being who might decide killing me is their best option, which seems dramatically more stressful, and harder to plan for (outside of being overly aggressive with any person who I think seems even a little dangerous, but we all hate when cops do that right).
I would expect that adversarial situations are more stressful _even_ if they're not, overall more 'risky'. But then, _knowing_ one is in an adversarial situation (very) probably has the 'side effect' of making one more wary and alert to risks/dangers than otherwise in the first place!
The obvious comparison that your analogy to a lumberjack implies is that if a lumberjack decided to show up 45 minutes late to their job to avoid the dangerous bit, they wouldn't be a lumberjack for very long.
I know it's not a direct analogue, especially since you can *argue* that police are still doing their jobs even after arriving 45 minutes late, but I'm sure many people who call the cops and then have them arrive long after they would have been useful would disagree with you.
Given that the police are very much NOT popular at the moment, in at least some (VERY visibly public) sense, and that current officers have been quitting/retiring, _and_ that departments are struggling to recruit new officers to even get back to recent staffing levels, it seems entirely unsurprising that police officers are arriving "45 minutes late" to some or even many calls.
There does NOT seem to be a consistent and coherent 'idea' about whether people even want police at all, or whether some people might think it's _good_ that there are less police now than even recently.
I can't even tell whether you'd condone or endorse reducing police budgets, e.g. to 'punish' them for showing up late to calls. (That that would probably make what you seem to be complaining about _worse_ is NOT a point that I've seen frequently even _noticed_, let alone acknowledged/considered explicitly.)
When I try to point things like this out in other forums, I'm often met with insistence that the police are "useless" or accused of 'licking the boots' of the police.
> I probably made five or six times as many stops as I did arrests.
This surprised me. I have been stopped many times more than five or six and have never been arrested. Does a stop precede every arrest or are there arrests without stops first?
This reasoning would only hold if the odds of a single person being arrested was independent from stop to stop: this is obviously not true.
Eg, consider a simple model where 20% of the population always gets arrested when stopped, and 80% of the population never gets arrested when stopped, and that stops are as likely for any member of the population. The stops/arrest ratio is quite clearly 5:1. But anyone in the no-arrest population can get stopped an arbitrary number of times and will still never be arrested.
The reason the model in Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 is not your normal regression discontinuity (the familiar 0 = pre-period, 1 = post-period approach) is exactly that - arrests and crime are connected! Their approach is to use a model that explicitly account for their interdependence. I explain a little bit more deeper in the original comment chain, and the paper discusses the issue well.
Furthermore, Scott used the post-Ferguson drop in recorded arrests as part of his evidence of depolicing. So, it seemed fair to include a study testing the very same measure. As to whether or not arrests are a GOOD measure of depolicing, that's a good point - I agree it's not ideal. Non-arrest interventions have effects, and we if don't account for them we might miss something. Rosenfeld and Wallman when justifying their proxy of depolicing via arrests write "There are good reasons for assuming that police disengagement should be reflected in declining arrest rates, especially for less serious Part II offenses, such as disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, vagrancy, loitering, suspicion, and vandalism. We might also expect police officers who fear legal repercussions or media exposure to make fewer arrests for some property crimes or drug possession. Unlike homicide or other serious violent offenses, these are the kinds of law violations for which the police have some discretion when deciding whether to make an arrest. If the police have “gone fetal,” we should expect them to make fewer such discretionary arrests." (2019: 57)
In their discussion of limitations, they directly acknowledge your point as a weakness of the study: "There are several limitations to our analysis. We measured de-policing with arrest rates, but making arrests is only one way the police can influence crime levels. In fact, some analysts have proposed that arrests represent the failure of the police to prevent crime; if crimes are averted by enhanced police presence at crime hot spots, for example, no arrests are necessary (Lum & Nagin, 2017; Nagin, Solow, & Lum, 2015). We are sympathetic to this view, but we would also point out that some minimum level of arrests is needed to maintain the credibility of proactive enforcement actions such as targeted patrols. Nonetheless, future research should be aimed at examining the effect on the rise of homicide levels of possible declines in forms of proactive policing other than arrests." (2019: 67)
But, I think overall we shouldn't say that arrest data is bad unless we think that arrests don't move with the data we think actually matters. That argument would be a bit odd to me; sure, arrests may be attenuated from the 'proactive' policing you describe, but surely some arrests result from traffic stops and terry stops? If so, then decreases in those stops should in turn affect arrests, which would be captured.
I missed the original discussion. I tried looking into their paper, but I am not exactly sure if I understand their SEM. (...Instead of extolling magical virtues of max likelihood SEM, why not specify the structure with a couple of equations...?) From their reference [1], I gather that their linear dynamic models SEM are something like,
rate_{arrests, city, time} = ??? *rate_{homicide,city,time-1}
rate_{homicide,city,time} = beta* rate_{arrests,city,time} + (economic disadvantage and bunch of other other time-constant covariates) + hidden city specific fixed time invariant effect alpha_{city} + hidden year specific effect common to all cities xi_{time} + noise_{city,time}.
for time = year, year-1. Or maybe it is one big model with beta_time for each time point?
I write ??? because this is just my best guess; I am not sure what they exactly mean by saying they condition on the previous year's arrest-homicide relationship but not including time-lagged homicide variable.
Whatever their model exactly is, they fit it to data 2010-2015, and report that estimated betas are small and positive.
Now looking at their results, here is an interesting question: It kinda looks like betas in their model might capture the prior-2015 trend? Like, the model (if I understand it correctly) could capture the general trend of beta after adjusting for all kinds of year-specific effects. Prior to 2015, the unadjusted scatter plots show both arrests and homicide slightly decreasing, perfectly consistent with their estimated small positive beta.
This is important, as I think "strongman" version of policing-homicide Ferguson hypothesis is not that less arrests result in less homicide universally, but in June 2015 there were many major changes in policing activity which show up in statistics as both declining arrests and increasing homicide. The "major changes" could have a proxy in form of the big protests, as ACX speculates.
So, if the special circumstances that correlated with the protests in 2015 disrupted [2] the general relationship "usually, arrests are slightly positively correlated with homicide", the model (depending on its structure to condition on previous years) would *eat* those "special circumstances" in fixed effects alpha and xi. All the 2015 special stuff common to all cities in xi_2015 and in alpha_city all city-specific stuff, like large protests.
One suggestive sign that something like this could be going is that reported variance in tables 2-3 (all, Black) more than double in 2015 for violent, property and drug crime. In table 4 (White) the variance stays similar in all years. So their estimates for arrest-homicide effect are getting a little bit less precise in 2015.
Also, I don't think it illuminates to aggregate their data yearly when lot of interesting stuff happens on much shorter time scales.
I like this discussion, but honestly I'm not the author or their even their advisee, so I won't be able to tell you definitively. The best path might be to ask the authors for clarification. That being said, I'll do what I can:
0) I'm not sure of their model's exact specification. I think your depiction is plausible, but a flaw of the paper is that it could have used an appendix item featuring that!
1) The practice of lagging past arrest->crime coefficients in this type of model stems from Greenberg, Kessler, and Logan 1979, who go into this model approach in general on pages 843-846. The usage of the lagged effect is important, because year 1's law enforcement actions/inactions ought to affect year 2's crime level. So, it's important to control for effect of arrests or else you'll discount current arrests. As they put it: " lagged effects are absorbed into later measures of enforcement and crime. If these effects are of opposite sign [crimes increase arrests but arrests decrease crime], as we have suggested the effect of crime on enforcement is expected to be, they will tend to cancel and lead to an underestimation of the influence of crime on enforcement. To avoid this possible source of bias, a model of the effects of crime on enforcement must include both short-term and long-term effects" (page 844)
Another important excerpt: "The basic ideas of the consistency procedure can be seen in Figure 1, which illustrates a three-wave, two-variable panel model. In this model, the per capita crime rate (C) at time t is assumed to depend linearly on the crime rate at time t- 1, and on the arrest clearance rate (A) at times t and t- 1. Similarly, the current clearance rate at time t is assumed to depend linearly on the clearance rate at time t - 1, and on the crime rates at times t and t - 1. Thus the model includes both lagged and instantaneous reciprocal influences between the crime rate and the clearance rate. The relationship between the crime rate and the clearance rate at time 1 is taken into account but is not subjected to causal analysis. Explicit allowance is made for the possibility that the residuals for the crime rate and clearance rate at time t (Ut and Vt, respectively) are correlated."
So, that's why they "condition on the previous year's arrest-homicide relationship"
1.5) As for why no lagged homicide rates, Rosenfeld and Wallman say: "Our models do not include lagged values of homicide rates, and the results therefore represent the effect of arrest rates and other predictors on the level of the annual homicide rate between 2010 and 2015. The essential feature of ML-SEM models we estimate is to adjust the arrest rate estimates for the year-to-year reciprocal relationship between homicide and arrest rates." (page 58)
2) Because the model controls for several prior years' relationships between arrests and homicides, it ought to be perfectly positioned to test for those special 2015 circumstances whereby there is a hypothesized causal relationship between "declining arrests and decreasing homicide". Indeed, this is how Rosenfeld and Wallman describe it it in their results: "Given the substantive interest in the possibility of a time-varying effect of arrest rates on the city homicide rates and the specific focus on the effect of arrest rates on the 2015 rise in homicide levels, we estimated models permitting the within-city arrest rates and controls to vary freely over time [that's important!]. With a single exception (the effect of White weapon arrest rates on homicide rates), this model specification converged to a unique solution.
If declining arrest rates spurred the 2015 homicide rate rise, we should observe significant and
negative coefficients on the arrest measures in 2015, particularly for those offenses permitting more police discretion, such as minor crimes and perhaps also drug and some property crimes." (page 62)
3) I would agree that variance was higher in 2015! But not even the sign of the point estimates flipped negative in table 3 year 2015 (relative to the prior years), when the hypothesis would have been that at least one became negative in that year. That's kinda surprising? Also, each point estimate increased in magnitude That's tough to swallow, because a minimal test of plausibility is whether your hypothesized effect - regardless of significance - at least moves in the theorized direction relative to placebo test (e.g. another year here). For all 5 crime rates to increase in point estimates magnitude when the theorized direction is negative... to me that further contradicts the lower arrests (as proxy for depolicing) -> more homicides mechanism.
Thanks for reply. Fortunately Greenberg, Kessler, and Logan 1979 is on JSTOR. So maybe Rosenfeld and Waldman drop the lagged crime (b1, b2 in GKL Fig 1) but have otherwise same model? Looks like a whole bunch of relationships to estimate. I wish they would report as much details as GKL Table 1 / Figure 1.
The reason I am interested in the variance of point estimates is that it kinda tells the estimate becomes much less precise in 2015. This is a conjecture, but it indicates there is more variation in homicide in 2015. It could be unsystematic, just noise. But it could be systematic effect on some particular cities.
Anyway, it is a quite difficult thing to estimate, and it is quite important what a model really estimated.
Let's take their results at face value, and suppose there is a small positive arrest-homicide association also in 2015. Then look the Economist graph "Fewer stops, more shot" in Baltimore before and after 2015 in the original ACX post. Pre-2015, such relationship isn't implausible. Not strongly suggested either. Post-2015 until end of graph in 2018, arrests and homicide is quite flat; again compatible with positive correlation. But if arrests and homicide track each other, how come the arrest rate stays in low 20s despite the large jump in homicide? Yes, it is supposed to small effect. But *still* a bit weird.
I agree that there's tons of variance in 2015. I fully expect that to be the case in 2020 (and 21! hopefully not 22) versions of similar models. Stylistically, I prefer reporting 95% CIs for exactly this reason - it shows a range of plausible (in the weird frequentist sense) values for coefficients. It also doesn't focus so heavily on the arbitrary 'well p-value of 0.049 is clearly good but 0.051 is clearly bad' distinctions, and so allows us to inform our priors with a gradient of confidence rather than a binary of significant (best result since sliced bread!) vs insignificant (hear no evil, see no evil).
And that's exactly what is interesting to me. It could be that (as Graham argues elsewhere) there's some focal depolicing -> homicides police intervention that moves orthogonally to arrests which really explains everything. It could be that different things are different - that there is no general relationship that is reliable (the 'only these 3 cities' argument). It could be that the frame of protests -> depolicing -> homicides is fundamentally flawed because the causal framework mostly follows a different but frequently parallel pathway (e.g. racial inequity -> public institution legitimacy crises -> homicides). What it seems highly unlikely to be is protests -> arrests (as a proxy of depolicing) -> homicides. This is not Scott's only argument, but it's a core piece of it - copy pasting one of my exchanges with Scott on this topic:
"You say that "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas". To support the existence of depolicing (I agree, btw, see my Hypothesis A), you use two variables as measures of this depolicing: Chicago arrests and Minneapolis vehicle stops.
Is your argument that Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 are wrong - that arrests don't move in concert with depolicing? The Cassell 2020 paper you reference actually likes the Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 paper, and instead says that the 'treatment' - protests - was instead probably too weak in the original Ferguson era to find statistical significance (pages 55-56). I'm not sure I believe that, but I prefer that argument to the argument you make here Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 aren't discussing what you're discussing. For that to be true, you'd have to claim that depolicing's relationship to arrests is weak at the same time you use a decline in arrests as evidence of depolicing. Pick one!"
I would love to hear your answer on this -- if one believes that pre-textual stops are concerning from a rights perspective... can you think of any valid alternatives? I can see why they are effective, but I can think of many systems that would be effective in the way they are -- e.g., random searches and tracking of people for whom cops have suspicions but not probably cause -- which are more obviously unconstitutional and we avoid. I know you don't feel this way about pre-textual stops, but if you did and someone made you in charge of police policy... what would you try to do instead?
What portion of the time would you say the utility of the stop was to notice that someone has an open warrant, vs searching their car or person & finding something illegal?
It just feels like a really weird evolved system. "We solve most crime by picking someone who looks kinda suspicious (suspicious to be defined by individual cop because how the heck else would you define it) and then looking through their stuff."
If a large portion of the people have open warrants, do you think more investment could be spent on tracking those specific people down instead?
I know you've said that you don't think that people have a right to privacy in their cars, which is defensible. And I'm sympathetic to the idea of reformers making physically unrealistic demands -- hence why I'm really interested what the alternatives would be to "nothing" since some people do seem to care about those stops/searches.
You've given me one lead, which is to make me want to go research how cops in the EU use that policy in practice and how people react to it, for which I thank you.
One issue with tying ourselves in knots over police interventions being human rights violations is its cuts off some very easy ways of dealing with crime.
I remember a study where 30-40% of who were sneaking onto public transit in a certain community had an open warrant. Seems like more than enough justification to detain everyone who was caught sneaking. Instead activists were demanding (and succeeded) the police stop detaining anyone sneaking because of racial disparities in the eventual arrestees.
> If a large portion of the people have open warrants, do you think more investment could be spent on tracking those specific people down instead?
This just seems, to me, and having been reading Graham since he started his blog, and Peter Moskos before him, to be REALLY expensive. Tracking down the kind of people that most often _have_ open warrants for their arrest is or can be arbitrarily difficult. They probably almost always KNOW that there is a warrant for their arrest and can, you know, evade capture!
I remember being shocked when I visited Switzerland in 1995 or so that there were police/military stationed in the airport with _machine guns_. That wasn't at that time something I'd ever seen in the U.S. and I still don't think I've ever seen it outside one specific city, NYC.
"You could do what they do in Europe, where there are no pretextual stops because police can simply stop people for no reason at all (see e.g. Section 60 stops in the UK)."
I would be interested in reading a comparison of stops in the US and UK, and e.g. arrest rates for both. It seems difficult to get good data on it, and I'm not sure what the correct things to compare are. My impression is that the US has traffic stops without searches but those don't really exist in the UK.
I find it kind of hilarious that both financial hardship from the pandemic and having better finances than usual due to stimulus checks (which supposedly was spent on guns) were being offered as (entirely ad hoc) explanations for the BLM effect.
I also found it hilarious how many commenters accused Scott of coming to the conclusion first and then desperately looking for a way to justify it - followed shortly thereafter by desperate attempts at dismissing the huge amounts of data Scott provided and asserting some politically convenient explanations with little to no data to support them.
In contrast, I was delighted at the relatively high quality of comments compared to the average comment section about a hot-button issue.
It’s a reasonable response to brainstorm alternative explanations to the one originally presented. Yes, many will be politically convenient, and most won’t bring much evidence to support their ideas. Still, there were many comments that brought interesting stuff to the conversation and even some that had interesting links to follow and relevant citations.
Maybe I’m grading in too much of a curve here, but I genuinely appreciate the general level (and civility) of discourse here.
I think the comments were a lot better because BLM is no longer a salient issue on people's minds. I'd bet a post on vaccine or mask mandates would get much better comments now than in mid-2021.
Brainstorming is reasonable - this wasn't that. [Many commenters] were convinced Scott was wrong and were looking for any excuse to dismiss his evidence. Things were certainly better than back when this was popping off, but that's an extremely low bar given the absolutely horrendous level of discourse back then.
Re: stimulus checks vs financial hardship: two different things things can happen to different people at the same time. Me and all my employed friends got stimulus on top of our continuing pay checks. We were all feeling flush and because of that we acted uncharacteristically in some ways. At the same time two of my friends were laid off of jobs and unable to find a new one for over a year, the lives and habits certainly changed!
Not saying I am putting any weight behind either of those hypotheses, just noting that the apparent contradiction isn’t a good reason to discount or scoff at either theory. Very few people commit crimes, so a large change in circumstances, even if it only affects a subset of the population, is worth evaluating evidence about.
(Tbh my guess is that the stimulus idea won’t hold water. Layoffs might be a contributing factor, and they were time-delayed with the start of lockdowns for many people, but I doubt the main factor.)
Scott has pointed out the sharpness of the spike several times, as well as the very close timing (end of May). The chances that the layoffs were both time-delayed and coordinated to explain such a spike would be very hard to believe. The reality was a group of short term layoffs even in March, and then a wide range of layoff dates spread out for months.
I don’t disagree. I’m responding to “I find it kind of hilarious that both financial hardship from the pandemic and having better finances than usual due to stimulus checks” - to note that those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Like I said in my post, I don’t think either is a driving factor. But to say something like ‘did people have too much money or too little money make up your minds’ ignores that both things can be true at the same time, for different people
The issue is when both of these contradictory things are being floated as *causes* of the homicide spike, and the fact that they were being proposed suggests that both camps weren't thinking about things too deeply.
Again, I’m not arguing for either theory, I’m just saying that you’re doing a lot of conflating here. Did any single commenter argue for both? Individuals can disagree, liberals don’t have to share the same pet theory. If this was a post about immigration we might see conservatives commenting that it’s bad for the economy and it’s good for the economy - hilarious.
But even if it was one person arguing that both were true, I really don’t think that more AND less money is contradictory because some people can experience each at the same time. More than one major economic shock in more than one population can drive a single trend.
I expect some of the sudden rental housing shortage was probably was driven by both too much and too little money: landlords burned by renters who couldn’t pay for months and months getting out of the rental game, plus flush professionals with a down-payment suddenly saved up.
Again, not arguing for the theory itself, just reiterating that these aren’t necessarily contradictory. Some people had lots of money and this changed their behavior, and some had too little and this changed their behavior. Both types of people were part of the same economic system. Complex interactions of different parts of a system, such as growing inequality in circumstances, can drive big changes in trends.
Ah yeah, that’s object level. I’m not arguing the object level here, I read Scott’s post. I’m not arguing that either economic explanation is actually the thing driving the rise in murders.
I’m making a meta level point here, responding to the parent comment, that there is some conflation happening to say that this theories are contradictory at all. They are just two different theories, being suggested by different individuals, pointing at different trends that were both actually happening for a subset of the population.
Good point. Relatedly, there's a fallacious argument that goes "people say this, but other people also say the opposite, and we can construe both groups as being on the same side (both people are on X side of the spectrum usually), so that means that X side is confused and contradicting themselves!" Of course, in real life people will have different ideas, and two people within a group disagreeing doesn't mean there's something with the reasoning capabilities of everyone in the group.
I didn't actually say that, I just found it that funny that pro-BLMers would make such contradictory arguments, but it does suggest at least one of them must be obviously wrong and should have realized that. Either poor black people had more money during the pandemic or they didn't.
For the purposes of averages, yes, it is irrelevant. But at the meta level my point is that I don’t think averages are the right thing to be looking at here.
Murderers aren’t the average person from a group, they’re a small population so they’ll always be a subset, and probably a very unusual subset within that population. I could easily imagine scenarios where a particular racial group became richer on average, but the subset of that group who committed murders on average became poorer at the same time. If, for example, none of the murderous group has legible enough sources of income to get unemployment benefits. And I could imagine situations with the reverse too, maybe prohibition/depression era Irish mob murderers vs the average Irish person? Of course we don’t gather information in murderers incomes so this would be hard to get. But it’s not crazy to suggest something like this could be worth looking into.
I can not stress enough that I’m not advocating for either of these hypotheses, I’m just pointing out that there *is not a hilarious contradiction* that would have caused someone to realize all economic based theories were wrong by noticing that there were different economic theories being suggested.
>At the same time two of my friends were laid off of jobs and unable to find a new one for over a year, the lives and habits certainly changed!
The point is *not* that people had to be all experiencing the same economic conditions. The problem is when they're proposed as causes for the homicide spike. *For the people committing the additional homicides*, you can't really claim that some of them did it because they had more money than usual and some did it because they had less. It's not literally impossible, but it's a bizarre kind of relationship between wealth and crime you're positing that is infinitely less preferable to much simpler and more empirically supported explanations.
>(Tbh my guess is that the stimulus idea won’t hold water. Layoffs might be a contributing factor, and they were time-delayed with the start of lockdowns for many people, but I doubt the main factor.)
They're almost certainly not a factor. Did you read Scott's post? The spike was sharp, the spike occurred in no other countries, the spike occurred without an economic downturn back in Ferguson, and crime *fell* during the '08 recession. It's wrong for at least four very big, clear reasons.
Just adding further complexity here: Many people I know got the COVID unemployment benefits (600+ a week), which in some cases gave them higher income than when they were employed.
I don’t know the median income of the average murderer, but my guess is they have unsteady income at all times.
I guess you could construct a scenario where less-violent criminals lost the jobs that were keeping them somewhat sane during the pandemic. These people don’t have the wherewithal to apply for special COVID unemployment benefits. So they went on with some murdering. Hard to believe though.
Again, not arguing for this theory because I don’t think it’s a primary driver BUT I bet that many murderers aren’t very employable and didn’t have a traditional 9-5 job in the first place, at least not one legible to the state. If that was the case they would not have gotten any unemployment benefits
" two different things things can happen to different people at the same time."
that is of course true but I dont see the pathways for each in this scenario. murderers in general have unsteady income so the pandemic didn't hurt them in any real way.
Same reaction. I was taking it seriously, but once I got to the "no it's warm weather and the pandemic" section, I had to grin a bit. For some reason, some people really, really don't want to believe there's any connection between policing and homicide rate, it seems.
I'm convinced and think Scott did a pretty good job here.
I find it sad, not "hilarious", but I also _think_ I can understand why lots of people really _do not_ want to believe that 'the protests', about unjust police killings of black people, had the extra sad effect of increasing non-police killings of mostly black people (and mostly by other black people). That IS a really depressing conclusion to reach!
> I can understand why lots of people really _do not_ want to believe that 'the protests', about unjust police killings of black people, had the extra sad effect of increasing non-police killings of mostly black people (and mostly by other black people
Where are these people that don’t understand that? I don’t run int them IRL. It’s common knowledge around Mpls. The whole thing was a tragedy. From the gruesome death of George Floyd, through the reckless destruction of property, on to the understandable police pullback, to the resulting rise in crime.
We are still watching the results play out on the local news every evening.
Scott’s article added nothing new to our understanding. I added links from the NYT that make similar points in the original thread other than his making the protests cause number 1 in this tragedy and not paying too much attention to the tape of the slow motion murder of Floyd.
If you downplay the murder in the sequence of events you have a Fox News story. If you start with Floyd’s murder you have an NPR story.
I don’t understand why so few people see this. It’s a high efficacy scissor statement depending on where you think the narrative starts.
Where you think narrative starts seems largely based on tribal identity.
Your experience differs from mine. Scott's take would be regarded as heterodox in my neck of the woods, and certainly on main stream media. Criticism of BLM, however focused and legitimate, is written off as white supremacy. That's the dominant cultural narrative here on the West Coast. So at least for me, Scott added a great deal to my understanding.
That said, I appreciate hearing a Twin Cities perspective, so thanks for that.
Most of my neighbors in my St Paul neighborhood have a Black Lives Matter in their front yard. My yard and the black couple across the street are the exceptions. None of these people condoned the violence that followed Floyd’s death. I might have joined the initial demonstration if not for the lockdown. I would have beat a hasty retreat when violence started though.
The Minnesota Department of Human Rights just released a large study on the relationship between blacks and Mpls PD. There were some serious problems, so between that and the Floyd killing we are earnest our support of BLM in calling attention to this stuff.
It’s important to distinguish between that and illegal violence and destruction of property though. I don’t personally know anyone who doesn’t condemn that.
What I heard out here is that whenever there was massive destruction associated with a BLM protest, that somehow it didn't count because it was done by outside agitators. And I think that may have been true in some cases, but it also drives right into the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
Even beyond that, there is definitely a radical but not exactly fringe voice out here that argues "So what that a bunch of property got destroyed? No justice no peace! It's just property. Black lives matter more." etc. etc. And that point of view is pretty dangerous. Does that not exist in the Twin Cities?
I’ve heard the “No justice no peace” thing being chanted on television. I don’t support the notion I’ve heard the same slogan going back to demonstrations in the 70’s. I took as the usual rhetoric of the hot heads at any protest.
That radical element does exist though. It just takes a handful to get things started in the wrong direction.
My wife and I watched the events in Mpls and Saint Paul play out in real time.
Scattered acts of destruction mixed with a larger group of people who were just tired of unarmed black men being killed. Mostly a bunch of idealistic white kids - a lot of U of Minnesota student - marching in demonstration of support.
Another thing to keep in mind is that at the time of Floyd’s death, very few people had jobs or classes to go to. It increased the scale of thing by probably 2 or 3 times.
It didn’t take long for whatever leaders of BLM that were there to become irrelevant.
Then there was the fact that once the police were in a defensive crouch anyone with malicious intent realized that this was the moment to get away with it.
What better time to plunder the OxyContin shelf at the local pharmacy. I have a photo of the smashed drive through window at the Walgreens a half mile from my home.
It was pure anarchy.
There was an instance of a Boogaloo Boi from Texas taking part. He does have a warrant out for his arrest for his part in the third precinct arson.
Another knucklehead was arrested when he brought looted police tactical gear to work to show off as souvenirs. He didn’t give a damn about Floyd. It was everything is allowed tonight that motivated him.
I watched another masked white guy smashing store front windows with a four pound hammer. He turned out to be a redneck biker from Stillwater Minnesota. Warrant out for his arrest too.
So there was an element of folks deliberately trying to make things worse for their own twisted reasons. But they don’t deserve the majority of the blame.
We had a few sleepless nights watching this go on. At an early morning hour the Minnesota gov came on television to recommend people in my neighborhood pack a go bag.
On those nights when daylight finally arrived our neighbors went into our front yards and talked about how we passed the night. At a distance. Covid was still considered a serious threat.
I think the distinction between depolicing and a collapse of trust in police is important (though of course you have every right to be agnostic on the question).
If the murder spike was a result of police pulling back, the lesson would be that getting police to be more active would save lives. That could mean making sure police feel that they'll be supported by politicians if they make tough calls in tough situations and not giving police extra paperwork.
If the murder spike was a result of the public losing trust in police, and so not calling the cops when there's a problem, the solution is the opposite--restoring public trust in police by holding police accountable when they do something wrong and requiring careful record-keeping.
That said, I would've expected 911 calls to be correlated with - and probably be a better measure of - trust in the police though. Maybe there are other empirical measures like rate of witness cooperation?
I'm not convinced the legitimacy hypothesis is a better explanation than depolicing, especially given there is stronger empirical evidence for that (although it does seem like it's simpler to measure). But I did think it fit the time line Scott laid out just as well, hence why I brought it up on the last post (although I didn't know it had a name and had been reasonably well studied).
The other problem with the idea that occurred to me after the post is that if depolicing leads to higher crime rates, that'd potentially lead to less trust and so they aren't even fully separable because one causes the other.
Has trust in police gone up? Or distrust just become quieter? I really haven't seen many signs that those who had distrust of the police have decided to trust them. Calls to 911 are a poor metric, because "a drowning man grasps at straws". You need to measure in non-emergency situations.
I don't have any answers to those questions, but I do think that anyone who had a valid reason to distrust the police two years ago still does. The alternatives may be worse, but that's a different argument.
It does seem like an implausibly big effect - I mentioned it because I was surprised at your comment about trusts levels and googled. The start of the decline in 2013 does roughly correspond to the reversal of the downward trend in the homicide rate in the first graph in Scott's original post, but you're right that rates haven't declined as trust has improved so it's not a great fit. I do agree that de-policing probably explains more.
I would expect 911 calls to be correlated both with trust in the police and the overall crime rate- so if lower trust in the police leads to higher overall crime then depending how the correlations work it's not too implausible that 911 calls could stay at a similar level?
Yeah, I agree. I did think about this before replying to Graham initially and decided it depended whether the 911 call rate was being defined as per person or per incident of crime and just assumed he meant the latter. As you say, if the number of calls stays the same even as crime goes up, that means the calls per incident are going down, and that could be caused by lower trust levels and less police cooperation.
Good point! Do you have any stats showing there in fact was depolicing? Reduced stops etc. as you mentioned in the other comment? I found this paper, saying it did (at least in California):
I also wonder if you have any study on the relationship more broadly - showing that reduced stops result in more crime.
P.S. I have binged a few of your articles after seeing the original comment, and I very much appreciate your perspectives, reasoned argumentation, knowledgeableness and writing. Keep at it!
I appreciate the links and everything you've written on the topic, but why do you think so many liberal-left activists are hell-bent on abolishing police in the first place? I've been reading through your article and I keep scratching my head trying to work out how they could possibly think police abolition would serve the public interest or even be strategically advantageous for their own team.
The core ideology is that all differences in people's conditions are created by and perpetuated through an oppressive system acting against a minority's interests in favour of a majority, or of a privileged class with aristocratic like power over society
If this is how you primarily understand the world around you it follows that reducing the contact of the majority controlled system with the victim group will improve the conditions of that group. The ability of the de-policing and rise in crime correlation to potentially falsify the essential theory is the reason mainstream media are carefully reluctant to give it any priority as a factor in the crime wave
There was 100% wildly decreased policing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the crisis. Tthis could lead to a change in long term behavior because the 2-4 days of near lawlessness serve as a “proof of concept” for some people. Someone who has tried out a crime when they know they won’t get caught has got to be incredibly more likely to try that crime out again eventually. Human brains are weak.
The long term change is less obvious, but I would bet IDK 95% of my net worth that the amount of “daily boots on the ground” and level of enforcement for minor incidents went down between say 2019 and 2021. Not necessarily fewer cops (though there are in Minneapolis I think), but definitely fewer on the streets.
This was a longer term problem in both cities, but there was discontinuity before and after the riots.
In terms of the longer term problem, in maybe 2014-2015? in downtown Minneapolis we were leaving a twins game with dozens of other people in small families. Probably two dozen traffic control cops within sight. Some on foot, some on horseback, some in cars. A convoy of hoodlums in 4 SUVs blaring music runs two red lights weaving at 30-40mph through peds in crosswalks. No one was hit, but my toddler probably had a car go past them within 4ft? And very easily someone could have died, one person who dropped something and suddenly stopped moving or whatever.
None of the cops moved a muscle. And when we asked about it they were just like “it’s not worth chasing after that sort of thing”. It was eye opening. Certain parts of town the laws are different.
The fact that black motorists were only about half as likely to be stopped after George Floyd's death explains a lot about why black traffic fatalities skyrocketed nationally in June through December 2020.
According to the CDC, Blacks died +29% more in motor vehicle accidents in 2020 than in 2019, compared to +16% for Hispanics, +4% for whites, +3% for American Indians and -2% for Asians.
In 2021, blacks died 38% more often than in 2019, quite comparable to the 44% increase in black homicide deaths from 2019 to 2021.
On the street, BLM seems to have turned out to mean Black Lives Mangled.
>Overall, public approval of police in America has been remarkably stable over the last 30 years.
To the extent that the data reflects this, I think we have to be suspicious that the polling methods used to collect that data are simply too crude to reflect the changes. I live in a high-crime inner city neighborhood right now, and I've worked in others over the last several years, and spoken to people who've grown up in them, and they've testified to seeing attitudes towards police really transform in that time period.
Thanks for all the high-quality evidence and discussion on this topic! I've really enjoyed your blog.
This is useful, and makes me more skeptical of the legitimacy hypothesis, but I'm not sure if it's definitive. Since violent crime is so concentrated, we'd really need to know how trust in police changed among people who are close to people who commit or are victimized by violent crimes.
This would follow from the lack of overall change to 911 calls if the kinds of incidents that result in deaths are similar to the kind of incidents that result in calls, but I'd honestly be surprised if this is the case (though I certainly don't know). I would speculate that a lot of 911 calls are for things like noise complaints or suspicious person complaints in low-crime areas, plus stuff like car accidents and medical emergencies.
Perhaps the most realistic way to get at this would be to see how specific types of 911 calls changed (if at all)--for instance, were people less likely after the summer of 2020 to call the police for welfare checks, or to call the police about violent disputes. If these sorts of calls didn't change, I'd be pretty convinced that the trust hypothesis doesn't explain much.
>"Why is legitimacy a problem for police, but not a problem for the media, Supreme Court, justice system at large, or public schools (all of which get lower marks in survey data than police)?"
Some of those need more cooperation from the general public than others - the power of the Supreme Court doesn't depend in any way on what the average man on the street thinks of them; police, on the other hand, need people to cooperate with them in order to be effective. (I expect that reduced trust in public schools does affect those in various ways, reducing attendance in low class people and increasing the flight to private schools in the middle and upper class).
Regarding your question of what causes public perceptions of legitimacy or illegitimacy, that's harder. I think it's obvious that police malpractice can cause distrust directly, but I also think that eg. prosecutorial decisions can affect how the public sees the cops on the ground - if a criminal is back on the streets the next day the cops are "useless" even if they're very diligent with arrests and the issue is with the DA's office
I agree the distinction is crucial and leads to divergent routes of action. I feel bad for not thinking about it before, and would not with a clear conscience say it was due to "the protests" when it could be due to the Floyd incident itself. However, Graham's comment below is pretty convincing that it could be the protests themselves.
The homicide rate right now for the black population in Chicago is at the highest recorded level since the start of modern record keeping. All those people saying that crime was much worse in the 1990's? Not for black residents of Chicago. The previous high in the 1990's was about 75 homicides per 1000 people. In 2021 that hit 85.2 incidents per 1000 people. By contrast the homicide rates for whites and Latinos are nowhere near their all-time highs.
The first question I have is whether or not this holds true for other large metropolitan areas as well. If so then aggregating homicide rates across an entire city is a mistake. The hypothesis that needs to be tested is whether or not the Chauvin/Ferguson/Freddie Grey/etc. incidents resulted in radicalization of black communities specifically rather than metropolitan populations as a whole.
Edit: more specifically poor urban black communities. If there is a historically bad epidemic of black homicides then why isn't that more apparent? After all the average US homicide rate has risen to 1996 levels but still falls short of historic highs around 1991-1992. I can think of a couple of factors. While blacks make up about 12% of the US population and have for decades the percentage of blacks living in poverty has declined sharply since the 1990's (peaking at around 31% in 1992 and declining to around 17% today). Potentially related to that with regards to Chicago specifically the black population of that city has also been in decline for decades, since at least the 1980's, even as the Latino population in that city has soared. If the twofer is urban poverty than a decrease in black poverty rates plus a change in the racial composition of cities could result in an average homicide rate that is still short of all time highs even as poor inner city communities face historic levels of devastation.
I was thinking in terms of local (Chicago) homicide statistics versus national.
1) If the per capita homicide rate for blacks living in Chicago is the highest it's ever been why isn't the overall homicide rate for all races in Chicago the highest its ever been? My guess: a declining black population that has been displaced by Latinos, and the homicide rate for Latinos is much lower.
2) At a national level, let's hypothesize that the pattern of Chicago holds true everywhere (NY, LA, New Orleans, St. Louis, etc.) If nationally blacks are experiencing the highest rates of homicide ever why isn't the national homicide rate at the same level? My guess is that homicide is concentrated among poor blacks and the black poverty rate today is half of what it was in 1992.
And I'm also guessing that as blacks attain wealth (meaning middle class levels of income) they do what the middle class has been doing all over the country: moving out of cities into the suburbs. So the issue of black poverty with regards to Chicago is related to both that city's homicide rate and its declining population of black residents.
"If the per capita homicide rate for blacks living in Chicago is the highest it's ever been why isn't the overall homicide rate for all races in Chicago the highest its ever been? My guess: a declining black population that has been displaced by Latinos, and the homicide rate for Latinos is much lower."
I don't quite know how to interpret your hypothesis, but the chart labelled "Homicides per 100,000 by race in Chicago from 1991 to 2021" here:
Shows a huge jump in the black homicide rate in Chicago between 2015 and 2016 (I think) and a VERY small corresponding jump in the white homicide rate. Things got better over the next few years and then jumped up again for the black rate but not the white rate. The Latino rate was sorta a damped version of the black rate.
Broadly speaking, the black homicide rate in Chicago doubled between ~2014 and 2021 and the white homicide rate in Chicago did not.
Blacks make up 12% of the US population but account for around 50% of both homicide victims and perpetrators in this country. That's the context for my statement. Given that how is it possible that a massive increase in black homicides doesn't return the city to 1992 per capita homicide rates? Because the average factors in a smaller black population.
The average is hiding the real dimensions--and severity--of this problem. The black population in Chicago right now is facing its highest ever level of homicides. What happens if you discuss the problem in that light rather than deflecting with claims that homicide rates have not yet reached the highs of the 1990's?
NYC and LA are still doing much better than the 90's, but Chicago and Philadelphia are about as bad. I'd imagine that some other places that aren't on that graph (Baltimore? St Louis?) are also near 90's peaks.
Those are just city wide stats, I don't know if anyone's looked specifically at black crime rates in NYC. Given that black crime rates tend to comprise 50%+ of the crime in general, I don't think they could be back to 90's levels in NYC.
Since law enforcement and criminal justice vary widely from city to city I would expect there to be a lot of variation. I don't know if this is true or not but I have heard that the gobs of money that poured into law enforcement in NYC in the post-911 era greatly benefited not only anti-terrorist measures but also units that focused on ordinary street crime. Certainly NYC has been an outlier before--during the mini homicide spike of 2014-2016 while murders jumped everywhere else in the country they actually declined in New York.
A couple of observations:
1) NYC has gotten progressively less black over the decades and the percentage of blacks living in poverty in the city has also declined.
2) For the purposes of the discussion here any trends pre- and post-BLM may be more obvious by examining homicide rates for the black population of NYC specifically rather than for all racial groups.
Thank you for so properly refuting the garbage analysis from Artifex0. His is a stupid idea that just won't go away despite the evidence to the contrary.
In case you're new here, an explanation of that partial ban seems useful.
Scott's house rules are that your comment should be at least two of {kind, true, necessary}. He tends to view language like "garbage analysis" and "stupid idea" as unkind, and the bar for necessary is pretty high; you've basically got to add new ideas or new information.
> If you have some clever reason why Central America is also a bad comparison, then please find me any major country
Noted, we should do more homework as a rule. We DO appreciate you doing the (occasionally tedious) research - it's still much better that somebody does it, and it helps a lot in fostering a culture of doing it. Even if it's a slow process.
Speaking of, I noticed recently my google-fu is lagging behind the times. Can you maybe do a post on "how to research"? Including stuff you find obvious or simple, like what sites you go first, or what tool you use to quickly generate a graph. For example: I realized annoyingly late that on sci-hub you should search by DOI, and not by paper title.
Second this - getting a "how to find 'good' research" would be incredibly valuable. It's easy to find papers - but I'm not sure how to find the 'general consensus today' type of results that would be valuable.
I "third" this. I find Scott's ability to find studies, graphs, then apply "proper study hygiene" rules to those studies nothing short of magical. I would very much enjoy a long-form essay that is just going through "here's a hypthesis, here's exactly how I find N studies about it, here's the basic rules I apply to filter those studies into M good ones and S bad ones, here's how I get useful insights from the S bad ones, here's how I reject the non-useful insights from the M good ones."
> I don’t really think of this as an alternative explanation. I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected.
And this?
> My claim is that this is false. It is not difficult to assign priority. The protests were the primary cause, with the other two being minor contributors at most. When I say the media is getting this issue wrong, I mean that they’re saying things like this.
In the first you're saying that there was a homicide spike as a result of the events that occurred right around Floyd's killing, and in the second you're saying specifically that it's the protests (keep in mind the comment to which you responded with the "agnostic" point is saying that it is *not* the protests). My reaction to the initial post was that you can't disentangle the protests themselves with other things that happened at the same time. You say you're agnostic between those things, but then also that it was the protests.
This leads to another issue I had, which is a question of which groups have agency and which are merely reacting to other stuff. In the "BLM did it" version of events, BLM protests lead to police doing their jobs less which leads to more crime - this is interpreted as "it's because of BLM". Assigning BLM agency to cause things to happen, and the police actions as being a natural reaction to outside events. Why not treat the *protests* as a natural reaction to outside events, same as you do with police doing their jobs less, and the *cause of the protests* as being the ultimate culprit?
When a negative event is a result of the actions of multiple people (or groups), often each person/group will characterize their own actions as being a mere *reaction* to someone else, and the *other* group as the real cause of the bad thing. The question becomes, who do you blame / put the onus on to change? Usually the answer is "whoever I sympathize with the least" but it's often not examined all that much.
Insofar as the "natural reaction" vs "agency" distinction makes sense, it also would generally be the case that the higher the number of people doing something, the more on the "natural reaction" side it is. If 10 million people all have the same reaction to an event, it's more likely a "natural reaction" than some hidden agenda they all happen to share.
The BLM protests were pretty spontaneous, and while there are people always pushing for protests in the aftermath of police injustice and there was a lot of positive media coverage, that's true of many other similar protests in the past, i.e., it's not like CNN can press a button and cause massive nationwide protests or it would have happened that way numerous times before.
Well this gets at what I said above "insofar as the ... distinction makes sense". If someone wants to say the distinction doesn't make sense that's fine with me, but if they're going to, then do it consistently.
I think this is what rubs me the wrong way about the original post. Along with the fact that this is all about correlation and very little reasoning about causal pathways (Graham's comments and blog start to get at the causal pathway but there is a lot of ??? involved between the BLM protests happened and then murder rate going up.
Why is it that the cause was arbitrarily chosen as the BLM protests and not the event(s) that sparked the BLM protests?
Well the BLM riots are one clearly defined phenomenon, whereas the causes of those riots are as multifaceted as the causes of WW1.
Sure, the most easily identified cause in both cases was some guy killing some other guy in a city street, but there was a lot more going on in both cases.
Presumably because the BLM protestors made specific demands (defund the police) which politicians partially undertook to do (no more traffic stops etc).
It is the result of those specific decisions which can be analysed and used to inform future law and order policy.
Agreed. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think another factor was that the ritualistic denunciations of the US as a "white supremacist," "systemically racist," " and other variations of the kind of slightly deranged, overheated rhetoric that began pouring out of the chattering classes around May of 2020 sent the message to people who didn't know any better that, as an aggrieved minority subject to an unjust and illegitimate system of oppression, they weren't morally obligated to follow its laws, and that in fact not following its laws was a justifiable form of political activism. Maybe the step back in policing was the bigger factor, but I can't believe that trying to delegitimize most of American society and its history didn't contribute to the situation, either.
In that context, though, it's worth noting that "American society" was not following its own official rules. The claims that it was engaging in "an unjust and illegitimate system of oppression" are basically claims that "We believed that we were a country of laws, and you ignore them when convenient", which is nearly true, if not unusual.
This is *one* reason why computers can't (yet) handle legal cases. The written laws are not the actual laws. Consider the difficulty people are having in trying to train an AI to be "unbiased". The database that they are trained against is corrupt (in the sense that it's not unbiased).
I'm not sure what "nearly true if not unusual" means in this context, but based on what I think you're trying to say, let me make a few points:
1. I think the US has a generalized problem with holding police accountable, due to factors like qualified immunity, the influence of police unions in local politics, and the deferential attitude of many judges/prosecutors towards individual police officers. This has nothing to do with race. You can look at the work Radley Balko has been doing for over a decade for evidence of this.
2. That said, the impact of a lack of accountability does fall more on black and Hispanic people because they have more interactions with police and thus are on the receiving end of the rough stuff more per capita than other groups. However, this is difficult to separate from the fact that they also have higher rates of criminal offense than other groups, too, so *of course* police are going to focus their time and attention on members of these groups.
3. Roland Fryer's research shows that black and Hispanic men were subject to more frequent uses of force by police (nearly 50%), but that may in large part be due to higher rates of non-compliance with police (ie, when they tell you to put your hands on the hood of the car, just do it, eh, and don't make a big thing of it), because he also found no racial disparity in the use of lethal force.
If you wanted to be tendentious, you could say that all of those murders were Derek Chauvin's fault.
I suspect that a very different group of people would be just as angry about that framing as the "it's caused by the BLM protests" framing.
The fact is that we don't really know whether lots of widely publicised protests (and a few riots) were the cause or widely publicised failures of policing and excessive force by police.
One other plausible causal path: Chauvin used excessive force. Lots of other police saw that and backed off on the use of force and aggression as part of their policing practice because they recognised Chauvin as bad, but the police that backed off were not the aggressive ones who were using excessive force, and the result was that they started underpolicing.
That's a causal path that doesn't involve the protests at all.
That last part particularly galls me. The Capitol Hill riots on Jan 6 were a significant event, but the BLM riots were not only longer, more extensive, and inflicted far more damage to lives and property, but also involved storming the White House while calling for Trump to be lynched a year beforehand. Why was this not construed as an 'assault on democracy'? Has anything resembling the same level of effort gone toward prosecuting those responsible? And why did Big Tech and the FBI crack down on the Jan 6 organisers immediately, while allowing BLM and Antifa to rampage virtually unchecked for months on end? Who the hell is calling the shots here?
The difference is pretty obvious? "Rioting to overturn a legitimate election in favor of your wannabe autocrat" is a super super different than "rioting to protest rampant racist police brutality that's going unchecked by the state".
The sane world wants elections not to be cheated and police not to murder people, hence, it condemns the first riot and sympathizes with the second.
