Maybe the total amount of bans has not increased, but it does seems like the first few comments have a higher ban rate on most posts. Before I scrolled down, I asked myself "I wonder if the top comment will be banned again."
Looking at this person's profile description, it reads:
"9/11/01 truth, 2001 weaponized anthrax & unproven anthrax vaccine scam truth, Covid/mask/vaccine truth, worthless electronic voting machine truth, Republic no Democracy truth, sound money & we don't have capitalism truth."
I am 99% confident that this person did not contribute to this discussion in an honest and good faith manner, but why do these kinds of commenters always grab the top spot? Trying to capture attention? How are they so good at it? Are they running bots to comment as soon as you post an article?
Weird. Or maybe I'm just seeing patterns in the dark. Entirely plausible as well.
Could be bots, as well. I don't know why anyone would want that, but the level of dedication to rss watch and snipe for crankitude of that degree is weird.
The cause is likely to be a mixture of increased policing by Scott, increasing lead levels, and better posting technology (LLMs). We need statistics and a post on this complex topic.
Is this satire? I'm unaware of any research showing lead levels are measurably increasing in the population. I believe the consensus is the opposite since the ban of lead based products in the mid 20th century.
>(But have you considered it's lead levels in data centers causing the LLMs to get aggressive with their comments?)
LOL! Cute... :-) Though, even if the solder on the PCBs is lead/tin, the rate of IQ rise of the LLMs would argue that it can't be doing them much harm...
I think Scott's probably got more energy and attention to spend on comments right after he posts something. He probably pays more attention to the first hour's comments.
Cranks don’t have to spend as long reading an article and arriving at valuable insights before they comment. As long as a decent population of cranks are on their Substack feeds, some of them should see these articles as they come out by chance.
It's the other way around, banned posts become the top post (or oldest post with how acx default sorts) right now the banned post is listed as being posted 20 hours ago, and falling knife's top thread says 21 hours ago for me.
Likely an artifact of the sorting algorithm. My guess is a deleted post is treated as empty, meaning in chronological order it floats to the top because a database thinks it's been there since the dawn of the unix era, or something like that.
Murder rate doesn't really matter. For the vast majority of the population who doesn't live in gang areas the murder rate is basically zero and is flat over time. The crime that matters is the crime people actually see. At the Mission and 24th BART station I see people selling stolen goods on blankets on the sidewalk and the police do nothing. I see people shooting heroin in full view of the public. I see videos of people stealing from CVS while security stands there watching and the police do nothing. When I go to the same CVS I see that everything is locked up and I have to go find an employee to buy it. It wasn't like this 20 years ago. Don't tell me crime is down. I'm not wrong. The statistics produced by the same police who do nothing about crime are wrong.
Jeff Bezos: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
But couldn't this be whole to part fallacy? I live in Ohio. It's definitely (much) safer here in general than when I was growing up and the anecdotes follow the data. But is it wrong to say to someone who has lived in San Francisco their whole life and can see where the weak points of the broadscale data is that they're out-of-hand incorrect?
They're also directly reaffirming your safety culture argument from your last paragraph. I can, uh, anecdotally attest that almost nothing was locked up when I grew up inner city in the 80s and 90s, while today all sorts of products are lucite sealed. Ditto for cars - you may remember The Club - where the $1 car key of the past has been replaced by an annoying system that requires a $100 car key but definitely deters car theft to a substantial degree.
I said myself in the post that San Francisco was getting worse in many ways, I'm just objecting to the specific quote that I quoted about how the statistics are "produced by the same police who do nothing about crime".
Is the population of San Francisco increasing (relatively to the rest of USA)?
I'm thinking in the direction of "less crime happens, but it happens in more visible places", so there is less "crime" but more "observations of crime".
Have a sibling who's lived in SF since the late 1980s and been a homeowner in that city since the mid 90s. He and his friends and neighbors feel safer than they did a few years ago and _much_ safer than they did during the 1990s.
I'm a mostly-lifelong Chicagoan including now 15 years in as a homeowner in the central part of the city. My wife and neighbors and I all feel safer now than a few years ago, and there's no comparison at all now to how the city felt during the 1980s and 90s.
New Orleanians also feel safer now than a few years ago. The crime wave that began in April 2020 definitely degraded quality of life for average residents of the cities that experienced the crime waves.
Btw, once the PPP fraud dollars ran out the criminals started breaking into vehicles to steal guns and so the criminal activity spread to other areas of life. And then you had young thugs that didn’t know how to use a gun holding people up and essentially accidentally shooting them because the adrenaline would lead to itchy trigger fingers. So before a terrible murder I read a Reddit post that essentially predicted the murder because the Redditor said if young thugs are holding you up you must consider your life in grave danger and so you have to kill the young thugs before they kill you.
I have lived in many places, including SF for the past decade. It is one of the safest places I've lived. My parents live in the midwest and have had their cars broken into in their driveway more times than I have had my car broken into in San Francisco.
I know people who grew up in SF. The stories of what this city were like in the 80s and 90s are honestly jaw dropping. A friend was born and raised in Bernal Heights in the 80s/90s. They told me that their friends were not allowed to visit their house because it was too dangerous. Today, this is one of the bougiest neighborhoods in the city. I had to move out because it became too expensive. This same thing is true for many, many neighborhoods across the city.
Of course, this is just my narrative. You have a narrative in your mind as well that says "San Francisco is unsafe." Rather than us trying to justify our own narratives, let's just look at the data. The purpose of this post was to analyze the data as thoroughly as possible, and it pretty clearly demonstrates that things are getting safer. Every piece of data I've ever been able to get my hands on regarding crimes rates say the same thing: crime across the US and developed world as a whole is rapidly declining (with the exception of a crime spike during and immediately after lockdowns).
San Francisco's black share of the population dropped from 13% in 1970 (which was about the national average) to 5% in recent years. African Americans comprise the majority of known murder offenders in the United States, so the demographics of San Francisco (lots of low crime Asians, lots of wealthy, educated whites, some Hispanics) are extremely favorable from a homicide standpoint.
I did. I do not dispute that murders and violent crimes are actually down. I dispute they relevant to the average person's perception of the level of crime. I do not dispute that car thefts are down. I think the NCVS is a much more accurate source than police reports, and I do not dispute that the percent of people victimized by violent or property crime victimization is flat (but not down) over the last 20 years as this survey reports.
But what about the owner of the store that is stolen from 100 times a year? Still counts as only one victim of property crime. What about all the heroin needles and thieves fencing goods out in the open that I see? If I were surveyed for the NCVS I would answer "no" because I have not been the victim of property or violent crime even though I see it all the time. And that's just a few statistical problems I can think of here. But still that's beside the point.
The point is that I see crime frequently and I didn't see it 20 years ago in the same places. I am inconvenienced by countermeasures that retail stores use to counter this crime that they didn't seem to need 20 years ago. I am victimized by this even though I am not the direct victim of the crimes in question.
The point is that I feel entitled to enforcement of the law in exchange for the tax money that is taken out of my pay check every two weeks, and I do not seem to be getting that. If the absolute rate of crime were higher, but those videos of shoplifters end with the security guard beating the crap out of the thief and the police coming to haul him away, I would probably be happier about the situation because at least thy are trying and we are all on the same side here fighting against the wave of degeneracy. Now I am very clear on the difference between this and the crime rate, but I am 50% autist. Most people aren't and I can totally sympathize when they conflate this situation with high crime rates.
The most important part of my comment is the Jeff Bezos quote. The fundamental problem with your analysis is that you are trying to disprove the claim that crime is rampant by looking at the absolute rate of crime as defined by statistical reporting. But that isn't the claim because when people talk about "crime" that isn't what we mean. (There is a similar problem when it comes to claims about "homeless" people). The fundamental problem is that you are trying to prove the public wrong here, but (other than some lizardman percentage) we aren't wrong. A better approach would be to look for statistics that match the public perception of crime and back into a definition from them. IMO the relevant question here is "how do we formally describe and measure this very real societal change that the public is describing as 'crime'?" I'm not really interested in debating whether or not it is real because it obviously is, but I'm very interested in analyzing exactly what happened and how to measure it.