A mob boss saying "Guido, Fredo, you two go kill Jack McCoy" is committing a crime, whereas a firebrand saying to a crowd, "Fuck the police, kill them all" is probably just exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech (at least under American law). Reason being, the mob boss intends and reasonably expects that his words will result in Jack McCoy being killed in the near future, whereas the firebrand is just trying to make people angry and doesn't expect that any prompt mass murder of police will occur.
It is highly unlikely that the White House protesters really expected that Donald Trump would be lynched. And, again, they're allowed to be angry and to use hyperbolic language about killing people to express their anger. Trespassing is still a crime, and maybe disorderly conduct, but that's about it.
The 1/6 protesters seem to have expected that their actions would result in senators. and the Vice President, would at minimum be violently intimidated into changing their votes in a specific proceeding and thus the outcome of an election. That is a crime, and a fairly serious one.
Words coordinating action are different than words expressing emotion, and trespassing with intent to commit more serious crimes is different than trespassing for the sake of trespassing (and expressing emotion).
Is Trump supposed to be the mob boss in this analogy, or the firebrand? For guidance, how much of a twitter following do you need to have before you count as the former?
Chauvin may have used excessive force and you could probably make a reasonable argument for that and/or incompetence contributing to Floyd's death, thereby leading to a Felony Homicide conviction by technicality. But the prosecution team at his trial didn't make this argument. They tried to argue that Chauvin was the dumbest murderer in recorded history and intentionally chose to snuff out his victim's life with a dozen eye-witnesses present and several cameras rolling. And then they trotted out an 'expert witness' who stated that a normal and healthy person subjected to the same method of restraint would have died, which anyone with half a brain (and Steven Crowder) can disprove trivially. It was an absolute fucking circus.
I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of cops became warier about getting entangled with suspects and/or flat-out resigned in the wake of the Chauvin trial, but the public sentiment that caused the video to go viral in the first place and led to immense public pressure being placed on the justice system to secure a conviction can't realistically be separated from the BLM memeplex.
Has anyone actually tested the method of restraint Chauvin used?
I guess I'm surprised that the country that ate tide pods and did the milk crate challenge didn't make a Youtube trend of people kneeling on each other's necks for 9 minutes to see what happens.
What happens if you do that to an average person that's not on fentanyl? Can you die of asphyxia while still being able to speak? What precisely is the mechanism of death?
Setting that aside, American police use this method of restraint hundreds of times every day on resisting suspects, and they use this method of restraint because it is less harmful than the alternatives and very, very unlikely to kill you. The notion claimed at the trial that this is practice is inherently dangerous is ludicrous.
Thanks! That definitely updates my position towards "Floyd died from overdose".
Possible objections:
I think Chauvin's right knee was on the ground, not Floyd's back? Hard for me to tell from the footage.
Someone in respiratory distress might still have survived in a different position, and Chauvin was negligent for not repositioning Floyd when he stopped talking/moving/breathing.
>Why is it that the cause was arbitrarily chosen as the BLM protests and not the event(s) that sparked the BLM protests?
Because then you're saying that in response to a black man being killed, black people directly decided to kill a bunch of black people in response. If that's the path you want to take, fine by me, but it's completely unintuitive and it paints black people in an extraordinarily bad light.
A black criminal dying in an encounter with the police happens about every other day.
In contrast, hundreds of riots across the country for months with most of the national elite excusing them as "mostly peaceful protests" is not something that happens all the time.
The third unusual event of 2020 beside covid and the riots was the exceptionally fervid presidential election and the bizarrely biased media coverage that accompanied it. I think that had a lot to do with how long it took the Establishment to recognize their egging on the "social justice protests" was getting a lot of people killed. A whole lot of the Establishment planned on using charges of racism to drive Trump from office, so they had an exceptional amount invested in their narrative and thus couldn't admit even to themselves how badly they were messing the country up by promoting BLM.
To be fair, the 'other two' in the second comment are gun sales and the pandemic. Neither of which fall into the causal pathways which he claims to be agnostic about. Although I think really, he was just overly hedging there and feels that the police trust explanation isn't correct but didn't examine it fully.
Edit - Thinking about it for more than a minute (and being a bit more charitable), maybe he was just saying that reduced trust is downstream of the protests? That would make his strong position on the protests more compatible with his soft position on the police trust effect.
While my edit sort of refuted the point I was making there, I guess I can expand on that idea a little bit as well.
The hypothetical that I was reasoning from; Scott has been responding to a Gish Gallop where the null hypothesis is that he is wrong (and a bad person) over these two posts. Assuming he thinks the police trust issue is downstream of protests, assuming he did not know how to easily evaluate it, assuming he was getting a bit tired at this point, etc. He attempts to 'hedge' and says he is agnostic because that sounds less bad than, 'I disagree but don't have a good argument yet'.
Of course, upon reflection, it was poor form for me to assume so much about his internal states; I was just speculating on the apparent incongruity between his seemingly firm stance that the protests are the most important cause and his statement of agnosticism. Basically, I thought he said he was agnostic 'under duress', and I was trying to convey that, but I accidentally hit the post button after writing the first word and then went to edit rather than delete (My reach exceeded my grasp) which forced me to try and complete a very incomplete thought quickly.
right, but that's perfectly compatible with being sure that it's *not* caused by Covid or gun sales. One can be agnostic between a limited subset of options while being confident in ruling out others.
What about the standard test of "that without which the following would not have happened"?
There have been pandemics before without massive spikes in murder rates. There have been riots before without massive spikes in the murder rates. There have been police killings of (armed and un-armed, dangerous and non-dangerous) people before without a spike in murder rates.
The pandemic was around for several months before the May Murder Extravaganza, so its relatively easy to discard the pandemic as a cause. If you are hell-bent on blaming Covid, can you hypothesize the causal mechanism that would lead to murders increasing at a significant time lag from the pandemic and from lockdowns? Note that it must not be applicable to any other pandemic, nor any other country.
I think Scott did enough to show that increasing gun sales wasn't driving the excess shootings. As a side note, I'd love to see a breakdown of how many of the homicides-by-gun were from recently purchased guns, and how many were legally purchased. Gun sales is a broad category that covers everything from rifles to shotguns to pistols. The majority of murders use pistols. Most of those pistols aren't legally acquired. So a spike in legal rifle sales has no bearing on a spike in pistol killings.
The BLM-lead protests/riots in the summer of 2020 were different from previous protests and riots in their focus specifically on the police, specifically their defunding and replacement. The municipalities that complied with those demands in any amount of half-measures lead the murder spike. Areas with less "police reform" had smaller spikes.
In short, the best causal explanation available is that the BLM protests drove the murder spike. Further detailed explanation would be great, but we will never get there if people insist that the pandemic is equally blameworthy and therefore investigating the protests effects on crime is pointless, or even worse motivated by political hostility.
"The BLM-lead protests/riots in the summer of 2020 were different from previous protests and riots in their focus specifically on the police, specifically their defunding and replacement. The municipalities that complied with those demands in any amount of half-measures lead the murder spike. Areas with less "police reform" had smaller spikes. "
Do you have a source for the "areas with less police reform" thing? I've read a lot of things claiming this is the case, but they all in essence say "these areas defunded the police and then saw more murders" when (i) not clear they did in fact defund the police and (ii) more importantly, the spike in crime seems to be pretty broad, including in rural areas, including areas that did not defund the police.
As for what's different this time, I think the answer is that per Scott's original post high-profile police killings, protests, heavy-handed responses to the protests, have happened before, and have resulted in spikes in murder rate. This one was bigger because the killing was more infamous, the protests broader, the heavy-handed responses more widespread - the same pattern as previously but bigger in every way. And yeah if you pay attention in the past you see similar anti-police rhetoric in response to the other ones.
As for why it was "bigger" it probably was the pandemic, but it doesn't really matter if it was the pandemic or something else to the above reasoning.
That said I don't think this changes my original point that Scott is contradicting himself, or that, in short, there's this disconnect between "cause" and "blame" going on.
1) for the difference between areas that did and didn't defend the police, compare Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, and Minneapolis (to name a few) to places like Boston, Tallahassee, Tampa, or Svannah. The per capita increases in the former exceed the later. It's a massive coincidence if the anti-police rhetoric of the former municipalities had no role in the larger increase in murders when compared to the later municipalities who mostly rejected the anti-police rhetoric (lovely defined by finding elected officials in each city who openly backed BLM and argued for defending the police).
2) for your point that it's "not clear they did in fact defund the police"
So did they not defund the police and American media is suffering mass hallucination that various city councils and mayors decreased police budgets and ordered police departments to police less?
Should the previous sampling of just the first line of Google results be unsatisfactory, I recommend you try it for yourself. Even CNN and MSNBC, liberal bastions that initially promoted defending the police and brought us memorable lines like "Firey but Mostly Peaceful" admit that defending the police had some bad consequences.
3) you're back to blaming the pandemic for an effect not observed in any other country, or in any other pandemic in American history. And as I said in my first comment, acknowledging the causes of an issue is part of addressing it. If the pandemic is the cause, then there's no public policy solution to bringing the murder rate down. The pandemic is over and murder will eventually return to its 1990-2018 patter of secular decline. If, instead, the public endorsement of things like "defund the police" and "racial equity justice" in policing caused the murder increase, then there is a public policy solution - stop doing things that encourage police to de-police, or stop doing things that encourage the public to view the police as the enemy. The list of things cities could do to decrease the murder rate is long and well-recited. But the first step to recovery is admitting theres a problem
On places defunding the police, I'm not saying that it didn't happen anywhere, I'm saying that a lot of the sources I've reading claiming a connection make very overbroad claims that amount to the idea that police defunding happened everywhere, or most places, or something like that.
In terms of the comparison, the below link claims that red states had a higher increase in murder rate than blue states. Of course "blue state vs red state" isn't the same as "defunded the police vs not" but probably correlated (and the statewide metric has the advantage of not neglecting rural areas).
On the pandemic, I'm not saying "pandemic led directly to crime wave" but rather "pandemic led to larger response to Floyd's killing which led to crime wave". That is perfectly consistent with it not happening in other countries or other pandemics. And while we're at it, it's also perfectly consistent with an interpretation of events that blames BLM for everything.
And more generally as to things that cause a decline in murder rate - "stop doing things that encourage the public to view the police as the enemy" - you can't force people to think the police are doing a good job. People thinking otherwise has a long history, the song came out in 1988! The idea that the police are hostile towards non-police clearly comes from individuals' interactions with the police, and it predated anything that MSNBC said on the topic.
It seems for lots of people, what they want is *deference* to the police. Nobody says anything about how, e.g., the police clearance rate has been going down for years, before all the George Floyd stuff, and "solving murders" seems like a core police function. Even with Uvalde, the same anti-defund people often haven't gotten around to criticizing the police sitting around while a mass shooter kills children, except in the most gentle and sanitized terms. Mostly instead trying to say why it's BLM's fault.
Among the many problems with the article you linked.
1) the red states with large murder increases include places like Louisiana (New Orleans), Illinois (Chicago), and Missouri (St Louis). The cities drive the murder rates for those states.
2) "Increase in murder rate" depends on base rates. An increase from 10 to 15 is a greater rate increase than from 20 to 25
3) the violence disparity between Appalachian whites and New England whites is well covered. I recommend Albion's Seed (reviewed by Scott on SSX before) and American Nations. So the article burys a lot of facts under snappy jabs like "there's more murders in Kentucky than San Fransisco"
We must be reading different writers on the Uvalde shooting. Most right-wing writers I read were up in arms about the police response the day the shooting happened. Not one has attempted to link it to BLM in any way. The loonies tried to run with the story that the shooter was a repressed transgender because they aren't very good at research. But not much BLM-blaming from what I saw.
As to your other point, it's obviously difficult to induce behavior, especially love for police. But that's hardly a free pass to let politicians encourage people to hate the police. Exaggerating the incidence and severity of police violence, declaring the racial reckoning to be a moral crusade and all actions in its service to be morally good, etc. These fall in the irresponsible category. Defending the actions of most police instead of calling for blood whenever anything happens would count as reasonable. Read the linked posts from Graham for an actual cop's explanation of what happens when you tell the average Joe that he doesn't need to listen to cops anymore unless he really feels like listening to them.
"1) the red states with large murder increases include places like Louisiana (New Orleans), Illinois (Chicago), and Missouri (St Louis). The cities drive the murder rates for those states. "
I don't think Illinois is a red state. Also from the below links and the populations of Louisiana and New Orleans you can back out the homicide rate of Louisiana-minus-New-Orleans in 2020, and it is still good for number 1 in country (also did New Orleans defund the police? From what I can tell they lowered the police budget, but not as an ideological thing, as part of broad-based budget cuts and many non-police things were cut even more, so whatever you make of that).
"2) "Increase in murder rate" depends on base rates. An increase from 10 to 15 is a greater rate increase than from 20 to 25"
What measurement would you propose? You already have talked about things in terms of increase rather than overall rate, are you saying absolute increase rather than percent increase? Not clear to me why you'd do it that way.
But even if you did, the article makes clear that red states on average have higher murder rates and higher percentage increases in their murder rate in 2020, which implies higher absolute increase in murder in 2020 as well.
"3) the violence disparity between Appalachian whites and New England whites is well covered. I recommend Albion's Seed (reviewed by Scott on SSX before) and American Nations. So the article burys a lot of facts under snappy jabs like "there's more murders in Kentucky than San Fransisco""
Like I said it is measuring increase not just absolute level. The increase in murder rate in Kentucky in 2020 was 6th highest in the country apparently (again, in a previous comment you used increase in murder rate as an important number), CA was middle of the pack.
On Uvalde - I don't have any data or objective measurement or whatever but I saw a lot of "this is what happens when you criticize/defund/question/etc the police", and not a lot of anger over the fact that they've apparently been doing a lot of covering up and intimidating witnesses.
As for politicians and liking the police, politicians usually reflect what people generally think. Does anyone think that maybe the police have any responsibility towards people not liking them, or is it always the dastardly politicians, you know that beloved and trusted group? People can see videos online or things with their own eyes and ears, that is a bigger effect than what some politician says.
"Defending the actions of most police instead of calling for blood whenever anything happens would count as reasonable"
I must point out, I"m sure most cops' actions are defensible but the same is definitely true of the protesters around the time of Floyd's death, many of my friends protested and they didn't do illegal stuff they just went and marched and held up signs and all that, but the whole "mostly peaceful" thing is a total punchline on the right. Most people on the right I see comment act like anyone who's ever said they support BLM personally burned down a building.
But it seems in this telling, any criticism of cops is definitionally unreasonable, which isn't sustainable.
The pandemic could easily be a major cause. The time lag isn't difficult to explain. The pandemic, over time, caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, which put them under increased stress. Being under increased stress cause them to have less control over their tempers, and to be willing to take larger chances to get more money.
This clearly happened. Whether the timing works out, I don't know, but the delayed action effect is quite reasonable.
(I also don't know what the lockdowns were like in various places, but I do know that increased time under lockdown tends to increase stress levels. There are various other indirect effects, like continually changing rules of behavior for reasons that many find difficult to understand. I think, though, that most of those are of lesser significance.
The lockdowns started at different times and in differing intensities. But the murder spike very clearly happened at the same time all over the country. Are you suggesting lockdown induced stress just happened to increase the likelihood of committing murder at precisely varying rates across different states so as to allow for all outbreaks of stress-provoked violence to begin at the exact same time, the Memorial Day weekend?
I'm suggesting that there were a large number of separate events that increased stress, and then there was a sharp interaction that pushed a lot of people over the edge at the same time. Which way they bent depended on lots of individual differences. There were several major attractors that gathered large and noticeable streams of people. When the dam breaks and a river floods, different parts of the bank react differently. Some houses are washed away, some have a flooded basement, some are beyond where the flood waters reach. They wouldn't have happened if the dam hadn't broken. The dam wouldn't have broken if there hadn't been an extra heavy rainfall, you can trace things back as far as you want, and the chain of causation is unbroken. This doesn't mean you could predict it in advance, though you can often make an estimate. (I've moved from places that I thought too dangerous.)
So. The rise in murders is related to the stuff that went before. No one piece of that stuff is sufficient in and of itself, but as a part of the context it is a component. At the moment the relevant name I'm remembering is Rodney King. The event wasn't that unusual, he was killed by police on camera. But it happened in a setting that was closer to the edge than usual, so it resulted in an explosion, called "The Watts Riots". I know that the riots were accompanied by looting, it wouldn't surprise me if there was also a rise in homicides, though I've never checked. They're all related, and it's a composite. You can't legitimately pick out any one piece and say "This caused it". There were probably lots of different ways that things could have been shifted into a less explosive pattern. Something that gave people who though their situation was hopeless a reason to hope would probably have done that. But I said "reason to hope" rather than "cause to hope". It doesn't matter how it appears to an external observer, what matters is how it appears to those embedded in the situation.
1. Other countries had the pandemic too and NONE of them experienced a homicide spike, even ones where the population are poorer than black americans (i.e. most non-western countries)
2. The 2008 recession saw a DECREASE in crime, not an increase, the opposite of what would be predicted based on your argument
3. The homicide increase was a spike that happened shortly after the BLM protests/riots. It would be an enormous coincidence if the pandemic just happened to cause this around the same time after not having done so previously.
4. The Ferguson effect in Ferguson was not preceded by an economic downturn, so you need *an entirely different explanation* for that than the one you're using here.
"This clearly happened"
No, it clearly did NOT happen. Your argument contradicts four massive, crucial pieces of empirical evidence.
You're focusing on "economic welfare". That's important to survival, but it's not what people react to except in a survival situation. What they react to is relative perceived social standing.
The pandemic was one of a number of stressors. It was a real stressor, and amplified the effects of other concurrent stressors.
When you deny "this clearly happened", it's not clear to me what you could be denying. I find it difficult to believe that you are denying that the pandemic imposed stresses, like job losses and isolation and rule changes that many saw as arbitrary. Or that this continued over a long period of time with a resulting build-up of tensions.
Now if you're saying that that is not, in and of itself, sufficient cause, then I will agree with you. If you're saying it's not a factor that adds to other factors, then I believe you are wrong.
FWIW, in a stable society an economic downturn that's perceived to be a shared problem has been reported to result in less crime than a rising economy. Clearly there are limits to this, as when it turns into a survival situation, people will do what they feel they must to survive.
It was my impression that riots usually are accompanied by an increase in the homicide rate, since riots are essentially mass lawbreaking that overwhelms the ability of police to respond. There can be more temporary riots like sports riots which don't have lasting effects, but I think the riots of the 60s occurred while homicide went up.
The difference most people are highlighting is that the murder rate/ crime more generally has not subsided. The murder rates in 2021 and 2022 are well above the 2010-2019 rates. So whatever drove up the murder rates was durable enough to keep them elevated. That's why many people, including me, assign more blame to the BLM activist movement than to the pandemic and lockdowns. Lockdowns went away, covid deaths are moving seasonally, but murders are staying up.
Telling a large percentage of the American population that they don't need to listen to cops and can kill/assault/rob at will with minimal consequences (both literally saying that and demonstrating it by refusing to prosecute rioters or the mass looters in LA and other cities) is the sort of thing that would predictably lead to an increase in things like murder, assault, and robbery.
According to Gun Violence Archive, through July 4, 2022 there were 40% more gun homicides year to date in the U.S. than year-to-date through July 4, 2019.
So there hasn't been a homicide "spike" because that implies a rapid rise and fall. Instead, since May 25, 2020 there hasn't been homicide plateau -- killings have stabilized at a dramatically higher level than before the Second BLM Era.
He doesn't just say it's not gun sales or the pandemic, he says it IS the protests. Then separately he says he's agnostic between it being the protests and it being a decline in trust (i.e. not the protests).
>> This leads to another issue I had, which is a question of which groups have agency and which are merely reacting to other stuff. In the "BLM did it" version of events, BLM protests lead to police doing their jobs less which leads to more crime - this is interpreted as "it's because of BLM". Assigning BLM agency to cause things to happen, and the police actions as being a natural reaction to outside events. Why not treat the *protests* as a natural reaction to outside events, same as you do with police doing their jobs less, and the *cause of the protests* as being the ultimate culprit?
This was my biggest issue in the last thread as well. A lot of "your side has agency and is to blame, my side has natural reactions and is blameless," when in fact everybody involved has agency. The police weren't forced to pull back any more than the protesters were forced to get out into the streets, or Derek Chauvin was forced to kill George Floyd, or bad actors in the communities were forced to take advantage of the police pullback to commit more crimes. Nothing's a "natural reaction," it's agency agency agency all the way down - the blame game just seems like an empty rhetorical game to me.
The BLM organization is not run by masterminds, it's run by not particularly bright people who aren't very good at filling out their tax forms and avoiding bad publicity over how they spend money.
More of the blame lies with the American Establishment for wanting the "racial reckoning" to happen for ideological and partisan reasons.
>ssigning BLM agency to cause things to happen, and the police actions as being a natural reaction to outside events. Why not treat the *protests* as a natural reaction to outside events, same as you do with police doing their jobs less, and the *cause of the protests* as being the ultimate culprit?
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BLM ACTIVISTS WANTED. They WANTED less police. They WANTED less police interacting with black people. They got what they want, and when it resulted in a bunch black people murdering each other, so they turned around and blamed the police. You're having your cake and eating it too here.
All caps does not just magically make one group exclusively at fault for something with multiple interacting causes. Observe:
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT POLICE WANTED. They WANTED to pull back. They CHOSE to interact less with black people. They got what they wanted (when it resulted in a bunch of black people being murdered), so that they can trade in an environment where people are scrutinizing how police use power for one where people are begging police to come back in force. You're having your cake and eating it too here.
'The protests' are the whole social/cultural/political 'bundle' of related 'things' all entangled together – or that's how I'm interpreting Scott.
In a real sense tho, the _actual real-world (and online) protests_ were a natural 'Schelling point' for the subsequent consequences, e.g. via build 'common knowledge' about 'what everyone knows'.
The Toronto Police Service seems to independently publish homicide data for the city (https://data.torontopolice.on.ca/pages/homicide), updated through the end of 2021. That's not universal, but Toronto is Canada's largest city so I'd expect any trend to also be present there.
To my eye, there's no evidence for a pandemic homicide spike, and certainly not one that obviously begins in mid-2020.
I agree that a Canadian murder spike should be reflected in Toronto stats big-time. Taking you at your word that it's not, that is a problem with this prediction. And an issue with Scott's theory too, because I'd say Canada had as big protests as the USA (per capita), resulting in a big pull-back in policing.
Agree; I suspect there's a lot to be learned by doing a deep dive on many individual cases. Even simply reading the news reports might be enough to help untangle some of these questions.
One thing I did in 2020 is to actually read through case by case police killing incidents pulled randomly, not ones that were national scandals. Really changes your perspective.
That the vast majority of police shootings are justified and that the controversial or problematic ones are a very small percentage.
Lots of “police called to house of dude with shotgun screaming at neighbors who has kids in his house”. Police try to talk him down and get kids out, man start’s shooting at police, police kill him. Turns out dude has 4 prior convictions for resisting arrest, 3 domestic violence priors and once stabbed someone in a bar and served 3 years.
Lots of drug dealer nodding off in car who when approached by police picks up pistol and points it at them. Has 17 prior charges including weapons, drugs, discharging a weapon dangerously (shot generally towards some people) etc.
Shit like that.
Just long lists of people society is better off without. And maybe 1/20 is slightly questionable and 1/100 really troublesome. Which given what the actual job is seems like a super good rate to me.
I feel like 70% of society would have a nervous breakdown by their 5th domestic violence call.
People screaming at each other, everyone lying, tons of tension, maybe a weapon involved maybe not. It’s like dealing with ill behaved 12 year olds (I did a week of ride alongs in a rural area 15 years ago).
Think about even law abiding citizens. What is the first think a large portion of them do as soon as they get pulled over. Immediately start brainstorming “how much of a lie can I get way with?”. Think about dealing with that all day every day.
re: Think about dealing with that all day every day.
Also think about why they react that way.
Is there a better way things could be organized? I was just reading about somewhere (Detroit?) that was having good success by having minor incidents handled by a mental health counseling group. (I think this was in Science News, but it was the print edition, and probably a couple of weeks old.)
I for sure think some things cops are sent to should probably have counselors sent. I also think that likely this will lead to a couple counselors getting killed each year.
Is a couple of counselors worth a dozen criminals? Tough question. Though maybe the counselors also get better results.
Hey, thanks. I don't know if I want to call this 'good news', but probably better than police just wildly shooting around. One caveat is, it's police reports, isn't it? In some cases it might be clear-cut, and in others it might be difficult to get at the facts: was the drug dealer, who had been sleeping a second before, killed when he pointed his gun at a police officer, or already hit by 3 bullets when he reached for it? With only police and the dead dealer around, how would you know if they put the inconvenient truth into the report (remember what you just wrote about lying).
Yeah, I certainly think of this as a very hard job.
I would be much more relaxed about everything being okay, if the really problematic cases wouldn't get that much blow-back, but just get a clear condemnation of everybody involved.
I am sure there are some cases where the drug dealer didn’t actually reach for their gun. Or police were just sacred confused. Neither of those seem like a big issue to me. So 100 extra career criminals die a year, on the scale of the United States it just tends to not actually be an actual issue.
Don’t want to get shot by cops, don’t commit crimes and have weapons i your person? Works 99.999% of the time!
I haven't gone back and done the same for 2020 or 2021. Maybe give it a try? It's a good exercise to just go to the Washington Post's police shootings database and pick cases at random (whether white or black or armed or unarmed), I think it gives a much better understanding of the average police shooting than simply focusing on some of the most heavily publicized cases.
After you've done that, it might also be interesting to compare those numbers to public perceptions of police brutality, and ask how well people understand the scale of the problem:
Thanks. The 'unarmed' victim is of course a case more easy to look at. Being far away from US media and debates, I in fact suspected most victims to be armed. I find it easy to imagine that heated media debates or even a lot of articles lead to skewed interpretation of the numbers.
I stumbled across this sentence of yours: 'Many of the victims were fleeing the scene of the crime, on foot or by car.' I mean, that's horrible. If you're fleeing, isn't this the opposite from actively endangering a police officers' life (in most cases)?
If you have a weapon and the cops are trying to atop you and you run and are shooting back absolutely deadly force should be authorized.
And I honestly suspect from a utilitarian perspective often society would be better off regardless.
Would society be better off or worse off if someone who robbed a bank with a gun and shot two people (maybe they lived and maybe they didn’t) is fleeing and tosses the gun, but police shoot them so they can catch them.
Walker fled from the police by car, fired one shot during the pursuit, then fled on foot, then was shot while running. He left his gun in his car before running.
Depending on how you want to categorize that, you could call it "unarmed black man shot in the back by police" or "police shoot fleeing suspect believed to be armed and dangerous".
I tried going through some of the "fleeing by car" suspects and found a number that were, say, driving towards an officer. And also found some where the officer was in no personal danger. I've not tried to categorize the circumstances of each one.
One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the police atrocities we've seen involved the police lying about it in their incident reports and trying to cover it up.
I think it's *likely* that most police killings are justified and unobjectionable, but it's also true that that's what the data would say, *regardless of whether it is actually true or not*.
I would be more worried about this if in a huge portion of the camera cases that are VERY CONTROVERSIAL and get big frenzies whipped up, the behavior doesn’t seem that abnormal to me. Certainly cops sometimes fuck up or behave horribly. But even in the cases that are selected for public outcry, when there is video more often than not they aren’t that bad.
Someone elsewhere in the comments mentioned a case where police decided to just go out in an unmarked car and shoot people with rubber bullets without provocation, beat up a guy who had already surrendered, and then lied about the whole thing in their official reports (fortunately there was bodycam footage which revealed the truth). And that's not even a famous incident - I'd never heard of it before!
And that's hardly the only case of police caught lying. If anything, it's the rule, not the exception - if the police realize there's anything people might question later, *of course* they'll try to cover it up. The only difference now is that they often get caught due to bodycams and bystanders with cellphones. But that only happens if people bother to investigate.
For weird toxoplasmosis of rage reasons, the really widely publicised cases tend to be the most borderline arguable ones, rather than clear cases of malpractice. I recall one from maybe a decade back that got some coverage in Australia but ~ none in the USA of a (white) Australian woman who called the police because she thought she saw someone sneaking around her garden, and then the cops came and shot her dead through her window.
I think the "toxoplasmosis of rage" hypothesis is a bit dubious. How do you explain stuff like Kathryn Johnston? Heck, even George Floyd was a lot more egregious than most police killings - that's part of why the response was so great in the first place!
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's just that there's more borderline cases than really egregious ones, so they get publicized more just due to numbers.
But could you believe the explanation that would be offered? One can expect that they will offer the explanation that they expect to be most productive of sympathy, or that was suggested by a lawyer. I think this is clearly a case where Celine's law applies.
Something that is deeply frustrating to me are complaints that collecting data on police stops (traffic, terry, or otherwise) is a problem. First, it's distasteful to me as an American to claim that creating a record of a stop is overly burdensome to the state security apparatus; I was taught to believe that undue search and seizure are things we should be guarding against. It's hard to guard against things that are invisible because there is no (legible to inspection) record. Second, there's increasingly smooth software to reduce the pain of paperwork (e.g. Mark43).** Third, records of police actions are useful to from an efficiency standpoint, as a lack of any stops may also be concerning.
So, data is good in my opinion. If collecting the data is painful, then we should seek to ease that pain, because deterring police work is inefficient. But arguing that silly reformers passed the Racial Identity and Profiling Act -- and that's why police can't police -- is itself rather silly. This is because it ignores that policing is part of a state's obligation to the general welfare of its populace -- policing isn't measured only from how efficiently police can deploy coercive power.
These questions should be simple for an officer to fill out or articulate.
Enough about my feelings though, what are some brass tacks about why we should care about recording data on stops? Well, let's look at traffic stops. Traffic stops are nicer for criminologists because they are usually discretionary and also usually recorded, because license plate checks themselves are recorded as part of almost traffic stops. These records are often enriched by the demos of the person(s) stopped, time/date info, and geolocation. This has allowed extensive empirical analyses to study both 1) efficiency and 2) bias in traffic stops. Findings indicate that traffic stops and searches are racially biased (when daylight allows), and this racial bias results inefficiency as searches of Black drivers are less likely to produce (drugs, guns, etc.). However, jurisdictions, units, and officers vary significantly. It's a well-known finding called the 'veil of darkness' (racial disparities disappear at night and often on highways, where it is difficult to discern phenotypical racial characteristics). The latest standout study in this vein is Feigenberg and Miller 2022 in the Quarterly Journal of Economic. Here's an imgur link of the most important point: https://imgur.com/a/renWnIu
Basically, searches are racially biased and inefficient in Texas, and equalizing them conditional on stops would yield more contraband and less racial bias. This isn't a shocking finding - it comports with the greatest hits of that literature:
Chanin, Joshua, Megan Welsh, and Dana Nurge. 2018. “Traffic Enforcement Through the Lens of Race: A Sequential Analysis of Post-Stop Outcomes in San Diego, California.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 29(6–7):561–83. doi: 10.1177/0887403417740188.
Feigenberg, Benjamin, and Conrad Miller. 2022. “Would Eliminating Racial Disparities in Motor Vehicle Searches Have Efficiency Costs?*.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137(1):49–113. doi: 10.1093/qje/qjab018.
Fryer, Roland G. 2019. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” Journal of Political Economy 127(3):1210–61. doi: 10.1086/701423.
Pierson, Emma, Camelia Simoiu, Jan Overgoor, Sam Corbett-Davies, Daniel Jenson, Amy Shoemaker, Vignesh Ramachandran, Phoebe Barghouty, Cheryl Phillips, Ravi Shroff, and Sharad Goel. 2020. “A Large-Scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops across the United States.” Nature Human Behaviour 4(7):736–45. doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-0858-1.
Roh, Sunghoon, and Matthew Robinson. 2009. “A Geographic Approach to Racial Profiling: The Microanalysis and Macroanalysis of Racial Disparity in Traffic Stops.” Police Quarterly 12(2):137–69. doi: 10.1177/1098611109332422.
Taniguchi, Travis A., Joshua A. Hendrix, Alison Levin-Rector, Brian P. Aagaard, Kevin J. Strom, and Stephanie A. Zimmer. 2017. “Extending the Veil of Darkness Approach: An Examination of Racial Disproportionality in Traffic Stops in Durham, NC.” Police Quarterly 20(4):420–48. doi: 10.1177/1098611117721665.
Withrow, Brian L., Jeffery D. Dailey, and Henry Jackson. 2008. “The Utility of an Internal Benchmarking Strategy in Racial Profiling Surveillance.” Justice Research and Policy 10(2):19–47. doi: 10.3818/JRP.10.2.2008.19.
Zingraff, Matthew, William Smith, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey. 2003. “North Carolina Highway Traffic Study, Final Report.” Department of Justice.
Having seen the software that organizations I'm familiar with use, I am quite sympathetic to that point. But the collection *could* be made nearly frictionless. E.g., a cell phone with a throat mike and voicemail to transcription. It could even automatically insert images on request.
I'm just not sure that that's a good idea. Too much malware out there.
It's easy to _imagine_ ways this kind of thing could work better, but the major obstacles are due to the _people_ involved, not the quality of the software itself.
It doesn't help tho that the _software_ is often pretty terrible too!
After starting medical residency I have much more sympathy for claims that paperwork to document stuff, even if it seems like an obviously good idea, can slow work down substantially.
Knowing nothing about the workflow of police officers, my assumption would be that paperwork and documentation burden would generally increase, without a strong countervailing force, and this would slow other police work.
FWIW, I'm quite sympathetic to the claim that paperwork *could* be nearly automated away. This doesn't mean that I think that kind of collection is a good idea. The amount of data leaked is already through the roof, lets not add more. Particularly more compromising stuff. ("X drunk and publicly nude while a teenager.") It's already too difficult to live down any mistakes you may have made.
I don't know about it's particular way of anonymizing data, but an extremely large number of the ways that data is anonymized have turned out to be quite ineffective. You correlate a bit from here and a bit from there, and pretty soon you've picked out who it's about. I've got no idea what the error rate it, of course. But then that it's in error isn't necessarily going to be a great consolation.
Yes, it _could_ be "nearly automated away" but these kinds of computer/IT/software systems are themselves often terrible AND it's EXTREMELY common for 'implementation projects' in big organizations to just straight up FAIL to be completed, like at all.
The hardest parts of 'implementing' or 'integrating' good 'automated systems' is surmounting the internal social/cultural/political obstacles that all of the various 'stakeholders' throw up in front of these kinds of efforts.
This kind of thing could be avoided by hiring different people to do the paperwork. Then the cost of documentation would be more legible to management in budget calculations.
For example, today the officer could easily dictate the details of the traffic stop, then attach bodycam videos to incident, and send the files forward. Then paperwork-person could process the documentation for archives.
Old time-y word for this line of work was "secretary". For some reason or other, the general tendency has been their removal outside C-suite.
I would imagine that criminology as a profession looks for reasons for crime other than individual responsibility. That means that if we change things about society like laws or norms, the problem of crime would be solved. This is a left wing idea.
Conjecture:
Those ideas trickle down and make people feel they can perform criminal activitivities because those are not their individual responsibility but are caused instead by forces outside of their control. This causes crime rates to go up. If not only prospective criminals but also law enforcement and the judicial system in general starts to believe this you get a vicious circle.
I wonder if there has ever been done a survey about the correlation between the propagation of criminology as a discipline and crime rates.
How about "That's an idea that is obviously true". Individual responsibility is a real thing, and necessary, but it doesn't exist in some splendid isolation.
Now if you can identify what environmental effects can statistically reduce what sort of crime, then you reduce crime without (directly) impacting individuals. So in that sense you aren't depending on "individual responsibility", but there will always be significant variation, and "individual responsibility" can be used to address the edge cases.
Your hypothesis seems (to me) to be that "individual responsibility" is sufficient in and of itself. This (as stated by me) is obviously false. A starving man will steal your food. See "The Donner Party" for a description of what environment can do. It's also plausible that no environment will eliminate all crime. This is particularly true since some crimes are created as such to punish unfavored groups. (Look into the history of why marijuana was banned. Or why only Senators were allowed to wear purple during Augstinian Rome.)
So it's definitely appropriate for criminologists to study environmental influences. It's also almost certain that environmental influences will not be sufficient as an explanation.
This is incredibly absurd, but I love it, because it's a great horseshoe theory accompaniment to the opposite view that policing causes crime, such that the propagation of policing leads to crimes.
I'm not an abolitionist. But I would pay to see a panel with you and an abolitionist duking it out about crime theory.
This has been my take on a lot of criminology. A bunch of people bending over backwards to avoid a lot of obvious answers because they don’t like them.
Criminologists in 90s: The criminal justice system is totally racist (something I believed in my 20s) people are discriminated against at all levels!
Except then when you get more sophisticated and look at their actual details and suggestions, they are often nonsense.
Criminologists: Sentencing is racist! “Why?” Well judges take into account things like; has this person committed crimes before, and does this person have another means to support themselves other than crime, and does this person have other family members depending on them? When sentencing.
Ummm…those all sound like great things to consider when sentencing.
Criminologist: no they are all racist! See this is why our system is racist!
It’s sounds like the system is just trying to prevent crime, and crime is pretty racially disparate. Also if it is all about racism why aren’t all minorities treated the same?
Criminologists: No look I cut up the sentencing data into 40 different ways and in two of them you can clearly see that even adjusting for these other things, sentencing is racist!
None of that is even getting into their just bizarre disconnection from human nature and reality. When I was closest with law enforcement it was in a small community that was ~3% native, where the crime was ~50% native. If you don’t think that situation is going to lead to some level of heightened “racism” and “suspicion” among law enforcement of natives (yes even strictly speaking above what an exact match to the data would indicate), you are blinded by ideology and have turned your brain off.
Criminologists: OMG 50% of traffic stops in this town should be natives, but after sifting through the data for 6 months we found it was 52%! OMG RACISM!
Police officers in particular, but people generally, are not saints. Asking them to be and telling them to stop doing their jobs if they cannot is not going to work.
Hot take - asking for policing that is racially equitable, even merely in an 'efficient' (one point in time, rather than thinking about pile-on effects of differential policing) - is a reasonable request.
It isn't 'saintly' to expect efficient treatment - it's professional. You laugh at criminologists' concern about a made up excess of 2 percentage points, because you argue that expecting equity of treatment by police will stop them from 'doing their jobs'. You seem to have a pretty low opinion then of the professionalism and adaptability of police and the criminal justice system if, when criminologists continue to find racially disparate treatment is inefficient, the problem is.... criminologists for studying racial disparity. How dare we go about studying things beyond what color of blue uniform results in the maximal level of compliance!
The real problem with your point of view is that it stops us from asking about conditions underlying racially disparate rates of crime commission and victimization exist. Your POV starts from that conclusion, and then excuses even inefficiently racially inequitable crime control policies. Instead, many criminologists want to understand mechanism that produce those disparities. So, no, we're not bending over backwards -- it's just that racially disparate rates of crime commissioning and victimization are the beginning of the question, not the 'obvious answer' that we should stop with.
The trouble with criminologists is they face no consequences for being wrong. A police chief at least can get replaced when the mayor decides things have gotten unacceptable. And I think police are plenty inefficient, seeing as how heavily unionized they are and how difficult they make it to fire even the worst cops. But I certainly don't trust the field of criminology not to make things worse, and I mean that in the sense that the people they are supposedly acting on behalf of would not prefer to live under such results.
Define "racially equitable" policing. How do we measure it? Is policing more or less "racially equitable" now or before the protests and riots of 2020?
I wouldn't put much stock into the claim that criminology is an ideologically left discipline when those claims are made by people who say that , criminology is left wing in comparison to people who claim that "the ability and willingness to act collectively appears to vary by race.... intimately tied to the lack of collective social behavior, to the lack of informal social control (Sampson & Laub, 1993), and to the violation of rudimentary norms of appropriate social conduct" (Wright in Biosocial Criminology pages 149-150). Their call for more representation of diverse political viewpoints? Sympathetic. However, what they actually want is different throwback - to the eugenic and phrenological era of early 19th century 'social' sciences that attributed behavior to skull measurements. In particular, people like Cesare Lomboso, whose ilk inspired this great Django Unchained scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQM4ebFILv4
Notably, however, is that the two professors who said that are professors of criminology. So, just as some famous philosopher kicked a rock to demonstrate physical reality, I'm kicking their awful goals to demonstrate the range of criminology faculty views.
People in the past didn't know as much as we do today... but they still managed to have more accurate views on archaeology than post-WW2 archaeologists.
Samuel Morton was pre-Darwin and incorrectly believed in multiregionism, but still managed to more accurately analyze skull measurements than S. J. Gould.
If your defense of 19th century phrenology and 20th century eugenics is that the only reason I don't like them is... I use a Django Unchained video excerpt to make fun of them, then that's on you.
TGGP is pointing out that mid-to-late 20th century archaeology systematically interpreted the available evidence in left-wing-flavored ways that made its predictions different from 19th & early 20th century archaeology.
Early 21st century genetics was able to test the 20th century theories against the 19th century theories and found the 20th century theories were wrong, in ways that were extremely obvious in retrospect (when there's a sudden and total culture shift in Europe, that's due to a violent invasion not peaceful cultural osmosis, to take the example given in https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/the-inexorable-progress-of-science-archaeology/).
So, we have strong empirical evidence for the idea that in the middle of the 20th century an entire academic discipline can go very badly off the rails in a left-leaning direction in ways that are beyond the capabilities of that discipline's peer review process to correct, and stay in that bad equilibrium until forced to change by overwhelming evidence from outside the discipline.
This is of course very relevant to where this conversation started, which was with Willy Chertman asking if criminology is a similarly left-wing-ideologically-captured academic discipline. Your responses make it look very likely that it is, which substantially reduces my inclination to try to work out where the root of your disagreement with Scott is on data interpretation relating to Ferguson.
"So, we have strong empirical evidence for the idea that in the middle of the 20th century an entire academic discipline can go very badly off the rails in a left-leaning direction in ways that are beyond the capabilities of that discipline's peer review process to correct, and stay in that bad equilibrium until forced to change by overwhelming evidence from outside the discipline."
Yup. More generally, I'm skeptical of arguments that, when there looks like there is a glaring mistake in a field, that the mutual review of people in that field is sufficient to assure that they haven't gone off the rails. Sometimes entire fields _do_ lock in assumptions or paradigms that are just false.
0) the conversation started in my post, where I made a variety of (rather good, I think) points about why we should want to collect data on police stops of various sorts, especially given . Willy Chertman responded with the left-field biological criminologist piece he posted, which argues that the field of criminology is hopeless because it's too liberal.
1) I responded to Chertman by saying I am sympathetic to the need for diverse political viewpoints (I might even surprise you about mine, but that's besides the point), but I don't take that piece too seriously: it isn't a political realignment per se but instead reflects the disciplines' movement away from criminology's origins in "the eugenic and phrenological era of early 19th century 'social' sciences that attributed behavior to skull measurements. In particular, people like Cesare Lomboso". FYI, there is still biological stuff, but the field now focuses more on psycho-cultural-social-economic interactions rather than on biology alone.
2) TGGP argues that because archaeology as a discipline departed from good ground truths and went the wrong way, criminology is similarly must be leaving truths from this era of scientific racism. There's no real argument here - it's impossible to prove a negative, and again doesn't actually address any point I've made. I've already discussed substantive and real problems in the discipline way back in a thread in the original post, so I'll post what I think is the actual biggest problem in the discipline: study designs are often shitty, so you can't trust a study before you read it and critique the methods: Chin, Jason M., Justin T. Pickett, Simine Vazire, and Alex O. Holcombe. 2021. “Questionable Research Practices and Open Science in Quantitative Criminology.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology. doi: 10.1007/s10940-021-09525-6.
3) It's frustrating when the claims I make are ignored in favor of the view that, by virtue of the average political alignment of people in the discipline I work in, all my claims are illegible and/or bogus. Indeed, you say that "your responses make it look very likely that it is [a left-wing discipline], which substantially reduces my inclination to try to work out where the root of your disagreement with Scott is on data interpretation relating to Ferguson."
4) The sources I'm citing most here are actually by economists and published in economics journals. But hey, I understand that - as a burgeoning criminologist AND worse yet sociologist - I might be distasteful. But that's on you, not me, and your biases are not my job. Don't expect me to both 1) spoon feed you the data interpretation in ever-more digestible chunks or 2) treat 19th century phrenology and early 20th century eugenics with profound respect.
My argument is not that because pre-WW2 archaeologists were more accurate than post-WW2 ones that all fields "must" be the same. I don't think that's true for physics. Instead it's that your argument that there must be something invalid about reversing changes in the conventional wisdom within a social science is wanting, because I can point to a counter-example like archaeology. Across different fields some will have "experts" who aren't really better at predicting things (like the archaeologists weren't about later DNA findings relative to the Indo-Europeanist linguists) or controlling outcomes in a desirable way (building a rocket ship that can go to the moon is not something you can do with folk science).
I don't think you enough about 19th century phrenology to make any sort of critique one would bother defending against. There were people who objected that "Crime and Human Nature" pointed out that mesomorphs commit violent crime at a higher rate than other body types, saying it smacked of phrenology, but didn't provide evidence that wasn't the case. The word "phrenology" was simply sufficient for them as a sign to stop thinking.
As for eugenics, the case against it is normative/political: there's no reason to trust existing governments with power over it, and most people aren't in favor of goal-directing human evolution (though on an individual voluntary basis we've come around to accepting things like selective use of sperm donors & even many cases of embryo selection). The idea that it would be scientifically unworkable is just wrong, and the people who got mad at Dawkins for pointing that out were fools.
am very surprised by the second part in this sentence: "Findings indicate that traffic stops and searches are racially biased (when daylight allows), and this racial bias results inefficiency as searches of Black drivers are less likely to produce (drugs, guns, etc.)."
Are you saying that the average non-black driver is _more_ likely to have drugs/illegal guns etc. in the car than the average black driver? I find that surprising because a) according to stats most known drugs/gun crimes that make their way into statistics are disproportionately committed by blacks and b) if this were a thing you'd figure at some point police would notice this and adjust their priors. For this to be true one would need to believe that 1) police are so blinded by their racism they continue a completely counter-productive strategy despite all evidence showing it's the exact opposite of what they should be doing and 2) the skew towards blacks in people who get arrested by these crimes is not because they commit more of them, but because they are unfairly targeted and if whites were just stopped more often that ratio would actually skew more towards them.
Consider a pathological example. The only blues that are ever stopped and searched are ones that are driving around in a clearly visible Tony Montana mountain of cocaine. The stopping police are _certain_ that these blues have contraband. However, there are only a tiny, miniscule handful of individuals of this sort - say a fraction of a single percent.
On the other hand, all greens are always stopped. Fully half are carrying contraband.
In this constructed example, of those stopped, blues are much more likely to produce fruitful searches, but blues generally do not carry. Stops targeting greens are half as likely to be successful, but greens carry substantially more often.
If you are an officer in this blue/green world and are given discretion to randomly stop with incentives to find contraband (either professional incentives like bonuses, quotas, or principled incentives like trying to reduce crime), what are your priors?
This is a correct in abstract point of view, but makes the reasonable but incorrect assumption that officers are behaving efficiently given vast differences in group-based propensity differences in hit rates (for as you say contraband). See my response to Arby using the latest and greatest disambiguation of that questions.
Basically, yes to your conclusions, and yes it is surprising. However, one caveat - I am not making a claim that cars contain contraband similarly or dissimilarly on the basis of driver's race. Instead, I'm asking a question of police behavior at the margin. The best exploration of this is a recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics - Feigenberg and Miller 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab018) - happy to share if it's paywalled.
Basically, searches are racially biased and inefficient in Texas, and equalizing them conditional on stops would yield more contraband and less racial bias. This isn't a shocking finding - it comports fairly well with the sources I mentioned up top.
The additional data collection seems to fall into the standard trap of "hidden" costs or unfunded mandates, where workload is increased but staffing is not increased to match. This is in general an unsustainable approach, where something has to give. It seems to be behind many of the standard "Workers keep asking for more money while our spending in this area has massively increased" problems we see in education, medicine, and police work.
The _charitable_ interpretation isn't that 'collecting data is bad', it's that 'collecting data is _expensive_' (in time/energy/effort/opportunity-costs-to-do-other-police-work).
But I agree that data is useful and that we _should_ make heroic efforts to ease any 'pain suffered' by police recording this data.
The blue line is the difference over the same smoothed 7 day period the year prior. Note that this is a trailing average, so the data point "today" is the arithmetic mean of the prior 7 days (including the current date). The vertical red line is Floyd's death. There is indeed support for some non-trivial excess shootings in the earlier part of may, but it's clearly dwarfed by what comes afterwards.
I also did the analysis using the average since 2006 of that same 7 day period as the baseline, but the chart looks very similar so I won't bother to upload that too.
In your code, you mention that "Each year is missing a few days. [...] Forward filling isn't the absolute most principled thing you could do here, but it's pretty close."
For days that are missing from the original dataset, isn't it more principled to fill that with zero? Is there some reason to think that when a day is missing, it's because there are shootings that weren't recorded?
For that reason, would suggest replacing ffill() with fillna(0).
Yes, you're right. Which one is most correct depends on why you think they're missing. If you think they're missing because there were no shootings that day, then you're right. If you think they're missing due to a recording error, then ffill() is probably more appropriate. Since only 10-20 of the days in the entire year are missing in this way, it's unlikely to change the result much, though.
However, in the interest of completeness, here's what it looks like run the other way:
Don't have any nitpick, just passing by to show my gratitude for you drilling deep down on a contentious topic that I feel the MSM should have covered with nuance but instead simply used as an opportunity to push sloganeering. Quality content like this is why so many of us read you.
Hmm, I agree that in a perfect world the MSM *should* have covered it, but any media organization has a demographically wider and motivationally different audience than this blog does. Scott has cultivated a relatively much better-faith community and comment section than average through careful moderation and enforcement.
If he was only sloganeering, odds are *we* wouldn't read it. If the MSM WASN'T sloganeering, odds are *their* audience wouldn't watch that either - or the quality of discourse would deteriorate rapidly. I don't see any way around this.
"what would be the explanation for why this trend would start on May 20 or something?"
Wikipedia tells me that the stay-at-home order expired May 17. I mostly believe your thesis, but you must admit that the alternative "The murder spike was caused by COVID damaging mental health and the economy (or any other cause) but started only with the end of lockdowns" also fit the timing. It probably fails on the international comparison, but you should not overstate your case...
There wasn't a single stay-at-home order, nor were they universally observed and/or enforced. The simultaneous consequences are going to struggle to correlate with any on-the-ground reality of any COVID restrictions.
I was referring to Minneapolis given that Scott was discussing Minneapolis data at this point. And I suppose that most states gradually reduced restrictions over May? (mind, I'm not from the US) As I said, I find Scott's conclusions very plausible, and the cross-country comparison is not favorable to the COVID hypothesis. So if the timing does not match in every city would not surprise me at all.
But I find Scott's argument that the COVID hypothesis would predict rising murders from March or April to be very weak, and kind of strawmannish - he didn't engage with actual model of people holding the opposite position. As a consequence, his analysis of the data would not convince me at all if I didn't have a prior that large anti-police demonstrations would reduce policing both bad and good, and that good policing reduces crime.
Scott then says that the media are wrong and bad, because "it is not difficult to assign priority" between demonstrations and COVID. But honestly, if Scott's argument is the best argument to be had, then reasonable people with different priors can come to different conclusions.
Scott's argument is not limited to the March & April, but also includes the international comparisons, as well as the earlier Ferguson effect. Taken as a whole, I do think it's unreasonable not to see that something different in the US happened after Floyd.
I think there is something to said for the compound copy-cat effect hypothesis:
Minneapolis stay-at-home expired on 17th, people are already agitated but also free to move, George Floyd is killed, protests start, and because of the circumstances, the protests are exceedingly distinctive. As a result, Minneapolis produces an example of "George Floyd protest" meme (in the original Dawkins sense of the word) which grows strong enough to catch on later elsewhere, too, no matter the local stay-at-home orders.
Is it really plausible that a significant number of people were angry enough to go do a murder, but were restrained by the almost-entirely-self-enforced stay-at-home order?
The vast majority of murders do not involve a person sitting at home, thinking "I am so angry at Bob that I should kill him", and then going out to kill Bob. They involve someone going out. meeting Bob, and in the course of that meeting getting so angry that they kill Bob right then and there. So, at this level at least, it is plausible that if people aren't going out in the first place, they aren't killing people in the third place.
If the timing and the observed behavior don't line up, then it's probably not that, but we can't rule it out a priori.
Exactly. Plus, possibly reduction of drunken fights if bars are closed, and no-one coming back with a gun after being beaten up? On the opposite side, more killings in the family.
1. This didn't happen in any other country in the world
2. Crime FELL during the 2008 recession.
3. These factors were not present back in Ferguson where the Ferguson effect originally occurred
4. The homicide spike was not just seen in Minneapolis, it was also in places without these stay at home orders or that had orders with different timing
5. The increase in homicides greatly outlasted the Minneapolis end of lockdowns
6. Why would the kind of people who commit MURDER be the sort of people to abide by covid lockdown rules?
There is no overstating of his case - all alternative explanations are plainly false
I regret starting this argument, as in the end I don't really feel like defending the reasonableness of a position that is not mine.
But I can put it on the abstract level. The following two statements require vastly different burdens of proof:
1) X is true
2) the case for X is so strong that anyone doubting it must be a motivated reasoner, or simply stupid
Scott says both 1 and 2. I agree with him on 1, but not 2. And I feel he has fudged several things to make alternative explanations look stupid (as opposed to probably incorrect) like ignoring the lockdowns.
US was not unique in not having a lockdown dip, and the spike afterwards was of much larger size so I agree it should not be interpreted as the same thing. But again, alternative explanations are not so outrageous as you (and Scott) think.
Don't know about the homicide spike but the trends in the homicide graph from central America are beautiful to see. What has been happening in El Salvador ? That's an impressive decrease !
tldr: El Salvador's murder rate is dependent on relations between the government and the gangs. Whatever the agreement was that kept the peace in the late teens, it has recently broken down.
It's a worthwhile reminder that in countries (including the US) where murder is primarily gang-driven, the causes of spikes and lulls can be pretty opaque to those of us who aren't directly involved.
Above my pay grade to comment on the particulars, so...just gonna leave some appreciation for the hard work. It's nice to have a feeling of relatively firmer empirical ground "in real time" as opposed to years later when the Official History Books(tm) are written. Scott going all Scott on thorny Current Issues is both (probably) the most controversial content, but also the primary reason SSC/ACX are my favourite blogs. You just write better than most when clearly annoyed/angry/jerk-ish. "A spoonful of heat helps the light go down"
Piggybacking on this to add the same comment-free appreciation. This is a difficult, thorny issue and I'm really glad someone's trying hard to tackle it with data.
Is it not possible, that protest actually did cause a decrease in policing AND, in parallel caused an increase in homicide, BUT homicide increase was not caused by de-policing? (or at least another factor had ~the same effect size as de-policing)
My theory is that protests and news about protests can temporarily change the behaviour of people. It may result in more people being on the streets, and them being more concentrated into smaller areas. In addition, based on "Politics is The Mind-Killer/Toxoplasma Of Rage/etc" articles, they may be more agitated and more prone to violence in such cases.
So: more people outside + concentrating them in specific areas + being agitated/outraged --> increased probability of violence happening --> increase in homicides
No doubt. But that doesn't explain the continuing high levels of violent crime. This isn't really a spike, more of a plateau. Especially when compared against previous years.
When you heat a gas in a test tube, all the gas molecules move faster, but random, "like mosquitoes on LSD" . But the net effect of all this random movement is that the gas moves upwards in the test tube. Similarly (& metaphorically) , the Floyd killing may have triggered a lot of changes in the minds of police officers, politicians and criminals, in several directions - we can make theories no end of what may have changed in the minds of the thousands of people we make theories about. What we may know with some degree of certainty, is only that the net effect of all this "opaque causality" was that murder rates spiked after the event. I. e. the net effect is observable, although the many, many possible causal pathways that produced this net outcome may forever elude our grasp. Not least since what goes on in another person's mind is not empirically observable. (Nor, for that matter, what goes on in your own.)
This seems like rather a stretch. The post-Floyd murder increase is pretty much the clearest signal that criminologists have ever had, pinnable as it is to a single day. The analysis on the article handily dismisses other theories of how it might have come about and still you are pretending that it is a baffling mystery, beyond the ken of mortal man.
The question is how the Floyd incident triggered the spike in homicides, not if it triggered the spike. The "if" question Scott in my opinion convincingly enough substantiates. But the "how" question is still there. What are the causal paths between these two phenomena - the "intermediate variables", so to speak? Scott himself suggested several possibilities in his original post, and several additional hypotheses have surfaced during the debate. The causal path/s is important, because they are linked to different "what to do" suggestions. And here we are on epistemic thin ice, because we have to suggest "stories"of what goes on in the minds of thousands of people.
Ok, this is arguably philosophical nit-picking, but sometimes it is fun to try to think through what "causal claims about the world" demands, in situations were the causal path is supposed to run through how people perceive a situation, and their own position in it.
The comparisons with other countries is a tricky one. In the original post you looked at the murder rate in European countries and saw no peak. But those countries, as you point out, have very low levels of gun ownership and also start from a lower level of homicide. That means that the number of people who can easily kill someone if they suddenly wanted to is already low. In the US, the high stocks of guns should allow more potential murderers - which may reflect in a more visible spike when factors combine to "encourage" homicide.
Perhaps looking at violent crime figures in Europe (without resulting in death) could be more reflective than just homicide rates. A quick look at the numbers from London suggests they also fell significantly in 2020 and 2021 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/864736/knife-crime-in-london/), while the murder rate doesn't show much of a change (https://www.statista.com/statistics/862984/murders-in-london/). So it doesn't look like the pandemic conspired to increase crime there (indeed, the opposite is probably true). Interestingly, the lack of relationship between murder and knife crime rates should support the idea that most knife crimes don't end up with some dead, but I suspect most gun crimes do.
I'd also caution the comparison with central America. The degree of pandemic restrictions and the level to which those restrictions were enforced varied greatly across the world. Having spent some time during the pandemic in less developed countries, I can tell you that in many places you'd barely know there was a pandemic at all (other than seeing a few badly worn masks).
In your original article on this topic, you specifically claimed that the increase in murder rates was due to a police pullback. When you were challenged about this, you claimed you are actually agnostic on the issue.
I'm disturbed by the gun suicides vs homicides graph. This post glosses right over the (granted, unrelated to the topic) GIGANTIC STEADY INCREASE IN SUICIDE OVER A 12-YEAR PERIOD FROM 2006 TO 2018. But that seems more interesting than the actual topic of the post.
Could we at least get a comment like "Don't be too alarmed, the gun suicides are displacing other suicide methods" or "Wow! What happened to suicide rates over the last 16 years?"
Part of that story is quite old though. The "deaths by despair" that have hammered middle aged, blue collar whites was commonly cited as one of the factors behind the rise of Trump.
I haven't read the book, and I have no stake in promoting any specific type of interpretation - just posting to say, there is work out there on this topic, and more generally as a reference.
If you're a not religous yourself, would you still promote/ favour more religion for that reason? Or more open question: is this reason enough for you to favour spreading of religion? And what's your personal attitude towards religion?
I'm an atheist. I think of every individual as having ownership over their own life and am thus uncomfortable with laws against suicide. If I were in a situation where I had a terminal illness and it was just downhill until I lost the last of my bodily functions, I'd prefer to go out in a manner of my choosing. The utilitarian in me thinks differently of suicides among the young though, who have many years of potential life ahead of them and could more plausibly be seen as making a mistake.
While suicide rates have increased significantly, up by 36% from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to a high of 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018, the raw numbers exaggerate that increase due to population growth. (29,350 in 2000 to 48,344 in 2018, a 65% increase.)
"So this theory requires us to believe that number of guns increasing 3.5% every year from 2015 - 2020 had no effect on the murder rate, but that guns going up 5.5% in 2020 had a very strong effect on the murder rate. Specifically, an extra two percent increase in guns must lead to a 30% increase in murder rates. Why would we believe that?"
Isn't this comparing a percentage point increase in gun sales to a percent increase in murders? That seems just as big a sin as comparing stocks and flows.
Putting both in percent increases, a 63% increase in sales was associated with a 30% increase in murders.
The rest of that section was pretty convincing, but I think that particular argument is bad and your point would be stronger if you omitted it.
> Putting both in percent increases, a 63% increase in sales was associated with a 30% increase in murders.
Sure – but then what's your theory/model/explanation for why _earlier_ increases in gun sales didn't also cause/correlate-with a corresponding increase in homicides?
I don't have to have a counter theory to point out that a specific argument is bad. In fact, as I specifically noted, I agree with the point he's making in that section.
There might be a correlation between BLM protests and rising gun sales:
If citizens imagined (rightly or not) police during the BLM protests, for fear of being labelled racist, were less likely to protect the public and their property against violent protesters , then citizens would feel the need to arm themselves. If police were defunded, this would provide even more reason to do so.
If the above is true, even if gunsales affected homicide rates, the latter would indirectly be affected by the BLM protests.
I found this comment with ctrl-f "guns" to see if anyone at all was pointing out the more obvious facts about existing gun owners buying more guns. TGGP & Henk B are the closest so far, so I'll chime in.
1a) Real-life firearms are consumable items, like boots: they don't last forever. Yes, they'll last forever if packed in oil-soaked rags and buried in a drum in your back yard, but if used they degrade over time.
1b) Real-life firearms aren't perfectly reliable, hence the gun-owning mantra "two is one and one is none"
2) Real-life firearms aren't useful without some modicum of training, hence using them.
3) The clear cultural momentum in this country is towards making guns harder to obtain, and making the kinds of guns obtainable less effective. While we on this blog consider this a victory of progress and an obvious good, people who already own guns probably do not.
If you combine these three points in a logical way, you get the following conclusion: Anytime anything happens that creates the sense that gun bans are coming, people who already have guns buy more while they still can. Obama wins? Buy guns. Riots across the country that might cause (or at least create the opportunity for) someone shooting rioters with an AR? Buy guns. Yet another school shooting? Buy guns.
Does this lead to a correlation with crime? Sometimes. Is this where the real action is? Really seems unlikely.
On the question of 'police pullback' vs 'distrust in police', you write:
> I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected.
If you yourself are agnostic, you should be aware that your original essay is very firmly not so, and is prominently on the side of police pullback. You give it in your opening sentence:
> In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and **subsequent police pullback**.
You have a *topic heading* "Police pullback" that opens with "My specific claim is that **the protests caused police to do less policing** in predominantly black areas" then gives multiple reasons that police would pull back, concluding: "I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that **at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back**."
Elsewhere:
> My interpretation is that people complied with the strict lockdown early in the pandemic, that effect was played out by May, and then separately **the protests caused a longer-term decrease in policing**.
> But there are lots of reasons to expect that the Black Lives Matter protests would **cause police to pull back** from black communities in particular.
> The New York Times had an article Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect, subtitled “The idea that **the police have retreated under siege** will not go away. But even if it's true, is it necessarily bad?”, which as far as I can tell is **as close as the New York Times has ever come to acknowledging that a politically inconvenient fact is true**.
> No country except the United States had a large homicide spike in 2020, which suggests that the spike was unrelated to the pandemic and more associated with US-specific factors, for which the BLM protests and **subsequent pullback of policing in black communities seem to me to be the most obvious suspect.**
'Police pullback' is explicitly described as a claim about _police_ action ("police have retreated under siege", "Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less", "Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake", [defunding the police] "made it harder for them to police", etc.)
This differs from 'distrust in police' which is about _citizen_ pullback. I know in my social network there was a lot of messaging/education about how things like this aren't isolated, how the police have historically mistreated marginalized groups (representative news article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/13/mistrust-police-minority-communities-hesitant-call-police-george-floyd/5347878002/ ) and explicit instructions like look for alternative services/options or at least think twice before you call 911 or police if you don't want someone to die. We still hesitate, even now.
Solutions for the problem "citizens pulling back from the police because of what police have done to them" are substantively different from solutions for the problem "police pulling back from citizens at large because of what protesters have done" so I think the distinction is relevant (though some amount of both problems being a factor is entirely possible).
You had to be there Scott. Everyone around Mpls knows the police are feeling unloved right now. There was stupid overreaction locally after Floyd’s death and we all know that too. There were a lot of early retirements and resignation as a result. Those that remain are understandably reluctant to leave their cars. Less enforcement leads to more crime.
There were several pieces in the NYT that made similar points to yours. They were more nuanced than your position. This sort of analysis should be nuanced. Right wing media beats the ‘BLM protests caused increased crime’ drum hard and often because their business model is to generate outrage.
Treating the BLM protests as a first cause in the chain of events is simply wrong.
I don’t understand why you are taking this tack of being a lone defender of The Truth. I honestly don’t think you are. You’ve analyzed a complex series of events by looking at one link in isolation and the result was that people felt free to use words like ‘libtard’ and reinforce their arguments with the rhetorical device of CapsLock shouting.
Yes, NYT has a moderate liberal bias. I try to keep that in mind when I read it. Is it possible that you have a moderate anti NYT bias?
Clearly, the first cause was God so Gunflint is plainly correct here.
Moving away from the first cause though, I would assume Scott's interest here reflects a general interest he has specifically in attacking things with good intentions and bad outcomes (consequentialists gonna focus on consequences). So the BLM protests stand out as unique in the cluster of related possible contributing factors in as much as they are ostensibly agitating for black lives and may have paradoxically resulted in a significant increase in black deaths. If this is the case, it is really important for a number of reasons, but the most salient here is that people who would potentially be in the next round of BLM protests (read, people who don't trust right-wing media) don't believe this to be the case.
I made a number of arguments in the original thread.
I agree with the general point of Scott’s essay. So do most folks near Mpls. I’m not a mind reader but I think most of NYT editorial staff would agree with it also. I think Scott claiming to be the only one to understand this is just plain silly.
My complaint is that without context or nuance, “BLM protest caused a spike in murders” looks like the sort of racial dog whistle that right wing media uses, quite profitably, to gin up white outage.
Part of the result was green lighting the ‘libtard’ name calling and the “This is CapLocked so it is thruthier” sorts of comments in the original thread. This sort of rhetoric just serves to amp up the sort of tribalism that Scott correctly criticizes in other essays.
I’m suspicious of any argument that boils down to something that fits on a bumper sticker. Adding more graphs doesn’t replace thoughtfully considering things in context.
Umm what he is clearly specifically keying on is the NYT equivocating between the pandemic, gun sales, and the riots. And I have zero idea how someone from Minneapolis couldn’t agree the riots were the driver. It is very obvious and
Scott has presented a clear case here. I do think pulling apart lack of trust, depolicing, etc. is hard, but he doesn’t claim to totally do that.
The pandemic played a part in that it increased the scale of the protest. No one had a job to go to or classes to attend when Floyd died. We had been hunkered down wiping our mail with isopropyl alcohol for a while.
I might have joined the original protest if not for the lock down. The death of George Floyd was grotesque. I wouldn’t have violated a lawful curfew or damages property though.
Young people who made up the bulk of the civil unrest were told that Covid was less of a threat to them.
Oh for sure I think the pandemic made the protests significantly larger.
Maybe we are quibbling over semantics. There are lots of large protests. Those siding cause this. A protest where it was deemed politically acceptable to let a police station burn caused this.
It's possible that the pandemic exacerbated the spike resulting from Floyd. But the pandemic didn't cause a spike in other countries, and events like Ferguson & Freddie Gray caused homicide to shoot up previously without any pandemic, so we can be MUCH more confident in that as a cause than the pandemic.
"My complaint is that without context or nuance, “BLM protest caused a spike in murders” looks like the sort of racial dog whistle that right wing media uses, quite profitably, to gin up white outage."
Make an actual argument or go away. You complain about the low level of discourse on these posts ("libtards") and then say stuff that belongs in a WaPo comment section.
"I’m suspicious of any argument that boils down to something that fits on a bumper sticker. Adding more graphs doesn’t replace thoughtfully considering things in context."
This is not an argument
This is not an argument
This is not an argument
Say what he did wrong, specifically. You're just mudslinging at this stage.
It's even worse than that. The Atlantic piece that *Scott himself linked* said most of the same stuff as Scott, the stuff the media supposedly won't talk about.
Cool, I'm glad you agree that BLM and defund the police are catastrophically wrong about this.
>They were more nuanced than your position.
'Nuanced' here meaning they buried the data in 10 layers of narrative about how oppressed black people are and the like.
>This sort of analysis should be nuanced. Right wing media beats the ‘BLM protests caused increased crime’ drum hard and often because their business model is to generate outrage.
Or, you know, it's the truth, and aa truth the left were denying? But hey, I'm sure your outgroup is a bunch of greedy money grubbers but your ingroup are an esteemed group of truth tellers who care for nothing but justice and journalistic integrity, right?
>Treating the BLM protests as a first cause in the chain of events is simply wrong.
It's not "simply" wrong. Scott put a lot of effort into this post- if you're going to make a statement like this, PROVE IT.
>I don’t understand why you are taking this tack of being a lone defender of The Truth. I honestly don’t think you are. You’ve analyzed a complex series of events by looking at one link in isolation and the result was that people felt free to use words like ‘libtard’ and reinforce their arguments with the rhetorical device of CapsLock shouting.
I (and millions like me) have endured 6+ years of being called a "nazi" for having a not entirely negative view of Trump, but sure, complain when a few clowns say 'libtard'. Also, this is yet another example of disagreeing with a conclusion because you don't like the consequences.
>Yes, NYT has a moderate liberal bias. I try to keep that in mind when I read it. Is it possible that you have a moderate anti NYT bias?
If Scott said something incorrect about the NYT's claim, PROVE IT. Stop with this vague, dismissive crap.
>What are you hoping to accomplish?
Alert people to something that has resulted in many hundreds of murders? If one guy being killed justified nationwide rioting, then surely hundreds of people being killed justifies a substack article that offends you?
The "BLM protests" were the _trigger_, i.e. an EXTREMELY visible SIGNAL generating 'common knowledge', e.g. that the police are racist murderers, and that it was something like a 'natural Schelling point' for the subsequent increase in 'bad behavior' that led to, among other things, increased homicides.
Oh god. Scott has created a scissor statement so effectively subtle it took in Scott himself.
Pick your trigger. The awful video of Floyd’s death or the awful destruction that followed.
Epistemological humility was abandoned in the original essay.
“Here are some graphs from countries that don’t have our complicated racial history. They didn’t have a spike. That rules out the lockdown as a factor. I’m right. They are wrong.”
Don’t you see what’s happening here? Please try taking one step back and looking again.
Myself and others asked Scott to make a post about this and, IMO, it was a 'sketch'/'outline' of the conclusion mostly but with _some_ of the reasoning.
I readily admit that it is NOT in fact a fully comprehensive post that would likely, let alone _should_ likely, be expected to be 'fully convincing' to anyone/everyone (that isn't like 'perfectly stuck' with their current views/priors).
There are many 'unbridged inferential gaps' in the arguments as presented, but I think the biggest obstacle to it being convincing is that it's entangled with lots of other EXTREMELY emotionally/politically/ideologically charged ideas/arguments/theories.
Yes it is extremely emotionally changed. It’s about race in the United States. There aren’t any simple answers. All we can do is to continue to act in good faith and cane tap our way to a better future.
> I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected.
This isn't consistent with the language you use elsewhere. I don't think there's so much disagreement about the correlation.
> Also, what would be the explanation for why this trend would start on May 20 or something? There isn’t more pandemic that day. There aren’t more guns that day. It’s not even especially warm that day. I think it’s got to be an artifact.
What? This reads as really close to assuming what you're trying to show. Could you spell this reasoning out?
It's also funny you should say May 20, since it was the first day with a high above 75 F in Minneapolis that year, as well as the first with a low above 55, going by https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/minneapolis/historic?month=5&year=2020. (Also, as another commenter points out, the stay-at-home order expired after May 17.)
By the way, it looks like you've put the black line for "Floyd's death" about a day and a half early. It should be on the shoulder of the first peak.
"Graham" wrote: "When an officer who is fired or prosecuted for something that is clearly unreasonable (like Derek Chauvin, whom all cops agreed was guilty)"
I am going to press [X] to doubt. I haven't been able to find any surveys that specifically ask current/former police officers what they think of Chauvin's actions. I've found articles that report the findings of interviews with cops. Those who are willing to go on the record, particularly high-ranking cops who don't do any actual policing and are sensitive to political considerations (not "real po-leece," as Det. McNulty would say) , are unanimous. But that begins to break down as soon as anonymity is provided, and as the interviews work their way down the chain to beat cops. To the extent that I've found a consensus (on a first-pass review of mainstream news articles), that consensus seems to be that Chauvin crossed a line but wasn't guilty of murder.
Your original point, as I understand it, was that the Chauvin/Floyd incident shouldn't change cops' risk assessment. With more context, you wrote: "When an officer who is fired or prosecuted for something that is clearly unreasonable (like Derek Chauvin, whom all cops agreed was guilty) police don't worry about it."
I understand your point to be that when police officers see another cop do something far over the line to the point that it's "murder" deserving of 23 years in prison, those officers don't fear that they'll face such punishment because they don't expect to commit murders. Murder of a suspect is inconceivable to most cops. They "don't worry about it" because murder of an incapacitated suspect is something that other cops do, not them.
But what Chauvin/Floyd demonstrates is that a little bit of excessive force can get you 23 years in prison. I expect there to be a number of cops who (a) already use Chauvin's level of force and have been getting away with it because it's effective and they never get caught because nobody died, (b) could see themselves going over the excessive-force line to that degree at some point in the future if they're having a terrible day, and/or (c) fear that even if they do nothing wrong, a jury could be convinced that excessive force had been used when it was not.* That has to change every beat cop's risk assessment, no?
*I'll posit that Chauvin used an illegal restraint. Regardless of Minnesota's quirky felony-murder rule, I don't think the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the illegal restraint contributed to Floyd's death.
I still don't see how it is necessary to defend Chauvin in order for that incident to change the average cop's risk assessment. Cops in Minnesota recently learned that the maximum punishment for excessive force (that they don't expect to harm, much less cause death) is not reprimand or firing but 23 years in prison. How does that not change the risk assessment of even a cop who knows that he'll never cross the line, but can't rule out the possibility of being falsely accused?
I also don't see how your characterization of my linked article fits this quotation:
"A sergeant in the [NYPD] who spoke on the condition of anonymity... said he and other officers saw Chauvin’s trial as a reason to think twice before using force against someone who is resisting arrest. 'It has an effect on police officers, no doubt about it, and for some officers it can even affect the way they approach certain situations,” the sergeant, who is white, said. 'They may be more hesitant to use force. I’d hate for officers to get killed or injured because they hesitated to use force.'"
Maybe he's exaggerating; maybe it's good that cops are thinking twice about force. But he said it, and his position is not dependent on justifying Chauvin's actions. It's anecdotal, sure, but no more than your experience.
The bit in that article where an officer said "maybe now people will think twice before using force" as though it was a bad thing is everything wrong with policing.
Good. If more police thought before using force, fewer people would get hurt. Both officers and non-officers.
Are you rejecting the possibilities that (i) there is some nonzero amount of force that is necessary for optimal policing, and (ii) fear of punishment might discourage cops from using that level of force?
A significant problem in Uvalde was the police thinking twice before using force, n'est-ce pas?
Most people getting hurt are getting hurt by people other than police. We've got a lot more people getting fatally hurt right now, and that result hardly seems "good".
In interactions involving police. Which was rather implied by my comment about 'both officers and non-officers', I thought.
Your assertion is really that the murder rate spike is because the police are afraid to use sufficient force? Policing and use of force are not the same thing, you realize...
Policing and use of force are indeed different things and ideally one could flood the streets with police and thereby deter crime, thus removing the need for most uses of force. But in our non-ideal world, policing DOES at times require force and the way police avoid getting blamed for using force is pulling back on policing.
If their view of policing is that use of force is so integral to it that the only way to avoid excessive use of force is to not police at all, I think they may be doing it wrong.
Especially given things like murder prevention are likely easily done by mere presence.
Mere presence can do a lot to deter crimes... but presence matters because actions will be taken in response to criminal activity. The Weberian state is defined as the entity with a monopoly on coercion because authority does ultimately boil down to force (even if it's the communal force of a mob against a single deviant, as in less formalized systems), and if no larger force cracks down then violent criminals get to be that force in their own right. If police just stand around during riots without doing anything, the riots can persist.
>Good. If more police thought before using force, fewer people would get hurt. Both officers and non-officers.
So let me get this right. If a suspect has a gun or a knife, and police officer hesitates in using force against the suspect, this will lead to LESS police officers getting hurt?
And the vast majority of people killed by police are armed, and many of the so-called 'unarmed' ones were still posing a serious (and even potentially fatal threat) like driving a car at officers. George Floyd is a rarity - meanwhile these past few years have shown the much larger increase in harm that occurs with less policing being done.
I hate to say it, but its hard to call BLM anything other than base tribalism. They would happily accept hundreds of black people being killed if it means (potentially) a handful less unarmed black people being killed by the police.
I am not particularly concerned about police use of force against armed suspects. I am much more concerned about their use of force against unarmed suspects. It doesn't kill people much, but plenty of people get roughed up very casually by the police, with little or no oversight or means of redress. That is a problem.
Nor am I particularly concerned that officers will not defend themselves because they are scared of getting in trouble. That takes a very particular combination of bravery and cowardice that I do not think actually exists that much in the real world.
Also note that I did not say "dead." I said "hurt."
You do realise pretty much your entire post is trying to set up strawmen of what I said, right?
> I am going to press [X] to doubt. I haven't been able to find any surveys that specifically ask current/former police officers what they think of Chauvin's actions.
You're refusing to believe this is because you think a survey is _required_ to make it plausible?
I think it is trivial to dispute the assertion that literally 100% of police officers think that Chauvin was guilty of the murder charge. All it takes is one and you're below 100%, so any anecdote will suffice.
The actual percentage of cops who think Chauvin was guilty (whether the number is 90%, 75%, 60%, a bare majority, or some smaller amount) has policy consequences corresponding to that number. That's what's interesting/relevant when trying to figure out if, when, and how cops changed their policing tactics, and how those changes contributed to the murder spike. And you're only going to get that data with a survey, yes.
>> There's an alternative explanation that fits the evidence here: the killing of Floyd itself caused the crime increase by damaging trust in the police, which led to an increase in retaliatory violence.
The article linked below that comment is focused on gangs. In my general model of gangs (on which I am an Noted Expert because I watched Breaking Bad and The Wire) and their feelings about the police, trust is not the word that comes to mind.
Of course, the probability of a murder suspect getting quickly arrested greatly affects the retaliatory murders. In a city where, by magic, the correct suspect is arrested within 24h of any homicide, only very foolish gang members would try there hands at revenge killings, while in a city where murders are never prosecuted, revenge killings may be rational for a gang.
I do not see why gang members should update their estimate of that probability as a direct result of a murder committed by the police. A much more likely chain of reasoning seems to be
murder by cops => decreased trust in police in general population => depolicing => higher probability estimate (among gang members) of getting away with murder => more gang revenge killings.
Summing up all the steps in between as "damaging trust in police" seems like an oversimplification.
(The quoted statement does not directly refer to gangs, so it could also be interpreted as meaning that previously noncriminal people start committing murders because they lost their faith in the justice system. I find that unconvincing as well. I don't think the update from "Police are good people who serve and protect, so I should report crimes to them" to "Police are racist assholes, so I should not talk to them and avenge any crimes on my own" will happen after any one murder by a cop. I don't claim that the effect of eroding trust is not there, I just claim that it is unlikely to cause that spike within a few days of a single incident.)
Yes, but it's not "any one murder by a cop". There are incidents reported from all over the country. I don't tend to remember them, but I know they happen, because I notice when they flash on the news for a day. Those who feel more affected/threatened probably notice them a lot more clearly and clearly remember them a lot longer. I've known several people whose response to crime was "Damn. Will the insurance pay? If so I've got to report this to the cops.". And I was once assaulted without provocation by a professional boxer, and they police just shrugged it off, so I sort of understand their response. I don't think I've ever gotten an direct help from them, though there is clear indirect help. (They do drive through the area. Our neighborhood eventually hired a security group because the police were so unhelpful. That helped a lot, even though they couldn't have arrested or stopped anyone.)
Is homicide the type of crime that should be expected to increase as a result of reduced policing?
I would not expect my chances to get away with murder to increase significantly as a result of fewer patrol cars rolling through the neighborhood. If my fingerprints are on the shell casing, if the victim has my skin cells under her fingernails, if my own blood is at the scene, I'm going to get caught. The cops might show up to the crime scene later, but unless they're so lackadaisical that I'm able to dispose of the evidence and concoct an alibi, I'm in trouble.
Shoplifting, minor assaults, smash-and-grab thefts, and public urination should explode, though. Now there may be a broken-windows effect by which murder is a downstream consequence of reduced policing, but I wouldn't expect that to take the form of a spike.
There are types of homicides that are really the “cream” of other criminal activities. If 8 guys rob a jewelry store for $100k that has some non trivial impact on their likelihood of being murdered.
I would think the causal chain goes something like the following in Minneapolis:
Anger causes riots > Riots cause a total pullback in policing >Total pullback in policing quickly leads to slightly more property crime and small scale violence > lack of police response to this leads to hugely more property crime and small violence > this higher level of general crime indirectly creates more murders.
Well the sudden spike is just the brute lawlessness during the riots. Then the casual chain i am talking about is explaining why it didn’t go away. Also I think we blew through stages 1-4 in my example in like a day.
Homicides by gun are less likely to be solved than others. So are inner city homicides relative to other areas, homicides of blacks relative to others. The book "Ghettoside" was about how rampant unsolved murders were in the worst parts of LA (like "the Grim Sleeper").
I don't see why you dismiss the temperature thing out of hand, when a plot of murders vs. time of year is right above. There is a clear dramatic increase from late May to September every year, yes there is a "critical temperature of 78 degrees" or perhaps a "critical solar angle" ... why is that silly?
The MN data do show a large increase in baseline (red vs. blue) so "nobody was comitting extra pandemic aggravated assaults/murders" looks to be flatly false - the "un-rolled" data in particular show far, far more red events compared to blue in the winter. In any case the ratio in assaults between winter and summer in MN, about 2x, is the same for both the 2020 and baseline data.
We don't have month-by-month murder data for the country to show whether this "surge" is bigger than the usual summer surge. It looks to be proportionately the same in MN and bigger in NY.
In the bigger picture distinguishing between "bigger summer effect due to pandemic " and "it's BLM" is difficult because they happened only once and at the same time, and you really didn't try. You just said that you don't take it seriously, then made some sarcastic "wHaT is ThErE a CrItICaL TeMp LOL" statements as if it proved anything ...
> the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures
Maybe show this? It's clear from the MN data and NY data that they neither started nor peaked at the same time ... not that you have any sort of statistical definition of "start" to begin with or anything, nor did you show data from other cities, nor did you show that the correlation was tighter than the usual correlation in seasonal crime etc. etc.
Which is fine, it's not your day job (or is it, being an influential truthy-ness teller), but don't claim you've rigorously disproved something by saying "it's hard for me to take it seriously".
SA didn't say that a "critical temperature" or "critical solar angle" hypotheses were "silly," but I do think he provided strong reasons to doubt them: "the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures." Similarly, the solar angle in New Orleans is never the same as in Chicago on the same day.
I haven't spent much time reading up on this, but it seems that we don't have great answers for why crime peaks during the summer. I found this study (PDF link https://is.gd/g86TzQ) that seems (upon skimming) to relate temperatures above 85F to increased violent crime in Los Angeles. But it seems important (and unasked) to know how the seasonal crime rates compare in cities with different seasonal temperature flucuations and different dates when schools go on summer break.
> the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures
Yes this was the substantive argument.
This isn't supported by any data he has shown though. The only time-resolved data he showed were NYC and MN, and depending on what you call "the start of the spike", one began in mid-May and the other late May. Which are two different times and both before Floyd.
If you call the "start of spike" when it exceeds previous historic norms in absolute rate rather than when it begins trending upwards (as SA did to avoid the point that the spike began before Floyd), then for MN it was a few days before Floyd, if we ignore e.g. February and the baselines being higher, and for NY sometime in mid-June, both different times.
Each of these has to be compared to the usual yearly swings, which also look correlated on these timescales, to show that this spike is more time-correlated than usual in addition to being higher in amplitude. Definitely, definitely not shown in anything SA has posted despite his claim.
And as you mention, a summer spike is not the same as a temperature-related spike or a solar angle spike.
For me, assaults and murders happen more when people are socializing and thus finding reasons to be violent. Lockdowns and winter reduce this, the coming of summer increases this. If the pandemic increased propensity for violence but winter lockdowns prevented people from going to the bar/club/house party where they normally would shoot someone, the ability to finally be outside on the streets, at a bbq and so on would of course result in a spike that is larger than usual. And also add to the intensity of the protests.
It is a sad comment in the state of modern academia and politicized issues that when someone tells me they are a PhD candidate at a top program in a politicized field, instead of my trust in their comment going up immensely, it only ticks up slightly over random stranger.
From what happened in the media and what criminologists were saying in the aftermath of the riots it is clear the discipline is very badly ideologically compromised. There are literally hundreds (thousands?) of papers who sole purpose seems to be misinterpreting data to avoid politically unflattering results.
My trust in their comment drops noticeably over a random stranger.
Being ideologically motivated to always prove things in one particular direction makes such a person worse than useless to me, as someone trying to get closer to the truth.
At least if someone randomly makes up BS, I have a hope of seeing the lie, and being able to call it out with my peers. If they're smart and motivated in lying to me, generally speaking, I will never figure out what the lie was, and my ideologically-motivated peers will continue to believe them over me.
This latter sort of person, who is very smart and motivated to propagate lies is... extremely common in the world right now.
Personally I think it's the lippy tone that really crushed my trust in that guy. "I trust this whole post will be reworked into a mea culpa, because I have a degree!" I mean, Jesus Christ.
It seems likely to me that we are nowhere near the Pareto optimal curve between policing and crime rate, just as in most governments' response to the pandemic we were nowhere near the optimal curve between economic impact and lives lost.
This situation would imply that while it may well be that police funding loss and increased restraint led to increased crime in 2021 specifically, it is still entirely possible that the best possible versions of "defunding the police", in which some large percentage of a city's police budget gets redirected to evidence based social services, could still result in a net decrease in crime.
The late Mark Kleiman used to talk about how an economic calculation of the cost of crime shows he massively underinvest in its prevention. Which is why he wrote the book "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment". The short version of that is hire lots more cops, and make punishment swift, certain & short.
"The short version of that is hire lots more cops, and make punishment swift, certain & short."
Given constrained budgets, but improving technology, I'd like to see how much of "swift, certain" can benefit from automation. We are under a lot of surveillance _anyway_. I'd like to see us get something from it.
More nearly: security cameras + Google + license plate readers. As I wrote, we are under a lot of surveillance _anyway_. If someone commits a crime, and it is captured on camera, and there is some record of where the person lives, they can be arrested at leisure by human police. As TGGP quoted, the point is to "make punishment swift, certain & short". The other nice things about cameras and similar sensors is that
a) They don't require putting police officers in harm's way, at least at the time of the crime. At the time of the arrest, the police could, at least in principle, arrange the circumstances to minimize risk (preferably to everyone concerned).
b) They don't have biases. A video of a crime is a video of a crime regardless of any preconceptions about any subgroup in the population in any direction.
I'm honestly not sure if you intend this sarcastically (seems probable) or not.
One other change that I would suggest adding to the mix: In addition to trying to make punishments certain & short, I think we simply have too many laws (most notably, the drug laws and other _victimless_ crime laws) and I think we should eliminate all the victimless ones and reconsider carefully which of the total set we really want to keep (and enforce). Some laws (e.g. against public lewdness) are merely because someone chooses to take offense at a behavior and I don't think those laws should be on the books either.
One of the things Kleiman suggested is releasing a lot more people from prison/jail but making them all wear ankle-monitors and immediately throwing them in jail (even if briefly) if they aren't where they're supposed to be (or somewhere they're not supposed to be). He was inspired by an example of hardcore meth addict burglars in Hawaii who cleaned up when they got credibly threatened with jail if they failed to show up for a drug test or tested dirty. As it is right now an enormous number of crimes are committed by people on parole or awaiting trial for other crimes.
That sounds reasonable. How restrictive is the set of places they are supposed to be? I could see someone on a work-release program being _mostly_ restricted to work/home/grocery store, but there are exceptions that come up. Pre or post authorizations for exceptions?
People's day to day lives continue to get worse so crime continues to rise. I don't find it to be that complicated and I find this whole analysis and conversation to a bit moot.... I see a lot of people taking correlations and inferring causality while oversimplifying this complex social issue. Scott has done a great job at doing this, but because of that nature the conversation leaves much to be desired for me. Take this excerpt from Scott as an example of the subtle framing expressed in his phrasing through the different posts in this thread.
> I accept I should have put more work in the original post into ruling out gun sales as the cause.
Why is it "the cause" and not "a cause"? Framing is so important.
----
I recognize policing as a way to abate crime, data shows it and, for example, the NIJ recognizes its utility among many other approaches (https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/171676.pdf), but I know of no evidence that a lack of policing is a driving force for crime. Key word: driving.
Am I surprised to see what Scott presented and do I doubt the data? No.
Do I agree that a decreasing amount of policing can be, and this case was, a contributing cause to rising homicides? Yes, and unfortunately I've seen it anecdotally in my community.
Do I think this conversation is well framed, actionable, and effectively presenting a variety of perspectives? Not really.
> What is the point of nitpicking over phrasing here?
Causal analysis... it's a question of addressing primary vs secondary issues. This analysis is quite focused on the secondary, but addressing primary issues is how we achieve the long term change for what I hope we all want. Happier healthier and safer societies .
> people should be more skeptical of Black Lives Matter and similar radical and racialized anti-police movements, so hopefully we won't go through this whole mess again next time there's a controversial shooting.
This is why i nuance. We have controversial police activity on a regular basis, so why did things come to a head in this moment of time? Yes, a match was struck in 2020, that is as clear as day. Do we want to talk about the match... or the built up tinder that's still burning?
Well this conversation has moved into strongly biased territory so I don't see much point in continuing. I can taste the disdain in your words. I'm seeking to ask open ended questions and it feel's like your hammering the same point. I've got a beach weekend and some reading to go to. Toodles
"People's day to day lives keep getting worse". No, on the contrary. Globally, everything is still improving, year by year. Some day it will obviously have to stop, but do not mix up what the click-bait media tells and what calm data tells.
> Globally, everything is still improving, year by year.
I agree with your point but our conversation isn't scoped globally, we're talking about lives in the USA and USA homicide rates... so the point is moot here.
> do not mix up what the click-bait media tells and what calm data tells.
How do you determine if people are arguing in good faith in an argument like this?
Thing X happens via a very simple mechanism that many people predicted, people propose a whole series of complicated different explanations.
I suppose that education and health issues we discuss often have complicated explanations has damaged our epistemic health when it comes to other areas.
Crime is a simpler area because it involves lower IQ people, simpler systems and clear incentives.
It is hard to tell if the complex explanations come from people with an open mind or just ideologues upset that their theories fall apart.
How would we know if assaults and other crimes went up?
How would we know if we could trust the data that's collected about this? Or whether data was even being collected (reliably) in the first place?
During the pandemic, I knew someone that worked at a high-end retail store in Manhattan and the regularly regaled me of the spectacularly _brazen_ shoplifting that they routinely observed, e.g. a group of people would drive right up in front of the store, several people would get out of the vehicle, walk right into the store, and just take entire stands/cases of whatever (very expensive) merchandise happened to be at hand. _Some_ of those thefts were reported to the police, but definitely not all, and it sure seemed to me like the retail person I knew had just become almost entirely resigned to the thefts. They certainly weren't, on their own and definitely not with any support/promotion of their superiors, doing anything at all about stopping or preventing the thefts either.
(And even more weirdly, at least from my perspective, is that the vehicles in which these thieves would arrive were often very expensive ones. Maybe that makes some kind of sense because they'd be more likely to even know about the high-end retail company/brand in the first place?)
What fraction of gun homicides use legal guns? I'd have thought that a lot of guns used in crime would not have been purchased through legal channels anyway, so the gun sales graphs would be irrelevant.
I was among those who wanted to read more about the homicide spike, so a late thanks to Scott for the post.
After reading the post, I asked an active member of the German Green Party about it; I was curious about the reaction I would get. (I would say sth. like: apparantly there is data showing that homicides among blacks grew after BLM protests.) What's your guess?
He confirmed this immediatly, his reaction was something like: yes, the police in the states is only trained to act while being violent. Then there are protests that they shouldn't be so violent, and they stop/reduce policing. They simply have no idea on how to carry out their duties without resorting to violence.
I admit I was surprised he knew the data and jumped right to: police is doing less (we're both living in Germany). It's just an anecdote, and I don't think it's representative for anybody. (I would still be surprised if the next nine Party Members or Green Party Members here knew.) I also think it shows nicely that even taking a BLM - homicide spike correlation as given, the question on *who has to change what* is totally dependant on the overall understanding of the situation.
You are putting your finger on something important here.