"What about all the heroin needles and thieves fencing goods out in the open that I see?"
For a counter-anecdote, I live in an okay neighborhood where I don't see too much crime. I was told by a neighborhood veteran that the local park, which is perfectly nice and where I bring my children, was covered with strewn heroin needles and a no-go zone for normal citizens twenty years ago.
I don't know if your anecdote or my anecdote is more valid, which is why, contra Jeff Bezos, we sometimes need statistics. Although given how much data Amazon collects on its customers, my guess is that Bezos was making a subtler point than just "always trust your gut".
I concur with Fallingknife (and moonshadow below). Here in Chicago, the signs of societal rot are everywhere, and what was a reasonably comfortable middle-class existence 15 years ago is no longer viable. You avoid taking the EL as much as possible or walking back home after dark. Coffee places close because they can't deal with the disorder. The local Jewell now hands plastic bags (they are 15c each) to individual shoppers in advance, by the count. Murders are indeed down a bit, citywide, but when before they were almost completely concentrated in "bad" areas, it's no longer the case. You hear gunshots from around the corner. Not often, no, but then you just shrug: this is normal now. People living in safe suburbs don't experience any of this, but what am I to do? I don't drive and love what the city has to offer. My formerly nice and cozy neighborhood has been transformed, and I suspect, for good. Can this be reflected in the crime stats? I doubt it.
I visited Chicago in November and took the EL after dark, both into downtown from Midway and out of downtown to O'Hare, as well as several times to get around downtown. I also walked around downtown, during the day and after dark. I didn't encounter anything concerning or that made me feel unsafe. Was I just really lucky?
You seem awfully certain about your ability to know how unsafe you are. How often do you recognize people carrying concealed weapons? A garrotte perhaps?
Very sorry your daily experience is feeling that way; been there, and it sucks.
Today I ride the L (not "El") many days and my youngest child rides it home from school almost every school day; I ride CTA busses on many other days. There are zero problems on the busses, and the L issues (quite serious 2021-2023) have been visibly declining during the past say 18 to 24 months. (It's not super clear to me why actually.)
No idea what the plastic shopping bags -- which are taxed by city ordinance for reasons unrelated to crime levels -- have to do with crime levels.
Coffee places close because for some years we had a stupid number of them being opened in this city and meanwhile US per-capita coffee consumption today is exactly the same as it was in 2002. But no worries, within a certain demographic there will always be new attempts to create that perfect young-adults city hangout like they had in "Friends". [How do you have a million-dollar cute restaurant in one of the most competitive dining locales in the world? Start with three million....]
My siblings and I heard gunshots all the time in the city during the 1980s and 90s. Now my wife and I have for 15 years resided in what used to be described by realtors as a "challenging" or "urban pioneer" neighborhood, and I am an obsessive about having fresh air and hence windows open, and we haven't heard one in years. [What we do hear _far_ more often than ever before is motorcycles backfiring which irritates me and drives our family dog crazy. I infer that tricked-out cycles have gotten cheaper in real dollars or something. A pox upon all the owners of same.]
Lived during the 2000s in one of Chicago's nicer suburbs and overall it felt about as safe as our city neighborhood does today. There were differences in specifics e.g. I knew many more people then who'd had their car or home broken into, than I do know.
Being a dog owner who does most of the daily walking, I have for years now regularly walked after dark across both our own city neighborhood and a neighboring one which was historically regarded as high-crime. Did the same throughout the 1990s when living in shall we say a "newly gentrifying maybe" portion of the city. That daily walking is definitely a safer daily experience now than a few years ago. (And compared to the 1990s, LOLOL....so many times in that era I arrived at home thinking "gonna need a bigger dog".)
I have lived in Chicago for 15 years, and my experience is more or less the opposite. I let my daughter wander the neighborhood on her own starting when she was 9. Now that she is 11, I taught her how to ride the El by herself. Coffee places are not, in actual fact, closed. I have never heard gunshots in Chicago and I'm not handed plastic bags in advance at the Jewel. I don't live in a particularly fancy neighborhood, although its by no means a dangerous neighborhood either. I'd probably describe it as transitional. People who have lived here longer than me say it used to be much rougher, which tracks with the visible gentrification I see.
There absolutely is serious crime happening in Chicago -- there have been shootings not all that far away from my house in recent years -- so I'm not trying to portray it as a paradise. Chicago has many, many problems. But no, signs of societal rot are certainly not everywhere in the city.
Maybe what you are observing is a local phenomenon. I really don't know. Since a lot of people seem to want to insist that their anecdotes give the lie to the broader statistics, it seems important to point out that your experience is far from universal.
I have no dog in this fight, having not been to Chicago in over a decade now, but I need to ask: what is this concept where receiving plastic bags sooner rather than later at this place called the Jewel serves as a harbinger of civilizational decline? As an outsider, I'm completely in the dark.
Lived in the same part of downtown Chicago for almost 10 years. Speaking purely on vibes and anecdotes as a normie-looking white dude:
- I can't really say violent crime is down, because I've never witnessed any instances. I think maybe 3 years ago I saw two dudes get into a scuffle on the L. In the 2010s, I knew two guys who each got mugged.
- Never heard of this Jewel bag thing
- Some coffee shops have closed, others have opened. I think my neighborhood is slightly down on volume, but up on quality.
- Either I don't know what gun shots sound like, or I've never heard them.
- Witnessed maybe 3 instances of shoplifting? In one case, it was the owner of a liquor store chasing a guy out with a broom and then calling the police. The remainder were dudes shoveling random items into bags at a CVS or Walgreens in the early post-COVID days.
- There was a spike in vandalism (window breaking) in the summer 2020
The only crime-related thing I have to complain about nowadays is public nuisance stuff on the L. It feels more common today to see people going up and down the cars begging, or selling drugs or candy.
Chicago tore down most of the public housing projects near the Loop, such as notorious Cabrini-Green, which was only a mile inland from the Magnificent Mile, the leading shopping street between the coasts.
So much of the inner city that was to be avoided when I lived in Chicago in 1982-2000 is now walkable. For example, on my book tour to Chicago in 2024, I stayed in a neighborhood 2 miles west of the Merchandise Mart that I had never thought to visit when I lived there because there was nothing of interest to a yuppie like myself.
On the other hand, places that were superb in the 1990s, like North Michigan Avenue, are looking worse for the wear. In 2020, Water Tower Mall, long Chicago's top shopping mall, got looted twice during the Summer of George and was looking depressed in 2024.
And I see more accounts of shootouts in River North lately, which was the capital of gentrifying yuppiedom in the 1980s-1990s.
So, if you'd told me in 2000 that the Daley and Emanuel Administrations would successfully tear down all the big housing projects within, say, a few miles of the Loop, I'd expect Chicago to be pretty utopian by 2026.
And in many ways it is pretty nice. But it is also falling apart in other ways.
Keep in mind that Chicago is doing pretty well relative to other Rust Belt big cities in the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds like New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland, etc.
Old cities with great locations for water transport have been doing badly in the 21st Century relative to newer cities built around highway and air transport like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Dallas. In general.
In 2006 I was in NYC and one of the people I was working with got an apartment in Bed-Stuy so apparently it was already nicer by that time. I think a crappy 3/1 1200 square foot bungalow in Compton is now probably a million dollar home.
Here's the CDC's counts of deaths by homicide in Cook County, IL (Chicago plus inner ring suburbs) among non-Hispanic whites from 1999 thru 2024 (the CDC puts a 6 month lag on homicides so 2025 full year data is not yet available). The worst year was 2001 with 104 homicides (which may be related to 9/11 -- I'm unsure if these are people murdered in Cook County or residents of Cook County who were murdered). The best year was 2013 with 22 homicides, right before the rise of BLM. The big increase from 2015 (24 homicides) to 2016 (52 homicides) was due to Mayor Emanuel releasing the video of the deplorable shooting of Laquan McDonald on November 23, 2015, which led to the ACLU winning a big court order against the Chicago police department, which led to murders soaring in 2016.
Here are non-Hispanic black deaths by homicide in Cook County:
The worst year in 1999-2024 was 2021 during the "Racial Reckoning," when blacks were about 33 times as likely to be murdered as whites.
Heckuva job, Black Lives Matter!
1999 529 1,407,944 37.6
2000 528 1,408,513 37.5
2001 504 1,398,106 36.0
2002 499 1,388,015 36.0
2003 514 1,376,060 37.4
2004 399 1,361,597 29.3
2005 408 1,346,398 30.3
2006 442 1,330,004 33.2
2007 399 1,315,487 30.3
2008 430 1,302,931 33.0
2009 428 1,293,197 33.1
2010 420 1,287,791 32.6
2011 406 1,279,061 31.7
2012 446 1,275,890 35.0
2013 408 1,264,413 32.3
2014 413 1,256,320 32.9
2015 472 1,246,966 37.9
2016 684 1,239,639 55.2
2017 616 1,229,482 50.1
2018 538 1,193,642 45.1
(41.3 - 48.9)
2019 511 1,184,247 43.1
(39.4 - 46.9)
2020 759 1,174,662 64.6
(60.0 - 69.2)
2021 858 1,180,443 72.7
(67.8 - 77.5)
2022 708 1,159,072 61.1
(56.6 - 65.6)
2023 618 1,139,137 54.3
(50.0 - 58.5)
2024 519 1,137,704 45.6
(41.7 - 49.5)
One obvious observation is that the homicide death ratio of blacks to whites got _much_ worse in Cook County over the course of the 21st Century. The black homicide victimization rate was 11 times worse than the white rate in 1999 and 29 times worse in 2024.
This is no doubt due to FDR's redlining getting much more powerful from 1999-2024.
I've lived in Chicago for almost 30 years now - there isn't sign of societal rot everywhere, in fact it is almost the opposite. You really should avoid relying on anecdotes.
I think your anecdote is equally as valid as mine or anyone else's. More relevant would probably be a comparison of anecdotes from people in your neighborhood over time vs others. My guess would be that you would find a lot of people in previously unaffected neighborhoods are now reporting "crime."* That would no longer be anecdotal, though. It would be statistical. And it's a great case for your point that statistics are important, which I very much agree with. But it's important to keep them in their place as a tool to analyze reality rather than the best representation of it. I think that is closer to Jeff Bezos's point here, along with the concept that it really doesn't matter if the customers are "right," it matters if they are satisfied, and you could say the same about the government and its citizens.
Your next post is exactly the type of analysis that I find interesting and I look forward to reading it.
*Another interesting angle here would be by class. I am going to make a guess that what you will see now is a lot more middle class people and above seeing this in their neighborhoods. (And from a public narrative angle those are the only people who matter). Gentrification might be an explanation here. People raised in suburbs moving into urban areas now seeing a lot more crime and disorder than they are used to.
I don't have a suggestion for wording, but I think you need some way to counter the selection bias where people who feel like crime has gone up are more likely to move away.
Is it possible what you value isn't anecdotes at all, but rather, qualitative data? Because we're getting a *lot* of anecdotes here from people who say crime is in fact down, and you have no way to answer them without aggregating anecdotes into some kind of data.
"It really doesn't matter if the customers are 'right,' it matters if they are satisfied, and you could say the same about the government and its citizens."
But it does matter whether the citizens are unsatisfied because there is some potentially measurable trend that is getting worse, or because the arrival of social media brought access to rage compilation videos of shoplifters getting away with it.
You claim that the former is happening, not just the latter, but anecdotes and personal narratives can be influenced by both types of effect. That's why we need data.
What's wrong with graffiti? I feel like the main reason people other than those whose walls are being drawn on have to care about graffiti is that it might serve as a signal that there are criminals around, parsing the graffiti as essentially gang signs, thugs marking their territory. But if crime is down in those areas then the graffiti must be the work of harmless mischief-makers making the city a little more colorful. What's left to worry about?
Perhaps I'm biased by the presence of a very nice wall painting of a robin near where I'm from. Still, while I'm no great fan of the "illegibly-scrawled spray-painted initials" kind of graffiti, its colorfulness still makes it a thousand times preferable to blank slate-grey walls as far as I'm concerned. If we had actually nice architecture, I might care more about the extents to which unattractive graffiti defaces it, but I'll take colourful manmade ugliness over greyscale machine-like ugliness.
I specifically said that "the people whose walls are being drawn on" have a very understandable complaint. But if I'm the owner of an eyesore, I would have a perfectly understandable complaint, in exactly the same "my rights as a private individual have been violated" way, if somebody remodeled it in my absence without permission into a beautiful palace the whole neighborhood admires. That's a completely different question from whether it makes random pedestrians' lives worse, as they walk about the streets, for there to be a lot of graffiti around.
My problem with graffiti is it is an individual claiming public space for their personal aggrandizement.
I like the wall art- San Francisco is full of it and it makes the city a more fun and vibrant place. What I dislike are the tags. They are just the person claiming that space as their own. That visual space belongs to all of us.
I wonder if the problem is too much aggregation, and that the paradox would be resolved by looking at e.g. the neighborhood level, where maybe crime has increased in some neighborhoods and decreased in other neighborhoods.
My guess would be that Jeff Bezos, who has been one of the most talented business executives in the world for the last 30+ years, has a near-genius gift for noticing correct statistical patterns from mundane events, so he has often been right more than many of the professional statistical analysts he employs.
DuPont Circle 30 years ago. There were many places in DC that were genuine "no go" places (needles and all). DC is unrecognizable. New York is unrecognizable from the 1970s (although the 1950's really did have people with dollar bills on strings, trying to lure little boys to you-know-what).
Could there be an effect where, in addition to crime decreasing overall, the crime that remains has become more concentrated in specific areas? To the people living there, crime has increased, it is super visible, and they rightfully cry bloody murder. Everyone else experiences no crime and therefore does not complain and is not visible on social media. So on an average day, the zeitgeist is full of “crime is much worse now”.
One of my theories is that reverse white flight (eg of white people into cities) means they are seeing cities for the first time in 60 years and being horrified at what's been there all along. I don't know if that's true.
Anecdotally, when I first came to New York City in 1978, union Square and Bryant Park were both disastrous. They were both called needle Park. Also I lived next to Tompkins Square Park in the east village of New York and it was a park you didn’t go into unless it was broad daylight and you stayed close to Avenue A. All three of them are very nice spaces these days. I brought my son up next to Tompkins Square Park and it was great. Meanwhile out in Queens there’s a massive increase in open air on the street prostitution which got a lot of press from the New York Post about two years ago. I think the police have cracked down on that, but I’m not really sure. These kinds of quality of life crimes are difficult to quantify.
There was a massive amount of bicycle theft during the 80s and that seems to have calmed down, although I do not have a bicycle anymore so I’m not sure about that.
I went to college in the 90s. I still remember the safety lecture the police officer gave us during the orientation: "If you have a bike, it will get stolen. This is inevitable. We do not investigate bike theft because stopping it is impossible, and we can better utilize our limited resources on investigating murder and rape. Speaking of which, if you are walking along such-and-such street, do not take a shortcut through the parking structure. You are likely to be raped and murdered there".
The lecture really opened my eyes on the realities of crime and policing.
I don’t know a single person in nyc who rides a personal bike from place to place. The only people I see with personal bikes are those who do sports and train with it. So, they just go in a big loop and never stop anywhere.
If you’re in nyc, it’s well known that you can’t own a bike and lock it up anywhere - it’ll be stolen immediately. That’s why everyone uses the citi bike stuff if they want to get around via bike. I know lots of people - including myself - who use Citi bike a lot. I much prefer having my own but the city doesn’t allow that kind of safety for personal bikes. I’d assume general knowledge of theft and seeing it happen so much would be the reason why no one bikes here…
When I stayed in Greenwich Village to look for a job in 1982, I was advised by New Yorkers to never cross 2nd Avenue to the east side of the street. The existence of nightmarish avenues named after letters of the alphabet further to the east ("Alphabet City") was rumored to exist but nobody I knew had ever dared go there.