Let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, that Scott has convincingly shown that the spike in homicides in the US was "caused" by the Floyd killing. That fact established, the question then becomes: "Now that we know that, what should we do? " The answer depends on what we assume is the main causal pathway/s that produced the spike, including the larger US context these pathways are "packaged" within.
... And that is devilishly difficult to get a proper handle on. (The task is made more difficult by all the people with a political agenda entering the debate, perhaps not really caring that much about what is the "most likely truth" - maybe even including your Green German politicians? )
However, in this situation maybe good old David Hume may offer some advice. He adviced (or he can at least be read that way) to do something, based on one's favorite theory of what is the main causal mechanism/s, and see if the change one then expects, takes place. If yes, that strengthens one's favorite theory. If not, do something based on your second-best theory of the main causal mechanism. And so on.
Oh, I was curious about the reaction, specifically because BLM could easily be an issue where a Green politician in Germany might have a gut reaction related to their general view of things.
At the same time, it was a low-level private conversation, and the US is far away. I think the incentive for them to deliberately distort what they had recognized as 'the truth' was rather low. So I think I got a fair account of what this person thought on the topic. Not more and not less.
Do they 'know what they're supposed to say' despite having a different conviction, or do they repeat certain talking points, because they are convinced of those? Or a bit of both?
I think Hume's advice is difficult to enact in politics, where you first need the decision (which takes time), and then sometimes big amounts of money, changes in real life take years, and so on. But it's a nice path for reflection. Already putting all the assumed pathways one besides the other and think about their consequences and implementation, without sticking to the intuitively closest, would be an advantage.
I saw some documentations comparing police training in US versus selected European countries. The differences both in total length of training, and in length and importance of training in deescalatory measures seemed huge. I didn't did deeper, so I don't know how much it holds under scutiny.
I would be interested to know more; relevant questions in this context would include:
- overall lenght of training
- weight giving to training on how to deescalate dangerous situations
- admission requirements
- overall weight given to making sure that nobody is harmed or killed (including attitude & and how people talk about that internally)
- measures to ensure that extremists, both from left and right, can't serve as police officers.
I'm aware that contexts (among others, gun ownership in general population) differ widely.
I have a big issue with using "police pullback" as a generic term because it obfuscates _how_ police pull back.
The Minneapolis police, for example, didn't say "let's reassess how we're interacting with the public and stop doing broken window policing" after George Floyd, they went full on "I'm taking my ball and going home." This is an excerpt from a store owner who used to have one of the best used book stores in Minneapolis which also happened to be close to where Floyd was killed:
"...There were 5 cops on the roof of the 5th Precinct building, watching and presumably reporting on events to a headquarters somewhere else, but there were no cops on the ground.
A little after 10 pm, some people pried a sheet of plywood part of the way off the door to a convenience store/gas station across the street from the 5th Precinct, crawled inside and grabbed some loot. There was no police response, so a few more people also crawled in and grabbed some loot...." http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/riotreport.php
The police bunkered up in their buildings and _watched_ looting and later arson go on. I find it a very disingenuous argument to blame reformers for the results of police literally watching felonies being committed without comment.
When they did actively police, many did so in the most incendiary way possible, to the point where a man was actually acquitted of shooting at police due to it being an act of self defense: Police where shooting rubber bullets from an unmarked van at random people without identifying themselves: https://www.ammoland.com/2021/09/man-not-guilty-in-self-defense-case-against-police-during-minneapolis-riots (Note that the author does his best to blame the incident on anything but the police, his account of the facts still has to admit that the police 1.) did not follow policy with regard to shooting people, 2.) did not follow policy when investigating the incident, giving the officers a chance to view the video and talk with each other before taking statements, 3.) made statements that conflicted with the videos they were shown before making those statements, and 4.) assaulted a man who had already surrendered himself.)
I think thinking in terms of police "pulling back" is at best not useful and more likely hiding the issue when it can cover activities as broad as not making as many traffic stops due to time required for paperwork and flagrantly standing and watching people looting and committing arson. Furthermore, saying police have "pulled back" when they are driving around in unmarked vans shooting people is highly misleading.
The discussion should be around changes in how antagonistic police policies and actions are, since the Minneapolis police have demonstrated that it certainly possible to both reduce the number of police interactions and increase the antagonism between police and the public at the same time.
Literal broken windows policing is the one replicated intervention in criminology shown to be effective. Jim Manzi pointed that out in his book "Uncontrolled", which I reviewed here:
"The Minneapolis police, for example, didn't say "let's reassess how we're interacting with the public and stop doing broken window policing" after George Floyd, they went full on "I'm taking my ball and going home."
*This is exactly what BLM wanted*
They WANTED less policing
They WANTED less police
They WANTED to defund the police, and most defund movements supported abolition of police
This is exactly what they wanted, and this is the result.
The police reduced policing in the most antagonistic way possible, then claimed that reduced policing was a failure. Instead of interacting with people breaking curfew they drove around in unmarked vehicles shooting people with rubber bullets, that's "pulling back? They slashed the tires of reporters' cars legally parked in parking lots "in case someone committed a crime and wanted to run."
Yeah, when upper management is putting policies in place to actively sabotage attempts to reform the organization and not holding employees accountable for violating even those rules, one of your few options is to get rid of the entire organization and replace it with something new. Something without the problematic culture. Which is what the defund the police movement was all about: Get rid of the police department and replace it with a public safety department including police officers but _not_ led by a police officer.
Not doing "broken windows policing" would be a lousy idea because literally policing broken windows is the one intervention in criminology successfully replicated in a controlled trial.
> The Minneapolis police, for example, didn't say "let's reassess how we're interacting with the public and stop doing broken window policing" after George Floyd, they went full on "I'm taking my ball and going home."
So, whenever there's a 'mass shooting', do you also, personally, 'reassess' your own likelihood of doing something similar?
As Graham has pointed out, both on his blog and here in the comments (both on this post and the previous one), Chauvin was an _extreme outlier among police officers. It seems totally unfair to expect or demand that police officers generally have a duty to reflect on 'their' bad behavior because of a single extreme outlier that does NOT accurately represent them.
But, because of the steady drumbeat of stories that, e.g. 'police are racist murderers', _of course_ it seems reasonable for police as a general class of people to soberly reflect on how terrible they are whenever any bad thing is done by any police officer anywhere in a huge country.
What's worse is that _many_ of the most prominent examples of 'police are racist murderers' are just straight up misleading/deceptive, e.g. Michael Brown.
Where is the sober and sincere reassessment of The Narrative when even the Obama DOJ eventually admits, e.g. 'Michael Brown likely tried to kill the police officer that eventually killed him'? I've never seen that myself.
I never mentioned Chauvin, I only spoke of unquestionably antagonistic and unjustifiable police behavior after Chauvin killed Floyd. But if you want to talk about him, while Chauvin's actions may have been outliers, as they say, "A single bad apple will spoil the whole damn bunch."
Chauvin, despite being a _known_ bad actor not only remained in a public facing position, was put into and stayed in a position of authority within the Minneapolis police force. Whatever made that possible, whether it's a cultural issue, union contracts that promote based solely on tenure, a militarized "us verses them" attitude that justifies violence against the public, or a whole host of other things, whatever it is that allows a guy who is known to be violent is not only kept in a position where he interacts with the public but is put in a position of authority _is the problem._ Chauvin is a symptom, just like the rest of the incompetent-to-violent behavior by the Minneapolis police through the protests and into the riots is a symptom of the underlying problem.
Look at the history of the Minneapolis Police Department and the DOJ:
November 2015, police kill Jamar Clark and rioting breaks out. Oops. Hello Black Lives Matter. The DOJ issues an after action report in 2019: "The review found that the City of Minneapolis lacked a coordinated political, tactical and operational response to the protests, demonstrations, and occupation of the fourth precinct police station. This led to inconsistent messaging, confusion and ineffective communication that negatively affected the response. The assessment team found that a breakdown in communication between city leaders, police leadership and line officers impacted the ability of line officers to carry out the response and inhibited effective crowd management." https://cops.usdoj.gov/pressrelease/department-justice-releases-after-action-assessment-response-minneapolis-protests
That sounds familiar. What did the MPD learn? Apparently not to display "...commendable restraint and resilience in these extremely difficult circumstances,” like they did last time.
Wanted to plug this Atlantic article from yesterday: "Six reasons why the police murder clearance rate has declined". Its a short (4 min read) interview with a crime analysts about why the murder clearance rate, or % of "solved" murders, has declined from 90% nationally in the 1960's to around 50% today. TLDR: Statistics until the 1990's are bunk and such a high % of murders weren't actually solved, firearm murders have increased from ~50% to ~80% and are much harder to solve than other murders, and distrust between cops and black Americans in areas with a high murder rate is worse than ever.
I think the reason this is getting SO much pushback is that you're looking at extremely noisy time-series data and telling a just-so story about it (handwaving things like, maybe the early-May spike was random and the late-May spike is real, or maybe it's the rolling average--without actually trying to verify how it was averaged! IMO this was a significant oversight in the original piece.)
Not that this means your just-so story is WRONG, but it makes people want to tell other just-so stories. For example: the pandemic caused an increased murder rate in the US for <pick-your-politically-charged-reason-here>, but the lockdowns caused a countervailing decrease, so the real spike took a few months to show up. You've already pooh-poohed this theory (“it took a few months for people to get cabin fever from the pandemic”), but seriously, look at the movement data for the US in "Retail and recreation" or "Public transport stations" here: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-google-mobility-trends It craters in March, with a significant recovery through May and June, exactly when murders were spiking.
To be clear, the data from Baltimore are very compelling, and the demographic breakdown of the murder spike is suggestive. I'm convinced that publicized police murders + protests caused part of the spike. But I think the time series data were the weakest part of the argument.
One thing about early May: movement upward with warmer weather could have contributed to a genuine "spike" where crime would fall later, but what we got was durably higher crime rates. A "plateau".
If you're talking about the red line in "Figure 1", that was also in Scott's original piece, and also unconvincing on its own. Yes, there's a big jump in May 2020, but there are similar-sized spikes in May 2017 and May 2019. It's just too noisy to tell from eye-balling the graph whether that's a single discontinuity, or, say, random noise on top of an increase over 2 months.
You're ignoring the point about real "spikes" vs "plateaus", with the latter being what we got. Sailer's link there to Richard Rosenfeld's finding of a "structural break" broke, so here's a working one:
He adjusted for season, which is the normal variation you're seeing in other years. The genuine "spike" in non-residential burglaries in another graph there is ridiculous.
Thanks for the working link! Really interesting that robberies, residential burglary, and larcenies fell during the pandemic *and stayed low* (and WTH is up with drug offenses between April and July?). Curious whether this is a genuine decline, or a result of less policing--I tried to check the national crime victimization survey, but their latest report "covers crimes experienced from July 1, 2019 to November 30, 2020" and doesn't break the data down over time.
The "structural break" methodology IIUC assumes there was a single "break", identifies the most likely location, then tests for significance. That's totally consistent with there being a gradual rise over 2 months as lockdowns ended & an additional sudden change from the police murder + protests (I'd even expect a significant "break" to appear during the 2 months if it was just the gradual rise + random noise).
I ignored the spike vs plateau distinction because it's irrelevant to my point that the time series data are hard to interpret (and I didn't say anything about warmer weather). Based on the time series data alone, these two narratives seem about equally plausible to me: (a) a random spike in early May bled into a real "plateau" in late May, vs (b) a real "plateau" somehow caused by the pandemic was masked in March and April due to decreased movement during lockdowns. I think Scott overemphasized the strength of the time series data compared to his other graphs.
The "additional sudden change" is the jump we see right after Floyd, and their method locates it then because that is the biggest change in the data. But the idea that the "plateau" was caused by the pandemic is implausible when you take a global perspective.
The 'George Floyd's killing directly lead to the violence outbreak' claim is kind of shocking to me. If a bunch of black people went around killing more cops, white people, politicians etc. than normal, that would at least make sense (while being obviously morally indefensible to non-BLM-supporters). But what are they saying here? A black man got killed, and their response was to go out and kill a bunch of other black people? Putting aside the lack of empirical evidence for the claim, the implication of the claim strikes me as profoundly unflattering for black people, and if true should inform how we view black social pathology generally.
Yes, most black people are murdered by other black people – that was and has been true for a LONG time. (It's true for other races too AFAICT.)
The extra murders are 'more of the same', e.g. retaliatory 'gang' killings, which are now _much_ easier to get away with because, e.g. potential killers are much _less_ likely to be pulled over on their way to a murder and caught with an illegal gun.
"... the implication of the claim strikes me as profoundly unflattering for black people, and if true should inform how we view black social pathology generally."
In contrast, American society has tried very hard since May 25, 2020 to flatter Black people and to close our eyes to Black social pathology generally. And what happened? According to last week's CDC numbers, 43.8% more Black people died by homicide in 2021 than in 2019.
It's frustrating to see people devote so much time and energy theorizing about homicides without any understanding of the specific factors that distinguish homicide from other types of crime, even other violent crimes, leading to "explanations" for general increases in crimes and not specifically spikes in homicides.
The single most important thing to understand about homicides is that the majority of urban homicides are committed by relatively small groups of gang members, starting as drug/turf disputes and continuing as retaliations against previously unsettled homicides. Thus they are highly correlated in a way that has been compared to disease outbreaks - one homicide leads to another, which leads to another - which is not at all the case for other crimes likes robberies. (The excellent book "Don't Shoot!" by David Kennedy describes this dynamic as well as fascinating efforts to understand and break such cycles) Any explanation must take this into account. Trying to explain a percentage increase by looking for general increases in uncorrelated behaviors across large groups of the population is a waste of time.
It seems to me that *something* tends to happen after these high-profile incidents that leads to new retaliatory cycles, or more intense cycles, or some other changed dynamic from the previous status quo (which is already pretty bad in many urban areas but is apparently not the maximum possible rate). I wish everybody would spend their creative energies hypothesizing about what that something might be (changes in the success rate of detective work that can end cycles, changes in opportunities to start a new cycle or heat up a previously cooling one, etc) and not on all the other somethings out there that don't really have anything to do with the nature of urban homicide in the first place.
The specific hypothesis/theory/model is that the police are not doing as much (or really any) proactive policing that otherwise would 'suppress' _some_ of the murders you describe.
I would quibble with describing these murders, now or in the past, as "gang" related. There's a HUGE variance in the degree of 'organization' among 'gangs'. Most of these groups are not as well organized (and 'disciplined') as the, e.g. Italian mafia organizations portrayed in movies and TV shows (and every other type of media).
A lot of these murders, and even many 'mass shootings' (that _aren't_ the 'typical' mass-murder-suicide rampages) involve 'lazy' drive-by shootings that mostly result in many injuries instead of many deaths, i.e. the shooters _aren't_ methodically killing a large number of targets but mostly just shooting 'in the direction of' someone with which they 'have beef' when they're in public (and often when they're in a larger gathering that mostly consists of innocents, e.g. 'barbecues' and _funerals_).
Yes you are right about the huge variance in organization. David Kennedy's book describes this as well. I don't know of a good substitute word that conveys this well ("groups" is too generic)
It is easy to see how such 'lazy' 'beef' shootings would drive retaliatory cycles.
When I predicted this homicide spike in early June 2020 and provided the reasoning, I specifically mentioned that homicides would increase (not all crime) and that black people would be most affected. And now we still have criminologists try to come up with alternate explanations that don't even take these two things into account.
The question is how the Floyd incident triggered the spike in homicides, not if it triggered the spike (which Scott in my opinion convincingly enough substantiates). What are the causal paths between these two phenomena - the "intermediate variables"? Scott himself suggested several possibilities in his original post, and several additional hypotheses have surfaced during the debate. The causal path/s is important, because they are linked to different "what to do" suggestions.
1. The "Floyd incident" inspired/triggered massive (and GLOBAL) protests, many of which were/became violent and destructive.
2. Police, _already_ demoralized, became resigned/resentful/fatalistic and mostly stopped proactively policing – when they weren't _officially ordered_ to do so by the relevant authorities in their jurisdiction.
3. The huge drop in proactive policing, e.g. traffic stops, removed a major/significant barrier to the kinds of murders that are routinely committed, e.g. 'gang' murders and other somewhat similar 'feud retaliations'.
And then, probably on top of that, I'd imagine/expect that homicide investigations became _even harder_ than they already were before "the Floyd incident", and the subsequent 'protests' (riots), so there's even less of a deterrent for the kind of people that commit these murders to doing so.
Thanks for taking up that point of 'what to do' again.
I think it's much broader in fact. What to do depends on the overall understanding/ view of the current realities, of causal mechanisms of course (of which BLM -> homicide pathways are only a minor part) and your ideas about how those realities *should* look like.
Worldview/Unterstanding of reality & causal pathways: Police behaviour is broadly fine, protests / riots were out of scale; protests -> demoralization & paperwork -> depolicing -> results in more homicides. What to do: limit protests, let police do their work, limit paperwork for police and add praise.
Worldview/Unterstanding of reality & causal pathways: Police behaviour is too violent and not accountable enough, protests were justified; protests -> demoralization & paperwork -> depolicing -> results in more homicides. What to do: reform police structures/staff/training in a way that results in better policing. If necessary, advocate for reform until it happens, including protests.
Two times the same 'causal paths' between the two phenomena, but two different results in terms of *what to do*.
Want one more?
Worldview/Unterstanding of reality & causal pathways: Police behaviour is too violent and not accountable enough, protests included riots and were out of scale; protests -> demoralization & paperwork -> depolicing -> results in more homicides. What to do: reform police structures/staff/training in a way that results in better policing. Scale down protests and invest in other/better forms of advocacy.
One of the few things where the causal pathways of BLM -> more homicides matter, is when they include: less policing -> more homicides, which would be a clear contra to 'just reduce policing, no matter what'. Although even in that case, if the worldview is eg.: less police causes homicides, as long as it's not replaced adequately by more social workers and more money for poorer communities (which will improve the situation medium-term), the conclusion again might be different (what to do: fund police less, and put all the money saved into social workers and money for poorer communities).
Could it be as simple as: Americans just being awakened to their overall unpreparedness for emergencies like a pandemic (ie lines to get paper towels and toilet paper), decided that when they saw police stations and Target stores and CNN buildings getting set on fire....that they decided to be prepared for those activities and proactively bought a gun for protection? I have anecdotal evidence from friends that would have never owned a gun prior to May 2020, but have one in their home now. The increase in gun transfer is the effect, not the cause?
Yes, this seems entirely reasonable and that's what the data mostly shows AFAIK, i.e. most of the 'new'/increase gun purchases were for the reasons you outlined.
Lots of people sensed in March 2020 that Trouble could be on the way, so a lot of guns were sold in March. But then nothing much happened in April, so gun sales dropped. Then in late May, Trouble with a Capital T arrived in the form of the Establishment egging on looters and arsonists, so there were a lot of gun sales in June.
Looting went on all summer in retail stores, but after awhile it became evident that the mobs were not pillaging residential neighborhoods, so gun sales receded again.
Totally hypothesising here and I don't have time atm to research this, but it seems weird to me that my first guess at the cause hasn't been mentioned anywhere I can see. Take a society with lots of guns and a strong suspicion of government and introduce a new scary phenomenon that cuases mass unemployment and house arrest. Take that increase in murderous intent and repress it with lockdowns and reduced mobility for the first few months (allowing for an increase in murderous intent but a reduced opportunity for murder) and then reduce movement restrictions and see what happens.
Hopefully will gget time to return to this and post some evidence.
If you're tired of us foreigners discussing a situation in US and want to engage in looking at problems in other countries for a change, this is for you:
In Germany, former UN expert Nils Melzer just accused the government of 'systemic failure' in the oversight of police. To my understanding the main accusation was, that goverment and judiciary system don't react adequately to cases of misuse of force by police. (https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/corona-demo-polizeigewalt-100.html).
In Germany, the rule of *Verhältnismäßigkeit* (proportionate reaction) is key. It rougly means, that police of course is allowed to use force, but only to the extend to which it is necessary in a given situation. Melzer found, that there were too many cases where force was used excessively (eg. taking sb. to the ground, even if the situation was already under control). The main problem here, according to him, is not only those cases, but that they are rarely prosecuted, and that the goverment doesn't really care much about them.
In case you care, the topic of excessive police force came up in the context of anti-Covid-measures - demonstrations. Not that I think this has any relevance.
Overall, I guess police is rather well trusted in Germany (except by the usual suspects like very leftists groups). Being part of the overall 'trust' vis-a-vis police, I think that most do a great job. A general tendency to protect police officers even if they overdid it, internally in the police, as well as in the judiciary system, + minimizing the problem by the goverment, is however plausible.
Here is a case that made it to the news: a girl that happened to be close to Anti-G20 protests wanted to go home, biked right towards a police barrier she thought was still open for passage, and ended up with a broken arm and severe PTSD. The article describes at lenght how the internal investigation was diverted and delayed for five years, until it was finally closed. A parallel lawsuit at an administrative court resulted in a statement that the force used by the police was illegitimate - this however has no concrete consequences. I don't think this one piece says all that much about the overall context; I would mostly trust that the main key points of the story itself have been well researched. (https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2022-07/g20-gipfel-hamburg-polizeigewalt-gericht/seite-5)
Then of course the question, how many police officers were killed. I found the number to be > 400. Since 1945. (https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article236666105/Mehr-als-400-Polizisten-im-Dienst-getoetet.html). If you scroll down, the article contains an overview of each single case in the last 20 years. No killings in 2018 and 2019, two police officers killed in 2020 and two killed in 2021. I remember the last case, it was in national news with lots of declarations of outrage and sadness.
The last two bits make me wonder, whether we live in a specifically peaceful country, or whether there is lots of crime and problems, but just below the level of killing each other (where police is involved). Probably a bit of both.
I want to make the argument that the media coverage of the murder itself is what led to the increased murder rates.
It is already well known that the wide-reporting of suicides leads to an increase in suicides (and, sadly, an increase in car and commercial aircraft crashes). It is similarly known that the reporting of murders leads to an increase in murders in the areas of reporting. This is most notably observed following, again sadly, school shootings, when numerous shootings occur in succession. So, I think the argument can be made that the massive media coverage of the murder of George Floyd led, in turn, to the murder of more black men.
This would track with the logic that in reporting suicides and murders you lead to copycat suicides and murders. Where ages are reported in articles discussing suicides, the increase in suicides occurs in those within that age group/range. It seems to follow, therefore, that massive reporting of the murder of a black man would lead to copycat events. This would seem to explain why deaths of other ethnicities do not see a staggering increase. Likewise, one imagines that coverage of the murder of George Floyd was more extreme in the United States hence why the increase is only observable there (albeit I would need to actually see if the coverage was greater in the US). I would add that this explanation would also cover why media outlets have discussed other reasons; to state this is the reason would make them, in some way, complicit.
Timings wise it would also make sense. The coverage and the protests would occur contemporaneously, each feeding off the other.
I appreciate that this thought is unsourced, and low-effort in that it may have been covered by other comments, or by ACT and I have just missed it. Regardless, any discussion based on this thought would be interesting.
Has there been any attempt to ask the murderers about this?
Would it be possible to get a hold of a sample of people who attempted or completed homicides in the summer of 2020, and ask them why they did it, what pushed them over the edge etc? Or perhaps just do a deep analysis of court proceedings from those cases.
I agree with most of Scott’s analysis but I think we could do a lot more to understand the causal pathways at play.
> I agree with most of Scott’s analysis but I think we could do a lot more to understand the causal pathways at play.
This. If there is correlation, but not much clarity on causal pathways, what would be useful is qualitative, close-up studies in different communities. Those with and without a spike etc. This might involve asking those who killed (if they are available), but more importantly also the broader community, the police, the relatives of victims, and using locally available data to figure out what happened in that specific community. Then afterwards to compare and to conduct analysis on different hypothesis across cases. This is obviously not Scott's task, nor is it the task of the commentators here. It's actually a fair research question.
Sure. They might be not available so to say, and even if they were, they might not want to talk to us, and they might have more incentives to lie to us than most. Equally important, we are mostly interested in the change of dynamics in a given community and not in the individual decisions.
I included this as a nod to the OP, and I thought my formulation made it clear, that all the bits after 'but also' were the ones I considered most important. ('This might involve asking those who killed, but also the broader community, the police, the relatives of victims, and using locally available data to figure out what happened in that specific community.') In a hurry now, but I'll change this to avoid misunderstandings.
The "stock of guns" argument seems flaky to me. No data, but I expect that a "new" gun would be vastly more likely to be involved in an actual shooting. There's various reasons including: People buy/obtain guns for a reason, a lot of the stock is tied up in large collections which won't all be used, new gun owners may not have thought ownership through and modified their guiding narratives and reactions.
That the median historical value. Did it change for new gun "owners"? There's a huge number of guns, the guns used in violent crime are edge cases. In this type of situation you would want to find out what drives the outlier cases. It might be the statistical edge of normal, but it may not. There's another logical step away when we are looking at a change from the usual level of outliers. (I'm not in the US and not that engaged; more intrigued by the assumptions and arguments used.)
The CDC WONDER database this week now has pretty solid data thru December 2021 on homicide victimizations.
I come up with black deaths by homicide going up 37.8% in 2020 over 2019, Hispanics up 28.2%, non-Hispanic whites up 20.7%, American Indians up 20.4%, and Asians flat at 0.0%.
For 2021 vs. 2019, blacks are up 43.8% and Hispanics 42.6. Whites are up 19.2%, Asians up 7.2%, and Native Americans 5.5%.
These are not murders perpetrated but victims of homicide. The FBI collects data on deaths by murder, which are a smaller but closely related number. The FBI has demographics on perpetrators of cleared murders, but a large fraction aren't cleared. Also, the FBI numbers are all snarled up involving Hispanics and whites, whereas the CDC numbers follow the usual modern government method of giving priority to Hispanics or Non-Hispanics, then looking by race at Non-Hispanics, so the CDC numbers are pretty useful.
I have qualms about the “gun sales” argument. Unlike hot weather and a pandemic, increase in gun sales do not just happen for no reason. It can happen as a result of a change in legislation, it can happen because TV had a cool show about a gun nut, it can happen because people are preparing to overthrow the government. But it happens for a reason. It is not an engine of the change, only possibly a transmission belt. So you cannot explain something *by* an increase of gun sales, only *through* it to the root cause.
(I have the same qualms when Aella quotes fatherlessness as a cause for social disparity: fatherlessness is not an intrinsic trait of a certain population, it is a consequence of other past social factors.)
Yes, and the reasons behind almost all firearms purchases are A: reasonably well understood and B: not particularly mudery. So, it's not the guns, or at very least not the recent gun purchases.
Also, "things happen for reasons" is not an argument unless you are willing to discuss the reasons and how they relate to the topic at hand. Since you didn't bother to do that, I think we're done.
To me, the protests were a breaking point, perhaps a spark that set off a fire that was already burning: a resentment of the privileged, of the status quo, of rules and civil order and bourgeois niceties that we take for granted which has been growing more and more in the last years, but accelerated during the pandemic. I see it in the recklessness of drivers, in the dismissal of property crime as victimless and deserved, in the attitude that most jobs, and expectations within those jobs (dress codes, uniforms, punctuality, etc.) are de facto exploitation.... feelings that were already festering, but the protests freed it all up - hence more lawlessness, more traffic incidents, more violence, and more murders too.
Also, this is a tangential point but any treatment of the protests as spontaneous seems off-base to me. They appeared almost simultaneously in so many cities at once, large, medium, small ones, including communities where large protests and social unrest weren't ever a thing in my memory.... suggesting a well-organized operation that had been preparing or planning this sort of action. And around it of course lots of people came out of their own accord. I don't know how to test my hypothesis about this, or whether it changes the conclusion about WHY the murder spike.... But I think it is worth thinking about and taking into account.
I’m a newbie here, but I’ll get this right out: Ever since Ferguson in 2014 I’m not sure very many amateur writers have dived into this topic of crime, race, and policing in quite the same way I have. Mostly I’ve put out Medium pieces and social media posts, but below I’ll just rattle off a few resources that might be handy for folks.
I 100% endorse Scott Alexander’s conclusions. It’s obvious it's the anti-establishment, anti-policing protests that have caused the near 29% spike in crime in 2020, just as nationwide protests led to consecutive double-digit percentage increases in 2015 and 2016. I’m forever impressed how Scott addresses critics, and I’ll repeat his request: “Please find me any major country besides the US that had a homicide spike in 2020.” It galls me how many obfuscate and point to the COVID pandemic for explanations. Talk about motivated reasoning.
• This 50% increase over six years means that from 2015 to 2021 we’ve likely seen an excess of 26,500 murders if 2014 is the baseline (50% black victims). Compare this to the 40-50 unarmed killings a year (25-35% black). This 26,500 number I calculated very simply in this 2nd tab “Murder increase 2014-2021.”
• In 1st tab “The Real BLM Effect” I calculate and hypothesize that some significant part of 180,000 lives were saved by incarcerating and arresting violent offenders, as the USA dropped from an average of 24,000 annual murders (1990-1994) to a low of just above 14,000 murders in 2014. We’re now past 21,000 murders again in 2020 and 2021. I quote Stephen Leavitt of Freakanomics fame who claimed these four factors led to violent crime decreasing: "Increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack, and legalized abortion." (Source: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf)
• In the 4th tab I ran the numbers to show that a black person killed by police is 12 times more likely to get a news story than someone non-black. That’s what you get when blacks are 25% of the people killed by cops but 80% of the news coverage. Obviously, black lives DO matter. Yes, the media is brainwashing our collective brains on this topic, and it’s why so many people believe cops are routinely going around killing black people willy nilly. It’s all we see, from CNN to the New York Times to our local affiliates. (Sources: https://www.commentary.org/articles/wilfred-reilly/no-there-is-no-coming-race-war/ & https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf)
THAT’S AMATEUR NUMBERS, GIVE ME ACADEMIC RESEARCH!
7 papers and analyses indicating a Ferguson Effect certainly occurred the past few years, defined as an uptick in violence and homicides as a result of increased police scrutiny and protests. This combination delegitimizes police in the eyes of citizens, causes police to pull back, and often leads to policies detrimental to public safety (like consent decrees).
• Dataset countering BLM and #SayHerName myths I put together on Fatal Force using 3 years of Washington Post data (and many other tabs with nerdy number crunching): https://tinyurl.com/http-blm-sayhername-myths
3 MEDIUM ARTICLES I’VE WRITTEN
I humbly serve these up for critique and/or for people to use as they see fit.
#1 Titled: “Kamala Harris: Biden’s VP Pick & Your Next Candidate to Libel Police & Criminal Justice”
The larger picture shows that African Americans are not being hunted down by police. But Americans are hunting down each other. In fact, from Chicago to New York City, black Americans are more than three times less likely to be killed by police than previous generations. Yet vast black-white disparities in murder haven’t changed at all.
For at least four decades African Americans have murdered others at a rate 8 times higher than their non-Hispanic white counterparts, and are killed at a rate 6 times greater. In 2016, CDC indicated there were more than 19,500 homicides and The Washington Post reported 234 black killings by police and 465 white killings by police. This means for every 40 blacks killed by fellow citizens, there’s only 1 by a cop. For whites, that ratio is 12:1. But even in August 2019 we get yet another questionable study omitting crime statistics, and incredibly arguing that police are a major threat to the lives of blacks, with this Harvard Kennedy School headline: “Black men 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police, new research estimates.”
People simply need to do the basic math. Or does the math not add up to the social injustices activists, academics, and the media have been portraying?
[end excerpt]
-
#2 Titled: “MY OPEN LETTER TO CHICAGO: Stripping Context from Media & Government Reports on Police Abuse a Likely Cause of More American and Chicago Bloodshed (Subhead: Statistical-Based Evidence Undermines Consent Decree Logic that Throws Chicago Police Under the Bus)”
THE GIST: Chicago-centric hard analysis w/ stats and graphics I created to try to help prevent a consent decree from taking shape. Roland Fryer’s 2020 paper highlighted how these consent decrees have led to potentially thousands of lives being lost. Had more than 20,000 views back in 2018.
-
#3 - Written directly after the George Floyd protests as the writing was on the wall, but few knew: Only around 10 unarmed black people were killed by cops the year before. Skeptic Magazine’s polling shows how large numbers of liberals believe 1,000 or even 10,000 unarmed blacks are killed by police each year. Note: Those folks driving our “national conversation” are in media and academia, yet their beliefs undergirding their “reform” demands are wildly off.
This goes without saying: These unarmed deaths are real lives and real tragedies. Just as the 62 police killed by felony gunfire in 2021 are, a jump from 45 in 2020. 346 officers were shot in 2021.
These are the final “unarmed and killed by police gunfire” breakdowns in the context of “Black Lives Matter” protests for 2019, the year before George Floyd’s death:
• 26 white
• 12 black
• 11 Hispanic
• 5 in the category of “other”
But look at that Skeptic chart above again. It’s also crystal clear that more than 50% of “very liberal” Americans live in a fictional reality — a morose and racist universe where the number of unarmed Black Americans killed by police might be as high as “about 1,000,” “about 10,000,” or “more than 10,000.” And it’s those “very liberal” people making the biggest stink on Twitter, trust me.
[end excerpt]
Fin. And hope to have many fun conversations here.
I don't disagree with any particular part of the analysis, but maybe it would be better to set up your own substack for this kind of long-form research summary? Comments are more likely to get a response if they're addressing a specific point made either in the article or by another poster.
"One reason might be if the people buying guns in 2020 were very different from the people buying guns in previous years. For example, if previous gun buyers were collectors who had 100 guns each, but 2020 gun owners were new buyers getting their first gun, then the share of people with at least one gun would go up by more than 2% over an average year."
Maybe the suicide rate didn't increase because the extra Americans who bought guns in 2020 were not people in suicide-prone demographics. Suicides are most common among older, white men living in rural areas, and I remember hearing about how many of the people buying guns in 2020 were women, black, or living in urban or suburban areas.
Late to the conversation, but this feels worth noting given Matty's point RE: the media's characterization of the homicide increase
Right on queue, on 7/8/2022, the Wapo published an article titled:
"The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings"
The print version, where this article was the header article on the front page, had the following subheader
"45,000 fatalaties in each of the past two years (line break) Increase conicides with record firearm purchases"
The article (and notably its actual interviewee quotes) goes on to hedge a bit but clearly wants to suggest that the gun purchase increase combined with covid stress is the likely culprit.
It cites lots of data on new gun purchases without ever comparing this to the existing gun stock or the existing gun ownership rate
It even correctly cites the race/skew of homicide and suicide victims (black male skew in homicide victims and white male skew in suicide victims) but it of course fails to cite the skew in homicide perpetrators or the race/sex characteristics of the perpetrator increase.
I think an under-ratedly weird aspect of the post-protest homicide spike is just how FAST it happened. Like, I wouldn't have been that skeptical of the protest/crime-spike link ex ante, but I would have guessed it would have taken, I dunno, months to set in gradually. When people try to deny the link, I think they're sometimes pattern-matching to other social phenomena in which there are meaningful lags between cause and effect, leaving all conclusions very fuzzy and uncertain. But here the whole thing played out in the blink of an eye. It seems almost too good to be true.
I have the same dizzy sensation regarding the CHAZ/CHOP debacle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest). I would have predicted ex ante that a miniature anarchist commune would run into trouble pretty quickly, but it was literally only a matter of days before these people reconstituted a police force that shot and killed an unarmed black teen! "Reductio ad absurdum" doesn't begin to cover it.
I guess the update is that...there ISN'T much ruin in a nation?
I'd like to signal boost the contributing factor of court closures to the perception of potential criminals that they would be unlikely to face (swift enough) consequences even if they did commit crimes.
In my perception it seems like the argument about changed police behavior (in part due to BLM protests) is implicitly assuming a model where the police behavior causes perception-of-risk amongst criminals, which in turn is the actual proximate cause of (the increase in) crimes committed. I wanted to draw more explicit attention this part of the causal chain.
I'd be curious to know if there was a good way to estimate the effect size of changed court behavior (probably mostly caused by responses to the pandemic) versus changed policy behavior (probably mostly caused by responses to BLM protests). I do think that police, prosecutor, and court behavior is the main cause (feasibly manipulable contributing factor) of the magnitude of violent crime and are much more significant than small changes in gun prevalence or other pandemic-related factors, in partial agreement with Scott's thesis.
Regarding the Alexander/Yglesias disagreement about media coverage: I think both positions make a lot of sense if we model media coverage of a generic "what causes Y?" questions as a binary choice between the "A is THE ONLY cause of Y, if we control A we will completely control Y (we literally cannot conceive the concept of multiple contributing factors or causes)" template and the "wow Y is complicated, look we can sit here and make up contributing factors all day, it sure seems impossible to compare factors and draw conclusion" template. So from Yglesias's perspective the media chose the correct template for the situation, and from Alexander's perspective the templates suck.
I think it is better for our blood pressure to recognize that this is a structural problem with the way news media is written that affects every topic they cover, and that the media is not specifically trying to hide the truth on this issue.
(Note: the thesis here is reliant on new media using a small fixed number of framings / templates for everything where the choice of template is the entire analysis of the topic, not on there being exactly 2 templates.)
Okay, but if there were a spike in gun thefts, that simply leads to the question - what caused people to start stealing guns more?
A rolling average *is* a low pass Finite Impulse Response filter.
Or, at least show the 'raw' data too!
It's often easy enough, with just our eyes (and visual processing done 'automatically' by our brains) to interpret 'noisy' graphs anyways.
What's the "olive branch" you had in mind?
If they're claiming the risk is too great, I'm skeptical. Policing isn't nearly as dangerous a job as you'd think, and deaths in the line of duty are actually rarer than in many manual labor jobs.
According to this[1] (pro-cop) website, the entire state has had only 7 line-of-duty assault or gunfire deaths in the past decade, and two of those were dogs.
I also feel like it is a bit weird to compare the risk when I try and put myself into the respective shoes of the people doing the job. I feel that if I found myself working as a lumberjack, I could be extra careful and follow all of the rules and baring equipment failure (and I assume checking equipment status is part of the safety rules) I should be fine. I don't 100% know for sure, but having worked in an auto mechanics shop, I can tell you that safety compliance is a bit of a joke, at least with the mechanics it was. On the other hand, as a cop I would be in an adversarial situation in which I am interacting with another human being who might decide killing me is their best option, which seems dramatically more stressful, and harder to plan for (outside of being overly aggressive with any person who I think seems even a little dangerous, but we all hate when cops do that right).
Yes!
I would expect that adversarial situations are more stressful _even_ if they're not, overall more 'risky'. But then, _knowing_ one is in an adversarial situation (very) probably has the 'side effect' of making one more wary and alert to risks/dangers than otherwise in the first place!
The obvious comparison that your analogy to a lumberjack implies is that if a lumberjack decided to show up 45 minutes late to their job to avoid the dangerous bit, they wouldn't be a lumberjack for very long.
I know it's not a direct analogue, especially since you can *argue* that police are still doing their jobs even after arriving 45 minutes late, but I'm sure many people who call the cops and then have them arrive long after they would have been useful would disagree with you.
Given that the police are very much NOT popular at the moment, in at least some (VERY visibly public) sense, and that current officers have been quitting/retiring, _and_ that departments are struggling to recruit new officers to even get back to recent staffing levels, it seems entirely unsurprising that police officers are arriving "45 minutes late" to some or even many calls.
There does NOT seem to be a consistent and coherent 'idea' about whether people even want police at all, or whether some people might think it's _good_ that there are less police now than even recently.
I can't even tell whether you'd condone or endorse reducing police budgets, e.g. to 'punish' them for showing up late to calls. (That that would probably make what you seem to be complaining about _worse_ is NOT a point that I've seen frequently even _noticed_, let alone acknowledged/considered explicitly.)
When I try to point things like this out in other forums, I'm often met with insistence that the police are "useless" or accused of 'licking the boots' of the police.
I'm not looking forward to the coming anarchy!
> I probably made five or six times as many stops as I did arrests.
This surprised me. I have been stopped many times more than five or six and have never been arrested. Does a stop precede every arrest or are there arrests without stops first?
This reasoning would only hold if the odds of a single person being arrested was independent from stop to stop: this is obviously not true.
Eg, consider a simple model where 20% of the population always gets arrested when stopped, and 80% of the population never gets arrested when stopped, and that stops are as likely for any member of the population. The stops/arrest ratio is quite clearly 5:1. But anyone in the no-arrest population can get stopped an arbitrary number of times and will still never be arrested.
The reason the model in Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 is not your normal regression discontinuity (the familiar 0 = pre-period, 1 = post-period approach) is exactly that - arrests and crime are connected! Their approach is to use a model that explicitly account for their interdependence. I explain a little bit more deeper in the original comment chain, and the paper discusses the issue well.
Furthermore, Scott used the post-Ferguson drop in recorded arrests as part of his evidence of depolicing. So, it seemed fair to include a study testing the very same measure. As to whether or not arrests are a GOOD measure of depolicing, that's a good point - I agree it's not ideal. Non-arrest interventions have effects, and we if don't account for them we might miss something. Rosenfeld and Wallman when justifying their proxy of depolicing via arrests write "There are good reasons for assuming that police disengagement should be reflected in declining arrest rates, especially for less serious Part II offenses, such as disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, vagrancy, loitering, suspicion, and vandalism. We might also expect police officers who fear legal repercussions or media exposure to make fewer arrests for some property crimes or drug possession. Unlike homicide or other serious violent offenses, these are the kinds of law violations for which the police have some discretion when deciding whether to make an arrest. If the police have “gone fetal,” we should expect them to make fewer such discretionary arrests." (2019: 57)
In their discussion of limitations, they directly acknowledge your point as a weakness of the study: "There are several limitations to our analysis. We measured de-policing with arrest rates, but making arrests is only one way the police can influence crime levels. In fact, some analysts have proposed that arrests represent the failure of the police to prevent crime; if crimes are averted by enhanced police presence at crime hot spots, for example, no arrests are necessary (Lum & Nagin, 2017; Nagin, Solow, & Lum, 2015). We are sympathetic to this view, but we would also point out that some minimum level of arrests is needed to maintain the credibility of proactive enforcement actions such as targeted patrols. Nonetheless, future research should be aimed at examining the effect on the rise of homicide levels of possible declines in forms of proactive policing other than arrests." (2019: 67)
But, I think overall we shouldn't say that arrest data is bad unless we think that arrests don't move with the data we think actually matters. That argument would be a bit odd to me; sure, arrests may be attenuated from the 'proactive' policing you describe, but surely some arrests result from traffic stops and terry stops? If so, then decreases in those stops should in turn affect arrests, which would be captured.
I missed the original discussion. I tried looking into their paper, but I am not exactly sure if I understand their SEM. (...Instead of extolling magical virtues of max likelihood SEM, why not specify the structure with a couple of equations...?) From their reference [1], I gather that their linear dynamic models SEM are something like,
rate_{arrests, city, time} = ??? *rate_{homicide,city,time-1}
rate_{homicide,city,time} = beta* rate_{arrests,city,time} + (economic disadvantage and bunch of other other time-constant covariates) + hidden city specific fixed time invariant effect alpha_{city} + hidden year specific effect common to all cities xi_{time} + noise_{city,time}.
for time = year, year-1. Or maybe it is one big model with beta_time for each time point?
I write ??? because this is just my best guess; I am not sure what they exactly mean by saying they condition on the previous year's arrest-homicide relationship but not including time-lagged homicide variable.
Whatever their model exactly is, they fit it to data 2010-2015, and report that estimated betas are small and positive.
Now looking at their results, here is an interesting question: It kinda looks like betas in their model might capture the prior-2015 trend? Like, the model (if I understand it correctly) could capture the general trend of beta after adjusting for all kinds of year-specific effects. Prior to 2015, the unadjusted scatter plots show both arrests and homicide slightly decreasing, perfectly consistent with their estimated small positive beta.
This is important, as I think "strongman" version of policing-homicide Ferguson hypothesis is not that less arrests result in less homicide universally, but in June 2015 there were many major changes in policing activity which show up in statistics as both declining arrests and increasing homicide. The "major changes" could have a proxy in form of the big protests, as ACX speculates.
So, if the special circumstances that correlated with the protests in 2015 disrupted [2] the general relationship "usually, arrests are slightly positively correlated with homicide", the model (depending on its structure to condition on previous years) would *eat* those "special circumstances" in fixed effects alpha and xi. All the 2015 special stuff common to all cities in xi_2015 and in alpha_city all city-specific stuff, like large protests.
One suggestive sign that something like this could be going is that reported variance in tables 2-3 (all, Black) more than double in 2015 for violent, property and drug crime. In table 4 (White) the variance stays similar in all years. So their estimates for arrest-homicide effect are getting a little bit less precise in 2015.
Also, I don't think it illuminates to aggregate their data yearly when lot of interesting stuff happens on much shorter time scales.
[1] https://www3.nd.edu/~rwilliam/dynamic/SJPaper.pdf
[2] Another way to phrase it: it could be a totally different effect that simply shows up in the same measure.
I like this discussion, but honestly I'm not the author or their even their advisee, so I won't be able to tell you definitively. The best path might be to ask the authors for clarification. That being said, I'll do what I can:
0) I'm not sure of their model's exact specification. I think your depiction is plausible, but a flaw of the paper is that it could have used an appendix item featuring that!
1) The practice of lagging past arrest->crime coefficients in this type of model stems from Greenberg, Kessler, and Logan 1979, who go into this model approach in general on pages 843-846. The usage of the lagged effect is important, because year 1's law enforcement actions/inactions ought to affect year 2's crime level. So, it's important to control for effect of arrests or else you'll discount current arrests. As they put it: " lagged effects are absorbed into later measures of enforcement and crime. If these effects are of opposite sign [crimes increase arrests but arrests decrease crime], as we have suggested the effect of crime on enforcement is expected to be, they will tend to cancel and lead to an underestimation of the influence of crime on enforcement. To avoid this possible source of bias, a model of the effects of crime on enforcement must include both short-term and long-term effects" (page 844)
Another important excerpt: "The basic ideas of the consistency procedure can be seen in Figure 1, which illustrates a three-wave, two-variable panel model. In this model, the per capita crime rate (C) at time t is assumed to depend linearly on the crime rate at time t- 1, and on the arrest clearance rate (A) at times t and t- 1. Similarly, the current clearance rate at time t is assumed to depend linearly on the clearance rate at time t - 1, and on the crime rates at times t and t - 1. Thus the model includes both lagged and instantaneous reciprocal influences between the crime rate and the clearance rate. The relationship between the crime rate and the clearance rate at time 1 is taken into account but is not subjected to causal analysis. Explicit allowance is made for the possibility that the residuals for the crime rate and clearance rate at time t (Ut and Vt, respectively) are correlated."