Also, nobody ever went west of about 8th avenue. Theoretically, the Hudson River had to be out there somewhere, but few had ever seen it from the ground.
While I was visiting in August 1982, Volcker cut interest rates and stocks started to rise for the time first time since the 1960s.
My wild ass speculation is that police forces are embarking on essentially a PR campaign, by concentrating their resources on the scariest crimes people care the most about (rape, murder, assault, etc), and taking their focus away from crimes that aren't as headline generating (drugs, prostitution, shoplifting, general public disorder). In particular, they're avoiding the things that actively give them *bad* PR, like kicking homeless people out of parks, or telling the schizophrenic guy on the subway that he has to leave, or generally doing the sort of "Broken Windows" policing that gets you accused of racism. Thus, certain forms of crime are down, while others are up.
Or crime went way up starting on May 25, 2020, but now the Floyd Effect is over and the cops are back to fighting crime, so crime is falling fast under Trump.
The opposite seems to me to be more likely, and to explain a lot of the observations.
When I moved to Richmond in 2001, it had one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country. But the vast majority murders were in a few square blocks which were basically an open-air wholesale drug market.
The murder rate for the whole city has gone down a lot. But I'm not sure that the murder rate for the city *excluding the open-air drug market* has gone down - and avoiding the open-air drug market was trivially easy.
Or less concentrated. If last year there were 100 murders in the ghetto and none in my neighborhood, and this year there are 80 murders in the ghetto and 10 in my neighborhood, that's going to feel to me like a huge and scary increase in crime, even though overall murders are down.
> I am inconvenienced by countermeasures that retail stores use to counter this crime that they didn't seem to need 20 years ago
I'm wondering if it's because, 20 years ago, they didn't think customers would put up with having things in locked cabinets but today they think people will.
Isn't it because of current laws like "you can steal stuff in the shop but not more than $900's worth". At some point corporate will have to do something. Like close the location or lock everything away.
I don't think Scott mentioned changed laws as a source of reduced crime for some reason. Or did I miss it?
I don’t remember where I read it, but I once saw someone distinguish between crime and direct contact with crime. Their point was that if you have direct contact with crime, i.e. if you are aware of it in your vicinity so that you sacrifice behaviors you would prefer to protect against it.
One interpretation offered, that doesn’t seem to apply to SF, is it’s a consequence of greater urbanization, where we simply have contact with more people, so the likely hood we’re aware of crimes increases.
>But what about the owner of the store that is stolen from 100 times a year? Still counts as only one victim of property crime.
Is this true? My instincts tell me he would almost certainly count 100 times, unless everybody doing these statistics is extremely stupid. Do all Walmart thefts really just count as 1 victim, 1 theft?
The above comment captures my thoughts on the matter as well. I don't think the "statistics ...are wrong", but the statistics do not quantify everything I experience as crime.
I have a neighbor who sells drugs and engages in prostitution, but the police do nothing no matter how many times we call them. My packages are continually stolen by thieves. The subway is full of antisocial people doing drugs in public and peeing in the station. Graffiti is replaced as quickly as it is painted over. There is dog shit everywhere from people not picking up after their animals (maybe not a crime, but it should be!).
While I'm happy that it's less likely I'll be murdered or assaulted, there are still many aggravations.
Maybe the problem is that the petty crimes have gotten more numerous. Everyone has their Amazon packages stolen now, whereas in the past the chances of being robbed, as in someone breaks into your house and takes your stuff, were quite low even though that sort of robbery was more common then than it is now.
Criminals being addicted to video games and instagrams sounds like it's intended as a joke, but should not be underrated as a cause of the decline.
Package thefts are included in the NCVS and the category that includes them seems to have a similar trend to all other categories. I've been a selected respondent to the NCVS before and they ask questions in a very thorough way, that I would expect to get folks to include package theft. I'll also say that I've never had a package stolen despite living in a city and not having any protections against it, so the claim that it's a universal experience seems questionable (maybe I'm a crazy outlier? but given that basically everyone gets fairly frequent deliveries these days, I'd expect it to show up more in the data if basically everyone was getting packages stolen).
Yeah, my theory about package theft is that it happens in particular areas that are prone to it, and those areas are not necessarily otherwise "high crime" areas where people are inured to it, and so we get some level of people being shocked that they're exposed to a crime rate which is not globally high, just sort of unevenly distributed in a way that feels novel.
That's very possible. I've literally never had a package stolen despite their being left outside my door, and I regularly see my neighbors' packages left outside unstolen. But, I hear about package theft all the time in the next city over.
There was that thing about some huge amount of shoplifting in NYC being driven by... Was it low hundreds of individuals? Sense of how common porch piracy is might be driven by being physically proximate to just one or two high-velocity offenders.
I believe you, I guess, but I am surprised to hear it. I live in a fairly good but "affordable" neighborhood and the buildings on my street have packages stolen relatively frequently. Not every day, but there's a spate of thefts every few months, especially around Christmas. Neighbors try to stop it by bringing packages out of the lobbies and moving them upstairs, but it's an imperfect solution.
I work at a college that is required to report crimes and I get an email at least once a week about packages being stolen from dormitories or college-occupied buildings.
I have family that lives in the suburbs in a different state and they've had packages taken off the doorstep - caught on camera.
Of course no one bothers reporting to the police - you just call Amazon and say it was lost. (They won't replace it if you tell them it was stolen.)
I'm surprised the NCVS statistics don't show a higher number. Maybe it's so common that people forgot to include it! I know my experience is only an anecdote, but it's made my sense that this is common so strong that I am really skeptical if someone says it's not. I can only say that I now do not understand this situation.
It's funny, after reading this post and a few of the comments, I was trying to remember the most recent time I personally had been the victim of a crime. And it wasn't until, like, two hours later that I remembered that I had to get a new credit card last year because someone halfway across the country was trying to make purchases with my information. As you say, credit card theft is so wildly commonplace that it doesn't even register as "crime" to me anymore - It's just something unfortunate that happens to you occasionally, like bad weather or a stomachache. I certainly wasn't so naive as to try to get the police involved.
I don't know how NCVS runs their survey, but if you had called me up yesterday and asked if I had been a victim of a crime in the last year, I probably would have said no.
I had some packages stolen for a time. Then my landlord finally managed to evict the literal murderer in the basement, and the theft stopped. We also got 5/6ths of a sixpack of laogama he'd I guess not found to his taste after Amazon refunded us, so that was nice.
Anyway, haven't experienced package theft before or since. Been alive 32 years. My little brother and mother experienced a bunch when they lived in West Oakland.
I've had something stolen from my doorstep, but it wasn't a package from Amazon; it was a new credit card from BankOfAmerica.
I ended up liveblogging the appearance of multiple fraudulent charges totaling a thousand or so dollars when accessing my account online, while I was on hold with BoA to have the card cancelled and arrange some other way to receive a new one. (They wouldn't simply mail it for some reason.)
As of my writing this, Scott's next article, "Crime as a Proxy for Disorder", is up, and I notice it does not mention fraud, which strikes me as a strong indicator of disorder, depending on the interpretation.
ETA: it was BankOfAmerica, not CitiBank; my memory was off.
I suppose you have not met the sort of people who have sex with their meth dealer. (Actually, it is not clear to me if they are paying for the meth with sex or buying sex in addition to meth but it makes little difference in its effects on the neighbors.) If you had, it would be quite clear why it is a problem. The "not properly zoned" comment is sort of correct.
Barring the one line about police looking the other way, doesn’t the rest of this comment explain why things are less safe? Street disorder is high. We can all see this.
You're using the words "less safe" to refer to a state of affairs where you're much less likely to be murdered, raped, or assaulted. I'm sympathetic to the more-disorder argument (and was planning to write about it as the second half of this post tomorrow) but people can't seem to make it without suggesting that it also applies to safety, which I am trying to establish is false.
Fine, Street unpleasantness street filth, street disgust, whatever you want to call it. If your only defense is that "murders which wouldn't happen to you happen to other people slightly less", it's meaningless to me. The degree to which I am "much less likely to be murdered, raped, or assaulted" is utterly insignificant
Yeah. In the 90's the gangs that ran the Mission would never have let people sell stuff on the street (unless they knew them and the product was drugs). Lots of murders though, the vast majority over turf. Believe me, the city was a lot more dangerous in the previous millennium...even though it looked better.
Is it possible that people's perception of personal safety isn't perfectly coupled to the real statistical murder rate? I attend a tabletop gaming group every Saturday; twice in the last two months, we've had a guy come in and walk around the restaurant asking everybody for cash. When I turned him down the first time, he said "I hope the Devil rapes you". I don't know what he said to everybody else.
That's not going to show up in any statistics, but I don't think it's unreasonable for somebody to feel less safe after an encounter like that. We were in that restaurant during the shooting at Brown (which took place just a couple blocks away) and I was less concerned then than I was with this guy making the rounds.
I'd almost prefer a physical altercation. That's clear-cut, gives people implicit permission to intervene and restore order, and one way or another we wouldn't have to worry about seeing him again.
Exactly. Having someone say "I hope the Devil rapes you," is not a crime, but it is the kind of thing that makes people unsafe, and it is the kind of disorder people are begging for a fix to. Not the murder rate.
What kind of solution would you be looking for in a case like this? Even here in Germany, which is much less Free Speech absolutist than the US, what the guy did probably isn't a crime. I guess you could try to influence the general niceness of society somehow, including the lower classes, but that sounds like a huge and vague undertaking which I personally wouldn't know how to approach.
I am pleasantly surprised to hear that someone actually uttered something like this in the wild.
Hear me out. There's this theory that the phrase "fuck you" came about analogously to "bless you", in that just as the latter is a shortening of "(may) God bless you", the former is a shortening of, well "(may) Devil fuck you", with the name of the devil consistently omitted for taboo reasons.
I find the theory appealing in many ways ("fuck you" makes no grammatical sense unless it's present subjunctive, at which point it makes a perfect one), but my one gripe was always - isn't that a fairly specific thing to wish on another person, who would actually do that? Well, someone apparently would, priors updated, thank you for your witness account.
It provides, among other things, a counterargument to the idea that "damn you" has "God" as the implied subject: namely, in that case "damn God" would be ungrammatical and "damn Himself" would be fine.
Other than that, it contains an ample collection of counterexample ungrammatical sentences that I find highly amusing, with sentences like "Describe and fuck communism" or "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear."
Yeah, when I hear people complain about the deterioration of their communities, it's rarely murder and rape that they're talking about. Littering, loitering, petty vandalism, small-time street harassment, crazies ranting on the bus, public drug use, aggressive panhandling, etc. - Such things are reflected in crime statistics poorly or not at all, but they have a HUGE impact on quality of life. If those sorts of things aren't accompanied by a corresponding increase in murder and rape, then that's great, but they're plenty bad on their own!
Unfortunately I doubt there's good data on this, and I'm not even sure how you would go about collecting it. I could give you plenty of anecdotes about how the places I've lived have gone downhill in the last decade, but they would be dismissed just like everybody else's anecdotes.
There is better data than you'd think, though it tends to be localized to the person (significant number of arrests (30+) tracks pretty well with "crazies on the street").
Pretty sure "public drug use" has gone down somewhat (at least when it's not marijuana or booze, both of which were "different" -- needles being a hazard).
It's more like... every New Yorker who takes the train regularly has at one time or another (several times if during 2020) been on a train where a psychopath who might have been armed with a knife obscured by layers of what appear to be shit-stains on his clothing... threatening to kill someone. Options are a) Ignore and walk away. b) Call cops who will never arrest, or arrest and immediately release, or arrest and then have charges dropped immediately by a prosecutor (the man Daniel Penny killed had 40 fucking charges and had randomly punched passers-by). c) engage in combat (which will lead to dying or the person getting released anyway or being charged yourself if you brutalize the subject enough to actually reduce the likeliness of them doing the exact thing on the same train next week).
In other words, lefties have basically deputized the entire spectrum of underclass scum as DISORDER ENFORCERS; tasked with imposing regular ritual humiliation of citizens. And you just have to take it or exclude yourself from public life.
This actually sounds like a pretty good outcome to me. I've taken public transit for many years, and while it never particularly common to share a bus or compartment with somebody acting overtly weird and unstable, it certainly happened a handful of times over the years. And when I witnessed such, I pretty much just shrugged and moved on with my life. It didn't ruin my day. It didn't sour me on public transit. It certainly didn't inspire to write angry rants in blog comments about "lefties" ruining society.
If somebody had asked me yesterday if I'd prefer my public transit experience to be free of those sorts of incidents regardless, I'd have said "yes." But I now see they were providing considerable, hidden value. If the downstream effect of sharing a ride with the occasional uncouth passenger is the sort of person who considers it "ritual humiliation" and actively considers assaulting people over it "excludes themselves from public life," then I can't imagine a better bargain.
I generally expect the weirdo on the bus has had a very tough life, due to some combination of poverty, childhood abuse and neglect, mental health issues, personal mistakes and just plain bad luck. I'd prefer to live in a word where he promptly gets the help he needs and is never reduced to that state. But seeing as I don't, enduring an occasional awkward bus ride with him and minding my own business seems like the least I can do[1]. Meanwhile, the sort of person who sees the weirdo firmly and fervently believes that inflicting violence on him (whether via the state or personally) is the appropriate response usually has much less excuse. The underlying mindset--the mindset that really, genuinely believes it is only just and right and proper to meet a minor, harmless instance of public disorder with whatever amount violence is necessary to end it--is so maladjusted and indefensible that it verges on the cartoonishly evil.
[1] If he were to actually assault someone, that would be a very different animal. But your own comment describes it *entirely* as "ritual humiliation;" my assessment of the safety risk is quite low, and I think it's implicitly clear that yours is too.
When my city got serious about inviting the homeless to come and make their … home there, many things changed almost overnight.
One thing was that the walking trail along the lake that was the work of Ben Crenshaw’s stepmother and some other ladies of the town, with an assist by Lady Bird, became lined with people, mostly men, in tents, with charcoal grills, armchairs, even TVs, mysteriously.
I think they are not there now, but haven’t been back to see, but they would’ve happily lived there the rest of their lives. And I’m sure many or most people on here would say what’s it to you (always, what’s it to you?) whether there’s trash-free landscaping, flowers and relative urban peace or screaming crazy people.
But it was shocking the first time I happened to walk past - I was not a regular trail user - to be hollered at in a sort of rough lunatic cat call, and then having ignored it, have a guy screaming profanities at me.
Needless to say, this sort of thing would’ve been quashed quickly during the period when the ladies first made this trail, and for decades after. It is interesting that things go from being unimaginable - to the prior way becoming unimaginable, sometimes, one feels, prematurely.
I live in a different city now, where wokeness manifests differently; and the situation in my old city would not happen here, because a different demographic makeup (heavily Hispanic) has a different attitude towards policing overall, and less interest in performing empathy.
I don’t have a lot of rapport with Mexican women, it’s just always been that way. But Mexican women will certainly give a few dollars to any homeless person they come across, and there is no performance in it. It is genuine, pity, and charity.
And, an ancillary question, since I’m not particularly wired to feel fear: does it always have to be fear that one feels, and never anger? Is only fear legitimate as evidence?
I really have never been able to quite encapsulate this difference between cities because of demographics. A new theory popped in my head. My old city was dominated by its traditional Anglo liberal power base, morphing from liberal to progressive as to the rest of the country since the advent of multiculturalism (yes I’m aware they were precursor events elsewhere, but this is flyover country).
Nowadays, there’s power sharing with younger POC progressives, But they, too, as with the older Anglo, progressives, Are inclined to see POC as a monolith. In particular, Hispanic people in this mindset are a monolith, Whether they’ve been here 150 years or 100 years, working hard the whole time, or whether they just arrived from Central America to reenact and nausea their gang wars. Or whether they are upstanding people, or cartel. All equally sanctified in this crude scheme.