So, that's why they "condition on the previous year's arrest-homicide relationship"
1.5) As for why no lagged homicide rates, Rosenfeld and Wallman say: "Our models do not include lagged values of homicide rates, and the results therefore represent the effect of arrest rates and other predictors on the level of the annual homicide rate between 2010 and 2015. The essential feature of ML-SEM models we estimate is to adjust the arrest rate estimates for the year-to-year reciprocal relationship between homicide and arrest rates." (page 58)
2) Because the model controls for several prior years' relationships between arrests and homicides, it ought to be perfectly positioned to test for those special 2015 circumstances whereby there is a hypothesized causal relationship between "declining arrests and decreasing homicide". Indeed, this is how Rosenfeld and Wallman describe it it in their results: "Given the substantive interest in the possibility of a time-varying effect of arrest rates on the city homicide rates and the specific focus on the effect of arrest rates on the 2015 rise in homicide levels, we estimated models permitting the within-city arrest rates and controls to vary freely over time [that's important!]. With a single exception (the effect of White weapon arrest rates on homicide rates), this model specification converged to a unique solution.
If declining arrest rates spurred the 2015 homicide rate rise, we should observe significant and
negative coefficients on the arrest measures in 2015, particularly for those offenses permitting more police discretion, such as minor crimes and perhaps also drug and some property crimes." (page 62)
3) I would agree that variance was higher in 2015! But not even the sign of the point estimates flipped negative in table 3 year 2015 (relative to the prior years), when the hypothesis would have been that at least one became negative in that year. That's kinda surprising? Also, each point estimate increased in magnitude That's tough to swallow, because a minimal test of plausibility is whether your hypothesized effect - regardless of significance - at least moves in the theorized direction relative to placebo test (e.g. another year here). For all 5 crime rates to increase in point estimates magnitude when the theorized direction is negative... to me that further contradicts the lower arrests (as proxy for depolicing) -> more homicides mechanism.
Thanks for reply. Fortunately Greenberg, Kessler, and Logan 1979 is on JSTOR. So maybe Rosenfeld and Waldman drop the lagged crime (b1, b2 in GKL Fig 1) but have otherwise same model? Looks like a whole bunch of relationships to estimate. I wish they would report as much details as GKL Table 1 / Figure 1.
The reason I am interested in the variance of point estimates is that it kinda tells the estimate becomes much less precise in 2015. This is a conjecture, but it indicates there is more variation in homicide in 2015. It could be unsystematic, just noise. But it could be systematic effect on some particular cities.
Anyway, it is a quite difficult thing to estimate, and it is quite important what a model really estimated.
Let's take their results at face value, and suppose there is a small positive arrest-homicide association also in 2015. Then look the Economist graph "Fewer stops, more shot" in Baltimore before and after 2015 in the original ACX post. Pre-2015, such relationship isn't implausible. Not strongly suggested either. Post-2015 until end of graph in 2018, arrests and homicide is quite flat; again compatible with positive correlation. But if arrests and homicide track each other, how come the arrest rate stays in low 20s despite the large jump in homicide? Yes, it is supposed to small effect. But *still* a bit weird.
I agree that there's tons of variance in 2015. I fully expect that to be the case in 2020 (and 21! hopefully not 22) versions of similar models. Stylistically, I prefer reporting 95% CIs for exactly this reason - it shows a range of plausible (in the weird frequentist sense) values for coefficients. It also doesn't focus so heavily on the arbitrary 'well p-value of 0.049 is clearly good but 0.051 is clearly bad' distinctions, and so allows us to inform our priors with a gradient of confidence rather than a binary of significant (best result since sliced bread!) vs insignificant (hear no evil, see no evil).
And that's exactly what is interesting to me. It could be that (as Graham argues elsewhere) there's some focal depolicing -> homicides police intervention that moves orthogonally to arrests which really explains everything. It could be that different things are different - that there is no general relationship that is reliable (the 'only these 3 cities' argument). It could be that the frame of protests -> depolicing -> homicides is fundamentally flawed because the causal framework mostly follows a different but frequently parallel pathway (e.g. racial inequity -> public institution legitimacy crises -> homicides). What it seems highly unlikely to be is protests -> arrests (as a proxy of depolicing) -> homicides. This is not Scott's only argument, but it's a core piece of it - copy pasting one of my exchanges with Scott on this topic:
"You say that "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas". To support the existence of depolicing (I agree, btw, see my Hypothesis A), you use two variables as measures of this depolicing: Chicago arrests and Minneapolis vehicle stops.
Is your argument that Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 are wrong - that arrests don't move in concert with depolicing? The Cassell 2020 paper you reference actually likes the Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 paper, and instead says that the 'treatment' - protests - was instead probably too weak in the original Ferguson era to find statistical significance (pages 55-56). I'm not sure I believe that, but I prefer that argument to the argument you make here Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 aren't discussing what you're discussing. For that to be true, you'd have to claim that depolicing's relationship to arrests is weak at the same time you use a decline in arrests as evidence of depolicing. Pick one!"
What police behaviours specifically increase the deterrent effect? Foot patrols? High visibility? Talking to young men?
I would love to hear your answer on this -- if one believes that pre-textual stops are concerning from a rights perspective... can you think of any valid alternatives? I can see why they are effective, but I can think of many systems that would be effective in the way they are -- e.g., random searches and tracking of people for whom cops have suspicions but not probably cause -- which are more obviously unconstitutional and we avoid. I know you don't feel this way about pre-textual stops, but if you did and someone made you in charge of police policy... what would you try to do instead?
What portion of the time would you say the utility of the stop was to notice that someone has an open warrant, vs searching their car or person & finding something illegal?
It just feels like a really weird evolved system. "We solve most crime by picking someone who looks kinda suspicious (suspicious to be defined by individual cop because how the heck else would you define it) and then looking through their stuff."
If a large portion of the people have open warrants, do you think more investment could be spent on tracking those specific people down instead?
I know you've said that you don't think that people have a right to privacy in their cars, which is defensible. And I'm sympathetic to the idea of reformers making physically unrealistic demands -- hence why I'm really interested what the alternatives would be to "nothing" since some people do seem to care about those stops/searches.
You've given me one lead, which is to make me want to go research how cops in the EU use that policy in practice and how people react to it, for which I thank you.
Robin Hanson has a proposal for a different system:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/09/who-vouches-for-you.html
One issue with tying ourselves in knots over police interventions being human rights violations is its cuts off some very easy ways of dealing with crime.
I remember a study where 30-40% of who were sneaking onto public transit in a certain community had an open warrant. Seems like more than enough justification to detain everyone who was caught sneaking. Instead activists were demanding (and succeeded) the police stop detaining anyone sneaking because of racial disparities in the eventual arrestees.
> If a large portion of the people have open warrants, do you think more investment could be spent on tracking those specific people down instead?
This just seems, to me, and having been reading Graham since he started his blog, and Peter Moskos before him, to be REALLY expensive. Tracking down the kind of people that most often _have_ open warrants for their arrest is or can be arbitrarily difficult. They probably almost always KNOW that there is a warrant for their arrest and can, you know, evade capture!
Bounty hunters can manage. Ankle monitors would help.
Yeah, I was shocked to find out that in Germany the police could just detain you for no reason at all.
I remember being shocked when I visited Switzerland in 1995 or so that there were police/military stationed in the airport with _machine guns_. That wasn't at that time something I'd ever seen in the U.S. and I still don't think I've ever seen it outside one specific city, NYC.
"You could do what they do in Europe, where there are no pretextual stops because police can simply stop people for no reason at all (see e.g. Section 60 stops in the UK)."
This isn't true (at least in the UK). Section 60 stops in the UK in 2020-2021 accounted for 1.3% of all stops, the vast majority are Section 1 which require suspicion (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-powers-and-procedures-stop-and-search-and-arrests-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2021).
I would be interested in reading a comparison of stops in the US and UK, and e.g. arrest rates for both. It seems difficult to get good data on it, and I'm not sure what the correct things to compare are. My impression is that the US has traffic stops without searches but those don't really exist in the UK.
I find it kind of hilarious that both financial hardship from the pandemic and having better finances than usual due to stimulus checks (which supposedly was spent on guns) were being offered as (entirely ad hoc) explanations for the BLM effect.
I also found it hilarious how many commenters accused Scott of coming to the conclusion first and then desperately looking for a way to justify it - followed shortly thereafter by desperate attempts at dismissing the huge amounts of data Scott provided and asserting some politically convenient explanations with little to no data to support them.
In contrast, I was delighted at the relatively high quality of comments compared to the average comment section about a hot-button issue.
It’s a reasonable response to brainstorm alternative explanations to the one originally presented. Yes, many will be politically convenient, and most won’t bring much evidence to support their ideas. Still, there were many comments that brought interesting stuff to the conversation and even some that had interesting links to follow and relevant citations.
Maybe I’m grading in too much of a curve here, but I genuinely appreciate the general level (and civility) of discourse here.
I think the comments were a lot better because BLM is no longer a salient issue on people's minds. I'd bet a post on vaccine or mask mandates would get much better comments now than in mid-2021.
Brainstorming is reasonable - this wasn't that. [Many commenters] were convinced Scott was wrong and were looking for any excuse to dismiss his evidence. Things were certainly better than back when this was popping off, but that's an extremely low bar given the absolutely horrendous level of discourse back then.
Re: stimulus checks vs financial hardship: two different things things can happen to different people at the same time. Me and all my employed friends got stimulus on top of our continuing pay checks. We were all feeling flush and because of that we acted uncharacteristically in some ways. At the same time two of my friends were laid off of jobs and unable to find a new one for over a year, the lives and habits certainly changed!
Not saying I am putting any weight behind either of those hypotheses, just noting that the apparent contradiction isn’t a good reason to discount or scoff at either theory. Very few people commit crimes, so a large change in circumstances, even if it only affects a subset of the population, is worth evaluating evidence about.
(Tbh my guess is that the stimulus idea won’t hold water. Layoffs might be a contributing factor, and they were time-delayed with the start of lockdowns for many people, but I doubt the main factor.)
Scott has pointed out the sharpness of the spike several times, as well as the very close timing (end of May). The chances that the layoffs were both time-delayed and coordinated to explain such a spike would be very hard to believe. The reality was a group of short term layoffs even in March, and then a wide range of layoff dates spread out for months.
I don’t disagree. I’m responding to “I find it kind of hilarious that both financial hardship from the pandemic and having better finances than usual due to stimulus checks” - to note that those aren’t mutually exclusive.
Like I said in my post, I don’t think either is a driving factor. But to say something like ‘did people have too much money or too little money make up your minds’ ignores that both things can be true at the same time, for different people
The issue is when both of these contradictory things are being floated as *causes* of the homicide spike, and the fact that they were being proposed suggests that both camps weren't thinking about things too deeply.
Again, I’m not arguing for either theory, I’m just saying that you’re doing a lot of conflating here. Did any single commenter argue for both? Individuals can disagree, liberals don’t have to share the same pet theory. If this was a post about immigration we might see conservatives commenting that it’s bad for the economy and it’s good for the economy - hilarious.
But even if it was one person arguing that both were true, I really don’t think that more AND less money is contradictory because some people can experience each at the same time. More than one major economic shock in more than one population can drive a single trend.
I expect some of the sudden rental housing shortage was probably was driven by both too much and too little money: landlords burned by renters who couldn’t pay for months and months getting out of the rental game, plus flush professionals with a down-payment suddenly saved up.
Again, not arguing for the theory itself, just reiterating that these aren’t necessarily contradictory. Some people had lots of money and this changed their behavior, and some had too little and this changed their behavior. Both types of people were part of the same economic system. Complex interactions of different parts of a system, such as growing inequality in circumstances, can drive big changes in trends.
Why do you insist on being loudly wrong about something like why you are right? Seriously, what is up?
Ah yeah, that’s object level. I’m not arguing the object level here, I read Scott’s post. I’m not arguing that either economic explanation is actually the thing driving the rise in murders.
I’m making a meta level point here, responding to the parent comment, that there is some conflation happening to say that this theories are contradictory at all. They are just two different theories, being suggested by different individuals, pointing at different trends that were both actually happening for a subset of the population.
Good point. Relatedly, there's a fallacious argument that goes "people say this, but other people also say the opposite, and we can construe both groups as being on the same side (both people are on X side of the spectrum usually), so that means that X side is confused and contradicting themselves!" Of course, in real life people will have different ideas, and two people within a group disagreeing doesn't mean there's something with the reasoning capabilities of everyone in the group.
I didn't actually say that, I just found it that funny that pro-BLMers would make such contradictory arguments, but it does suggest at least one of them must be obviously wrong and should have realized that. Either poor black people had more money during the pandemic or they didn't.
The only problem is that “poor black people” is not a monolithic entity. Some did have more money, significantly! And others had far far less.
Surely for purposes of looking at an average effect across an entire population, this is irrelevant.
For the purposes of averages, yes, it is irrelevant. But at the meta level my point is that I don’t think averages are the right thing to be looking at here.
Murderers aren’t the average person from a group, they’re a small population so they’ll always be a subset, and probably a very unusual subset within that population. I could easily imagine scenarios where a particular racial group became richer on average, but the subset of that group who committed murders on average became poorer at the same time. If, for example, none of the murderous group has legible enough sources of income to get unemployment benefits. And I could imagine situations with the reverse too, maybe prohibition/depression era Irish mob murderers vs the average Irish person? Of course we don’t gather information in murderers incomes so this would be hard to get. But it’s not crazy to suggest something like this could be worth looking into.
I can not stress enough that I’m not advocating for either of these hypotheses, I’m just pointing out that there *is not a hilarious contradiction* that would have caused someone to realize all economic based theories were wrong by noticing that there were different economic theories being suggested.
>At the same time two of my friends were laid off of jobs and unable to find a new one for over a year, the lives and habits certainly changed!
The point is *not* that people had to be all experiencing the same economic conditions. The problem is when they're proposed as causes for the homicide spike. *For the people committing the additional homicides*, you can't really claim that some of them did it because they had more money than usual and some did it because they had less. It's not literally impossible, but it's a bizarre kind of relationship between wealth and crime you're positing that is infinitely less preferable to much simpler and more empirically supported explanations.
>(Tbh my guess is that the stimulus idea won’t hold water. Layoffs might be a contributing factor, and they were time-delayed with the start of lockdowns for many people, but I doubt the main factor.)
They're almost certainly not a factor. Did you read Scott's post? The spike was sharp, the spike occurred in no other countries, the spike occurred without an economic downturn back in Ferguson, and crime *fell* during the '08 recession. It's wrong for at least four very big, clear reasons.
Just adding further complexity here: Many people I know got the COVID unemployment benefits (600+ a week), which in some cases gave them higher income than when they were employed.
I don’t know the median income of the average murderer, but my guess is they have unsteady income at all times.
I guess you could construct a scenario where less-violent criminals lost the jobs that were keeping them somewhat sane during the pandemic. These people don’t have the wherewithal to apply for special COVID unemployment benefits. So they went on with some murdering. Hard to believe though.
Again, not arguing for this theory because I don’t think it’s a primary driver BUT I bet that many murderers aren’t very employable and didn’t have a traditional 9-5 job in the first place, at least not one legible to the state. If that was the case they would not have gotten any unemployment benefits
" two different things things can happen to different people at the same time."
that is of course true but I dont see the pathways for each in this scenario. murderers in general have unsteady income so the pandemic didn't hurt them in any real way.
Same reaction. I was taking it seriously, but once I got to the "no it's warm weather and the pandemic" section, I had to grin a bit. For some reason, some people really, really don't want to believe there's any connection between policing and homicide rate, it seems.
I'm convinced and think Scott did a pretty good job here.
I find it sad, not "hilarious", but I also _think_ I can understand why lots of people really _do not_ want to believe that 'the protests', about unjust police killings of black people, had the extra sad effect of increasing non-police killings of mostly black people (and mostly by other black people). That IS a really depressing conclusion to reach!
Yes. This is the phenomenon in a nutshell. I too find it very saddening. It seems some folks just can't let go of their dogma, no matter the costs.
> I can understand why lots of people really _do not_ want to believe that 'the protests', about unjust police killings of black people, had the extra sad effect of increasing non-police killings of mostly black people (and mostly by other black people
Where are these people that don’t understand that? I don’t run int them IRL. It’s common knowledge around Mpls. The whole thing was a tragedy. From the gruesome death of George Floyd, through the reckless destruction of property, on to the understandable police pullback, to the resulting rise in crime.
We are still watching the results play out on the local news every evening.
Scott’s article added nothing new to our understanding. I added links from the NYT that make similar points in the original thread other than his making the protests cause number 1 in this tragedy and not paying too much attention to the tape of the slow motion murder of Floyd.
If you downplay the murder in the sequence of events you have a Fox News story. If you start with Floyd’s murder you have an NPR story.
I don’t understand why so few people see this. It’s a high efficacy scissor statement depending on where you think the narrative starts.
Where you think narrative starts seems largely based on tribal identity.
Your experience differs from mine. Scott's take would be regarded as heterodox in my neck of the woods, and certainly on main stream media. Criticism of BLM, however focused and legitimate, is written off as white supremacy. That's the dominant cultural narrative here on the West Coast. So at least for me, Scott added a great deal to my understanding.
That said, I appreciate hearing a Twin Cities perspective, so thanks for that.
Most of my neighbors in my St Paul neighborhood have a Black Lives Matter in their front yard. My yard and the black couple across the street are the exceptions. None of these people condoned the violence that followed Floyd’s death. I might have joined the initial demonstration if not for the lockdown. I would have beat a hasty retreat when violence started though.
The Minnesota Department of Human Rights just released a large study on the relationship between blacks and Mpls PD. There were some serious problems, so between that and the Floyd killing we are earnest our support of BLM in calling attention to this stuff.
It’s important to distinguish between that and illegal violence and destruction of property though. I don’t personally know anyone who doesn’t condemn that.
What I heard out here is that whenever there was massive destruction associated with a BLM protest, that somehow it didn't count because it was done by outside agitators. And I think that may have been true in some cases, but it also drives right into the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
Even beyond that, there is definitely a radical but not exactly fringe voice out here that argues "So what that a bunch of property got destroyed? No justice no peace! It's just property. Black lives matter more." etc. etc. And that point of view is pretty dangerous. Does that not exist in the Twin Cities?
I’ve heard the “No justice no peace” thing being chanted on television. I don’t support the notion I’ve heard the same slogan going back to demonstrations in the 70’s. I took as the usual rhetoric of the hot heads at any protest.
That radical element does exist though. It just takes a handful to get things started in the wrong direction.
My wife and I watched the events in Mpls and Saint Paul play out in real time.
Scattered acts of destruction mixed with a larger group of people who were just tired of unarmed black men being killed. Mostly a bunch of idealistic white kids - a lot of U of Minnesota student - marching in demonstration of support.
Another thing to keep in mind is that at the time of Floyd’s death, very few people had jobs or classes to go to. It increased the scale of thing by probably 2 or 3 times.
It didn’t take long for whatever leaders of BLM that were there to become irrelevant.
Then there was the fact that once the police were in a defensive crouch anyone with malicious intent realized that this was the moment to get away with it.
What better time to plunder the OxyContin shelf at the local pharmacy. I have a photo of the smashed drive through window at the Walgreens a half mile from my home.
It was pure anarchy.
There was an instance of a Boogaloo Boi from Texas taking part. He does have a warrant out for his arrest for his part in the third precinct arson.
Another knucklehead was arrested when he brought looted police tactical gear to work to show off as souvenirs. He didn’t give a damn about Floyd. It was everything is allowed tonight that motivated him.
I watched another masked white guy smashing store front windows with a four pound hammer. He turned out to be a redneck biker from Stillwater Minnesota. Warrant out for his arrest too.
So there was an element of folks deliberately trying to make things worse for their own twisted reasons. But they don’t deserve the majority of the blame.
We had a few sleepless nights watching this go on. At an early morning hour the Minnesota gov came on television to recommend people in my neighborhood pack a go bag.
On those nights when daylight finally arrived our neighbors went into our front yards and talked about how we passed the night. At a distance. Covid was still considered a serious threat.
Here is a better explanation of the difference between the BLM movement and the BLM organization.
My neighbors and I consider ourselves part of the movement not the organization
https://www.newtownbee.com/08202020/blm-organization-vs-blm-movement-a-semantic-trap/
I think the distinction between depolicing and a collapse of trust in police is important (though of course you have every right to be agnostic on the question).
If the murder spike was a result of police pulling back, the lesson would be that getting police to be more active would save lives. That could mean making sure police feel that they'll be supported by politicians if they make tough calls in tough situations and not giving police extra paperwork.
If the murder spike was a result of the public losing trust in police, and so not calling the cops when there's a problem, the solution is the opposite--restoring public trust in police by holding police accountable when they do something wrong and requiring careful record-keeping.
According to Gallup, there does appear to have been a decline trust in the police among black Americans since 2013ish.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/352304/black-confidence-police-recovers-2020-low.aspx
That said, I would've expected 911 calls to be correlated with - and probably be a better measure of - trust in the police though. Maybe there are other empirical measures like rate of witness cooperation?
I'm not convinced the legitimacy hypothesis is a better explanation than depolicing, especially given there is stronger empirical evidence for that (although it does seem like it's simpler to measure). But I did think it fit the time line Scott laid out just as well, hence why I brought it up on the last post (although I didn't know it had a name and had been reasonably well studied).
The other problem with the idea that occurred to me after the post is that if depolicing leads to higher crime rates, that'd potentially lead to less trust and so they aren't even fully separable because one causes the other.
Has trust in police gone up? Or distrust just become quieter? I really haven't seen many signs that those who had distrust of the police have decided to trust them. Calls to 911 are a poor metric, because "a drowning man grasps at straws". You need to measure in non-emergency situations.
I don't have any answers to those questions, but I do think that anyone who had a valid reason to distrust the police two years ago still does. The alternatives may be worse, but that's a different argument.
Grasping at straws, man.
It does seem like an implausibly big effect - I mentioned it because I was surprised at your comment about trusts levels and googled. The start of the decline in 2013 does roughly correspond to the reversal of the downward trend in the homicide rate in the first graph in Scott's original post, but you're right that rates haven't declined as trust has improved so it's not a great fit. I do agree that de-policing probably explains more.
I would expect 911 calls to be correlated both with trust in the police and the overall crime rate- so if lower trust in the police leads to higher overall crime then depending how the correlations work it's not too implausible that 911 calls could stay at a similar level?
Yeah, I agree. I did think about this before replying to Graham initially and decided it depended whether the 911 call rate was being defined as per person or per incident of crime and just assumed he meant the latter. As you say, if the number of calls stays the same even as crime goes up, that means the calls per incident are going down, and that could be caused by lower trust levels and less police cooperation.
Good point! Do you have any stats showing there in fact was depolicing? Reduced stops etc. as you mentioned in the other comment? I found this paper, saying it did (at least in California):
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4094498
And this analysis by Reuters with nice graphs, for Minneapolis:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-policing-minneapolis/
I also wonder if you have any study on the relationship more broadly - showing that reduced stops result in more crime.
P.S. I have binged a few of your articles after seeing the original comment, and I very much appreciate your perspectives, reasoned argumentation, knowledgeableness and writing. Keep at it!
I appreciate the links and everything you've written on the topic, but why do you think so many liberal-left activists are hell-bent on abolishing police in the first place? I've been reading through your article and I keep scratching my head trying to work out how they could possibly think police abolition would serve the public interest or even be strategically advantageous for their own team.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform
Ideology has a way of turning off people’s brains.
The core ideology is that all differences in people's conditions are created by and perpetuated through an oppressive system acting against a minority's interests in favour of a majority, or of a privileged class with aristocratic like power over society
If this is how you primarily understand the world around you it follows that reducing the contact of the majority controlled system with the victim group will improve the conditions of that group. The ability of the de-policing and rise in crime correlation to potentially falsify the essential theory is the reason mainstream media are carefully reluctant to give it any priority as a factor in the crime wave
Extremely well-stated.
There was 100% wildly decreased policing in Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the crisis. Tthis could lead to a change in long term behavior because the 2-4 days of near lawlessness serve as a “proof of concept” for some people. Someone who has tried out a crime when they know they won’t get caught has got to be incredibly more likely to try that crime out again eventually. Human brains are weak.
The long term change is less obvious, but I would bet IDK 95% of my net worth that the amount of “daily boots on the ground” and level of enforcement for minor incidents went down between say 2019 and 2021. Not necessarily fewer cops (though there are in Minneapolis I think), but definitely fewer on the streets.
This was a longer term problem in both cities, but there was discontinuity before and after the riots.
In terms of the longer term problem, in maybe 2014-2015? in downtown Minneapolis we were leaving a twins game with dozens of other people in small families. Probably two dozen traffic control cops within sight. Some on foot, some on horseback, some in cars. A convoy of hoodlums in 4 SUVs blaring music runs two red lights weaving at 30-40mph through peds in crosswalks. No one was hit, but my toddler probably had a car go past them within 4ft? And very easily someone could have died, one person who dropped something and suddenly stopped moving or whatever.
None of the cops moved a muscle. And when we asked about it they were just like “it’s not worth chasing after that sort of thing”. It was eye opening. Certain parts of town the laws are different.
From a study of traffic stops in California:
"I find that the rate of stops of white drivers decreased by 16% after the protests, with the rate for black drivers falling by 45%..."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4094498
The fact that black motorists were only about half as likely to be stopped after George Floyd's death explains a lot about why black traffic fatalities skyrocketed nationally in June through December 2020.
According to the CDC, Blacks died +29% more in motor vehicle accidents in 2020 than in 2019, compared to +16% for Hispanics, +4% for whites, +3% for American Indians and -2% for Asians.
In 2021, blacks died 38% more often than in 2019, quite comparable to the 44% increase in black homicide deaths from 2019 to 2021.
On the street, BLM seems to have turned out to mean Black Lives Mangled.
In the year after George Floyd's death, traffic stops were down 74% compared to the year before. Not surprisingly, black traffic deaths are way up.
Some of that is "social distancing" due to covid, but most of it is likely the (initially) much-praised "racial reckoning."
>Overall, public approval of police in America has been remarkably stable over the last 30 years.
To the extent that the data reflects this, I think we have to be suspicious that the polling methods used to collect that data are simply too crude to reflect the changes. I live in a high-crime inner city neighborhood right now, and I've worked in others over the last several years, and spoken to people who've grown up in them, and they've testified to seeing attitudes towards police really transform in that time period.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie6r0di/
Attitudes like this can't easily be captured with a simple approve/disapprove polling question.
Thanks for all the high-quality evidence and discussion on this topic! I've really enjoyed your blog.
This is useful, and makes me more skeptical of the legitimacy hypothesis, but I'm not sure if it's definitive. Since violent crime is so concentrated, we'd really need to know how trust in police changed among people who are close to people who commit or are victimized by violent crimes.
This would follow from the lack of overall change to 911 calls if the kinds of incidents that result in deaths are similar to the kind of incidents that result in calls, but I'd honestly be surprised if this is the case (though I certainly don't know). I would speculate that a lot of 911 calls are for things like noise complaints or suspicious person complaints in low-crime areas, plus stuff like car accidents and medical emergencies.
Perhaps the most realistic way to get at this would be to see how specific types of 911 calls changed (if at all)--for instance, were people less likely after the summer of 2020 to call the police for welfare checks, or to call the police about violent disputes. If these sorts of calls didn't change, I'd be pretty convinced that the trust hypothesis doesn't explain much.
>"Why is legitimacy a problem for police, but not a problem for the media, Supreme Court, justice system at large, or public schools (all of which get lower marks in survey data than police)?"
Some of those need more cooperation from the general public than others - the power of the Supreme Court doesn't depend in any way on what the average man on the street thinks of them; police, on the other hand, need people to cooperate with them in order to be effective. (I expect that reduced trust in public schools does affect those in various ways, reducing attendance in low class people and increasing the flight to private schools in the middle and upper class).
Regarding your question of what causes public perceptions of legitimacy or illegitimacy, that's harder. I think it's obvious that police malpractice can cause distrust directly, but I also think that eg. prosecutorial decisions can affect how the public sees the cops on the ground - if a criminal is back on the streets the next day the cops are "useless" even if they're very diligent with arrests and the issue is with the DA's office
I agree the distinction is crucial and leads to divergent routes of action. I feel bad for not thinking about it before, and would not with a clear conscience say it was due to "the protests" when it could be due to the Floyd incident itself. However, Graham's comment below is pretty convincing that it could be the protests themselves.
> by holding police accountable when they do something wrong and requiring careful record-keeping.
So...you mean exactly what has happened?
Regarding the racial disparity in homicides Andrew Sullivan retweeted this recently:
https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1544375597312385024
The homicide rate right now for the black population in Chicago is at the highest recorded level since the start of modern record keeping. All those people saying that crime was much worse in the 1990's? Not for black residents of Chicago. The previous high in the 1990's was about 75 homicides per 1000 people. In 2021 that hit 85.2 incidents per 1000 people. By contrast the homicide rates for whites and Latinos are nowhere near their all-time highs.
The first question I have is whether or not this holds true for other large metropolitan areas as well. If so then aggregating homicide rates across an entire city is a mistake. The hypothesis that needs to be tested is whether or not the Chauvin/Ferguson/Freddie Grey/etc. incidents resulted in radicalization of black communities specifically rather than metropolitan populations as a whole.
Edit: more specifically poor urban black communities. If there is a historically bad epidemic of black homicides then why isn't that more apparent? After all the average US homicide rate has risen to 1996 levels but still falls short of historic highs around 1991-1992. I can think of a couple of factors. While blacks make up about 12% of the US population and have for decades the percentage of blacks living in poverty has declined sharply since the 1990's (peaking at around 31% in 1992 and declining to around 17% today). Potentially related to that with regards to Chicago specifically the black population of that city has also been in decline for decades, since at least the 1980's, even as the Latino population in that city has soared. If the twofer is urban poverty than a decrease in black poverty rates plus a change in the racial composition of cities could result in an average homicide rate that is still short of all time highs even as poor inner city communities face historic levels of devastation.
I think this is what you're saying, but to restate it in a way that's clearer to me:
(1) The decline in black poverty is associated with blacks moving out of Chicago;
(2) Those blacks who are not poor are less likely to commit crimes than those who are poor;
(3) The blacks who moved out of Chicago are wealtheir and therefore less likely to commit crimes than those who remain.
I was thinking in terms of local (Chicago) homicide statistics versus national.
1) If the per capita homicide rate for blacks living in Chicago is the highest it's ever been why isn't the overall homicide rate for all races in Chicago the highest its ever been? My guess: a declining black population that has been displaced by Latinos, and the homicide rate for Latinos is much lower.
2) At a national level, let's hypothesize that the pattern of Chicago holds true everywhere (NY, LA, New Orleans, St. Louis, etc.) If nationally blacks are experiencing the highest rates of homicide ever why isn't the national homicide rate at the same level? My guess is that homicide is concentrated among poor blacks and the black poverty rate today is half of what it was in 1992.
And I'm also guessing that as blacks attain wealth (meaning middle class levels of income) they do what the middle class has been doing all over the country: moving out of cities into the suburbs. So the issue of black poverty with regards to Chicago is related to both that city's homicide rate and its declining population of black residents.
"If the per capita homicide rate for blacks living in Chicago is the highest it's ever been why isn't the overall homicide rate for all races in Chicago the highest its ever been? My guess: a declining black population that has been displaced by Latinos, and the homicide rate for Latinos is much lower."
I don't quite know how to interpret your hypothesis, but the chart labelled "Homicides per 100,000 by race in Chicago from 1991 to 2021" here:
https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/1/3/22858995/chicago-violence-dangerous-murders-per-capita-2021-2020-surge-garfield-park-police-lori-lightfoot
Shows a huge jump in the black homicide rate in Chicago between 2015 and 2016 (I think) and a VERY small corresponding jump in the white homicide rate. Things got better over the next few years and then jumped up again for the black rate but not the white rate. The Latino rate was sorta a damped version of the black rate.
Broadly speaking, the black homicide rate in Chicago doubled between ~2014 and 2021 and the white homicide rate in Chicago did not.
Blacks make up 12% of the US population but account for around 50% of both homicide victims and perpetrators in this country. That's the context for my statement. Given that how is it possible that a massive increase in black homicides doesn't return the city to 1992 per capita homicide rates? Because the average factors in a smaller black population.
The average is hiding the real dimensions--and severity--of this problem. The black population in Chicago right now is facing its highest ever level of homicides. What happens if you discuss the problem in that light rather than deflecting with claims that homicide rates have not yet reached the highs of the 1990's?
It's highly variable by city. There's some data on page 2 of this report:
https://criminaljustice.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2020-Shootings-and-Murder-factsheet_January-2021.pdf
NYC and LA are still doing much better than the 90's, but Chicago and Philadelphia are about as bad. I'd imagine that some other places that aren't on that graph (Baltimore? St Louis?) are also near 90's peaks.
Those are just city wide stats, I don't know if anyone's looked specifically at black crime rates in NYC. Given that black crime rates tend to comprise 50%+ of the crime in general, I don't think they could be back to 90's levels in NYC.
Since law enforcement and criminal justice vary widely from city to city I would expect there to be a lot of variation. I don't know if this is true or not but I have heard that the gobs of money that poured into law enforcement in NYC in the post-911 era greatly benefited not only anti-terrorist measures but also units that focused on ordinary street crime. Certainly NYC has been an outlier before--during the mini homicide spike of 2014-2016 while murders jumped everywhere else in the country they actually declined in New York.
A couple of observations:
1) NYC has gotten progressively less black over the decades and the percentage of blacks living in poverty in the city has also declined.
2) For the purposes of the discussion here any trends pre- and post-BLM may be more obvious by examining homicide rates for the black population of NYC specifically rather than for all racial groups.
Thank you for so properly refuting the garbage analysis from Artifex0. His is a stupid idea that just won't go away despite the evidence to the contrary.
Major warning (50% of a ban)
In case you're new here, an explanation of that partial ban seems useful.
Scott's house rules are that your comment should be at least two of {kind, true, necessary}. He tends to view language like "garbage analysis" and "stupid idea" as unkind, and the bar for necessary is pretty high; you've basically got to add new ideas or new information.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/register-of-bans
Thanks for _charitably_ explaining 'our' rules about charity :)
> If you have some clever reason why Central America is also a bad comparison, then please find me any major country
Noted, we should do more homework as a rule. We DO appreciate you doing the (occasionally tedious) research - it's still much better that somebody does it, and it helps a lot in fostering a culture of doing it. Even if it's a slow process.
Speaking of, I noticed recently my google-fu is lagging behind the times. Can you maybe do a post on "how to research"? Including stuff you find obvious or simple, like what sites you go first, or what tool you use to quickly generate a graph. For example: I realized annoyingly late that on sci-hub you should search by DOI, and not by paper title.
Second this - getting a "how to find 'good' research" would be incredibly valuable. It's easy to find papers - but I'm not sure how to find the 'general consensus today' type of results that would be valuable.
I "third" this. I find Scott's ability to find studies, graphs, then apply "proper study hygiene" rules to those studies nothing short of magical. I would very much enjoy a long-form essay that is just going through "here's a hypthesis, here's exactly how I find N studies about it, here's the basic rules I apply to filter those studies into M good ones and S bad ones, here's how I get useful insights from the S bad ones, here's how I reject the non-useful insights from the M good ones."
Gwern has an excellent post on Google-Fu! https://www.gwern.net/Search
It's not Scott's method, but this post is very useful in its own right.
Gwern has LOTS of useful articles/essays like that!
For anyone not already familiar with Gwern, take a 'stroll' around his site sometime. If you like this blog, you'll probably like Gwern's site too.
How do you reconcile this
> I don’t really think of this as an alternative explanation. I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected.
And this?
> My claim is that this is false. It is not difficult to assign priority. The protests were the primary cause, with the other two being minor contributors at most. When I say the media is getting this issue wrong, I mean that they’re saying things like this.
In the first you're saying that there was a homicide spike as a result of the events that occurred right around Floyd's killing, and in the second you're saying specifically that it's the protests (keep in mind the comment to which you responded with the "agnostic" point is saying that it is *not* the protests). My reaction to the initial post was that you can't disentangle the protests themselves with other things that happened at the same time. You say you're agnostic between those things, but then also that it was the protests.
This leads to another issue I had, which is a question of which groups have agency and which are merely reacting to other stuff. In the "BLM did it" version of events, BLM protests lead to police doing their jobs less which leads to more crime - this is interpreted as "it's because of BLM". Assigning BLM agency to cause things to happen, and the police actions as being a natural reaction to outside events. Why not treat the *protests* as a natural reaction to outside events, same as you do with police doing their jobs less, and the *cause of the protests* as being the ultimate culprit?
When a negative event is a result of the actions of multiple people (or groups), often each person/group will characterize their own actions as being a mere *reaction* to someone else, and the *other* group as the real cause of the bad thing. The question becomes, who do you blame / put the onus on to change? Usually the answer is "whoever I sympathize with the least" but it's often not examined all that much.
Insofar as the "natural reaction" vs "agency" distinction makes sense, it also would generally be the case that the higher the number of people doing something, the more on the "natural reaction" side it is. If 10 million people all have the same reaction to an event, it's more likely a "natural reaction" than some hidden agenda they all happen to share.
The BLM protests were pretty spontaneous, and while there are people always pushing for protests in the aftermath of police injustice and there was a lot of positive media coverage, that's true of many other similar protests in the past, i.e., it's not like CNN can press a button and cause massive nationwide protests or it would have happened that way numerous times before.
Well this gets at what I said above "insofar as the ... distinction makes sense". If someone wants to say the distinction doesn't make sense that's fine with me, but if they're going to, then do it consistently.
I think this is what rubs me the wrong way about the original post. Along with the fact that this is all about correlation and very little reasoning about causal pathways (Graham's comments and blog start to get at the causal pathway but there is a lot of ??? involved between the BLM protests happened and then murder rate going up.
Why is it that the cause was arbitrarily chosen as the BLM protests and not the event(s) that sparked the BLM protests?
Well the BLM riots are one clearly defined phenomenon, whereas the causes of those riots are as multifaceted as the causes of WW1.
Sure, the most easily identified cause in both cases was some guy killing some other guy in a city street, but there was a lot more going on in both cases.
Presumably because the BLM protestors made specific demands (defund the police) which politicians partially undertook to do (no more traffic stops etc).
It is the result of those specific decisions which can be analysed and used to inform future law and order policy.
Agreed. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think another factor was that the ritualistic denunciations of the US as a "white supremacist," "systemically racist," " and other variations of the kind of slightly deranged, overheated rhetoric that began pouring out of the chattering classes around May of 2020 sent the message to people who didn't know any better that, as an aggrieved minority subject to an unjust and illegitimate system of oppression, they weren't morally obligated to follow its laws, and that in fact not following its laws was a justifiable form of political activism. Maybe the step back in policing was the bigger factor, but I can't believe that trying to delegitimize most of American society and its history didn't contribute to the situation, either.
In that context, though, it's worth noting that "American society" was not following its own official rules. The claims that it was engaging in "an unjust and illegitimate system of oppression" are basically claims that "We believed that we were a country of laws, and you ignore them when convenient", which is nearly true, if not unusual.
This is *one* reason why computers can't (yet) handle legal cases. The written laws are not the actual laws. Consider the difficulty people are having in trying to train an AI to be "unbiased". The database that they are trained against is corrupt (in the sense that it's not unbiased).
I'm not sure what "nearly true if not unusual" means in this context, but based on what I think you're trying to say, let me make a few points:
1. I think the US has a generalized problem with holding police accountable, due to factors like qualified immunity, the influence of police unions in local politics, and the deferential attitude of many judges/prosecutors towards individual police officers. This has nothing to do with race. You can look at the work Radley Balko has been doing for over a decade for evidence of this.
2. That said, the impact of a lack of accountability does fall more on black and Hispanic people because they have more interactions with police and thus are on the receiving end of the rough stuff more per capita than other groups. However, this is difficult to separate from the fact that they also have higher rates of criminal offense than other groups, too, so *of course* police are going to focus their time and attention on members of these groups.
3. Roland Fryer's research shows that black and Hispanic men were subject to more frequent uses of force by police (nearly 50%), but that may in large part be due to higher rates of non-compliance with police (ie, when they tell you to put your hands on the hood of the car, just do it, eh, and don't make a big thing of it), because he also found no racial disparity in the use of lethal force.
https://www.hoplofobia.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2018-An-Empirical-Analysis-of-Racial-Differences-in-Police-Use-of-Force.pdf
If you wanted to be tendentious, you could say that all of those murders were Derek Chauvin's fault.
I suspect that a very different group of people would be just as angry about that framing as the "it's caused by the BLM protests" framing.
The fact is that we don't really know whether lots of widely publicised protests (and a few riots) were the cause or widely publicised failures of policing and excessive force by police.
One other plausible causal path: Chauvin used excessive force. Lots of other police saw that and backed off on the use of force and aggression as part of their policing practice because they recognised Chauvin as bad, but the police that backed off were not the aggressive ones who were using excessive force, and the result was that they started underpolicing.
That's a causal path that doesn't involve the protests at all.
That last part particularly galls me. The Capitol Hill riots on Jan 6 were a significant event, but the BLM riots were not only longer, more extensive, and inflicted far more damage to lives and property, but also involved storming the White House while calling for Trump to be lynched a year beforehand. Why was this not construed as an 'assault on democracy'? Has anything resembling the same level of effort gone toward prosecuting those responsible? And why did Big Tech and the FBI crack down on the Jan 6 organisers immediately, while allowing BLM and Antifa to rampage virtually unchecked for months on end? Who the hell is calling the shots here?
The difference is pretty obvious? "Rioting to overturn a legitimate election in favor of your wannabe autocrat" is a super super different than "rioting to protest rampant racist police brutality that's going unchecked by the state".
The sane world wants elections not to be cheated and police not to murder people, hence, it condemns the first riot and sympathizes with the second.
A mob boss saying "Guido, Fredo, you two go kill Jack McCoy" is committing a crime, whereas a firebrand saying to a crowd, "Fuck the police, kill them all" is probably just exercising his constitutionally protected right to free speech (at least under American law). Reason being, the mob boss intends and reasonably expects that his words will result in Jack McCoy being killed in the near future, whereas the firebrand is just trying to make people angry and doesn't expect that any prompt mass murder of police will occur.
It is highly unlikely that the White House protesters really expected that Donald Trump would be lynched. And, again, they're allowed to be angry and to use hyperbolic language about killing people to express their anger. Trespassing is still a crime, and maybe disorderly conduct, but that's about it.
The 1/6 protesters seem to have expected that their actions would result in senators. and the Vice President, would at minimum be violently intimidated into changing their votes in a specific proceeding and thus the outcome of an election. That is a crime, and a fairly serious one.
Words coordinating action are different than words expressing emotion, and trespassing with intent to commit more serious crimes is different than trespassing for the sake of trespassing (and expressing emotion).
Is Trump supposed to be the mob boss in this analogy, or the firebrand? For guidance, how much of a twitter following do you need to have before you count as the former?
Chauvin may have used excessive force and you could probably make a reasonable argument for that and/or incompetence contributing to Floyd's death, thereby leading to a Felony Homicide conviction by technicality. But the prosecution team at his trial didn't make this argument. They tried to argue that Chauvin was the dumbest murderer in recorded history and intentionally chose to snuff out his victim's life with a dozen eye-witnesses present and several cameras rolling. And then they trotted out an 'expert witness' who stated that a normal and healthy person subjected to the same method of restraint would have died, which anyone with half a brain (and Steven Crowder) can disprove trivially. It was an absolute fucking circus.
I don't think anyone disputes that a lot of cops became warier about getting entangled with suspects and/or flat-out resigned in the wake of the Chauvin trial, but the public sentiment that caused the video to go viral in the first place and led to immense public pressure being placed on the justice system to secure a conviction can't realistically be separated from the BLM memeplex.
Has anyone actually tested the method of restraint Chauvin used?
I guess I'm surprised that the country that ate tide pods and did the milk crate challenge didn't make a Youtube trend of people kneeling on each other's necks for 9 minutes to see what happens.
What happens if you do that to an average person that's not on fentanyl? Can you die of asphyxia while still being able to speak? What precisely is the mechanism of death?
"Has anyone actually tested the method of restraint Chauvin used?"
Yes. Yes they have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh5joodocmc&ab_channel=America
Setting that aside, American police use this method of restraint hundreds of times every day on resisting suspects, and they use this method of restraint because it is less harmful than the alternatives and very, very unlikely to kill you. The notion claimed at the trial that this is practice is inherently dangerous is ludicrous.
Thanks! That definitely updates my position towards "Floyd died from overdose".
Possible objections:
I think Chauvin's right knee was on the ground, not Floyd's back? Hard for me to tell from the footage.
Someone in respiratory distress might still have survived in a different position, and Chauvin was negligent for not repositioning Floyd when he stopped talking/moving/breathing.
>Why is it that the cause was arbitrarily chosen as the BLM protests and not the event(s) that sparked the BLM protests?
Because then you're saying that in response to a black man being killed, black people directly decided to kill a bunch of black people in response. If that's the path you want to take, fine by me, but it's completely unintuitive and it paints black people in an extraordinarily bad light.
A black criminal dying in an encounter with the police happens about every other day.
In contrast, hundreds of riots across the country for months with most of the national elite excusing them as "mostly peaceful protests" is not something that happens all the time.
The third unusual event of 2020 beside covid and the riots was the exceptionally fervid presidential election and the bizarrely biased media coverage that accompanied it. I think that had a lot to do with how long it took the Establishment to recognize their egging on the "social justice protests" was getting a lot of people killed. A whole lot of the Establishment planned on using charges of racism to drive Trump from office, so they had an exceptional amount invested in their narrative and thus couldn't admit even to themselves how badly they were messing the country up by promoting BLM.
To be fair, the 'other two' in the second comment are gun sales and the pandemic. Neither of which fall into the causal pathways which he claims to be agnostic about. Although I think really, he was just overly hedging there and feels that the police trust explanation isn't correct but didn't examine it fully.
Edit - Thinking about it for more than a minute (and being a bit more charitable), maybe he was just saying that reduced trust is downstream of the protests? That would make his strong position on the protests more compatible with his soft position on the police trust effect.
Maybe that's what he thinks, but what he said is that he's agnostic to whether it's the protests or the police/trust thing.
While my edit sort of refuted the point I was making there, I guess I can expand on that idea a little bit as well.
The hypothetical that I was reasoning from; Scott has been responding to a Gish Gallop where the null hypothesis is that he is wrong (and a bad person) over these two posts. Assuming he thinks the police trust issue is downstream of protests, assuming he did not know how to easily evaluate it, assuming he was getting a bit tired at this point, etc. He attempts to 'hedge' and says he is agnostic because that sounds less bad than, 'I disagree but don't have a good argument yet'.