Where as in my current city being heavily Mexican, There is not the same feeling that “we are a monolith”. Why would there be? Do groups usually consider themselves a monolith?! Nor do they have the same guilt-ridden attitude towards another group which the left has tended, patronizingly, to view as a monolith.
So there’s no trouble making distinctions, and in particular the police are able to shoot people once or twice a week; and the attitude is generally, thanks for doing your job and putting that person down.
I don’t expect I should add that this will hold much longer, as younger people here have been through American public school, and so they will probably hew to the new ideology about such things,
I look forward to your second post, as I agree with Brenton and the others below that not being murdered or subject to a crime is not the only indication of personal safety. My friend sat down in a puddle of someone else's urine on a train, is that safe? Someone slapped my bottom as I walked by, is that safe?
I think you need to be clear if you're talking about actual danger, or just perception of danger. We can be more afraid of being a victim of a crime even if we're less likely to be victimized.
If people are urinating all over, that's a big problem. But it's a different problem and you're going to confuse everyone if you jump into a discussion on falling crime rates and say we're less safe from sitting in urine.
It's not clear to me whether by "unsafe" you mean unsafe from unpleasant but not criminal experiences, or if you mean events that make you worried you will be physically assaulted.
Someone slapping your bottom is sexual assault or assault.
Urine is a sanitation issue. All I'm saying is that the safety issue bloggers are often arguing against when they say "why are people so upset, crime is going down?" is that crime isn't actually what people are upset about. It's street disorder. But it sounds like that's what Scott is writing about tomorrow.
I would argue that being stolen from, verbally abused, stalked, or harassed on the regular basis, are all things that make people feel unsafe because they are *actually* unsafe. Granted, this is better than murder, but still worse than baseline.
How much do the headline crime numbers really say about the risk that *you* will be murdered, raped, or assaulted other than in a spherical cow kind of way?
I think the average person cares mostly about something along the lines of "What is the risk of violence from a stranger to a random, basically law-abiding person just going about their business?" I don't have any data, but I suspect that's a very small proportion of violent crimes and so it can plausibly move around in ways that are uncorrelated with the totals.
First off, a lot of violence is internal to the criminal ecosystem. If drug dealers are beefing over territory less often, that could dramatically reduce the overall murder rate but it doesn't really tell you anything about the risks faced by people who are not associated with the drug trade.
Then, there's the whole category of domestic violence. It's a disturbing and terrible category, but once again -- you already more or less know if you're in the at-risk group. If, for whatever reason, that goes way up or way down, it doesn't really have any impact on the risks faced by people outside that group.
I really don't think the average rat is in fact much less likely to be murdered, raped, or assaulted, and the arguments presented in this post don't actually disagree with that at all.
Since moving to Seattle four years ago, I've been assaulted like three times (I work from home) and my roommate like eight (she rides the light rail a lot). In the 2010s I've been assaulted once, ever, despite near-exclusively living in cities.
You can have a lot of models about why; I personally would guess that "fights" have gone down but unprovoked attacks from psychotic people imagining a problem have gone up. But it does include assault, and I do think that needs to be addressed.
Do you think street disorder is higher now than it was in the 1970s, 80s, 90s? I don't. And if so it seems very bizarre to describe a situation where street disorder is better and there is less crime as being somehow "less safe."
People are mad that street disorder is high, not that it used to be higher.
You don't have to walk around an American city in the 1970s to know that an American city in the 2020s still needs a lot of improvement.
Other cities have managed to nearly eradicate street disorder. If this is the best America can do in 50 years then our cities aren't improving fast enough.
Hmm I feel like that's a somewhat different aspect. Even in the post, Scott talks about crime being at an all-time low. People in the comments object that the murder rate isn't relevant, but nobody seems to object that the murder rate is still too high, so the post is pointless or something.
How low a certain statistic (eg feeling of unsafeness or sth) should be, and whether things are getting better or worse are two related but separate conversations, I think.
I'm talking about street disorder, not crime and murder. We can keep pointing out that crime is getting better, but people aren't mad about the crime and murder rates they are mad about the street disorder.
My position is that most cities in the United States are more pleasant to live in, walk around in, and spend time in than they've been at basically any point in history, that there still is crime and street disorder, and that we should address those things but that it's bad to act like things are worse than they were in the past.
Do you have sources for this, or is that just your impression? Not disagreeing mind you, it just seems that this kind of data would answer the objections of many commenters if true.
I think Fallingknife's broader point is that we're using a series of technocratic coping mechanisms to compensate for a deeper moral rot in our societies, and this would include things like surveillance systems, items locked up in stores, using credit cards instead of cash, possibly video games and even incarceration itself.
I don't think this is a crazy thing to be worried about.
I think that if you could demonstrate that (adjusted for various suppressants), the crime rate had increased, that would be evidence. But I haven't seen anyone do this, just point to actual crime rates (which are declining).
Incarceration rates have been decreasing since 2006, which I think emphasizes the importance of doing these analyses instead of gesturing at them.
I'm aware of the decline in incarceration in the US specifically since 2006, I'm also aware it's still 5-6x higher than it was during the previous historic low, and I don't think the same decline is seen in other countries.
afaict there's no public database for this and that makes providing statistical evidence quite difficult, unless you've got connections to informants deep inside Target and Walgreens corporate offices.
All the evidence seems to be absolutely contrary to this idea, crime by any measure is falling. By your reasoning it would appear that if anything "religious morality" was a contributor to crime. As religiosity has declined, so has crime.
I don't recall mentioning religious morality specifically, but it's pretty well-known that religious people do give a larger fraction of their income to charity than atheists (although it's not that vast a difference.) Religion also motivates higher rates of family formation and lower rates of divorce once IQ is controlled for, so I'd be rather surprised if it led to higher rates of within-group violence.
Yes, they give a larger fraction to charity, because donating to their place of worship counts as charity. Ensuring you have a marble and gold building to sit in on Sunday doesn't contribute to the greater good. Correct for donations going to the place of worship and there is no difference between religious and non-religious charitable donations.
>Religion also motivates higher rates of family formation and lower rates of divorce
Yes, because nearly every religion values young marriage and reproduction and demonizes divorce. There's actually evidence that domestic violence is higher in religious households because there is pressure and shame preventing partners from dissolving a failing relationship.
> "Ensuring you have a marble and gold building to sit in on Sunday doesn't contribute to the greater good"
Assuming that churches as institutions do literally nothing with their donations aside from build more churches seems like a prodigiously ignorant and cynical statement, although frankly we could use more eye-pleasing architecture in the world.
> "Yes, because nearly every religion values young marriage and reproduction and demonizes divorce"
So what? Every society chooses particular behaviours to endorse and praise and other behaviours to condemn and stigmatise. Is it a failure of public health initiatives that they 'demonise' smoking?
The OECD has been in a demographic suicide spiral since around the mid-80s, btw, so encouraging young people to get married and have kids before they exit their reproductive window seems like a perfectly rational social priority to me.
As for the stats on domestic violence- again, I'd like to see those adjusted for IQ/SES and other confounders, and last I checked married women were self-reporting greater happiness, but if some non-zero disparity in domestic violence is supposed to be the greater evil compared to your species' extinction then I think you need your head examined.
Is there *any* way to objectively measure the thing you actually are concerned about (deeper moral rot)? Because otherwise you're just debating differing viewpoints with individuals which is really not going to lead anywhere conclusive.
What actual data would you expect to see that would either prove or disprove your view that some "x factor" has gotten worse, society-wide?
Well... disproving it would be simple enough. If the coping mechanisms went down at the same time the population's age composition was held constant *and* crime went down as well, for example.
Surveillance systems and items locked in stores as the primary coping mechanisms? (Presumably credit cards instead of cash is increasing for many reasons beyond fear of theft.)
I think that's fair - the problem is there isn't reliable data on those coping mechanisms, I imagine. Also some of those behaviors might be sticky (once you've started locking a bunch of things up, it takes a lot of effort to rearrange your store displays to do less of it)
Right, part of the disconnect here is that there are countermeasures that can successfully reduce crime, but are unpleasant in and of themselves. Stuff being locked up at the store is a great example. A town where everything needs to be locked up is worse than a town where nothing does, even if their shoplifting rates cash out as identical. Indeed, from the perspective of the non-criminal third party the countermeasure often "feels" worse than the crime. Everything at the store being locked up negatively impacts me as a customer much more directly and viscerally than the shoplifting did.
To further expand on this: Imagine two towns. In Town A, nobody bothers to lock their homes or vehicles. Stores are normal, and people run farm stands on the honor system. Anybody can walk around alone at any time of day.
Town B used to have a huge crime problem. But people responded with countermeasures. Not only does everyone lock their houses, they all have expensive security systems and bars on their windows. Stores lock up all their products, the cashier sits behind bulletproof glass, and many businesses have armed private security on the premises. People know not to go out alone after dark, and systematically avoid certain neighborhoods. Now, *after* the countermeasures have taken effect, Town B's crime rate is the same as Town A.
I don't think it's incorrect to say that Town B is "more dangerous" or "more criminal" than Town A is, even though their crime rates are now identical. Certainly, the quality of life in Town B is much lower. Not being a victim of crime because you're actively defending yourself against it is *very different* than not being a victim of crime because you live in an inherently safe place. It feels very different, and people sense it at a deep level.
The countermeasures can be annoying, sure, but it's more the indication that the people in your society are steadily trending in the direction of wanting to kill/harm eachother over time that worries me more. We can't just keep escalating the technocratic coping mechanisms forever.
School shootings are another example of this. I mean... yeah, the likelihood of dying in one is microscopic, but if you track the numbers decade-over-decade and adjust for population size they do seem to be slowly increasing in frequency and death toll. Household gun ownership has been basically static over the same period.
> we're using a series of technocratic coping mechanisms to compensate for a deeper moral rot in our societies
Frankly, I suspect this might be true but not that bad. I'm an atheist, but I don't deny the utility of many people believing they are under surveillance from God. Our more secular society just removed the "from God" part, among other things.
The only way the surveillance state could fully replace the psychological effect of religiosity is to surveil people 24/7, indoors and out, and then to read their thoughts. (And even that might not be enough, unless you're going to synthesise an afterlife as well.)
I don't personally love the idea of the average person being so constitutionally spineless that this level of external motivation is required to induce pro-social behaviour. e.g, if religiosity can induce women to have 6-10 kids then we only need to get ~10% of the way to that by non-religious methods to get above-replacement TFR. But I'm not going to pretend that declining religiosity had zero effect here.
I think he's saying that the decrease in average crime rates is driven primarily by poorer neighbourhoods, where murder and carjacking are daily occurrences. Meanwhile, theft and narcotics trafficking are rising in more prosperous neighbourhoods, and while this increase is not enough to drive up the national average, it's significant for people who live there. As it happens, most people who post comments on smart Substacks live in wealthier neighbourhoods, which explains the overall perception of rising crime.
Is it possible that on the lower end of the crime spectrum enforcement has weakened? To some extent petty crime is less a failure of police doing its job and more of a shift in the Overton window. San Francisco decided that shooting heroine in public is not a crime.
It sounds frustrating to write a post, and be met with a thousand comments debunking arguments you didn't make and/or complaining that you didn't talk about something else tangentially related to your post. I admire that you handle it gracefully.
I thought I read it. I thought it said absolutely nothing about theft except car theft. It seemed to mostly concentrate on murder, car theft, and violent crimes. It didn't seem to concentrate non-violent crimes, non car theft, traffic violations, and other visible to many people every day.
I know in my own anecdata, there's no reason to report these crimes. Your bike gets stolen? The police don't care. Your car gets broken into? It doesn't help to report this (1) the police won't do anything (2) if you report it your car insurance they'll just raise your rates to cover the check they claimed to cut you.
I've had my car broken into several times, didn't report because of the experience have trying once and getting the same result, nothing.
I've seen all the traffic violations. In fact the poster above mentions Mission and 24th. Try, Mission and 20th and Mission and 16 going downtown (north bound). You can look down on satellite view on google maps and verify that at both intersections no cars are allowed north of either intersection. You can then go stand on those corners and watch 3 of 5 cars just drive through ignoring both the signs and the painted street lines.
You might not care about this particular "crime". I only brought it up because it's trivially provable where as I can't prove all of the other more dangerous traffic violations I see everyday. I only know, everytime I drive, I see 3-8 violations per 30 minute drive and I believe that is way up from 20 years ago.
Anyway, I can fully accept that murders and car theft are down and yet still believe that other crime is up.
Also also, maybe some percentage of crime moved online? (probably not a reasonable displacement)
Note that none of those (selling stolen goods, using illegal drugs, shoplifting) are mentioned in the crime statistics. Probably because they aren't reported (ie did you file a police report with a description of the person you saw shoplifting? Why not?)
Weirdly, that's actually the opposite of what most people believe. People are actually in general *more* positive about local crime than they are about national.
Sure, I bet it can go the other way too, I just feel like the most prominent "belief" mode about it is "crime is pretty low in my local area, but I've heard about another place nearby where crime is up - regardless of what nation rates say."
That makes sense given the premise. Anecdotal observation shows that locally, crime is down for most places (SF excluded). But our safetyist culture means that distant/national crime is reported loudly and alarmingly, without the context that these things have always happened and are happening less frequently now.
Now I'm curious if it's because crimes "near me" are down, crimes "in places I care of" go up (maybe urbanites only care about other urban, suburban to suburbs, etc), and crimes overall in the nation goes down. Maybe there can be some Simpson paradox sprinkled in somewhere.
I would also expect that when crime goes up at place X, and down at place Y, people living at place X will be louder about their experience online, regardless of the national statistics.
I wanted to say something similar. In several European countries, the police does not care at all about smaller crimes, like someone beaten up, so it does not go into the stats. And this is what affects most people. Burglary happens to mostly empty second homes. Assault is something the police is not interested it, and we know rape is underreported.
Crime from the average person's perspective is not something dramatic like murder. That is too movie-centric. In real life it is the aggressive homeless who punches you.
READ THE POST! Actually, just read the title of the post! I say in the title that it's going to demonstrate that it isn't just reporting bias! Then I have a whole section giving three arguments showing that that's true!
Aggressive homeless punching you is a form of assault! That's worse than burglary!
And "assault is something the police are not interested in" and "rape are underreported" are exactly the sorts of arguments that the NCVS data are supposed to counter.
Actually, does the NCVS data compensate well against underreporting rape? Replying on the phone¹ is, I assume, less traumatic than going to the police (even though I'm judging by Russia where the situation might be unusually bad in that regard?..), but there's still a significant amount of stigma and shame around it. (It took me a very long time to tell someone about some of the things that happened to me, for example.) Imagine someone selected more or less randomly who's asked about it on a survey and finds it significantly less painful to just not say what happened. Or perhaps they're not admitting it to themselves, even.
UPD:
¹ looks like NCVS's initial interview is in person and subsequent ones are either in person or by phone. more importantly, it looks like they interview by households, and a rape victim may be hiding the fact from someone in the household. i don't know if they ask people individually or just talk to them as a group, but even in the former case it might feel like "this is not mentioned here" if it's done in their house.
This type of low quality comment ends up not getting reported and not showing up on the ban statistics. This contributes to a pervasive sense I have that the comments are much worse. I say we prioritize my felt sense over the data or mere things like "principles".
I find the NCVS argument entirely unconvincing. For one thing, seeing people stealing from CVS or every time I go in is not me being a victim of anything, but it is in fact crime that I witness. Not mention the fact that everything is locked up behind cabinets in every nearby store; this isn't crime, but it's a highly visible and disturbing loss of social trust.
There are whole categories of anti-social behavior that constitute crimes that I witness that don't victimize me, like people shooting up drugs in the street or picking up prostitutes. I worked in a kitchen in college where every single person was an illegal immigrant using a stolen or borrowed social security number. Again, I would report that I was not a victim of anything.