Of course, upon reflection, it was poor form for me to assume so much about his internal states; I was just speculating on the apparent incongruity between his seemingly firm stance that the protests are the most important cause and his statement of agnosticism. Basically, I thought he said he was agnostic 'under duress', and I was trying to convey that, but I accidentally hit the post button after writing the first word and then went to edit rather than delete (My reach exceeded my grasp) which forced me to try and complete a very incomplete thought quickly.
right, but that's perfectly compatible with being sure that it's *not* caused by Covid or gun sales. One can be agnostic between a limited subset of options while being confident in ruling out others.
What about the standard test of "that without which the following would not have happened"?
There have been pandemics before without massive spikes in murder rates. There have been riots before without massive spikes in the murder rates. There have been police killings of (armed and un-armed, dangerous and non-dangerous) people before without a spike in murder rates.
The pandemic was around for several months before the May Murder Extravaganza, so its relatively easy to discard the pandemic as a cause. If you are hell-bent on blaming Covid, can you hypothesize the causal mechanism that would lead to murders increasing at a significant time lag from the pandemic and from lockdowns? Note that it must not be applicable to any other pandemic, nor any other country.
I think Scott did enough to show that increasing gun sales wasn't driving the excess shootings. As a side note, I'd love to see a breakdown of how many of the homicides-by-gun were from recently purchased guns, and how many were legally purchased. Gun sales is a broad category that covers everything from rifles to shotguns to pistols. The majority of murders use pistols. Most of those pistols aren't legally acquired. So a spike in legal rifle sales has no bearing on a spike in pistol killings.
The BLM-lead protests/riots in the summer of 2020 were different from previous protests and riots in their focus specifically on the police, specifically their defunding and replacement. The municipalities that complied with those demands in any amount of half-measures lead the murder spike. Areas with less "police reform" had smaller spikes.
In short, the best causal explanation available is that the BLM protests drove the murder spike. Further detailed explanation would be great, but we will never get there if people insist that the pandemic is equally blameworthy and therefore investigating the protests effects on crime is pointless, or even worse motivated by political hostility.
"The BLM-lead protests/riots in the summer of 2020 were different from previous protests and riots in their focus specifically on the police, specifically their defunding and replacement. The municipalities that complied with those demands in any amount of half-measures lead the murder spike. Areas with less "police reform" had smaller spikes. "
Do you have a source for the "areas with less police reform" thing? I've read a lot of things claiming this is the case, but they all in essence say "these areas defunded the police and then saw more murders" when (i) not clear they did in fact defund the police and (ii) more importantly, the spike in crime seems to be pretty broad, including in rural areas, including areas that did not defund the police.
As for what's different this time, I think the answer is that per Scott's original post high-profile police killings, protests, heavy-handed responses to the protests, have happened before, and have resulted in spikes in murder rate. This one was bigger because the killing was more infamous, the protests broader, the heavy-handed responses more widespread - the same pattern as previously but bigger in every way. And yeah if you pay attention in the past you see similar anti-police rhetoric in response to the other ones.
As for why it was "bigger" it probably was the pandemic, but it doesn't really matter if it was the pandemic or something else to the above reasoning.
That said I don't think this changes my original point that Scott is contradicting himself, or that, in short, there's this disconnect between "cause" and "blame" going on.
1) for the difference between areas that did and didn't defend the police, compare Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, and Minneapolis (to name a few) to places like Boston, Tallahassee, Tampa, or Svannah. The per capita increases in the former exceed the later. It's a massive coincidence if the anti-police rhetoric of the former municipalities had no role in the larger increase in murders when compared to the later municipalities who mostly rejected the anti-police rhetoric (lovely defined by finding elected officials in each city who openly backed BLM and argued for defending the police).
2) for your point that it's "not clear they did in fact defund the police"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/seattle-city-council-defunds-the-police-again-11638572886
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-botched-experiment-with-defund-the-police-now-could-mean-unwinding-10000-tows/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-cities-adding-funds-to-police-departments
https://m.startribune.com/minneapolis-police-spending-rises-as-defund-movement-fades/600126143/?clmob=y&c=n&clmob=y&c=n
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/05/politics/defund-the-police-democrats/index.html
So did they not defund the police and American media is suffering mass hallucination that various city councils and mayors decreased police budgets and ordered police departments to police less?
Should the previous sampling of just the first line of Google results be unsatisfactory, I recommend you try it for yourself. Even CNN and MSNBC, liberal bastions that initially promoted defending the police and brought us memorable lines like "Firey but Mostly Peaceful" admit that defending the police had some bad consequences.
3) you're back to blaming the pandemic for an effect not observed in any other country, or in any other pandemic in American history. And as I said in my first comment, acknowledging the causes of an issue is part of addressing it. If the pandemic is the cause, then there's no public policy solution to bringing the murder rate down. The pandemic is over and murder will eventually return to its 1990-2018 patter of secular decline. If, instead, the public endorsement of things like "defund the police" and "racial equity justice" in policing caused the murder increase, then there is a public policy solution - stop doing things that encourage police to de-police, or stop doing things that encourage the public to view the police as the enemy. The list of things cities could do to decrease the murder rate is long and well-recited. But the first step to recovery is admitting theres a problem
On places defunding the police, I'm not saying that it didn't happen anywhere, I'm saying that a lot of the sources I've reading claiming a connection make very overbroad claims that amount to the idea that police defunding happened everywhere, or most places, or something like that.
In terms of the comparison, the below link claims that red states had a higher increase in murder rate than blue states. Of course "blue state vs red state" isn't the same as "defunded the police vs not" but probably correlated (and the statewide metric has the advantage of not neglecting rural areas).
https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem
On the pandemic, I'm not saying "pandemic led directly to crime wave" but rather "pandemic led to larger response to Floyd's killing which led to crime wave". That is perfectly consistent with it not happening in other countries or other pandemics. And while we're at it, it's also perfectly consistent with an interpretation of events that blames BLM for everything.
And more generally as to things that cause a decline in murder rate - "stop doing things that encourage the public to view the police as the enemy" - you can't force people to think the police are doing a good job. People thinking otherwise has a long history, the song came out in 1988! The idea that the police are hostile towards non-police clearly comes from individuals' interactions with the police, and it predated anything that MSNBC said on the topic.
It seems for lots of people, what they want is *deference* to the police. Nobody says anything about how, e.g., the police clearance rate has been going down for years, before all the George Floyd stuff, and "solving murders" seems like a core police function. Even with Uvalde, the same anti-defund people often haven't gotten around to criticizing the police sitting around while a mass shooter kills children, except in the most gentle and sanitized terms. Mostly instead trying to say why it's BLM's fault.
Among the many problems with the article you linked.
1) the red states with large murder increases include places like Louisiana (New Orleans), Illinois (Chicago), and Missouri (St Louis). The cities drive the murder rates for those states.
2) "Increase in murder rate" depends on base rates. An increase from 10 to 15 is a greater rate increase than from 20 to 25
3) the violence disparity between Appalachian whites and New England whites is well covered. I recommend Albion's Seed (reviewed by Scott on SSX before) and American Nations. So the article burys a lot of facts under snappy jabs like "there's more murders in Kentucky than San Fransisco"
We must be reading different writers on the Uvalde shooting. Most right-wing writers I read were up in arms about the police response the day the shooting happened. Not one has attempted to link it to BLM in any way. The loonies tried to run with the story that the shooter was a repressed transgender because they aren't very good at research. But not much BLM-blaming from what I saw.
As to your other point, it's obviously difficult to induce behavior, especially love for police. But that's hardly a free pass to let politicians encourage people to hate the police. Exaggerating the incidence and severity of police violence, declaring the racial reckoning to be a moral crusade and all actions in its service to be morally good, etc. These fall in the irresponsible category. Defending the actions of most police instead of calling for blood whenever anything happens would count as reasonable. Read the linked posts from Graham for an actual cop's explanation of what happens when you tell the average Joe that he doesn't need to listen to cops anymore unless he really feels like listening to them.
"1) the red states with large murder increases include places like Louisiana (New Orleans), Illinois (Chicago), and Missouri (St Louis). The cities drive the murder rates for those states. "
I don't think Illinois is a red state. Also from the below links and the populations of Louisiana and New Orleans you can back out the homicide rate of Louisiana-minus-New-Orleans in 2020, and it is still good for number 1 in country (also did New Orleans defund the police? From what I can tell they lowered the police budget, but not as an ideological thing, as part of broad-based budget cuts and many non-police things were cut even more, so whatever you make of that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate
https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_ad846f9a-4b7c-11eb-8937-f3b1be3eebaa.html
"2) "Increase in murder rate" depends on base rates. An increase from 10 to 15 is a greater rate increase than from 20 to 25"
What measurement would you propose? You already have talked about things in terms of increase rather than overall rate, are you saying absolute increase rather than percent increase? Not clear to me why you'd do it that way.
But even if you did, the article makes clear that red states on average have higher murder rates and higher percentage increases in their murder rate in 2020, which implies higher absolute increase in murder in 2020 as well.
"3) the violence disparity between Appalachian whites and New England whites is well covered. I recommend Albion's Seed (reviewed by Scott on SSX before) and American Nations. So the article burys a lot of facts under snappy jabs like "there's more murders in Kentucky than San Fransisco""
Like I said it is measuring increase not just absolute level. The increase in murder rate in Kentucky in 2020 was 6th highest in the country apparently (again, in a previous comment you used increase in murder rate as an important number), CA was middle of the pack.
On Uvalde - I don't have any data or objective measurement or whatever but I saw a lot of "this is what happens when you criticize/defund/question/etc the police", and not a lot of anger over the fact that they've apparently been doing a lot of covering up and intimidating witnesses.
As for politicians and liking the police, politicians usually reflect what people generally think. Does anyone think that maybe the police have any responsibility towards people not liking them, or is it always the dastardly politicians, you know that beloved and trusted group? People can see videos online or things with their own eyes and ears, that is a bigger effect than what some politician says.
"Defending the actions of most police instead of calling for blood whenever anything happens would count as reasonable"
I must point out, I"m sure most cops' actions are defensible but the same is definitely true of the protesters around the time of Floyd's death, many of my friends protested and they didn't do illegal stuff they just went and marched and held up signs and all that, but the whole "mostly peaceful" thing is a total punchline on the right. Most people on the right I see comment act like anyone who's ever said they support BLM personally burned down a building.
But it seems in this telling, any criticism of cops is definitionally unreasonable, which isn't sustainable.
The pandemic could easily be a major cause. The time lag isn't difficult to explain. The pandemic, over time, caused a lot of people to lose their jobs, which put them under increased stress. Being under increased stress cause them to have less control over their tempers, and to be willing to take larger chances to get more money.
This clearly happened. Whether the timing works out, I don't know, but the delayed action effect is quite reasonable.
(I also don't know what the lockdowns were like in various places, but I do know that increased time under lockdown tends to increase stress levels. There are various other indirect effects, like continually changing rules of behavior for reasons that many find difficult to understand. I think, though, that most of those are of lesser significance.
The lockdowns started at different times and in differing intensities. But the murder spike very clearly happened at the same time all over the country. Are you suggesting lockdown induced stress just happened to increase the likelihood of committing murder at precisely varying rates across different states so as to allow for all outbreaks of stress-provoked violence to begin at the exact same time, the Memorial Day weekend?
I'm suggesting that there were a large number of separate events that increased stress, and then there was a sharp interaction that pushed a lot of people over the edge at the same time. Which way they bent depended on lots of individual differences. There were several major attractors that gathered large and noticeable streams of people. When the dam breaks and a river floods, different parts of the bank react differently. Some houses are washed away, some have a flooded basement, some are beyond where the flood waters reach. They wouldn't have happened if the dam hadn't broken. The dam wouldn't have broken if there hadn't been an extra heavy rainfall, you can trace things back as far as you want, and the chain of causation is unbroken. This doesn't mean you could predict it in advance, though you can often make an estimate. (I've moved from places that I thought too dangerous.)
So. The rise in murders is related to the stuff that went before. No one piece of that stuff is sufficient in and of itself, but as a part of the context it is a component. At the moment the relevant name I'm remembering is Rodney King. The event wasn't that unusual, he was killed by police on camera. But it happened in a setting that was closer to the edge than usual, so it resulted in an explosion, called "The Watts Riots". I know that the riots were accompanied by looting, it wouldn't surprise me if there was also a rise in homicides, though I've never checked. They're all related, and it's a composite. You can't legitimately pick out any one piece and say "This caused it". There were probably lots of different ways that things could have been shifted into a less explosive pattern. Something that gave people who though their situation was hopeless a reason to hope would probably have done that. But I said "reason to hope" rather than "cause to hope". It doesn't matter how it appears to an external observer, what matters is how it appears to those embedded in the situation.
1. Other countries had the pandemic too and NONE of them experienced a homicide spike, even ones where the population are poorer than black americans (i.e. most non-western countries)
2. The 2008 recession saw a DECREASE in crime, not an increase, the opposite of what would be predicted based on your argument
3. The homicide increase was a spike that happened shortly after the BLM protests/riots. It would be an enormous coincidence if the pandemic just happened to cause this around the same time after not having done so previously.
4. The Ferguson effect in Ferguson was not preceded by an economic downturn, so you need *an entirely different explanation* for that than the one you're using here.
"This clearly happened"
No, it clearly did NOT happen. Your argument contradicts four massive, crucial pieces of empirical evidence.
You're focusing on "economic welfare". That's important to survival, but it's not what people react to except in a survival situation. What they react to is relative perceived social standing.
The pandemic was one of a number of stressors. It was a real stressor, and amplified the effects of other concurrent stressors.
When you deny "this clearly happened", it's not clear to me what you could be denying. I find it difficult to believe that you are denying that the pandemic imposed stresses, like job losses and isolation and rule changes that many saw as arbitrary. Or that this continued over a long period of time with a resulting build-up of tensions.
Now if you're saying that that is not, in and of itself, sufficient cause, then I will agree with you. If you're saying it's not a factor that adds to other factors, then I believe you are wrong.
FWIW, in a stable society an economic downturn that's perceived to be a shared problem has been reported to result in less crime than a rising economy. Clearly there are limits to this, as when it turns into a survival situation, people will do what they feel they must to survive.
It was my impression that riots usually are accompanied by an increase in the homicide rate, since riots are essentially mass lawbreaking that overwhelms the ability of police to respond. There can be more temporary riots like sports riots which don't have lasting effects, but I think the riots of the 60s occurred while homicide went up.
The homicide spike lasted longer than the riots though - something else has to be going on
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/08/the-baltimore-tipping-point.html
The difference most people are highlighting is that the murder rate/ crime more generally has not subsided. The murder rates in 2021 and 2022 are well above the 2010-2019 rates. So whatever drove up the murder rates was durable enough to keep them elevated. That's why many people, including me, assign more blame to the BLM activist movement than to the pandemic and lockdowns. Lockdowns went away, covid deaths are moving seasonally, but murders are staying up.
Telling a large percentage of the American population that they don't need to listen to cops and can kill/assault/rob at will with minimal consequences (both literally saying that and demonstrating it by refusing to prosecute rioters or the mass looters in LA and other cities) is the sort of thing that would predictably lead to an increase in things like murder, assault, and robbery.
According to Gun Violence Archive, through July 4, 2022 there were 40% more gun homicides year to date in the U.S. than year-to-date through July 4, 2019.
So there hasn't been a homicide "spike" because that implies a rapid rise and fall. Instead, since May 25, 2020 there hasn't been homicide plateau -- killings have stabilized at a dramatically higher level than before the Second BLM Era.
One comment is about how it is clear is is not gun sales or the pandemic and the NYT intimates.
The other is that he is agnostic about the exact nexus between depolicing, riots, lack of trust, etc.
He doesn't just say it's not gun sales or the pandemic, he says it IS the protests. Then separately he says he's agnostic between it being the protests and it being a decline in trust (i.e. not the protests).
Decline in trust spurred on by the protests/BLM movement
>> This leads to another issue I had, which is a question of which groups have agency and which are merely reacting to other stuff. In the "BLM did it" version of events, BLM protests lead to police doing their jobs less which leads to more crime - this is interpreted as "it's because of BLM". Assigning BLM agency to cause things to happen, and the police actions as being a natural reaction to outside events. Why not treat the *protests* as a natural reaction to outside events, same as you do with police doing their jobs less, and the *cause of the protests* as being the ultimate culprit?
This was my biggest issue in the last thread as well. A lot of "your side has agency and is to blame, my side has natural reactions and is blameless," when in fact everybody involved has agency. The police weren't forced to pull back any more than the protesters were forced to get out into the streets, or Derek Chauvin was forced to kill George Floyd, or bad actors in the communities were forced to take advantage of the police pullback to commit more crimes. Nothing's a "natural reaction," it's agency agency agency all the way down - the blame game just seems like an empty rhetorical game to me.
The BLM organization is not run by masterminds, it's run by not particularly bright people who aren't very good at filling out their tax forms and avoiding bad publicity over how they spend money.
More of the blame lies with the American Establishment for wanting the "racial reckoning" to happen for ideological and partisan reasons.
>ssigning BLM agency to cause things to happen, and the police actions as being a natural reaction to outside events. Why not treat the *protests* as a natural reaction to outside events, same as you do with police doing their jobs less, and the *cause of the protests* as being the ultimate culprit?
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BLM ACTIVISTS WANTED. They WANTED less police. They WANTED less police interacting with black people. They got what they want, and when it resulted in a bunch black people murdering each other, so they turned around and blamed the police. You're having your cake and eating it too here.
All caps does not just magically make one group exclusively at fault for something with multiple interacting causes. Observe:
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT POLICE WANTED. They WANTED to pull back. They CHOSE to interact less with black people. They got what they wanted (when it resulted in a bunch of black people being murdered), so that they can trade in an environment where people are scrutinizing how police use power for one where people are begging police to come back in force. You're having your cake and eating it too here.
'The protests' are the whole social/cultural/political 'bundle' of related 'things' all entangled together – or that's how I'm interpreting Scott.
In a real sense tho, the _actual real-world (and online) protests_ were a natural 'Schelling point' for the subsequent consequences, e.g. via build 'common knowledge' about 'what everyone knows'.
Wonder if Canada had a big rise in murder. I can't find any up to date stats. We did have a lot of simultaneous protests.
My prediction... a smaller increase than the US of A, but an increase nonetheless. Also an increase in traffic fatalities.
Ah, traffic increase was easy to find, big spike. Murder rate, nothing seems up to date.
The Toronto Police Service seems to independently publish homicide data for the city (https://data.torontopolice.on.ca/pages/homicide), updated through the end of 2021. That's not universal, but Toronto is Canada's largest city so I'd expect any trend to also be present there.
To my eye, there's no evidence for a pandemic homicide spike, and certainly not one that obviously begins in mid-2020.
That page won't load for me.
I agree that a Canadian murder spike should be reflected in Toronto stats big-time. Taking you at your word that it's not, that is a problem with this prediction. And an issue with Scott's theory too, because I'd say Canada had as big protests as the USA (per capita), resulting in a big pull-back in policing.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-homicide-rate-statistics-canada-1.6262423
There was. Though some places actually had a drop and others had a very big rise.
Now, if you take out the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, it's a lot smaller.
They also note that the crime-severity index went down but homicides went up - there were fewer lower-level crimes, but more murders.
Also, guys, all I had to do was Google "Canada homicide spike." Try harder. lol
It could be instructive to have some analysis of motives in these homicides.
Are such records kept?
I don’t know, but if someone is caught it should be recorded somewhere.
Agree; I suspect there's a lot to be learned by doing a deep dive on many individual cases. Even simply reading the news reports might be enough to help untangle some of these questions.
One thing I did in 2020 is to actually read through case by case police killing incidents pulled randomly, not ones that were national scandals. Really changes your perspective.
What was your impression from those?
That the vast majority of police shootings are justified and that the controversial or problematic ones are a very small percentage.
Lots of “police called to house of dude with shotgun screaming at neighbors who has kids in his house”. Police try to talk him down and get kids out, man start’s shooting at police, police kill him. Turns out dude has 4 prior convictions for resisting arrest, 3 domestic violence priors and once stabbed someone in a bar and served 3 years.
Lots of drug dealer nodding off in car who when approached by police picks up pistol and points it at them. Has 17 prior charges including weapons, drugs, discharging a weapon dangerously (shot generally towards some people) etc.
Shit like that.
Just long lists of people society is better off without. And maybe 1/20 is slightly questionable and 1/100 really troublesome. Which given what the actual job is seems like a super good rate to me.
I feel like 70% of society would have a nervous breakdown by their 5th domestic violence call.
People screaming at each other, everyone lying, tons of tension, maybe a weapon involved maybe not. It’s like dealing with ill behaved 12 year olds (I did a week of ride alongs in a rural area 15 years ago).
Think about even law abiding citizens. What is the first think a large portion of them do as soon as they get pulled over. Immediately start brainstorming “how much of a lie can I get way with?”. Think about dealing with that all day every day.
re: Think about dealing with that all day every day.
Also think about why they react that way.
Is there a better way things could be organized? I was just reading about somewhere (Detroit?) that was having good success by having minor incidents handled by a mental health counseling group. (I think this was in Science News, but it was the print edition, and probably a couple of weeks old.)
I for sure think some things cops are sent to should probably have counselors sent. I also think that likely this will lead to a couple counselors getting killed each year.
Is a couple of counselors worth a dozen criminals? Tough question. Though maybe the counselors also get better results.
Hey, thanks. I don't know if I want to call this 'good news', but probably better than police just wildly shooting around. One caveat is, it's police reports, isn't it? In some cases it might be clear-cut, and in others it might be difficult to get at the facts: was the drug dealer, who had been sleeping a second before, killed when he pointed his gun at a police officer, or already hit by 3 bullets when he reached for it? With only police and the dead dealer around, how would you know if they put the inconvenient truth into the report (remember what you just wrote about lying).
Yeah, I certainly think of this as a very hard job.
I would be much more relaxed about everything being okay, if the really problematic cases wouldn't get that much blow-back, but just get a clear condemnation of everybody involved.
I am sure there are some cases where the drug dealer didn’t actually reach for their gun. Or police were just sacred confused. Neither of those seem like a big issue to me. So 100 extra career criminals die a year, on the scale of the United States it just tends to not actually be an actual issue.
Don’t want to get shot by cops, don’t commit crimes and have weapons i your person? Works 99.999% of the time!
I went through all the police shootings of unarmed black victims for 2 years and wrote a blog post detailing each case:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/these-are-the-unarmed-black-victims-of-police-brutality-1dcea5f99b74
I haven't gone back and done the same for 2020 or 2021. Maybe give it a try? It's a good exercise to just go to the Washington Post's police shootings database and pick cases at random (whether white or black or armed or unarmed), I think it gives a much better understanding of the average police shooting than simply focusing on some of the most heavily publicized cases.
After you've done that, it might also be interesting to compare those numbers to public perceptions of police brutality, and ask how well people understand the scale of the problem:
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1364024711592738817
Well and even the “unarmed black victims” is just a small subset of all the shootings.
Thanks. The 'unarmed' victim is of course a case more easy to look at. Being far away from US media and debates, I in fact suspected most victims to be armed. I find it easy to imagine that heated media debates or even a lot of articles lead to skewed interpretation of the numbers.
I stumbled across this sentence of yours: 'Many of the victims were fleeing the scene of the crime, on foot or by car.' I mean, that's horrible. If you're fleeing, isn't this the opposite from actively endangering a police officers' life (in most cases)?
If you have a weapon and the cops are trying to atop you and you run and are shooting back absolutely deadly force should be authorized.
And I honestly suspect from a utilitarian perspective often society would be better off regardless.
Would society be better off or worse off if someone who robbed a bank with a gun and shot two people (maybe they lived and maybe they didn’t) is fleeing and tosses the gun, but police shoot them so they can catch them.
I think it's highly dependent on the circumstances. Take the recent shooting of Jayland Walker:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8HfS2jZ0RU
Walker fled from the police by car, fired one shot during the pursuit, then fled on foot, then was shot while running. He left his gun in his car before running.
Depending on how you want to categorize that, you could call it "unarmed black man shot in the back by police" or "police shoot fleeing suspect believed to be armed and dangerous".
I tried going through some of the "fleeing by car" suspects and found a number that were, say, driving towards an officer. And also found some where the officer was in no personal danger. I've not tried to categorize the circumstances of each one.
One thing that concerns me is that a lot of the police atrocities we've seen involved the police lying about it in their incident reports and trying to cover it up.
I think it's *likely* that most police killings are justified and unobjectionable, but it's also true that that's what the data would say, *regardless of whether it is actually true or not*.
I would be more worried about this if in a huge portion of the camera cases that are VERY CONTROVERSIAL and get big frenzies whipped up, the behavior doesn’t seem that abnormal to me. Certainly cops sometimes fuck up or behave horribly. But even in the cases that are selected for public outcry, when there is video more often than not they aren’t that bad.
Someone elsewhere in the comments mentioned a case where police decided to just go out in an unmarked car and shoot people with rubber bullets without provocation, beat up a guy who had already surrendered, and then lied about the whole thing in their official reports (fortunately there was bodycam footage which revealed the truth). And that's not even a famous incident - I'd never heard of it before!
And that's hardly the only case of police caught lying. If anything, it's the rule, not the exception - if the police realize there's anything people might question later, *of course* they'll try to cover it up. The only difference now is that they often get caught due to bodycams and bystanders with cellphones. But that only happens if people bother to investigate.
You evidence police lying is the rule not the exception is what exactly?
For weird toxoplasmosis of rage reasons, the really widely publicised cases tend to be the most borderline arguable ones, rather than clear cases of malpractice. I recall one from maybe a decade back that got some coverage in Australia but ~ none in the USA of a (white) Australian woman who called the police because she thought she saw someone sneaking around her garden, and then the cops came and shot her dead through her window.
I think the "toxoplasmosis of rage" hypothesis is a bit dubious. How do you explain stuff like Kathryn Johnston? Heck, even George Floyd was a lot more egregious than most police killings - that's part of why the response was so great in the first place!
If I had to guess, I'd say that it's just that there's more borderline cases than really egregious ones, so they get publicized more just due to numbers.
But could you believe the explanation that would be offered? One can expect that they will offer the explanation that they expect to be most productive of sympathy, or that was suggested by a lawyer. I think this is clearly a case where Celine's law applies.
That would be an issue in some cases but in quite a few others I think the motive would be fairly clear even if the circumstances are debatable.
Turf war
Money
Jealousy
A fight that got out of hand
Psychosis
I think it would be useful to break them down, even with a category of “unknown“.
Something that is deeply frustrating to me are complaints that collecting data on police stops (traffic, terry, or otherwise) is a problem. First, it's distasteful to me as an American to claim that creating a record of a stop is overly burdensome to the state security apparatus; I was taught to believe that undue search and seizure are things we should be guarding against. It's hard to guard against things that are invisible because there is no (legible to inspection) record. Second, there's increasingly smooth software to reduce the pain of paperwork (e.g. Mark43).** Third, records of police actions are useful to from an efficiency standpoint, as a lack of any stops may also be concerning.
So, data is good in my opinion. If collecting the data is painful, then we should seek to ease that pain, because deterring police work is inefficient. But arguing that silly reformers passed the Racial Identity and Profiling Act -- and that's why police can't police -- is itself rather silly. This is because it ignores that policing is part of a state's obligation to the general welfare of its populace -- policing isn't measured only from how efficiently police can deploy coercive power.
** See the exact requirements here: https://mark43.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4410748957965-Understanding-and-Completing-a-RIPA-Report
These questions should be simple for an officer to fill out or articulate.
Enough about my feelings though, what are some brass tacks about why we should care about recording data on stops? Well, let's look at traffic stops. Traffic stops are nicer for criminologists because they are usually discretionary and also usually recorded, because license plate checks themselves are recorded as part of almost traffic stops. These records are often enriched by the demos of the person(s) stopped, time/date info, and geolocation. This has allowed extensive empirical analyses to study both 1) efficiency and 2) bias in traffic stops. Findings indicate that traffic stops and searches are racially biased (when daylight allows), and this racial bias results inefficiency as searches of Black drivers are less likely to produce (drugs, guns, etc.). However, jurisdictions, units, and officers vary significantly. It's a well-known finding called the 'veil of darkness' (racial disparities disappear at night and often on highways, where it is difficult to discern phenotypical racial characteristics). The latest standout study in this vein is Feigenberg and Miller 2022 in the Quarterly Journal of Economic. Here's an imgur link of the most important point: https://imgur.com/a/renWnIu
Basically, searches are racially biased and inefficient in Texas, and equalizing them conditional on stops would yield more contraband and less racial bias. This isn't a shocking finding - it comports with the greatest hits of that literature:
Chanin, Joshua, Megan Welsh, and Dana Nurge. 2018. “Traffic Enforcement Through the Lens of Race: A Sequential Analysis of Post-Stop Outcomes in San Diego, California.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 29(6–7):561–83. doi: 10.1177/0887403417740188.
Feigenberg, Benjamin, and Conrad Miller. 2022. “Would Eliminating Racial Disparities in Motor Vehicle Searches Have Efficiency Costs?*.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 137(1):49–113. doi: 10.1093/qje/qjab018.
Fryer, Roland G. 2019. “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” Journal of Political Economy 127(3):1210–61. doi: 10.1086/701423.
Pierson, Emma, Camelia Simoiu, Jan Overgoor, Sam Corbett-Davies, Daniel Jenson, Amy Shoemaker, Vignesh Ramachandran, Phoebe Barghouty, Cheryl Phillips, Ravi Shroff, and Sharad Goel. 2020. “A Large-Scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police Stops across the United States.” Nature Human Behaviour 4(7):736–45. doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-0858-1.
Roh, Sunghoon, and Matthew Robinson. 2009. “A Geographic Approach to Racial Profiling: The Microanalysis and Macroanalysis of Racial Disparity in Traffic Stops.” Police Quarterly 12(2):137–69. doi: 10.1177/1098611109332422.
Taniguchi, Travis A., Joshua A. Hendrix, Alison Levin-Rector, Brian P. Aagaard, Kevin J. Strom, and Stephanie A. Zimmer. 2017. “Extending the Veil of Darkness Approach: An Examination of Racial Disproportionality in Traffic Stops in Durham, NC.” Police Quarterly 20(4):420–48. doi: 10.1177/1098611117721665.
Withrow, Brian L., Jeffery D. Dailey, and Henry Jackson. 2008. “The Utility of an Internal Benchmarking Strategy in Racial Profiling Surveillance.” Justice Research and Policy 10(2):19–47. doi: 10.3818/JRP.10.2.2008.19.
Zingraff, Matthew, William Smith, and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey. 2003. “North Carolina Highway Traffic Study, Final Report.” Department of Justice.
Having seen the software that organizations I'm familiar with use, I am quite sympathetic to that point. But the collection *could* be made nearly frictionless. E.g., a cell phone with a throat mike and voicemail to transcription. It could even automatically insert images on request.
I'm just not sure that that's a good idea. Too much malware out there.
It's easy to _imagine_ ways this kind of thing could work better, but the major obstacles are due to the _people_ involved, not the quality of the software itself.
It doesn't help tho that the _software_ is often pretty terrible too!
I'm a tech/software person and I READILY (and REPEATEDLY) admit that most software (or the larger 'software/people SYSTEMS') are frankly TERRIBLE!
I would not be surprised, at all, by any horror stories you might have to share about this kind of thing!
After starting medical residency I have much more sympathy for claims that paperwork to document stuff, even if it seems like an obviously good idea, can slow work down substantially.
Knowing nothing about the workflow of police officers, my assumption would be that paperwork and documentation burden would generally increase, without a strong countervailing force, and this would slow other police work.
FWIW, I'm quite sympathetic to the claim that paperwork *could* be nearly automated away. This doesn't mean that I think that kind of collection is a good idea. The amount of data leaked is already through the roof, lets not add more. Particularly more compromising stuff. ("X drunk and publicly nude while a teenager.") It's already too difficult to live down any mistakes you may have made.
The FIPA form is anonymized FYI
I don't know about it's particular way of anonymizing data, but an extremely large number of the ways that data is anonymized have turned out to be quite ineffective. You correlate a bit from here and a bit from there, and pretty soon you've picked out who it's about. I've got no idea what the error rate it, of course. But then that it's in error isn't necessarily going to be a great consolation.
Yes, it _could_ be "nearly automated away" but these kinds of computer/IT/software systems are themselves often terrible AND it's EXTREMELY common for 'implementation projects' in big organizations to just straight up FAIL to be completed, like at all.
The hardest parts of 'implementing' or 'integrating' good 'automated systems' is surmounting the internal social/cultural/political obstacles that all of the various 'stakeholders' throw up in front of these kinds of efforts.
This is a VERY hard problem to solve in general.
This kind of thing could be avoided by hiring different people to do the paperwork. Then the cost of documentation would be more legible to management in budget calculations.
For example, today the officer could easily dictate the details of the traffic stop, then attach bodycam videos to incident, and send the files forward. Then paperwork-person could process the documentation for archives.
Old time-y word for this line of work was "secretary". For some reason or other, the general tendency has been their removal outside C-suite.
Also, would be curious to hear your take on the idea that criminology as a field is ideologically left wing, which is made in this article:
https://www.city-journal.org/html/what-criminologists-dont-say-and-why-15328.html
Does it seem possibly true, definitely not true, etc. ?
I would imagine that criminology as a profession looks for reasons for crime other than individual responsibility. That means that if we change things about society like laws or norms, the problem of crime would be solved. This is a left wing idea.
Conjecture:
Those ideas trickle down and make people feel they can perform criminal activitivities because those are not their individual responsibility but are caused instead by forces outside of their control. This causes crime rates to go up. If not only prospective criminals but also law enforcement and the judicial system in general starts to believe this you get a vicious circle.
I wonder if there has ever been done a survey about the correlation between the propagation of criminology as a discipline and crime rates.
How about "That's an idea that is obviously true". Individual responsibility is a real thing, and necessary, but it doesn't exist in some splendid isolation.
Now if you can identify what environmental effects can statistically reduce what sort of crime, then you reduce crime without (directly) impacting individuals. So in that sense you aren't depending on "individual responsibility", but there will always be significant variation, and "individual responsibility" can be used to address the edge cases.
Your hypothesis seems (to me) to be that "individual responsibility" is sufficient in and of itself. This (as stated by me) is obviously false. A starving man will steal your food. See "The Donner Party" for a description of what environment can do. It's also plausible that no environment will eliminate all crime. This is particularly true since some crimes are created as such to punish unfavored groups. (Look into the history of why marijuana was banned. Or why only Senators were allowed to wear purple during Augstinian Rome.)
So it's definitely appropriate for criminologists to study environmental influences. It's also almost certain that environmental influences will not be sufficient as an explanation.
This is incredibly absurd, but I love it, because it's a great horseshoe theory accompaniment to the opposite view that policing causes crime, such that the propagation of policing leads to crimes.
I'm not an abolitionist. But I would pay to see a panel with you and an abolitionist duking it out about crime theory.
This has been my take on a lot of criminology. A bunch of people bending over backwards to avoid a lot of obvious answers because they don’t like them.
Criminologists in 90s: The criminal justice system is totally racist (something I believed in my 20s) people are discriminated against at all levels!
Except then when you get more sophisticated and look at their actual details and suggestions, they are often nonsense.
Criminologists: Sentencing is racist! “Why?” Well judges take into account things like; has this person committed crimes before, and does this person have another means to support themselves other than crime, and does this person have other family members depending on them? When sentencing.
Ummm…those all sound like great things to consider when sentencing.
Criminologist: no they are all racist! See this is why our system is racist!
It’s sounds like the system is just trying to prevent crime, and crime is pretty racially disparate. Also if it is all about racism why aren’t all minorities treated the same?
Criminologists: No look I cut up the sentencing data into 40 different ways and in two of them you can clearly see that even adjusting for these other things, sentencing is racist!
None of that is even getting into their just bizarre disconnection from human nature and reality. When I was closest with law enforcement it was in a small community that was ~3% native, where the crime was ~50% native. If you don’t think that situation is going to lead to some level of heightened “racism” and “suspicion” among law enforcement of natives (yes even strictly speaking above what an exact match to the data would indicate), you are blinded by ideology and have turned your brain off.
Criminologists: OMG 50% of traffic stops in this town should be natives, but after sifting through the data for 6 months we found it was 52%! OMG RACISM!
Police officers in particular, but people generally, are not saints. Asking them to be and telling them to stop doing their jobs if they cannot is not going to work.
Hot take - asking for policing that is racially equitable, even merely in an 'efficient' (one point in time, rather than thinking about pile-on effects of differential policing) - is a reasonable request.
It isn't 'saintly' to expect efficient treatment - it's professional. You laugh at criminologists' concern about a made up excess of 2 percentage points, because you argue that expecting equity of treatment by police will stop them from 'doing their jobs'. You seem to have a pretty low opinion then of the professionalism and adaptability of police and the criminal justice system if, when criminologists continue to find racially disparate treatment is inefficient, the problem is.... criminologists for studying racial disparity. How dare we go about studying things beyond what color of blue uniform results in the maximal level of compliance!
The real problem with your point of view is that it stops us from asking about conditions underlying racially disparate rates of crime commission and victimization exist. Your POV starts from that conclusion, and then excuses even inefficiently racially inequitable crime control policies. Instead, many criminologists want to understand mechanism that produce those disparities. So, no, we're not bending over backwards -- it's just that racially disparate rates of crime commissioning and victimization are the beginning of the question, not the 'obvious answer' that we should stop with.
The trouble with criminologists is they face no consequences for being wrong. A police chief at least can get replaced when the mayor decides things have gotten unacceptable. And I think police are plenty inefficient, seeing as how heavily unionized they are and how difficult they make it to fire even the worst cops. But I certainly don't trust the field of criminology not to make things worse, and I mean that in the sense that the people they are supposedly acting on behalf of would not prefer to live under such results.
The trouble with commenters is that they face no consequences for not addressing anything in the comment to which they respond to.
Define "racially equitable" policing. How do we measure it? Is policing more or less "racially equitable" now or before the protests and riots of 2020?
edit - spelling
I wouldn't put much stock into the claim that criminology is an ideologically left discipline when those claims are made by people who say that , criminology is left wing in comparison to people who claim that "the ability and willingness to act collectively appears to vary by race.... intimately tied to the lack of collective social behavior, to the lack of informal social control (Sampson & Laub, 1993), and to the violation of rudimentary norms of appropriate social conduct" (Wright in Biosocial Criminology pages 149-150). Their call for more representation of diverse political viewpoints? Sympathetic. However, what they actually want is different throwback - to the eugenic and phrenological era of early 19th century 'social' sciences that attributed behavior to skull measurements. In particular, people like Cesare Lomboso, whose ilk inspired this great Django Unchained scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQM4ebFILv4
Notably, however, is that the two professors who said that are professors of criminology. So, just as some famous philosopher kicked a rock to demonstrate physical reality, I'm kicking their awful goals to demonstrate the range of criminology faculty views.
People in the past didn't know as much as we do today... but they still managed to have more accurate views on archaeology than post-WW2 archaeologists.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/the-inexorable-progress-of-science-archaeology/
Samuel Morton was pre-Darwin and incorrectly believed in multiregionism, but still managed to more accurately analyze skull measurements than S. J. Gould.
https://phys.org/news/2011-06-samuel-morton-skulls-center-controversy.html
If your views on 19th century science are coming from 21st century entertainment, you might not understand that.
If your defense of 19th century phrenology and 20th century eugenics is that the only reason I don't like them is... I use a Django Unchained video excerpt to make fun of them, then that's on you.
TGGP is pointing out that mid-to-late 20th century archaeology systematically interpreted the available evidence in left-wing-flavored ways that made its predictions different from 19th & early 20th century archaeology.
Early 21st century genetics was able to test the 20th century theories against the 19th century theories and found the 20th century theories were wrong, in ways that were extremely obvious in retrospect (when there's a sudden and total culture shift in Europe, that's due to a violent invasion not peaceful cultural osmosis, to take the example given in https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/11/01/the-inexorable-progress-of-science-archaeology/).
So, we have strong empirical evidence for the idea that in the middle of the 20th century an entire academic discipline can go very badly off the rails in a left-leaning direction in ways that are beyond the capabilities of that discipline's peer review process to correct, and stay in that bad equilibrium until forced to change by overwhelming evidence from outside the discipline.
This is of course very relevant to where this conversation started, which was with Willy Chertman asking if criminology is a similarly left-wing-ideologically-captured academic discipline. Your responses make it look very likely that it is, which substantially reduces my inclination to try to work out where the root of your disagreement with Scott is on data interpretation relating to Ferguson.
"So, we have strong empirical evidence for the idea that in the middle of the 20th century an entire academic discipline can go very badly off the rails in a left-leaning direction in ways that are beyond the capabilities of that discipline's peer review process to correct, and stay in that bad equilibrium until forced to change by overwhelming evidence from outside the discipline."
Yup. More generally, I'm skeptical of arguments that, when there looks like there is a glaring mistake in a field, that the mutual review of people in that field is sufficient to assure that they haven't gone off the rails. Sometimes entire fields _do_ lock in assumptions or paradigms that are just false.
0) the conversation started in my post, where I made a variety of (rather good, I think) points about why we should want to collect data on police stops of various sorts, especially given . Willy Chertman responded with the left-field biological criminologist piece he posted, which argues that the field of criminology is hopeless because it's too liberal.
1) I responded to Chertman by saying I am sympathetic to the need for diverse political viewpoints (I might even surprise you about mine, but that's besides the point), but I don't take that piece too seriously: it isn't a political realignment per se but instead reflects the disciplines' movement away from criminology's origins in "the eugenic and phrenological era of early 19th century 'social' sciences that attributed behavior to skull measurements. In particular, people like Cesare Lomboso". FYI, there is still biological stuff, but the field now focuses more on psycho-cultural-social-economic interactions rather than on biology alone.
2) TGGP argues that because archaeology as a discipline departed from good ground truths and went the wrong way, criminology is similarly must be leaving truths from this era of scientific racism. There's no real argument here - it's impossible to prove a negative, and again doesn't actually address any point I've made. I've already discussed substantive and real problems in the discipline way back in a thread in the original post, so I'll post what I think is the actual biggest problem in the discipline: study designs are often shitty, so you can't trust a study before you read it and critique the methods: Chin, Jason M., Justin T. Pickett, Simine Vazire, and Alex O. Holcombe. 2021. “Questionable Research Practices and Open Science in Quantitative Criminology.” Journal of Quantitative Criminology. doi: 10.1007/s10940-021-09525-6.
3) It's frustrating when the claims I make are ignored in favor of the view that, by virtue of the average political alignment of people in the discipline I work in, all my claims are illegible and/or bogus. Indeed, you say that "your responses make it look very likely that it is [a left-wing discipline], which substantially reduces my inclination to try to work out where the root of your disagreement with Scott is on data interpretation relating to Ferguson."
4) The sources I'm citing most here are actually by economists and published in economics journals. But hey, I understand that - as a burgeoning criminologist AND worse yet sociologist - I might be distasteful. But that's on you, not me, and your biases are not my job. Don't expect me to both 1) spoon feed you the data interpretation in ever-more digestible chunks or 2) treat 19th century phrenology and early 20th century eugenics with profound respect.
My argument is not that because pre-WW2 archaeologists were more accurate than post-WW2 ones that all fields "must" be the same. I don't think that's true for physics. Instead it's that your argument that there must be something invalid about reversing changes in the conventional wisdom within a social science is wanting, because I can point to a counter-example like archaeology. Across different fields some will have "experts" who aren't really better at predicting things (like the archaeologists weren't about later DNA findings relative to the Indo-Europeanist linguists) or controlling outcomes in a desirable way (building a rocket ship that can go to the moon is not something you can do with folk science).
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/10/20/the-experts/
I don't think you enough about 19th century phrenology to make any sort of critique one would bother defending against. There were people who objected that "Crime and Human Nature" pointed out that mesomorphs commit violent crime at a higher rate than other body types, saying it smacked of phrenology, but didn't provide evidence that wasn't the case. The word "phrenology" was simply sufficient for them as a sign to stop thinking.
As for eugenics, the case against it is normative/political: there's no reason to trust existing governments with power over it, and most people aren't in favor of goal-directing human evolution (though on an individual voluntary basis we've come around to accepting things like selective use of sperm donors & even many cases of embryo selection). The idea that it would be scientifically unworkable is just wrong, and the people who got mad at Dawkins for pointing that out were fools.
Generally the safe assumption to make is that an academic field is left wing until proven otherwise.
am very surprised by the second part in this sentence: "Findings indicate that traffic stops and searches are racially biased (when daylight allows), and this racial bias results inefficiency as searches of Black drivers are less likely to produce (drugs, guns, etc.)."
Are you saying that the average non-black driver is _more_ likely to have drugs/illegal guns etc. in the car than the average black driver? I find that surprising because a) according to stats most known drugs/gun crimes that make their way into statistics are disproportionately committed by blacks and b) if this were a thing you'd figure at some point police would notice this and adjust their priors. For this to be true one would need to believe that 1) police are so blinded by their racism they continue a completely counter-productive strategy despite all evidence showing it's the exact opposite of what they should be doing and 2) the skew towards blacks in people who get arrested by these crimes is not because they commit more of them, but because they are unfairly targeted and if whites were just stopped more often that ratio would actually skew more towards them.
Selection effects.
Consider a pathological example. The only blues that are ever stopped and searched are ones that are driving around in a clearly visible Tony Montana mountain of cocaine. The stopping police are _certain_ that these blues have contraband. However, there are only a tiny, miniscule handful of individuals of this sort - say a fraction of a single percent.
On the other hand, all greens are always stopped. Fully half are carrying contraband.
In this constructed example, of those stopped, blues are much more likely to produce fruitful searches, but blues generally do not carry. Stops targeting greens are half as likely to be successful, but greens carry substantially more often.
If you are an officer in this blue/green world and are given discretion to randomly stop with incentives to find contraband (either professional incentives like bonuses, quotas, or principled incentives like trying to reduce crime), what are your priors?
This is a correct in abstract point of view, but makes the reasonable but incorrect assumption that officers are behaving efficiently given vast differences in group-based propensity differences in hit rates (for as you say contraband). See my response to Arby using the latest and greatest disambiguation of that questions.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/06/max-policing-is-disproportionate.html
Basically, yes to your conclusions, and yes it is surprising. However, one caveat - I am not making a claim that cars contain contraband similarly or dissimilarly on the basis of driver's race. Instead, I'm asking a question of police behavior at the margin. The best exploration of this is a recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics - Feigenberg and Miller 2022 (https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjab018) - happy to share if it's paywalled.
Here's an imgur link of the most important point: https://imgur.com/a/renWnIu
Basically, searches are racially biased and inefficient in Texas, and equalizing them conditional on stops would yield more contraband and less racial bias. This isn't a shocking finding - it comports fairly well with the sources I mentioned up top.
The additional data collection seems to fall into the standard trap of "hidden" costs or unfunded mandates, where workload is increased but staffing is not increased to match. This is in general an unsustainable approach, where something has to give. It seems to be behind many of the standard "Workers keep asking for more money while our spending in this area has massively increased" problems we see in education, medicine, and police work.
Seems like a case where, if you could make the data collection super easy, just about everyone would be happy.
The _charitable_ interpretation isn't that 'collecting data is bad', it's that 'collecting data is _expensive_' (in time/energy/effort/opportunity-costs-to-do-other-police-work).
But I agree that data is useful and that we _should_ make heroic efforts to ease any 'pain suffered' by police recording this data.
The NYC data is actually available in incident-level granularity, if you look at shootings. You can download it yourself here:
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Shooting-Incident-Data-Historic-/833y-fsy8/data
I did download it, and here's what a very simple analysis of it looks like:
https://i.imgur.com/kXxSKiR.png
The blue line is the difference over the same smoothed 7 day period the year prior. Note that this is a trailing average, so the data point "today" is the arithmetic mean of the prior 7 days (including the current date). The vertical red line is Floyd's death. There is indeed support for some non-trivial excess shootings in the earlier part of may, but it's clearly dwarfed by what comes afterwards.
I also did the analysis using the average since 2006 of that same 7 day period as the baseline, but the chart looks very similar so I won't bother to upload that too.
In your code, you mention that "Each year is missing a few days. [...] Forward filling isn't the absolute most principled thing you could do here, but it's pretty close."
For days that are missing from the original dataset, isn't it more principled to fill that with zero? Is there some reason to think that when a day is missing, it's because there are shootings that weren't recorded?
For that reason, would suggest replacing ffill() with fillna(0).
If that's done, does it change the analysis?
Yes, you're right. Which one is most correct depends on why you think they're missing. If you think they're missing because there were no shootings that day, then you're right. If you think they're missing due to a recording error, then ffill() is probably more appropriate. Since only 10-20 of the days in the entire year are missing in this way, it's unlikely to change the result much, though.
However, in the interest of completeness, here's what it looks like run the other way:
https://i.imgur.com/Za1L21z.png
Don't have any nitpick, just passing by to show my gratitude for you drilling deep down on a contentious topic that I feel the MSM should have covered with nuance but instead simply used as an opportunity to push sloganeering. Quality content like this is why so many of us read you.
Yes!
Hmm, I agree that in a perfect world the MSM *should* have covered it, but any media organization has a demographically wider and motivationally different audience than this blog does. Scott has cultivated a relatively much better-faith community and comment section than average through careful moderation and enforcement.
If he was only sloganeering, odds are *we* wouldn't read it. If the MSM WASN'T sloganeering, odds are *their* audience wouldn't watch that either - or the quality of discourse would deteriorate rapidly. I don't see any way around this.
"what would be the explanation for why this trend would start on May 20 or something?"
Wikipedia tells me that the stay-at-home order expired May 17. I mostly believe your thesis, but you must admit that the alternative "The murder spike was caused by COVID damaging mental health and the economy (or any other cause) but started only with the end of lockdowns" also fit the timing. It probably fails on the international comparison, but you should not overstate your case...
There wasn't a single stay-at-home order, nor were they universally observed and/or enforced. The simultaneous consequences are going to struggle to correlate with any on-the-ground reality of any COVID restrictions.
I was referring to Minneapolis given that Scott was discussing Minneapolis data at this point. And I suppose that most states gradually reduced restrictions over May? (mind, I'm not from the US) As I said, I find Scott's conclusions very plausible, and the cross-country comparison is not favorable to the COVID hypothesis. So if the timing does not match in every city would not surprise me at all.
But I find Scott's argument that the COVID hypothesis would predict rising murders from March or April to be very weak, and kind of strawmannish - he didn't engage with actual model of people holding the opposite position. As a consequence, his analysis of the data would not convince me at all if I didn't have a prior that large anti-police demonstrations would reduce policing both bad and good, and that good policing reduces crime.
Scott then says that the media are wrong and bad, because "it is not difficult to assign priority" between demonstrations and COVID. But honestly, if Scott's argument is the best argument to be had, then reasonable people with different priors can come to different conclusions.
Scott's argument is not limited to the March & April, but also includes the international comparisons, as well as the earlier Ferguson effect. Taken as a whole, I do think it's unreasonable not to see that something different in the US happened after Floyd.
I answered to the reply by Jason below
Are you referring to this?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-bb9/comment/7658279
Different areas experienced the same murder rate increase but didn't have a May 17 change in stay-at-home orders.
I think there is something to said for the compound copy-cat effect hypothesis:
Minneapolis stay-at-home expired on 17th, people are already agitated but also free to move, George Floyd is killed, protests start, and because of the circumstances, the protests are exceedingly distinctive. As a result, Minneapolis produces an example of "George Floyd protest" meme (in the original Dawkins sense of the word) which grows strong enough to catch on later elsewhere, too, no matter the local stay-at-home orders.
Is it really plausible that a significant number of people were angry enough to go do a murder, but were restrained by the almost-entirely-self-enforced stay-at-home order?
The vast majority of murders do not involve a person sitting at home, thinking "I am so angry at Bob that I should kill him", and then going out to kill Bob. They involve someone going out. meeting Bob, and in the course of that meeting getting so angry that they kill Bob right then and there. So, at this level at least, it is plausible that if people aren't going out in the first place, they aren't killing people in the third place.
If the timing and the observed behavior don't line up, then it's probably not that, but we can't rule it out a priori.
Exactly. Plus, possibly reduction of drunken fights if bars are closed, and no-one coming back with a gun after being beaten up? On the opposite side, more killings in the family.
It seems to have happened in multiple countries:
https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/covid/Property_Crime_Brief_2020.pdf
but not all.
1. This didn't happen in any other country in the world
2. Crime FELL during the 2008 recession.
3. These factors were not present back in Ferguson where the Ferguson effect originally occurred
4. The homicide spike was not just seen in Minneapolis, it was also in places without these stay at home orders or that had orders with different timing
5. The increase in homicides greatly outlasted the Minneapolis end of lockdowns
6. Why would the kind of people who commit MURDER be the sort of people to abide by covid lockdown rules?
There is no overstating of his case - all alternative explanations are plainly false
I regret starting this argument, as in the end I don't really feel like defending the reasonableness of a position that is not mine.
But I can put it on the abstract level. The following two statements require vastly different burdens of proof:
1) X is true
2) the case for X is so strong that anyone doubting it must be a motivated reasoner, or simply stupid
Scott says both 1 and 2. I agree with him on 1, but not 2. And I feel he has fudged several things to make alternative explanations look stupid (as opposed to probably incorrect) like ignoring the lockdowns.
BTW, murders went down significantly in my country during lockdown, and up a bit (above trend) after lockdown ended, with a compensating effect. So clearly lockdown can affect murder. In fact, that seems the most common trend https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/covid/Property_Crime_Brief_2020.pdf
US was not unique in not having a lockdown dip, and the spike afterwards was of much larger size so I agree it should not be interpreted as the same thing. But again, alternative explanations are not so outrageous as you (and Scott) think.
I don't think US homicide was significantly below trend prior to Floyd.
Don't know about the homicide spike but the trends in the homicide graph from central America are beautiful to see. What has been happening in El Salvador ? That's an impressive decrease !
I was thinking that too! El Salvador is so impressive though, that it makes me skeptical of the data.
The data only goes to 2021, unfortunately there's been a recent spike
https://www.dw.com/en/why-el-salvadors-murder-rate-has-surged/a-61306161
tldr: El Salvador's murder rate is dependent on relations between the government and the gangs. Whatever the agreement was that kept the peace in the late teens, it has recently broken down.
It's a worthwhile reminder that in countries (including the US) where murder is primarily gang-driven, the causes of spikes and lulls can be pretty opaque to those of us who aren't directly involved.
This is a great point!
Above my pay grade to comment on the particulars, so...just gonna leave some appreciation for the hard work. It's nice to have a feeling of relatively firmer empirical ground "in real time" as opposed to years later when the Official History Books(tm) are written. Scott going all Scott on thorny Current Issues is both (probably) the most controversial content, but also the primary reason SSC/ACX are my favourite blogs. You just write better than most when clearly annoyed/angry/jerk-ish. "A spoonful of heat helps the light go down"
Piggybacking on this to add the same comment-free appreciation. This is a difficult, thorny issue and I'm really glad someone's trying hard to tackle it with data.
Is it not possible, that protest actually did cause a decrease in policing AND, in parallel caused an increase in homicide, BUT homicide increase was not caused by de-policing? (or at least another factor had ~the same effect size as de-policing)
My theory is that protests and news about protests can temporarily change the behaviour of people. It may result in more people being on the streets, and them being more concentrated into smaller areas. In addition, based on "Politics is The Mind-Killer/Toxoplasma Of Rage/etc" articles, they may be more agitated and more prone to violence in such cases.
So: more people outside + concentrating them in specific areas + being agitated/outraged --> increased probability of violence happening --> increase in homicides
No doubt. But that doesn't explain the continuing high levels of violent crime. This isn't really a spike, more of a plateau. Especially when compared against previous years.
When you heat a gas in a test tube, all the gas molecules move faster, but random, "like mosquitoes on LSD" . But the net effect of all this random movement is that the gas moves upwards in the test tube. Similarly (& metaphorically) , the Floyd killing may have triggered a lot of changes in the minds of police officers, politicians and criminals, in several directions - we can make theories no end of what may have changed in the minds of the thousands of people we make theories about. What we may know with some degree of certainty, is only that the net effect of all this "opaque causality" was that murder rates spiked after the event. I. e. the net effect is observable, although the many, many possible causal pathways that produced this net outcome may forever elude our grasp. Not least since what goes on in another person's mind is not empirically observable. (Nor, for that matter, what goes on in your own.)
This seems like rather a stretch. The post-Floyd murder increase is pretty much the clearest signal that criminologists have ever had, pinnable as it is to a single day. The analysis on the article handily dismisses other theories of how it might have come about and still you are pretending that it is a baffling mystery, beyond the ken of mortal man.
The question is how the Floyd incident triggered the spike in homicides, not if it triggered the spike. The "if" question Scott in my opinion convincingly enough substantiates. But the "how" question is still there. What are the causal paths between these two phenomena - the "intermediate variables", so to speak? Scott himself suggested several possibilities in his original post, and several additional hypotheses have surfaced during the debate. The causal path/s is important, because they are linked to different "what to do" suggestions. And here we are on epistemic thin ice, because we have to suggest "stories"of what goes on in the minds of thousands of people.
Ok, this is arguably philosophical nit-picking, but sometimes it is fun to try to think through what "causal claims about the world" demands, in situations were the causal path is supposed to run through how people perceive a situation, and their own position in it.
You seem to have simply restated Scott's hypothesis/theory – AFAICT anyways.
The comparisons with other countries is a tricky one. In the original post you looked at the murder rate in European countries and saw no peak. But those countries, as you point out, have very low levels of gun ownership and also start from a lower level of homicide. That means that the number of people who can easily kill someone if they suddenly wanted to is already low. In the US, the high stocks of guns should allow more potential murderers - which may reflect in a more visible spike when factors combine to "encourage" homicide.
Perhaps looking at violent crime figures in Europe (without resulting in death) could be more reflective than just homicide rates. A quick look at the numbers from London suggests they also fell significantly in 2020 and 2021 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/864736/knife-crime-in-london/), while the murder rate doesn't show much of a change (https://www.statista.com/statistics/862984/murders-in-london/). So it doesn't look like the pandemic conspired to increase crime there (indeed, the opposite is probably true). Interestingly, the lack of relationship between murder and knife crime rates should support the idea that most knife crimes don't end up with some dead, but I suspect most gun crimes do.
I'd also caution the comparison with central America. The degree of pandemic restrictions and the level to which those restrictions were enforced varied greatly across the world. Having spent some time during the pandemic in less developed countries, I can tell you that in many places you'd barely know there was a pandemic at all (other than seeing a few badly worn masks).
Looking at the top 5 European countries by gun ownership with a population of at least 1M, there does not appear to be much of a spike: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?end=2020&locations=RS-FI-CY-BA-AT&start=1990&view=chart
In your original article on this topic, you specifically claimed that the increase in murder rates was due to a police pullback. When you were challenged about this, you claimed you are actually agnostic on the issue.
I don't think this is true.
'The protests' is all of the entangled/related things and the "police pullback" is one part of it.
I'm disturbed by the gun suicides vs homicides graph. This post glosses right over the (granted, unrelated to the topic) GIGANTIC STEADY INCREASE IN SUICIDE OVER A 12-YEAR PERIOD FROM 2006 TO 2018. But that seems more interesting than the actual topic of the post.
Could we at least get a comment like "Don't be too alarmed, the gun suicides are displacing other suicide methods" or "Wow! What happened to suicide rates over the last 16 years?"
Part of that story is quite old though. The "deaths by despair" that have hammered middle aged, blue collar whites was commonly cited as one of the factors behind the rise of Trump.
The book that comes to mind is Deaths of Despair by Case and Deaton. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190785/deaths-of-despair-and-the-future-of-capitalism
I haven't read the book, and I have no stake in promoting any specific type of interpretation - just posting to say, there is work out there on this topic, and more generally as a reference.
The US has gotten less religious and religiosity deters suicide.
If you're a not religous yourself, would you still promote/ favour more religion for that reason? Or more open question: is this reason enough for you to favour spreading of religion? And what's your personal attitude towards religion?
I'm an atheist. I think of every individual as having ownership over their own life and am thus uncomfortable with laws against suicide. If I were in a situation where I had a terminal illness and it was just downhill until I lost the last of my bodily functions, I'd prefer to go out in a manner of my choosing. The utilitarian in me thinks differently of suicides among the young though, who have many years of potential life ahead of them and could more plausibly be seen as making a mistake.
thanks
Agreed on all points.
While suicide rates have increased significantly, up by 36% from 10.4 per 100,000 in 2000 to a high of 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018, the raw numbers exaggerate that increase due to population growth. (29,350 in 2000 to 48,344 in 2018, a 65% increase.)
CDC's working on suicide prevention, but I'm not seeing much in the way of a reason for the trend here: https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/index.html
"So this theory requires us to believe that number of guns increasing 3.5% every year from 2015 - 2020 had no effect on the murder rate, but that guns going up 5.5% in 2020 had a very strong effect on the murder rate. Specifically, an extra two percent increase in guns must lead to a 30% increase in murder rates. Why would we believe that?"
Isn't this comparing a percentage point increase in gun sales to a percent increase in murders? That seems just as big a sin as comparing stocks and flows.
Putting both in percent increases, a 63% increase in sales was associated with a 30% increase in murders.
The rest of that section was pretty convincing, but I think that particular argument is bad and your point would be stronger if you omitted it.
> Putting both in percent increases, a 63% increase in sales was associated with a 30% increase in murders.
Sure – but then what's your theory/model/explanation for why _earlier_ increases in gun sales didn't also cause/correlate-with a corresponding increase in homicides?
Didn't they? I don't have any numbers, but this is an assertion I wouldn't make without data.
No, not really
I don't have to have a counter theory to point out that a specific argument is bad. In fact, as I specifically noted, I agree with the point he's making in that section.
Regarding rising gunsales:
There might be a correlation between BLM protests and rising gun sales:
If citizens imagined (rightly or not) police during the BLM protests, for fear of being labelled racist, were less likely to protect the public and their property against violent protesters , then citizens would feel the need to arm themselves. If police were defunded, this would provide even more reason to do so.
If the above is true, even if gunsales affected homicide rates, the latter would indirectly be affected by the BLM protests.
Gun sales went up when Obama took office, but homicides didn't until 2014 (Ferguson).
I found this comment with ctrl-f "guns" to see if anyone at all was pointing out the more obvious facts about existing gun owners buying more guns. TGGP & Henk B are the closest so far, so I'll chime in.
1a) Real-life firearms are consumable items, like boots: they don't last forever. Yes, they'll last forever if packed in oil-soaked rags and buried in a drum in your back yard, but if used they degrade over time.
1b) Real-life firearms aren't perfectly reliable, hence the gun-owning mantra "two is one and one is none"
2) Real-life firearms aren't useful without some modicum of training, hence using them.
3) The clear cultural momentum in this country is towards making guns harder to obtain, and making the kinds of guns obtainable less effective. While we on this blog consider this a victory of progress and an obvious good, people who already own guns probably do not.
If you combine these three points in a logical way, you get the following conclusion: Anytime anything happens that creates the sense that gun bans are coming, people who already have guns buy more while they still can. Obama wins? Buy guns. Riots across the country that might cause (or at least create the opportunity for) someone shooting rioters with an AR? Buy guns. Yet another school shooting? Buy guns.
Does this lead to a correlation with crime? Sometimes. Is this where the real action is? Really seems unlikely.
On the question of 'police pullback' vs 'distrust in police', you write:
> I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected.
If you yourself are agnostic, you should be aware that your original essay is very firmly not so, and is prominently on the side of police pullback. You give it in your opening sentence:
> In my review of San Fransicko, I mentioned that it was hard to separate the effect of San Francisco’s local policies from the general 2020 spike in homicides, which I attributed to the Black Lives Matter protests and **subsequent police pullback**.
You have a *topic heading* "Police pullback" that opens with "My specific claim is that **the protests caused police to do less policing** in predominantly black areas" then gives multiple reasons that police would pull back, concluding: "I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that **at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back**."
Elsewhere:
> My interpretation is that people complied with the strict lockdown early in the pandemic, that effect was played out by May, and then separately **the protests caused a longer-term decrease in policing**.
> But there are lots of reasons to expect that the Black Lives Matter protests would **cause police to pull back** from black communities in particular.
> The New York Times had an article Deconstructing The Ferguson Effect, subtitled “The idea that **the police have retreated under siege** will not go away. But even if it's true, is it necessarily bad?”, which as far as I can tell is **as close as the New York Times has ever come to acknowledging that a politically inconvenient fact is true**.
> No country except the United States had a large homicide spike in 2020, which suggests that the spike was unrelated to the pandemic and more associated with US-specific factors, for which the BLM protests and **subsequent pullback of policing in black communities seem to me to be the most obvious suspect.**
My interpretation is that Scott is agnostic as to _how_ exactly 'the protests' caused 'police pullback' not that it didn't cause it (somehow).
'Police pullback' is explicitly described as a claim about _police_ action ("police have retreated under siege", "Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less", "Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake", [defunding the police] "made it harder for them to police", etc.)
This differs from 'distrust in police' which is about _citizen_ pullback. I know in my social network there was a lot of messaging/education about how things like this aren't isolated, how the police have historically mistreated marginalized groups (representative news article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/13/mistrust-police-minority-communities-hesitant-call-police-george-floyd/5347878002/ ) and explicit instructions like look for alternative services/options or at least think twice before you call 911 or police if you don't want someone to die. We still hesitate, even now.
Solutions for the problem "citizens pulling back from the police because of what police have done to them" are substantively different from solutions for the problem "police pulling back from citizens at large because of what protesters have done" so I think the distinction is relevant (though some amount of both problems being a factor is entirely possible).
These highlights posts are some of your best ones. I really appreciate the effort you put into making them.
Agreed!
You had to be there Scott. Everyone around Mpls knows the police are feeling unloved right now. There was stupid overreaction locally after Floyd’s death and we all know that too. There were a lot of early retirements and resignation as a result. Those that remain are understandably reluctant to leave their cars. Less enforcement leads to more crime.
There were several pieces in the NYT that made similar points to yours. They were more nuanced than your position. This sort of analysis should be nuanced. Right wing media beats the ‘BLM protests caused increased crime’ drum hard and often because their business model is to generate outrage.
Treating the BLM protests as a first cause in the chain of events is simply wrong.
I don’t understand why you are taking this tack of being a lone defender of The Truth. I honestly don’t think you are. You’ve analyzed a complex series of events by looking at one link in isolation and the result was that people felt free to use words like ‘libtard’ and reinforce their arguments with the rhetorical device of CapsLock shouting.
Yes, NYT has a moderate liberal bias. I try to keep that in mind when I read it. Is it possible that you have a moderate anti NYT bias?
What are you hoping to accomplish?
> Treating the BLM protests as a first cause in the chain of events is simply wrong.
Just asserting it doesn’t make it right. Maybe try offering a counter argument that isn’t “you don’t want to agree with Those People, do you?”
Clearly, the first cause was God so Gunflint is plainly correct here.
Moving away from the first cause though, I would assume Scott's interest here reflects a general interest he has specifically in attacking things with good intentions and bad outcomes (consequentialists gonna focus on consequences). So the BLM protests stand out as unique in the cluster of related possible contributing factors in as much as they are ostensibly agitating for black lives and may have paradoxically resulted in a significant increase in black deaths. If this is the case, it is really important for a number of reasons, but the most salient here is that people who would potentially be in the next round of BLM protests (read, people who don't trust right-wing media) don't believe this to be the case.
I made a number of arguments in the original thread.
I agree with the general point of Scott’s essay. So do most folks near Mpls. I’m not a mind reader but I think most of NYT editorial staff would agree with it also. I think Scott claiming to be the only one to understand this is just plain silly.
My complaint is that without context or nuance, “BLM protest caused a spike in murders” looks like the sort of racial dog whistle that right wing media uses, quite profitably, to gin up white outage.
Part of the result was green lighting the ‘libtard’ name calling and the “This is CapLocked so it is thruthier” sorts of comments in the original thread. This sort of rhetoric just serves to amp up the sort of tribalism that Scott correctly criticizes in other essays.
I’m suspicious of any argument that boils down to something that fits on a bumper sticker. Adding more graphs doesn’t replace thoughtfully considering things in context.
Umm what he is clearly specifically keying on is the NYT equivocating between the pandemic, gun sales, and the riots. And I have zero idea how someone from Minneapolis couldn’t agree the riots were the driver. It is very obvious and
Scott has presented a clear case here. I do think pulling apart lack of trust, depolicing, etc. is hard, but he doesn’t claim to totally do that.
The pandemic played a part in that it increased the scale of the protest. No one had a job to go to or classes to attend when Floyd died. We had been hunkered down wiping our mail with isopropyl alcohol for a while.
I might have joined the original protest if not for the lock down. The death of George Floyd was grotesque. I wouldn’t have violated a lawful curfew or damages property though.
Young people who made up the bulk of the civil unrest were told that Covid was less of a threat to them.
I don’t think gun sales played into this.
Oh for sure I think the pandemic made the protests significantly larger.
Maybe we are quibbling over semantics. There are lots of large protests. Those siding cause this. A protest where it was deemed politically acceptable to let a police station burn caused this.
Good god, no one, no one thought that was acceptable.
https://www.atf.gov/news/pr/staples-man-sentenced-prison-12-million-restitution-minneapolis-police-third-precinct-arson
It's possible that the pandemic exacerbated the spike resulting from Floyd. But the pandemic didn't cause a spike in other countries, and events like Ferguson & Freddie Gray caused homicide to shoot up previously without any pandemic, so we can be MUCH more confident in that as a cause than the pandemic.
No other country had the video of that gruesome murder. This is a uniquely American problem.
"My complaint is that without context or nuance, “BLM protest caused a spike in murders” looks like the sort of racial dog whistle that right wing media uses, quite profitably, to gin up white outage."
Make an actual argument or go away. You complain about the low level of discourse on these posts ("libtards") and then say stuff that belongs in a WaPo comment section.
"I’m suspicious of any argument that boils down to something that fits on a bumper sticker. Adding more graphs doesn’t replace thoughtfully considering things in context."
This is not an argument
This is not an argument
This is not an argument
Say what he did wrong, specifically. You're just mudslinging at this stage.
Mud slinging? I don’t think you read my comment very carefully.
Have a good day.
It's even worse than that. The Atlantic piece that *Scott himself linked* said most of the same stuff as Scott, the stuff the media supposedly won't talk about.
This did really irk me. I’m tempted to pull Strunk and White off the shelf and go long form on this one.
This comment should be in a museum.
> Less enforcement leads to more crime.
Cool, I'm glad you agree that BLM and defund the police are catastrophically wrong about this.
>They were more nuanced than your position.
'Nuanced' here meaning they buried the data in 10 layers of narrative about how oppressed black people are and the like.
>This sort of analysis should be nuanced. Right wing media beats the ‘BLM protests caused increased crime’ drum hard and often because their business model is to generate outrage.
Or, you know, it's the truth, and aa truth the left were denying? But hey, I'm sure your outgroup is a bunch of greedy money grubbers but your ingroup are an esteemed group of truth tellers who care for nothing but justice and journalistic integrity, right?
>Treating the BLM protests as a first cause in the chain of events is simply wrong.
It's not "simply" wrong. Scott put a lot of effort into this post- if you're going to make a statement like this, PROVE IT.
>I don’t understand why you are taking this tack of being a lone defender of The Truth. I honestly don’t think you are. You’ve analyzed a complex series of events by looking at one link in isolation and the result was that people felt free to use words like ‘libtard’ and reinforce their arguments with the rhetorical device of CapsLock shouting.
I (and millions like me) have endured 6+ years of being called a "nazi" for having a not entirely negative view of Trump, but sure, complain when a few clowns say 'libtard'. Also, this is yet another example of disagreeing with a conclusion because you don't like the consequences.
>Yes, NYT has a moderate liberal bias. I try to keep that in mind when I read it. Is it possible that you have a moderate anti NYT bias?
If Scott said something incorrect about the NYT's claim, PROVE IT. Stop with this vague, dismissive crap.
>What are you hoping to accomplish?
Alert people to something that has resulted in many hundreds of murders? If one guy being killed justified nationwide rioting, then surely hundreds of people being killed justifies a substack article that offends you?
CapLocks, huh? You are obviously correct because you are shouting I guess. A sure sign of a carefully reasoned argument.
Have a good day.
In the annals of feeble comebacks, this is a particularly limp spinach.
The "BLM protests" were the _trigger_, i.e. an EXTREMELY visible SIGNAL generating 'common knowledge', e.g. that the police are racist murderers, and that it was something like a 'natural Schelling point' for the subsequent increase in 'bad behavior' that led to, among other things, increased homicides.
Oh god. Scott has created a scissor statement so effectively subtle it took in Scott himself.
Pick your trigger. The awful video of Floyd’s death or the awful destruction that followed.
Epistemological humility was abandoned in the original essay.
“Here are some graphs from countries that don’t have our complicated racial history. They didn’t have a spike. That rules out the lockdown as a factor. I’m right. They are wrong.”
Don’t you see what’s happening here? Please try taking one step back and looking again.
Myself and others asked Scott to make a post about this and, IMO, it was a 'sketch'/'outline' of the conclusion mostly but with _some_ of the reasoning.
I readily admit that it is NOT in fact a fully comprehensive post that would likely, let alone _should_ likely, be expected to be 'fully convincing' to anyone/everyone (that isn't like 'perfectly stuck' with their current views/priors).
There are many 'unbridged inferential gaps' in the arguments as presented, but I think the biggest obstacle to it being convincing is that it's entangled with lots of other EXTREMELY emotionally/politically/ideologically charged ideas/arguments/theories.
Yes it is extremely emotionally changed. It’s about race in the United States. There aren’t any simple answers. All we can do is to continue to act in good faith and cane tap our way to a better future.
> I am agnostic to the exact causal pathway between the events of May 25 2020 and the homicide spike; all I’m trying to show is that the spike did begin around that time and seems connected.
This isn't consistent with the language you use elsewhere. I don't think there's so much disagreement about the correlation.
> Also, what would be the explanation for why this trend would start on May 20 or something? There isn’t more pandemic that day. There aren’t more guns that day. It’s not even especially warm that day. I think it’s got to be an artifact.
What? This reads as really close to assuming what you're trying to show. Could you spell this reasoning out?
It's also funny you should say May 20, since it was the first day with a high above 75 F in Minneapolis that year, as well as the first with a low above 55, going by https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/minneapolis/historic?month=5&year=2020. (Also, as another commenter points out, the stay-at-home order expired after May 17.)
By the way, it looks like you've put the black line for "Floyd's death" about a day and a half early. It should be on the shoulder of the first peak.
"Graham" wrote: "When an officer who is fired or prosecuted for something that is clearly unreasonable (like Derek Chauvin, whom all cops agreed was guilty)"
I am going to press [X] to doubt. I haven't been able to find any surveys that specifically ask current/former police officers what they think of Chauvin's actions. I've found articles that report the findings of interviews with cops. Those who are willing to go on the record, particularly high-ranking cops who don't do any actual policing and are sensitive to political considerations (not "real po-leece," as Det. McNulty would say) , are unanimous. But that begins to break down as soon as anonymity is provided, and as the interviews work their way down the chain to beat cops. To the extent that I've found a consensus (on a first-pass review of mainstream news articles), that consensus seems to be that Chauvin crossed a line but wasn't guilty of murder.
https://is.gd/cHsZ2g
Your original point, as I understand it, was that the Chauvin/Floyd incident shouldn't change cops' risk assessment. With more context, you wrote: "When an officer who is fired or prosecuted for something that is clearly unreasonable (like Derek Chauvin, whom all cops agreed was guilty) police don't worry about it."
I understand your point to be that when police officers see another cop do something far over the line to the point that it's "murder" deserving of 23 years in prison, those officers don't fear that they'll face such punishment because they don't expect to commit murders. Murder of a suspect is inconceivable to most cops. They "don't worry about it" because murder of an incapacitated suspect is something that other cops do, not them.
But what Chauvin/Floyd demonstrates is that a little bit of excessive force can get you 23 years in prison. I expect there to be a number of cops who (a) already use Chauvin's level of force and have been getting away with it because it's effective and they never get caught because nobody died, (b) could see themselves going over the excessive-force line to that degree at some point in the future if they're having a terrible day, and/or (c) fear that even if they do nothing wrong, a jury could be convinced that excessive force had been used when it was not.* That has to change every beat cop's risk assessment, no?
*I'll posit that Chauvin used an illegal restraint. Regardless of Minnesota's quirky felony-murder rule, I don't think the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the illegal restraint contributed to Floyd's death.
I'll try this a different way:
What evidence, if it existed, would be sufficient to convince you that the Chauvin/Floyd incident changed the average beat cop's risk assessment?
I still don't see how it is necessary to defend Chauvin in order for that incident to change the average cop's risk assessment. Cops in Minnesota recently learned that the maximum punishment for excessive force (that they don't expect to harm, much less cause death) is not reprimand or firing but 23 years in prison. How does that not change the risk assessment of even a cop who knows that he'll never cross the line, but can't rule out the possibility of being falsely accused?
I also don't see how your characterization of my linked article fits this quotation:
"A sergeant in the [NYPD] who spoke on the condition of anonymity... said he and other officers saw Chauvin’s trial as a reason to think twice before using force against someone who is resisting arrest. 'It has an effect on police officers, no doubt about it, and for some officers it can even affect the way they approach certain situations,” the sergeant, who is white, said. 'They may be more hesitant to use force. I’d hate for officers to get killed or injured because they hesitated to use force.'"
Maybe he's exaggerating; maybe it's good that cops are thinking twice about force. But he said it, and his position is not dependent on justifying Chauvin's actions. It's anecdotal, sure, but no more than your experience.
Thanks for the insights. It's good to read something that hadn't been processed through x layers of media.
Seconded!
This makes sense to me.
If you go back to that thread, you'll find me disagreeing with Graham there.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7428604
The bit in that article where an officer said "maybe now people will think twice before using force" as though it was a bad thing is everything wrong with policing.
Good. If more police thought before using force, fewer people would get hurt. Both officers and non-officers.
Are you rejecting the possibilities that (i) there is some nonzero amount of force that is necessary for optimal policing, and (ii) fear of punishment might discourage cops from using that level of force?
A significant problem in Uvalde was the police thinking twice before using force, n'est-ce pas?
I am not rejecting i. I will worry about ii when we are anywhere close to it. We aren't.
Do not confuse "police not doing something" with police use of force. The two are not the same.
Put it this way...how do you think police use of force results in optimal policing?
Most people getting hurt are getting hurt by people other than police. We've got a lot more people getting fatally hurt right now, and that result hardly seems "good".
In interactions involving police. Which was rather implied by my comment about 'both officers and non-officers', I thought.
Your assertion is really that the murder rate spike is because the police are afraid to use sufficient force? Policing and use of force are not the same thing, you realize...
Policing and use of force are indeed different things and ideally one could flood the streets with police and thereby deter crime, thus removing the need for most uses of force. But in our non-ideal world, policing DOES at times require force and the way police avoid getting blamed for using force is pulling back on policing.
If their view of policing is that use of force is so integral to it that the only way to avoid excessive use of force is to not police at all, I think they may be doing it wrong.
Especially given things like murder prevention are likely easily done by mere presence.
Mere presence can do a lot to deter crimes... but presence matters because actions will be taken in response to criminal activity. The Weberian state is defined as the entity with a monopoly on coercion because authority does ultimately boil down to force (even if it's the communal force of a mob against a single deviant, as in less formalized systems), and if no larger force cracks down then violent criminals get to be that force in their own right. If police just stand around during riots without doing anything, the riots can persist.
>Good. If more police thought before using force, fewer people would get hurt. Both officers and non-officers.
So let me get this right. If a suspect has a gun or a knife, and police officer hesitates in using force against the suspect, this will lead to LESS police officers getting hurt?
And the vast majority of people killed by police are armed, and many of the so-called 'unarmed' ones were still posing a serious (and even potentially fatal threat) like driving a car at officers. George Floyd is a rarity - meanwhile these past few years have shown the much larger increase in harm that occurs with less policing being done.
I hate to say it, but its hard to call BLM anything other than base tribalism. They would happily accept hundreds of black people being killed if it means (potentially) a handful less unarmed black people being killed by the police.
I am not particularly concerned about police use of force against armed suspects. I am much more concerned about their use of force against unarmed suspects. It doesn't kill people much, but plenty of people get roughed up very casually by the police, with little or no oversight or means of redress. That is a problem.
Nor am I particularly concerned that officers will not defend themselves because they are scared of getting in trouble. That takes a very particular combination of bravery and cowardice that I do not think actually exists that much in the real world.
Also note that I did not say "dead." I said "hurt."
You do realise pretty much your entire post is trying to set up strawmen of what I said, right?
> I am going to press [X] to doubt. I haven't been able to find any surveys that specifically ask current/former police officers what they think of Chauvin's actions.
You're refusing to believe this is because you think a survey is _required_ to make it plausible?
I think it is trivial to dispute the assertion that literally 100% of police officers think that Chauvin was guilty of the murder charge. All it takes is one and you're below 100%, so any anecdote will suffice.
The actual percentage of cops who think Chauvin was guilty (whether the number is 90%, 75%, 60%, a bare majority, or some smaller amount) has policy consequences corresponding to that number. That's what's interesting/relevant when trying to figure out if, when, and how cops changed their policing tactics, and how those changes contributed to the murder spike. And you're only going to get that data with a survey, yes.
>> There's an alternative explanation that fits the evidence here: the killing of Floyd itself caused the crime increase by damaging trust in the police, which led to an increase in retaliatory violence.
The article linked below that comment is focused on gangs. In my general model of gangs (on which I am an Noted Expert because I watched Breaking Bad and The Wire) and their feelings about the police, trust is not the word that comes to mind.
Of course, the probability of a murder suspect getting quickly arrested greatly affects the retaliatory murders. In a city where, by magic, the correct suspect is arrested within 24h of any homicide, only very foolish gang members would try there hands at revenge killings, while in a city where murders are never prosecuted, revenge killings may be rational for a gang.
I do not see why gang members should update their estimate of that probability as a direct result of a murder committed by the police. A much more likely chain of reasoning seems to be
murder by cops => decreased trust in police in general population => depolicing => higher probability estimate (among gang members) of getting away with murder => more gang revenge killings.
Summing up all the steps in between as "damaging trust in police" seems like an oversimplification.
(The quoted statement does not directly refer to gangs, so it could also be interpreted as meaning that previously noncriminal people start committing murders because they lost their faith in the justice system. I find that unconvincing as well. I don't think the update from "Police are good people who serve and protect, so I should report crimes to them" to "Police are racist assholes, so I should not talk to them and avenge any crimes on my own" will happen after any one murder by a cop. I don't claim that the effect of eroding trust is not there, I just claim that it is unlikely to cause that spike within a few days of a single incident.)
Yes, but it's not "any one murder by a cop". There are incidents reported from all over the country. I don't tend to remember them, but I know they happen, because I notice when they flash on the news for a day. Those who feel more affected/threatened probably notice them a lot more clearly and clearly remember them a lot longer. I've known several people whose response to crime was "Damn. Will the insurance pay? If so I've got to report this to the cops.". And I was once assaulted without provocation by a professional boxer, and they police just shrugged it off, so I sort of understand their response. I don't think I've ever gotten an direct help from them, though there is clear indirect help. (They do drive through the area. Our neighborhood eventually hired a security group because the police were so unhelpful. That helped a lot, even though they couldn't have arrested or stopped anyone.)
> And I was once assaulted without provocation by a professional boxer, and they police just shrugged it off, so I sort of understand their response.
A friend of a friend _died_ a few years ago after being punched _once_ by a former 'pro' boxer.
And a friend of that friend-of-a-friend had his jaw broken from a random entirely-unexpected haymaker from some drunk asshole.
Punching someone is an extremely threatening/dangerous thing to do!
Is homicide the type of crime that should be expected to increase as a result of reduced policing?
I would not expect my chances to get away with murder to increase significantly as a result of fewer patrol cars rolling through the neighborhood. If my fingerprints are on the shell casing, if the victim has my skin cells under her fingernails, if my own blood is at the scene, I'm going to get caught. The cops might show up to the crime scene later, but unless they're so lackadaisical that I'm able to dispose of the evidence and concoct an alibi, I'm in trouble.
Shoplifting, minor assaults, smash-and-grab thefts, and public urination should explode, though. Now there may be a broken-windows effect by which murder is a downstream consequence of reduced policing, but I wouldn't expect that to take the form of a spike.
There are types of homicides that are really the “cream” of other criminal activities. If 8 guys rob a jewelry store for $100k that has some non trivial impact on their likelihood of being murdered.
I would think the causal chain goes something like the following in Minneapolis:
Anger causes riots > Riots cause a total pullback in policing >Total pullback in policing quickly leads to slightly more property crime and small scale violence > lack of police response to this leads to hugely more property crime and small violence > this higher level of general crime indirectly creates more murders.
Completely plausible, but that wouldn't manifest as a sudden spike, right?
Well the sudden spike is just the brute lawlessness during the riots. Then the casual chain i am talking about is explaining why it didn’t go away. Also I think we blew through stages 1-4 in my example in like a day.
Roughly half of all murders get solved now.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/barely-half-of-murders-are-now-being-solved/
Homicides by gun are less likely to be solved than others. So are inner city homicides relative to other areas, homicides of blacks relative to others. The book "Ghettoside" was about how rampant unsolved murders were in the worst parts of LA (like "the Grim Sleeper").
I don't see why you dismiss the temperature thing out of hand, when a plot of murders vs. time of year is right above. There is a clear dramatic increase from late May to September every year, yes there is a "critical temperature of 78 degrees" or perhaps a "critical solar angle" ... why is that silly?
The MN data do show a large increase in baseline (red vs. blue) so "nobody was comitting extra pandemic aggravated assaults/murders" looks to be flatly false - the "un-rolled" data in particular show far, far more red events compared to blue in the winter. In any case the ratio in assaults between winter and summer in MN, about 2x, is the same for both the 2020 and baseline data.
We don't have month-by-month murder data for the country to show whether this "surge" is bigger than the usual summer surge. It looks to be proportionately the same in MN and bigger in NY.
In the bigger picture distinguishing between "bigger summer effect due to pandemic " and "it's BLM" is difficult because they happened only once and at the same time, and you really didn't try. You just said that you don't take it seriously, then made some sarcastic "wHaT is ThErE a CrItICaL TeMp LOL" statements as if it proved anything ...
> the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures
Maybe show this? It's clear from the MN data and NY data that they neither started nor peaked at the same time ... not that you have any sort of statistical definition of "start" to begin with or anything, nor did you show data from other cities, nor did you show that the correlation was tighter than the usual correlation in seasonal crime etc. etc.
Which is fine, it's not your day job (or is it, being an influential truthy-ness teller), but don't claim you've rigorously disproved something by saying "it's hard for me to take it seriously".
SA didn't say that a "critical temperature" or "critical solar angle" hypotheses were "silly," but I do think he provided strong reasons to doubt them: "the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures." Similarly, the solar angle in New Orleans is never the same as in Chicago on the same day.
I haven't spent much time reading up on this, but it seems that we don't have great answers for why crime peaks during the summer. I found this study (PDF link https://is.gd/g86TzQ) that seems (upon skimming) to relate temperatures above 85F to increased violent crime in Los Angeles. But it seems important (and unasked) to know how the seasonal crime rates compare in cities with different seasonal temperature flucuations and different dates when schools go on summer break.
> the homicide spike started at the the same time in a lot of different cities with widely varying temperatures
Yes this was the substantive argument.
This isn't supported by any data he has shown though. The only time-resolved data he showed were NYC and MN, and depending on what you call "the start of the spike", one began in mid-May and the other late May. Which are two different times and both before Floyd.
If you call the "start of spike" when it exceeds previous historic norms in absolute rate rather than when it begins trending upwards (as SA did to avoid the point that the spike began before Floyd), then for MN it was a few days before Floyd, if we ignore e.g. February and the baselines being higher, and for NY sometime in mid-June, both different times.
Each of these has to be compared to the usual yearly swings, which also look correlated on these timescales, to show that this spike is more time-correlated than usual in addition to being higher in amplitude. Definitely, definitely not shown in anything SA has posted despite his claim.
And as you mention, a summer spike is not the same as a temperature-related spike or a solar angle spike.
For me, assaults and murders happen more when people are socializing and thus finding reasons to be violent. Lockdowns and winter reduce this, the coming of summer increases this. If the pandemic increased propensity for violence but winter lockdowns prevented people from going to the bar/club/house party where they normally would shoot someone, the ability to finally be outside on the streets, at a bbq and so on would of course result in a spike that is larger than usual. And also add to the intensity of the protests.
It is a sad comment in the state of modern academia and politicized issues that when someone tells me they are a PhD candidate at a top program in a politicized field, instead of my trust in their comment going up immensely, it only ticks up slightly over random stranger.
From what happened in the media and what criminologists were saying in the aftermath of the riots it is clear the discipline is very badly ideologically compromised. There are literally hundreds (thousands?) of papers who sole purpose seems to be misinterpreting data to avoid politically unflattering results.
My trust in their comment drops noticeably over a random stranger.
Being ideologically motivated to always prove things in one particular direction makes such a person worse than useless to me, as someone trying to get closer to the truth.
At least if someone randomly makes up BS, I have a hope of seeing the lie, and being able to call it out with my peers. If they're smart and motivated in lying to me, generally speaking, I will never figure out what the lie was, and my ideologically-motivated peers will continue to believe them over me.
This latter sort of person, who is very smart and motivated to propagate lies is... extremely common in the world right now.
Personally I think it's the lippy tone that really crushed my trust in that guy. "I trust this whole post will be reworked into a mea culpa, because I have a degree!" I mean, Jesus Christ.
It seems likely to me that we are nowhere near the Pareto optimal curve between policing and crime rate, just as in most governments' response to the pandemic we were nowhere near the optimal curve between economic impact and lives lost.
This situation would imply that while it may well be that police funding loss and increased restraint led to increased crime in 2021 specifically, it is still entirely possible that the best possible versions of "defunding the police", in which some large percentage of a city's police budget gets redirected to evidence based social services, could still result in a net decrease in crime.
The late Mark Kleiman used to talk about how an economic calculation of the cost of crime shows he massively underinvest in its prevention. Which is why he wrote the book "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment". The short version of that is hire lots more cops, and make punishment swift, certain & short.
"The short version of that is hire lots more cops, and make punishment swift, certain & short."
Given constrained budgets, but improving technology, I'd like to see how much of "swift, certain" can benefit from automation. We are under a lot of surveillance _anyway_. I'd like to see us get something from it.
Robocop?
Gort?
More nearly: security cameras + Google + license plate readers. As I wrote, we are under a lot of surveillance _anyway_. If someone commits a crime, and it is captured on camera, and there is some record of where the person lives, they can be arrested at leisure by human police. As TGGP quoted, the point is to "make punishment swift, certain & short". The other nice things about cameras and similar sensors is that
a) They don't require putting police officers in harm's way, at least at the time of the crime. At the time of the arrest, the police could, at least in principle, arrange the circumstances to minimize risk (preferably to everyone concerned).
b) They don't have biases. A video of a crime is a video of a crime regardless of any preconceptions about any subgroup in the population in any direction.
I get it.
That’s very empowering.
"That’s very empowering."
I'm honestly not sure if you intend this sarcastically (seems probable) or not.
One other change that I would suggest adding to the mix: In addition to trying to make punishments certain & short, I think we simply have too many laws (most notably, the drug laws and other _victimless_ crime laws) and I think we should eliminate all the victimless ones and reconsider carefully which of the total set we really want to keep (and enforce). Some laws (e.g. against public lewdness) are merely because someone chooses to take offense at a behavior and I don't think those laws should be on the books either.
What are your preferences?
One of the things Kleiman suggested is releasing a lot more people from prison/jail but making them all wear ankle-monitors and immediately throwing them in jail (even if briefly) if they aren't where they're supposed to be (or somewhere they're not supposed to be). He was inspired by an example of hardcore meth addict burglars in Hawaii who cleaned up when they got credibly threatened with jail if they failed to show up for a drug test or tested dirty. As it is right now an enormous number of crimes are committed by people on parole or awaiting trial for other crimes.
That sounds reasonable. How restrictive is the set of places they are supposed to be? I could see someone on a work-release program being _mostly_ restricted to work/home/grocery store, but there are exceptions that come up. Pre or post authorizations for exceptions?
People's day to day lives continue to get worse so crime continues to rise. I don't find it to be that complicated and I find this whole analysis and conversation to a bit moot.... I see a lot of people taking correlations and inferring causality while oversimplifying this complex social issue. Scott has done a great job at doing this, but because of that nature the conversation leaves much to be desired for me. Take this excerpt from Scott as an example of the subtle framing expressed in his phrasing through the different posts in this thread.
> I accept I should have put more work in the original post into ruling out gun sales as the cause.
Why is it "the cause" and not "a cause"? Framing is so important.
----
I recognize policing as a way to abate crime, data shows it and, for example, the NIJ recognizes its utility among many other approaches (https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles/171676.pdf), but I know of no evidence that a lack of policing is a driving force for crime. Key word: driving.
Am I surprised to see what Scott presented and do I doubt the data? No.
Do I agree that a decreasing amount of policing can be, and this case was, a contributing cause to rising homicides? Yes, and unfortunately I've seen it anecdotally in my community.
Do I think this conversation is well framed, actionable, and effectively presenting a variety of perspectives? Not really.
I'm ready to move onto the next topic...
> What is the point of nitpicking over phrasing here?
Causal analysis... it's a question of addressing primary vs secondary issues. This analysis is quite focused on the secondary, but addressing primary issues is how we achieve the long term change for what I hope we all want. Happier healthier and safer societies .
> people should be more skeptical of Black Lives Matter and similar radical and racialized anti-police movements, so hopefully we won't go through this whole mess again next time there's a controversial shooting.
This is why i nuance. We have controversial police activity on a regular basis, so why did things come to a head in this moment of time? Yes, a match was struck in 2020, that is as clear as day. Do we want to talk about the match... or the built up tinder that's still burning?
Well this conversation has moved into strongly biased territory so I don't see much point in continuing. I can taste the disdain in your words. I'm seeking to ask open ended questions and it feel's like your hammering the same point. I've got a beach weekend and some reading to go to. Toodles
"People's day to day lives keep getting worse". No, on the contrary. Globally, everything is still improving, year by year. Some day it will obviously have to stop, but do not mix up what the click-bait media tells and what calm data tells.
> Globally, everything is still improving, year by year.
I agree with your point but our conversation isn't scoped globally, we're talking about lives in the USA and USA homicide rates... so the point is moot here.
> do not mix up what the click-bait media tells and what calm data tells.
Bruh
I see your point.
Canada did have more murders in 2020 than any year since 1991, though it should be noted that a significant percentage of our murders that year (3%) was the work of one mass shooter in Nova Scotia. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-worst-mass-shooting-helped-push-2020-murder-rate-15-year-high-2021-11-25/
Yeah, that doesn't seem like a 'significant' trend!
How do you determine if people are arguing in good faith in an argument like this?
Thing X happens via a very simple mechanism that many people predicted, people propose a whole series of complicated different explanations.
I suppose that education and health issues we discuss often have complicated explanations has damaged our epistemic health when it comes to other areas.
Crime is a simpler area because it involves lower IQ people, simpler systems and clear incentives.
It is hard to tell if the complex explanations come from people with an open mind or just ideologues upset that their theories fall apart.
Did assaults and other crimes go up or not?
I don't recall if this was addressed in the original essay.
If they did, then it's people doing it.
If they didn't, it's less policing.
Our stats on that are much less reliable than for murders.
How would we know if assaults and other crimes went up?
How would we know if we could trust the data that's collected about this? Or whether data was even being collected (reliably) in the first place?
During the pandemic, I knew someone that worked at a high-end retail store in Manhattan and the regularly regaled me of the spectacularly _brazen_ shoplifting that they routinely observed, e.g. a group of people would drive right up in front of the store, several people would get out of the vehicle, walk right into the store, and just take entire stands/cases of whatever (very expensive) merchandise happened to be at hand. _Some_ of those thefts were reported to the police, but definitely not all, and it sure seemed to me like the retail person I knew had just become almost entirely resigned to the thefts. They certainly weren't, on their own and definitely not with any support/promotion of their superiors, doing anything at all about stopping or preventing the thefts either.
(And even more weirdly, at least from my perspective, is that the vehicles in which these thieves would arrive were often very expensive ones. Maybe that makes some kind of sense because they'd be more likely to even know about the high-end retail company/brand in the first place?)
What fraction of gun homicides use legal guns? I'd have thought that a lot of guns used in crime would not have been purchased through legal channels anyway, so the gun sales graphs would be irrelevant.
In past studies it was only about 20%, but I'm not sure if that's changed in the last 30 years.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/armed-and-considered-dangerous-survey-felons-and-their-firearms-0
I was among those who wanted to read more about the homicide spike, so a late thanks to Scott for the post.
After reading the post, I asked an active member of the German Green Party about it; I was curious about the reaction I would get. (I would say sth. like: apparantly there is data showing that homicides among blacks grew after BLM protests.) What's your guess?
He confirmed this immediatly, his reaction was something like: yes, the police in the states is only trained to act while being violent. Then there are protests that they shouldn't be so violent, and they stop/reduce policing. They simply have no idea on how to carry out their duties without resorting to violence.
I admit I was surprised he knew the data and jumped right to: police is doing less (we're both living in Germany). It's just an anecdote, and I don't think it's representative for anybody. (I would still be surprised if the next nine Party Members or Green Party Members here knew.) I also think it shows nicely that even taking a BLM - homicide spike correlation as given, the question on *who has to change what* is totally dependant on the overall understanding of the situation.
You are putting your finger on something important here.
Let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, that Scott has convincingly shown that the spike in homicides in the US was "caused" by the Floyd killing. That fact established, the question then becomes: "Now that we know that, what should we do? " The answer depends on what we assume is the main causal pathway/s that produced the spike, including the larger US context these pathways are "packaged" within.
... And that is devilishly difficult to get a proper handle on. (The task is made more difficult by all the people with a political agenda entering the debate, perhaps not really caring that much about what is the "most likely truth" - maybe even including your Green German politicians? )
However, in this situation maybe good old David Hume may offer some advice. He adviced (or he can at least be read that way) to do something, based on one's favorite theory of what is the main causal mechanism/s, and see if the change one then expects, takes place. If yes, that strengthens one's favorite theory. If not, do something based on your second-best theory of the main causal mechanism. And so on.
Oh, I was curious about the reaction, specifically because BLM could easily be an issue where a Green politician in Germany might have a gut reaction related to their general view of things.
At the same time, it was a low-level private conversation, and the US is far away. I think the incentive for them to deliberately distort what they had recognized as 'the truth' was rather low. So I think I got a fair account of what this person thought on the topic. Not more and not less.
I think you're likely right about the 'psychological' motivations given the circumstances of your conversation.
Here in the U.S., most people I've talked to about this kind of thing – in-person – definitely seem to 'know what they're supposed to say'.
Do they 'know what they're supposed to say' despite having a different conviction, or do they repeat certain talking points, because they are convinced of those? Or a bit of both?
I think Hume's advice is difficult to enact in politics, where you first need the decision (which takes time), and then sometimes big amounts of money, changes in real life take years, and so on. But it's a nice path for reflection. Already putting all the assumed pathways one besides the other and think about their consequences and implementation, without sticking to the intuitively closest, would be an advantage.
I saw some documentations comparing police training in US versus selected European countries. The differences both in total length of training, and in length and importance of training in deescalatory measures seemed huge. I didn't did deeper, so I don't know how much it holds under scutiny.
I would be interested to know more; relevant questions in this context would include:
- overall lenght of training
- weight giving to training on how to deescalate dangerous situations
- admission requirements
- overall weight given to making sure that nobody is harmed or killed (including attitude & and how people talk about that internally)
- measures to ensure that extremists, both from left and right, can't serve as police officers.
I'm aware that contexts (among others, gun ownership in general population) differ widely.
>I can’t find temperatures for 2020 in particular, but here’s average temperature in New York City over the course of the year.
I found temperatures for 2019-2020, and graphed them to see how 2020 compared to the previous year.
https://i.imgur.com/R2TBdqF.png
This graph shows that the temperature in NYC was very similar to the previous year.
Thanks!
I have a big issue with using "police pullback" as a generic term because it obfuscates _how_ police pull back.
The Minneapolis police, for example, didn't say "let's reassess how we're interacting with the public and stop doing broken window policing" after George Floyd, they went full on "I'm taking my ball and going home." This is an excerpt from a store owner who used to have one of the best used book stores in Minneapolis which also happened to be close to where Floyd was killed:
"...There were 5 cops on the roof of the 5th Precinct building, watching and presumably reporting on events to a headquarters somewhere else, but there were no cops on the ground.
A little after 10 pm, some people pried a sheet of plywood part of the way off the door to a convenience store/gas station across the street from the 5th Precinct, crawled inside and grabbed some loot. There was no police response, so a few more people also crawled in and grabbed some loot...." http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/riotreport.php
The police bunkered up in their buildings and _watched_ looting and later arson go on. I find it a very disingenuous argument to blame reformers for the results of police literally watching felonies being committed without comment.
When they did actively police, many did so in the most incendiary way possible, to the point where a man was actually acquitted of shooting at police due to it being an act of self defense: Police where shooting rubber bullets from an unmarked van at random people without identifying themselves: https://www.ammoland.com/2021/09/man-not-guilty-in-self-defense-case-against-police-during-minneapolis-riots (Note that the author does his best to blame the incident on anything but the police, his account of the facts still has to admit that the police 1.) did not follow policy with regard to shooting people, 2.) did not follow policy when investigating the incident, giving the officers a chance to view the video and talk with each other before taking statements, 3.) made statements that conflicted with the videos they were shown before making those statements, and 4.) assaulted a man who had already surrendered himself.)
I think thinking in terms of police "pulling back" is at best not useful and more likely hiding the issue when it can cover activities as broad as not making as many traffic stops due to time required for paperwork and flagrantly standing and watching people looting and committing arson. Furthermore, saying police have "pulled back" when they are driving around in unmarked vans shooting people is highly misleading.
The discussion should be around changes in how antagonistic police policies and actions are, since the Minneapolis police have demonstrated that it certainly possible to both reduce the number of police interactions and increase the antagonism between police and the public at the same time.
Literal broken windows policing is the one replicated intervention in criminology shown to be effective. Jim Manzi pointed that out in his book "Uncontrolled", which I reviewed here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/uncontrolled/
"The Minneapolis police, for example, didn't say "let's reassess how we're interacting with the public and stop doing broken window policing" after George Floyd, they went full on "I'm taking my ball and going home."
*This is exactly what BLM wanted*
They WANTED less policing
They WANTED less police
They WANTED to defund the police, and most defund movements supported abolition of police
This is exactly what they wanted, and this is the result.
The police reduced policing in the most antagonistic way possible, then claimed that reduced policing was a failure. Instead of interacting with people breaking curfew they drove around in unmarked vehicles shooting people with rubber bullets, that's "pulling back? They slashed the tires of reporters' cars legally parked in parking lots "in case someone committed a crime and wanted to run."
Yeah, when upper management is putting policies in place to actively sabotage attempts to reform the organization and not holding employees accountable for violating even those rules, one of your few options is to get rid of the entire organization and replace it with something new. Something without the problematic culture. Which is what the defund the police movement was all about: Get rid of the police department and replace it with a public safety department including police officers but _not_ led by a police officer.
Slashing tires: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/slashed-tires-protests/
Not doing "broken windows policing" would be a lousy idea because literally policing broken windows is the one intervention in criminology successfully replicated in a controlled trial.
> The Minneapolis police, for example, didn't say "let's reassess how we're interacting with the public and stop doing broken window policing" after George Floyd, they went full on "I'm taking my ball and going home."
So, whenever there's a 'mass shooting', do you also, personally, 'reassess' your own likelihood of doing something similar?
As Graham has pointed out, both on his blog and here in the comments (both on this post and the previous one), Chauvin was an _extreme outlier among police officers. It seems totally unfair to expect or demand that police officers generally have a duty to reflect on 'their' bad behavior because of a single extreme outlier that does NOT accurately represent them.
But, because of the steady drumbeat of stories that, e.g. 'police are racist murderers', _of course_ it seems reasonable for police as a general class of people to soberly reflect on how terrible they are whenever any bad thing is done by any police officer anywhere in a huge country.
What's worse is that _many_ of the most prominent examples of 'police are racist murderers' are just straight up misleading/deceptive, e.g. Michael Brown.
Where is the sober and sincere reassessment of The Narrative when even the Obama DOJ eventually admits, e.g. 'Michael Brown likely tried to kill the police officer that eventually killed him'? I've never seen that myself.
I never mentioned Chauvin, I only spoke of unquestionably antagonistic and unjustifiable police behavior after Chauvin killed Floyd. But if you want to talk about him, while Chauvin's actions may have been outliers, as they say, "A single bad apple will spoil the whole damn bunch."
Chauvin, despite being a _known_ bad actor not only remained in a public facing position, was put into and stayed in a position of authority within the Minneapolis police force. Whatever made that possible, whether it's a cultural issue, union contracts that promote based solely on tenure, a militarized "us verses them" attitude that justifies violence against the public, or a whole host of other things, whatever it is that allows a guy who is known to be violent is not only kept in a position where he interacts with the public but is put in a position of authority _is the problem._ Chauvin is a symptom, just like the rest of the incompetent-to-violent behavior by the Minneapolis police through the protests and into the riots is a symptom of the underlying problem.
Look at the history of the Minneapolis Police Department and the DOJ:
January 2015, the DOJ "The Diagnostic Center analyzed citizen complaints over a six-year period, identified strengths and gaps in oversight, discipline and accountability, and evaluated MPD’s current early-intervention system and how it compares to other model systems." https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-diagnostic-center-provides-final-assessment-minneapolis-police-department
November 2015, police kill Jamar Clark and rioting breaks out. Oops. Hello Black Lives Matter. The DOJ issues an after action report in 2019: "The review found that the City of Minneapolis lacked a coordinated political, tactical and operational response to the protests, demonstrations, and occupation of the fourth precinct police station. This led to inconsistent messaging, confusion and ineffective communication that negatively affected the response. The assessment team found that a breakdown in communication between city leaders, police leadership and line officers impacted the ability of line officers to carry out the response and inhibited effective crowd management." https://cops.usdoj.gov/pressrelease/department-justice-releases-after-action-assessment-response-minneapolis-protests
That sounds familiar. What did the MPD learn? Apparently not to display "...commendable restraint and resilience in these extremely difficult circumstances,” like they did last time.
Oh, and Chauvin as an outlier? Maybe, but reading the Minnesota's Department of Human right's report on the MPD makes me think he's closer to a 2 standard deviation outlier than a 4 or 5 SD outlier: https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City%20of%20Minneapolis%20and%20the%20Minneapolis%20Police%20Department_tcm1061-526417.pdf
Wanted to plug this Atlantic article from yesterday: "Six reasons why the police murder clearance rate has declined". Its a short (4 min read) interview with a crime analysts about why the murder clearance rate, or % of "solved" murders, has declined from 90% nationally in the 1960's to around 50% today. TLDR: Statistics until the 1990's are bunk and such a high % of murders weren't actually solved, firearm murders have increased from ~50% to ~80% and are much harder to solve than other murders, and distrust between cops and black Americans in areas with a high murder rate is worse than ever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/07/police-murder-clearance-rate/661500/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20220707&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily
I think the reason this is getting SO much pushback is that you're looking at extremely noisy time-series data and telling a just-so story about it (handwaving things like, maybe the early-May spike was random and the late-May spike is real, or maybe it's the rolling average--without actually trying to verify how it was averaged! IMO this was a significant oversight in the original piece.)
Not that this means your just-so story is WRONG, but it makes people want to tell other just-so stories. For example: the pandemic caused an increased murder rate in the US for <pick-your-politically-charged-reason-here>, but the lockdowns caused a countervailing decrease, so the real spike took a few months to show up. You've already pooh-poohed this theory (“it took a few months for people to get cabin fever from the pandemic”), but seriously, look at the movement data for the US in "Retail and recreation" or "Public transport stations" here: https://ourworldindata.org/covid-google-mobility-trends It craters in March, with a significant recovery through May and June, exactly when murders were spiking.
To be clear, the data from Baltimore are very compelling, and the demographic breakdown of the murder spike is suggestive. I'm convinced that publicized police murders + protests caused part of the spike. But I think the time series data were the weakest part of the argument.
The structural break lines up with Floyd too exactly for it to be a coincidence.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/was-2020s-huge-murder-surge-due-to-pandemic-or-to-blm/
One thing about early May: movement upward with warmer weather could have contributed to a genuine "spike" where crime would fall later, but what we got was durably higher crime rates. A "plateau".
https://www.unz.com/isteve/my-response-to-scott-alexanders-what-caused-the-2020-homicid/
If you're talking about the red line in "Figure 1", that was also in Scott's original piece, and also unconvincing on its own. Yes, there's a big jump in May 2020, but there are similar-sized spikes in May 2017 and May 2019. It's just too noisy to tell from eye-balling the graph whether that's a single discontinuity, or, say, random noise on top of an increase over 2 months.
You're ignoring the point about real "spikes" vs "plateaus", with the latter being what we got. Sailer's link there to Richard Rosenfeld's finding of a "structural break" broke, so here's a working one:
https://build.neoninspire.com/counciloncj/wp-content/uploads/sites/96/2021/07/Crime-in-US-Cities-October-Update.pdf
He adjusted for season, which is the normal variation you're seeing in other years. The genuine "spike" in non-residential burglaries in another graph there is ridiculous.
Thanks for the working link! Really interesting that robberies, residential burglary, and larcenies fell during the pandemic *and stayed low* (and WTH is up with drug offenses between April and July?). Curious whether this is a genuine decline, or a result of less policing--I tried to check the national crime victimization survey, but their latest report "covers crimes experienced from July 1, 2019 to November 30, 2020" and doesn't break the data down over time.
The "structural break" methodology IIUC assumes there was a single "break", identifies the most likely location, then tests for significance. That's totally consistent with there being a gradual rise over 2 months as lockdowns ended & an additional sudden change from the police murder + protests (I'd even expect a significant "break" to appear during the 2 months if it was just the gradual rise + random noise).
I ignored the spike vs plateau distinction because it's irrelevant to my point that the time series data are hard to interpret (and I didn't say anything about warmer weather). Based on the time series data alone, these two narratives seem about equally plausible to me: (a) a random spike in early May bled into a real "plateau" in late May, vs (b) a real "plateau" somehow caused by the pandemic was masked in March and April due to decreased movement during lockdowns. I think Scott overemphasized the strength of the time series data compared to his other graphs.
The "additional sudden change" is the jump we see right after Floyd, and their method locates it then because that is the biggest change in the data. But the idea that the "plateau" was caused by the pandemic is implausible when you take a global perspective.
The wave of "non-residential burglaries" in late May 2020 is looting.
The 'George Floyd's killing directly lead to the violence outbreak' claim is kind of shocking to me. If a bunch of black people went around killing more cops, white people, politicians etc. than normal, that would at least make sense (while being obviously morally indefensible to non-BLM-supporters). But what are they saying here? A black man got killed, and their response was to go out and kill a bunch of other black people? Putting aside the lack of empirical evidence for the claim, the implication of the claim strikes me as profoundly unflattering for black people, and if true should inform how we view black social pathology generally.
Yes, most black people are murdered by other black people – that was and has been true for a LONG time. (It's true for other races too AFAICT.)
The extra murders are 'more of the same', e.g. retaliatory 'gang' killings, which are now _much_ easier to get away with because, e.g. potential killers are much _less_ likely to be pulled over on their way to a murder and caught with an illegal gun.
"... the implication of the claim strikes me as profoundly unflattering for black people, and if true should inform how we view black social pathology generally."
In contrast, American society has tried very hard since May 25, 2020 to flatter Black people and to close our eyes to Black social pathology generally. And what happened? According to last week's CDC numbers, 43.8% more Black people died by homicide in 2021 than in 2019.
It's frustrating to see people devote so much time and energy theorizing about homicides without any understanding of the specific factors that distinguish homicide from other types of crime, even other violent crimes, leading to "explanations" for general increases in crimes and not specifically spikes in homicides.
The single most important thing to understand about homicides is that the majority of urban homicides are committed by relatively small groups of gang members, starting as drug/turf disputes and continuing as retaliations against previously unsettled homicides. Thus they are highly correlated in a way that has been compared to disease outbreaks - one homicide leads to another, which leads to another - which is not at all the case for other crimes likes robberies. (The excellent book "Don't Shoot!" by David Kennedy describes this dynamic as well as fascinating efforts to understand and break such cycles) Any explanation must take this into account. Trying to explain a percentage increase by looking for general increases in uncorrelated behaviors across large groups of the population is a waste of time.
It seems to me that *something* tends to happen after these high-profile incidents that leads to new retaliatory cycles, or more intense cycles, or some other changed dynamic from the previous status quo (which is already pretty bad in many urban areas but is apparently not the maximum possible rate). I wish everybody would spend their creative energies hypothesizing about what that something might be (changes in the success rate of detective work that can end cycles, changes in opportunities to start a new cycle or heat up a previously cooling one, etc) and not on all the other somethings out there that don't really have anything to do with the nature of urban homicide in the first place.
The specific hypothesis/theory/model is that the police are not doing as much (or really any) proactive policing that otherwise would 'suppress' _some_ of the murders you describe.
I would quibble with describing these murders, now or in the past, as "gang" related. There's a HUGE variance in the degree of 'organization' among 'gangs'. Most of these groups are not as well organized (and 'disciplined') as the, e.g. Italian mafia organizations portrayed in movies and TV shows (and every other type of media).
A lot of these murders, and even many 'mass shootings' (that _aren't_ the 'typical' mass-murder-suicide rampages) involve 'lazy' drive-by shootings that mostly result in many injuries instead of many deaths, i.e. the shooters _aren't_ methodically killing a large number of targets but mostly just shooting 'in the direction of' someone with which they 'have beef' when they're in public (and often when they're in a larger gathering that mostly consists of innocents, e.g. 'barbecues' and _funerals_).
Yes you are right about the huge variance in organization. David Kennedy's book describes this as well. I don't know of a good substitute word that conveys this well ("groups" is too generic)
It is easy to see how such 'lazy' 'beef' shootings would drive retaliatory cycles.
> David Kennedy's book describes this as well.
What book is this? I couldn't find it after a cursory search. (There are several "David Kennedy"-s too.)
"Don't Shoot" by David M. Kennedy
https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Shoot-Fellowship-Violence-Inner-City/dp/1608194140/ref=sr_1_1?crid=HZEP6N7ZZGL2&keywords=don%27t+shoot+david+kennedy&qid=1657547103&sprefix=don%27t+shoot+david+kennedy%2Caps%2C82&sr=8-1
Thanks!
When I predicted this homicide spike in early June 2020 and provided the reasoning, I specifically mentioned that homicides would increase (not all crime) and that black people would be most affected. And now we still have criminologists try to come up with alternate explanations that don't even take these two things into account.
The question is how the Floyd incident triggered the spike in homicides, not if it triggered the spike (which Scott in my opinion convincingly enough substantiates). What are the causal paths between these two phenomena - the "intermediate variables"? Scott himself suggested several possibilities in his original post, and several additional hypotheses have surfaced during the debate. The causal path/s is important, because they are linked to different "what to do" suggestions.
Causal pathway:
1. The "Floyd incident" inspired/triggered massive (and GLOBAL) protests, many of which were/became violent and destructive.
2. Police, _already_ demoralized, became resigned/resentful/fatalistic and mostly stopped proactively policing – when they weren't _officially ordered_ to do so by the relevant authorities in their jurisdiction.
3. The huge drop in proactive policing, e.g. traffic stops, removed a major/significant barrier to the kinds of murders that are routinely committed, e.g. 'gang' murders and other somewhat similar 'feud retaliations'.
And then, probably on top of that, I'd imagine/expect that homicide investigations became _even harder_ than they already were before "the Floyd incident", and the subsequent 'protests' (riots), so there's even less of a deterrent for the kind of people that commit these murders to doing so.
I agree, these are good hypotheses about pathways.
They may be wrong, though, and there may (always) be others.
But don't get me wrong; we must act based on our perceived best hypotheses about how the killing of Floyd was linked to the spike.
...and then, later, check if whatever we did, brought homicide rates back to "normal"or not.
Thanks for taking up that point of 'what to do' again.
I think it's much broader in fact. What to do depends on the overall understanding/ view of the current realities, of causal mechanisms of course (of which BLM -> homicide pathways are only a minor part) and your ideas about how those realities *should* look like.
Examples:
Worldview/Unterstanding of reality & causal pathways: Police behaviour is broadly fine, protests / riots were out of scale; protests -> demoralization & paperwork -> depolicing -> results in more homicides. What to do: limit protests, let police do their work, limit paperwork for police and add praise.
Worldview/Unterstanding of reality & causal pathways: Police behaviour is too violent and not accountable enough, protests were justified; protests -> demoralization & paperwork -> depolicing -> results in more homicides. What to do: reform police structures/staff/training in a way that results in better policing. If necessary, advocate for reform until it happens, including protests.
Two times the same 'causal paths' between the two phenomena, but two different results in terms of *what to do*.
Want one more?
Worldview/Unterstanding of reality & causal pathways: Police behaviour is too violent and not accountable enough, protests included riots and were out of scale; protests -> demoralization & paperwork -> depolicing -> results in more homicides. What to do: reform police structures/staff/training in a way that results in better policing. Scale down protests and invest in other/better forms of advocacy.
One of the few things where the causal pathways of BLM -> more homicides matter, is when they include: less policing -> more homicides, which would be a clear contra to 'just reduce policing, no matter what'. Although even in that case, if the worldview is eg.: less police causes homicides, as long as it's not replaced adequately by more social workers and more money for poorer communities (which will improve the situation medium-term), the conclusion again might be different (what to do: fund police less, and put all the money saved into social workers and money for poorer communities).
Could it be as simple as: Americans just being awakened to their overall unpreparedness for emergencies like a pandemic (ie lines to get paper towels and toilet paper), decided that when they saw police stations and Target stores and CNN buildings getting set on fire....that they decided to be prepared for those activities and proactively bought a gun for protection? I have anecdotal evidence from friends that would have never owned a gun prior to May 2020, but have one in their home now. The increase in gun transfer is the effect, not the cause?
Yes, this seems entirely reasonable and that's what the data mostly shows AFAIK, i.e. most of the 'new'/increase gun purchases were for the reasons you outlined.
Lots of people sensed in March 2020 that Trouble could be on the way, so a lot of guns were sold in March. But then nothing much happened in April, so gun sales dropped. Then in late May, Trouble with a Capital T arrived in the form of the Establishment egging on looters and arsonists, so there were a lot of gun sales in June.
Looting went on all summer in retail stores, but after awhile it became evident that the mobs were not pillaging residential neighborhoods, so gun sales receded again.
Totally hypothesising here and I don't have time atm to research this, but it seems weird to me that my first guess at the cause hasn't been mentioned anywhere I can see. Take a society with lots of guns and a strong suspicion of government and introduce a new scary phenomenon that cuases mass unemployment and house arrest. Take that increase in murderous intent and repress it with lockdowns and reduced mobility for the first few months (allowing for an increase in murderous intent but a reduced opportunity for murder) and then reduce movement restrictions and see what happens.
Hopefully will gget time to return to this and post some evidence.
If you're tired of us foreigners discussing a situation in US and want to engage in looking at problems in other countries for a change, this is for you:
In Germany, former UN expert Nils Melzer just accused the government of 'systemic failure' in the oversight of police. To my understanding the main accusation was, that goverment and judiciary system don't react adequately to cases of misuse of force by police. (https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/corona-demo-polizeigewalt-100.html).
In Germany, the rule of *Verhältnismäßigkeit* (proportionate reaction) is key. It rougly means, that police of course is allowed to use force, but only to the extend to which it is necessary in a given situation. Melzer found, that there were too many cases where force was used excessively (eg. taking sb. to the ground, even if the situation was already under control). The main problem here, according to him, is not only those cases, but that they are rarely prosecuted, and that the goverment doesn't really care much about them.
In case you care, the topic of excessive police force came up in the context of anti-Covid-measures - demonstrations. Not that I think this has any relevance.
Overall, I guess police is rather well trusted in Germany (except by the usual suspects like very leftists groups). Being part of the overall 'trust' vis-a-vis police, I think that most do a great job. A general tendency to protect police officers even if they overdid it, internally in the police, as well as in the judiciary system, + minimizing the problem by the goverment, is however plausible.
Here is a case that made it to the news: a girl that happened to be close to Anti-G20 protests wanted to go home, biked right towards a police barrier she thought was still open for passage, and ended up with a broken arm and severe PTSD. The article describes at lenght how the internal investigation was diverted and delayed for five years, until it was finally closed. A parallel lawsuit at an administrative court resulted in a statement that the force used by the police was illegitimate - this however has no concrete consequences. I don't think this one piece says all that much about the overall context; I would mostly trust that the main key points of the story itself have been well researched. (https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2022-07/g20-gipfel-hamburg-polizeigewalt-gericht/seite-5)
Of course I wanted to know the number of killings by the police, if you're interested, here is some data: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/706648/umfrage/durch-polizisten-getoetete-menschen-in-deutschland/ . Mostly between 5 and 15 persons killed / year.
Then of course the question, how many police officers were killed. I found the number to be > 400. Since 1945. (https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article236666105/Mehr-als-400-Polizisten-im-Dienst-getoetet.html). If you scroll down, the article contains an overview of each single case in the last 20 years. No killings in 2018 and 2019, two police officers killed in 2020 and two killed in 2021. I remember the last case, it was in national news with lots of declarations of outrage and sadness.
The last two bits make me wonder, whether we live in a specifically peaceful country, or whether there is lots of crime and problems, but just below the level of killing each other (where police is involved). Probably a bit of both.
I want to make the argument that the media coverage of the murder itself is what led to the increased murder rates.
It is already well known that the wide-reporting of suicides leads to an increase in suicides (and, sadly, an increase in car and commercial aircraft crashes). It is similarly known that the reporting of murders leads to an increase in murders in the areas of reporting. This is most notably observed following, again sadly, school shootings, when numerous shootings occur in succession. So, I think the argument can be made that the massive media coverage of the murder of George Floyd led, in turn, to the murder of more black men.
This would track with the logic that in reporting suicides and murders you lead to copycat suicides and murders. Where ages are reported in articles discussing suicides, the increase in suicides occurs in those within that age group/range. It seems to follow, therefore, that massive reporting of the murder of a black man would lead to copycat events. This would seem to explain why deaths of other ethnicities do not see a staggering increase. Likewise, one imagines that coverage of the murder of George Floyd was more extreme in the United States hence why the increase is only observable there (albeit I would need to actually see if the coverage was greater in the US). I would add that this explanation would also cover why media outlets have discussed other reasons; to state this is the reason would make them, in some way, complicit.
Timings wise it would also make sense. The coverage and the protests would occur contemporaneously, each feeding off the other.
I appreciate that this thought is unsourced, and low-effort in that it may have been covered by other comments, or by ACT and I have just missed it. Regardless, any discussion based on this thought would be interesting.
Has there been any attempt to ask the murderers about this?
Would it be possible to get a hold of a sample of people who attempted or completed homicides in the summer of 2020, and ask them why they did it, what pushed them over the edge etc? Or perhaps just do a deep analysis of court proceedings from those cases.
I agree with most of Scott’s analysis but I think we could do a lot more to understand the causal pathways at play.
> I agree with most of Scott’s analysis but I think we could do a lot more to understand the causal pathways at play.
This. If there is correlation, but not much clarity on causal pathways, what would be useful is qualitative, close-up studies in different communities. Those with and without a spike etc. This might involve asking those who killed (if they are available), but more importantly also the broader community, the police, the relatives of victims, and using locally available data to figure out what happened in that specific community. Then afterwards to compare and to conduct analysis on different hypothesis across cases. This is obviously not Scott's task, nor is it the task of the commentators here. It's actually a fair research question.
We'd need to catch the shooters, first. Which, for various reasons, we aren't.
Sure. They might be not available so to say, and even if they were, they might not want to talk to us, and they might have more incentives to lie to us than most. Equally important, we are mostly interested in the change of dynamics in a given community and not in the individual decisions.
I included this as a nod to the OP, and I thought my formulation made it clear, that all the bits after 'but also' were the ones I considered most important. ('This might involve asking those who killed, but also the broader community, the police, the relatives of victims, and using locally available data to figure out what happened in that specific community.') In a hurry now, but I'll change this to avoid misunderstandings.
The "stock of guns" argument seems flaky to me. No data, but I expect that a "new" gun would be vastly more likely to be involved in an actual shooting. There's various reasons including: People buy/obtain guns for a reason, a lot of the stock is tied up in large collections which won't all be used, new gun owners may not have thought ownership through and modified their guiding narratives and reactions.
I don't know the data myself, so will just repeat what I have heard others say without knowing the fundamental source.
The common claims are as follows:
1) The vast, vast majority of homicides are committed using guns that are not legally owned.
2) The average (median) time from first sale to "use of unlawful gun in homicide" is something like 7-8 years.
These would indeed suggest that it is very hard to get large effects on homicides from small changes in the stock of guns.
That the median historical value. Did it change for new gun "owners"? There's a huge number of guns, the guns used in violent crime are edge cases. In this type of situation you would want to find out what drives the outlier cases. It might be the statistical edge of normal, but it may not. There's another logical step away when we are looking at a change from the usual level of outliers. (I'm not in the US and not that engaged; more intrigued by the assumptions and arguments used.)
The CDC WONDER database this week now has pretty solid data thru December 2021 on homicide victimizations.
I come up with black deaths by homicide going up 37.8% in 2020 over 2019, Hispanics up 28.2%, non-Hispanic whites up 20.7%, American Indians up 20.4%, and Asians flat at 0.0%.
For 2021 vs. 2019, blacks are up 43.8% and Hispanics 42.6. Whites are up 19.2%, Asians up 7.2%, and Native Americans 5.5%.
These are not murders perpetrated but victims of homicide. The FBI collects data on deaths by murder, which are a smaller but closely related number. The FBI has demographics on perpetrators of cleared murders, but a large fraction aren't cleared. Also, the FBI numbers are all snarled up involving Hispanics and whites, whereas the CDC numbers follow the usual modern government method of giving priority to Hispanics or Non-Hispanics, then looking by race at Non-Hispanics, so the CDC numbers are pretty useful.
I have qualms about the “gun sales” argument. Unlike hot weather and a pandemic, increase in gun sales do not just happen for no reason. It can happen as a result of a change in legislation, it can happen because TV had a cool show about a gun nut, it can happen because people are preparing to overthrow the government. But it happens for a reason. It is not an engine of the change, only possibly a transmission belt. So you cannot explain something *by* an increase of gun sales, only *through* it to the root cause.
(I have the same qualms when Aella quotes fatherlessness as a cause for social disparity: fatherlessness is not an intrinsic trait of a certain population, it is a consequence of other past social factors.)
Yes, and the reasons behind almost all firearms purchases are A: reasonably well understood and B: not particularly mudery. So, it's not the guns, or at very least not the recent gun purchases.
Also, "things happen for reasons" is not an argument unless you are willing to discuss the reasons and how they relate to the topic at hand. Since you didn't bother to do that, I think we're done.
To me, the protests were a breaking point, perhaps a spark that set off a fire that was already burning: a resentment of the privileged, of the status quo, of rules and civil order and bourgeois niceties that we take for granted which has been growing more and more in the last years, but accelerated during the pandemic. I see it in the recklessness of drivers, in the dismissal of property crime as victimless and deserved, in the attitude that most jobs, and expectations within those jobs (dress codes, uniforms, punctuality, etc.) are de facto exploitation.... feelings that were already festering, but the protests freed it all up - hence more lawlessness, more traffic incidents, more violence, and more murders too.
Also, this is a tangential point but any treatment of the protests as spontaneous seems off-base to me. They appeared almost simultaneously in so many cities at once, large, medium, small ones, including communities where large protests and social unrest weren't ever a thing in my memory.... suggesting a well-organized operation that had been preparing or planning this sort of action. And around it of course lots of people came out of their own accord. I don't know how to test my hypothesis about this, or whether it changes the conclusion about WHY the murder spike.... But I think it is worth thinking about and taking into account.
HI FROM THE NEW GUY
I’m a newbie here, but I’ll get this right out: Ever since Ferguson in 2014 I’m not sure very many amateur writers have dived into this topic of crime, race, and policing in quite the same way I have. Mostly I’ve put out Medium pieces and social media posts, but below I’ll just rattle off a few resources that might be handy for folks.
I 100% endorse Scott Alexander’s conclusions. It’s obvious it's the anti-establishment, anti-policing protests that have caused the near 29% spike in crime in 2020, just as nationwide protests led to consecutive double-digit percentage increases in 2015 and 2016. I’m forever impressed how Scott addresses critics, and I’ll repeat his request: “Please find me any major country besides the US that had a homicide spike in 2020.” It galls me how many obfuscate and point to the COVID pandemic for explanations. Talk about motivated reasoning.
MY DATA
https://tinyurl.com/jails-police-save-lives
• This 50% increase over six years means that from 2015 to 2021 we’ve likely seen an excess of 26,500 murders if 2014 is the baseline (50% black victims). Compare this to the 40-50 unarmed killings a year (25-35% black). This 26,500 number I calculated very simply in this 2nd tab “Murder increase 2014-2021.”
• In 1st tab “The Real BLM Effect” I calculate and hypothesize that some significant part of 180,000 lives were saved by incarcerating and arresting violent offenders, as the USA dropped from an average of 24,000 annual murders (1990-1994) to a low of just above 14,000 murders in 2014. We’re now past 21,000 murders again in 2020 and 2021. I quote Stephen Leavitt of Freakanomics fame who claimed these four factors led to violent crime decreasing: "Increased incarceration, more police, the decline of crack, and legalized abortion." (Source: http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf)
• In the 4th tab I ran the numbers to show that a black person killed by police is 12 times more likely to get a news story than someone non-black. That’s what you get when blacks are 25% of the people killed by cops but 80% of the news coverage. Obviously, black lives DO matter. Yes, the media is brainwashing our collective brains on this topic, and it’s why so many people believe cops are routinely going around killing black people willy nilly. It’s all we see, from CNN to the New York Times to our local affiliates. (Sources: https://www.commentary.org/articles/wilfred-reilly/no-there-is-no-coming-race-war/ & https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf)
THAT’S AMATEUR NUMBERS, GIVE ME ACADEMIC RESEARCH!
7 papers and analyses indicating a Ferguson Effect certainly occurred the past few years, defined as an uptick in violence and homicides as a result of increased police scrutiny and protests. This combination delegitimizes police in the eyes of citizens, causes police to pull back, and often leads to policies detrimental to public safety (like consent decrees).
1. https://scholarworks.uark.edu/edrepub/136/ (2022, Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas, Wilfred Reilly, Kentucky State University)
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047272721001936 (2022, Cheng Cheng, Department of Economics, The University of Mississippi, University and Wei Long, Department of Economics, Tulane University)
3. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3715223 (2021, Deepak Premkumar, Public Policy Institute of California)
4. https://www.nber.org/papers/w27324.pdf (2020, Roland Fryer & Tanaya Devi, Harvard University)
5.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3145287 (2018, Paul G. Cassell, University of Utah College of Law)
6.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023117703122 (2017, Neil Gross, Colby College)
7th analysis on George Floyd Effect (2022, David Pyrooz, Justin Nix & Scott Wolfe)
https://jnix.netlify.app/files/pdfs/denpo_depolicing.pdf
AND THE PROTESTS WERE FOR NAUGHT
I’ve collected articles and research in Google Docs for the past few years, and some may find them useful.
• The system is not systematically racist: https://tinyurl.com/4-steps-crime-just-bias
• Also here: https://tinyurl.com/The-Real-Crime-Stat-Myths
• 13 studies indicating no proven racism in lethal use of force (started as nine studies, but keeps growing): https://tinyurl.com/9-studies-no-racist-police
• Dataset countering BLM and #SayHerName myths I put together on Fatal Force using 3 years of Washington Post data (and many other tabs with nerdy number crunching): https://tinyurl.com/http-blm-sayhername-myths
3 MEDIUM ARTICLES I’VE WRITTEN
I humbly serve these up for critique and/or for people to use as they see fit.
#1 Titled: “Kamala Harris: Biden’s VP Pick & Your Next Candidate to Libel Police & Criminal Justice”
https://agent-orange-chicago.medium.com/kamala-harris-bidens-vp-pick-your-next-candidate-to-libel-police-criminal-justice-1c797d705d05
EXCERPT:
The larger picture shows that African Americans are not being hunted down by police. But Americans are hunting down each other. In fact, from Chicago to New York City, black Americans are more than three times less likely to be killed by police than previous generations. Yet vast black-white disparities in murder haven’t changed at all.
For at least four decades African Americans have murdered others at a rate 8 times higher than their non-Hispanic white counterparts, and are killed at a rate 6 times greater. In 2016, CDC indicated there were more than 19,500 homicides and The Washington Post reported 234 black killings by police and 465 white killings by police. This means for every 40 blacks killed by fellow citizens, there’s only 1 by a cop. For whites, that ratio is 12:1. But even in August 2019 we get yet another questionable study omitting crime statistics, and incredibly arguing that police are a major threat to the lives of blacks, with this Harvard Kennedy School headline: “Black men 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police, new research estimates.”
People simply need to do the basic math. Or does the math not add up to the social injustices activists, academics, and the media have been portraying?
[end excerpt]
-
#2 Titled: “MY OPEN LETTER TO CHICAGO: Stripping Context from Media & Government Reports on Police Abuse a Likely Cause of More American and Chicago Bloodshed (Subhead: Statistical-Based Evidence Undermines Consent Decree Logic that Throws Chicago Police Under the Bus)”
https://medium.com/@agent.orange.chicago/my-open-letter-to-chicago-stripping-context-from-reporting-on-police-abuse-a-likely-cause-of-more-225feacb9301
THE GIST: Chicago-centric hard analysis w/ stats and graphics I created to try to help prevent a consent decree from taking shape. Roland Fryer’s 2020 paper highlighted how these consent decrees have led to potentially thousands of lives being lost. Had more than 20,000 views back in 2018.
-
#3 - Written directly after the George Floyd protests as the writing was on the wall, but few knew: Only around 10 unarmed black people were killed by cops the year before. Skeptic Magazine’s polling shows how large numbers of liberals believe 1,000 or even 10,000 unarmed blacks are killed by police each year. Note: Those folks driving our “national conversation” are in media and academia, yet their beliefs undergirding their “reform” demands are wildly off.
https://agent-orange-chicago.medium.com/unarmed-killings-of-african-americans-numbered-under-10-last-year-a-400-reduction-since-2015-e54f3eeb67ae
EXCERPT:
This goes without saying: These unarmed deaths are real lives and real tragedies. Just as the 62 police killed by felony gunfire in 2021 are, a jump from 45 in 2020. 346 officers were shot in 2021.
These are the final “unarmed and killed by police gunfire” breakdowns in the context of “Black Lives Matter” protests for 2019, the year before George Floyd’s death:
• 26 white
• 12 black
• 11 Hispanic
• 5 in the category of “other”
But look at that Skeptic chart above again. It’s also crystal clear that more than 50% of “very liberal” Americans live in a fictional reality — a morose and racist universe where the number of unarmed Black Americans killed by police might be as high as “about 1,000,” “about 10,000,” or “more than 10,000.” And it’s those “very liberal” people making the biggest stink on Twitter, trust me.
[end excerpt]
Fin. And hope to have many fun conversations here.
David
I don't disagree with any particular part of the analysis, but maybe it would be better to set up your own substack for this kind of long-form research summary? Comments are more likely to get a response if they're addressing a specific point made either in the article or by another poster.
I dont disagree. My comment was ridiculously long.
And not a bad idea to move from Medium to Substack.
Fair enough.
"One reason might be if the people buying guns in 2020 were very different from the people buying guns in previous years. For example, if previous gun buyers were collectors who had 100 guns each, but 2020 gun owners were new buyers getting their first gun, then the share of people with at least one gun would go up by more than 2% over an average year."
Maybe the suicide rate didn't increase because the extra Americans who bought guns in 2020 were not people in suicide-prone demographics. Suicides are most common among older, white men living in rural areas, and I remember hearing about how many of the people buying guns in 2020 were women, black, or living in urban or suburban areas.
Late to the conversation, but this feels worth noting given Matty's point RE: the media's characterization of the homicide increase
Right on queue, on 7/8/2022, the Wapo published an article titled:
"The staggering scope of U.S. gun deaths goes far beyond mass shootings"
The print version, where this article was the header article on the front page, had the following subheader
"45,000 fatalaties in each of the past two years (line break) Increase conicides with record firearm purchases"
The article (and notably its actual interviewee quotes) goes on to hedge a bit but clearly wants to suggest that the gun purchase increase combined with covid stress is the likely culprit.
It cites lots of data on new gun purchases without ever comparing this to the existing gun stock or the existing gun ownership rate
It even correctly cites the race/skew of homicide and suicide victims (black male skew in homicide victims and white male skew in suicide victims) but it of course fails to cite the skew in homicide perpetrators or the race/sex characteristics of the perpetrator increase.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2022/gun-deaths-per-year-usa/
I think an under-ratedly weird aspect of the post-protest homicide spike is just how FAST it happened. Like, I wouldn't have been that skeptical of the protest/crime-spike link ex ante, but I would have guessed it would have taken, I dunno, months to set in gradually. When people try to deny the link, I think they're sometimes pattern-matching to other social phenomena in which there are meaningful lags between cause and effect, leaving all conclusions very fuzzy and uncertain. But here the whole thing played out in the blink of an eye. It seems almost too good to be true.
I have the same dizzy sensation regarding the CHAZ/CHOP debacle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest). I would have predicted ex ante that a miniature anarchist commune would run into trouble pretty quickly, but it was literally only a matter of days before these people reconstituted a police force that shot and killed an unarmed black teen! "Reductio ad absurdum" doesn't begin to cover it.
I guess the update is that...there ISN'T much ruin in a nation?
I'd like to signal boost the contributing factor of court closures to the perception of potential criminals that they would be unlikely to face (swift enough) consequences even if they did commit crimes.
Thread: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7427848
Atlantic Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/covid-court-closings-violent-crime-wave/670559/
In my perception it seems like the argument about changed police behavior (in part due to BLM protests) is implicitly assuming a model where the police behavior causes perception-of-risk amongst criminals, which in turn is the actual proximate cause of (the increase in) crimes committed. I wanted to draw more explicit attention this part of the causal chain.
I'd be curious to know if there was a good way to estimate the effect size of changed court behavior (probably mostly caused by responses to the pandemic) versus changed policy behavior (probably mostly caused by responses to BLM protests). I do think that police, prosecutor, and court behavior is the main cause (feasibly manipulable contributing factor) of the magnitude of violent crime and are much more significant than small changes in gun prevalence or other pandemic-related factors, in partial agreement with Scott's thesis.
Regarding the Alexander/Yglesias disagreement about media coverage: I think both positions make a lot of sense if we model media coverage of a generic "what causes Y?" questions as a binary choice between the "A is THE ONLY cause of Y, if we control A we will completely control Y (we literally cannot conceive the concept of multiple contributing factors or causes)" template and the "wow Y is complicated, look we can sit here and make up contributing factors all day, it sure seems impossible to compare factors and draw conclusion" template. So from Yglesias's perspective the media chose the correct template for the situation, and from Alexander's perspective the templates suck.
I think it is better for our blood pressure to recognize that this is a structural problem with the way news media is written that affects every topic they cover, and that the media is not specifically trying to hide the truth on this issue.
(Note: the thesis here is reliant on new media using a small fixed number of framings / templates for everything where the choice of template is the entire analysis of the topic, not on there being exactly 2 templates.)