I actually find the argument that murder, burglary, assault, etc. is down entirely convincing. There are just so many illegal activities which are completely ignored to the point that things feel less trusted and more lawless, and the "major" crimes being down is a technicality that I don't care about because it never impacts me.
Yes, but note that while you have given us the data for homicide and for property crimes, and for the probabilities of reporting robbery, simple assault, aggravated assault, and sexual offenses, and the graph showing the rates for both homicide and aggravated assault, (all of which are much appreciated!!), to the extent that quality of life issues track simple assault (and aggressive panhandling, with a credible threat of assault), all of these statistics, though much appreciated, may miss an important part of everyday criminal threat.
I don't believe that police does not care about "beaten up" in Europe. Maybe "slightly punched", yeah, I don't even cared to report this. But certainly police cares about real punches that left bruises.
"I'm not wrong" is an interesting thing to feel the need to say. I think it's worth asking, bluntly, if there is any evidence that crime is actually down that you would accept besides your own vibes? I note that your description of events ("I see...") is all present tense, with no comparison point to the past. I also note that there is a long history of research that explains how human perception is often biased and wrong. And if we're going off wisdom from tech moguls, Larry and Sergei both believed in hard data over basically anything else (https://cloud.google.com/resources/building-a-data-driven-culture)
What would convince you the stats are wrong, or that they are some how not including our lived experience?
I lived in SF from 2007-2013 and again from 2021-2024. The first time the block on Mission betwen 15th and 16th was normal city block. Now, the entire block is one large illegal market with people selling stolen goods (assuming it hasn't been cleaned up since 2024). Is that one crime per seller, per day? They're out in the open, every day. They weren't there before.
Is this an exception, crime is down over all but just not in SF?
I'm now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place. Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done. So every day I see these crimes. They weren't here 10 years ago. Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.
I see homeless parking on Washington Blvd. I can feel sorry for them but it is a crime and it's visible, and it's more than it was in the past.
I give those examples because they're easy to verify where as bike theft or broken into cars are not. Maybe murder is down. Maybe crime is down overall but not in the places I live. Maybe the crime I see is not counted.
I feel like some of this dicussion is kind of like when TPTB tell us prices aren't goiing up. Then I go to a food truck and the price for one entree and a drink is > $20. I went to a bakery this weekend. One BLT + one coffee + one cookie, $37. So sorry if I don't believe the TPTB when they tell me prices are not rising. And, in the same way, it's hard to believe crime is low when I see it every day. I feel like somewhere there has to be something missing from the data.
I also feel like sometimes Americans are like the whole asking a fish "how's the water". Fish: "What's water?" Go live in Japan or Singapore for a few years, then move back. Suddently you see all the crime and similar issues you were just taking for granted. Like the idea that you should need to make sure there's nothing visible in your car otherwise it will get broken into and that if you did leave something out it's really your fault beacuse that's just the way the world is. It's not! There are places where you can leave stuff in your car and not worry about it getting stolen. But, people have been victims for so long the crime is just all taken as normal. Every parking garage has signs up "not responsible for crime". Those signs shouldn't exist. The fact that they do is just proof we're swimming in it and we no longer see it.
Careful meta analysis (beware the man of one study) or a convincing explanation for why the stats are all biased in the same direction cf Nate Silver
I've mostly been in NYC, and I'm younger than you, but as a rough counterpoint Morningside heights and downtown Brooklyn were both considered so dangerous you couldn't go out past 8 without risk of getting mugged, and that's just not true at all now
People of a recent generation, living in the Bay Area and complaining about mostly aesthetic crime that doesn’t affect them directly. In the 80s and early 90s in NYC you could get mugged in the upper west side, just walking down Broadway.
This "disorder" seems to be a mostly west coast thing[1]. Here in NYC we do have homelessness of course, but not more than usual and not the tent cities and open shooting up people discuss (and I've seen some of) in LA and SF.
Our signs of disorder include:
• Toiletries under lock and key at CVS and Duane Reade: Annoying but this likely reduced shoplifting
• Filth everywhere: NYC is a famously dirty city, but not more than before
• Weed smoke in public: Kind of annoying, but not illegal now.
• Reckless delivery drivers on sidewalks: Illegal, but a very petty crime
[1]: Ilya did mention seeing more disorder in Chicago where I spent a lot of time in 2022-2024 (I worked remotely for a company there). I didn't really see a lot of that (it seemed way better than LA), though I was in mostly nice neighborhoods.
Your first bullet point is the most important. Why is it suddenly necessary to put things under lock and key which historically did not require such measures? Clearly something has changed for the worse.
Because it's clearly worse. It's harder to buy the product. It's more expensive to supply the product. It's harder to stalk the selves. It requires an employee to open the shelves. In other words, it costs more money than doing nothing unless crime went up to the point that guarding the product saves more that it loses in the extra costs and lost sales.
No store would add those selves unless theft was up. All customers hate them. All employees hate them. They reduce sales and increase costs.
Its leftover from Martin v. Boise and Johnson v. Grants Pass. From 2018 until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2024, the 9th Circuit had effectively made it impossible to arrest homeless people for sleeping or camping in public areas. The 9th Circuit's jurisdiction covers the entire West Coast. So for six years cities in the West Coast couldn't really do much about homeless camps and people sleeping on the sidewalks, so there was a lot more obvious "public disorder" than in NYC, where there are just as many homeless people but the police were allowed to keep them from camping in Central Park and whatnot. Since 2024 many cities have started cracking down on the obvious homeless disorder, so there has been a good deal of improvement. Of course some cities don't want to crack down to hard for cultural/political reasons, like Seattle.
Thank you! I believe all the posts above to the effect that life is grimier and closer to the edge of chaos in the cities than it used to be are basically saying those people who's very existence is a low-level crime are difficult for me to be around. It turns out the murder rate was easier to fix than the rate at which marginally functional people are chiseled into being submarginal.
That Bezos comment could use some context. He is saying that when anecdotes conflict with data, it's not saying that the data is being miscollected, it's that you're not measuring the right thing. The prescription he'd push is not "trust your vibes over statistics", it is "anecdotes are a signal that you should go investigate your methodology and figure out what you're actually failing to capture".
Bezos would probably agree with you that the stats are missing something - his whole point is that's what anecdotal friction usually means (the data is incomplete, not fake).
Don't throw out the statistics, but maybe we need better metrics that reflect what actually affects your daily lived experience.
Anecdotes are just data points. So when you say that some anecdotes don't align with the data, what are you saying? You are saying that the anecdotes fall outside of some statistical measure of the data. So what? That has zero statistical significance, unless you show that it does. And until you do show that, that observation should be given about as much attention as any other baseless claim without evidence.
The problem is entirely the overloading of the words "safe" and "crime".
>The crime that matters is the crime people actually see
Arguably true, as is almost everything else in your post
>Don't tell me crime is down. I'm not wrong.
This is not correct.
Certain subsets of crime are way up, particularly in certain urban areas. This is _extremely_ visible in London, and John Burn-Murdoch in the FT did some excellent reporting of it here:
Phone snatching and shoplifting *are* way up and are essentially decriminalised. As this is the crime we are most likely to see or be victim to, we feel a decaying of the social fabric, although violent crime is generally down.
Potentially it then gets exacerbated by social media and the fact that journalists tend to live in these urban areas, but I have nothing to back that up.
This discourse is constant in London and most of it seems to be that people are talking at cross-purposes, as far as I can see it's 3 clusters shouting past each other.
The first group, largely socially conservative, who have an agenda to push and are using the growing perception of crime to their own ends.
The second group, largely socially liberal, reacting against the first, pointing out that violent crime and overall crime has fallen, but dismissing the petty stuff as unimportant.
The third, who genuinely feel something has changed, can't fully articulate it, and mostly get drowned out by the other two in any online discussion.
I, for one, would like to read a Substack article about crime that isn’t essentially someone in the Bay Area complaining about aesthetics. Come to Baltimore and look at our crime! (Dropping relentlessly as well!)
The remark about stuff being locked up is interesting. In many ways, due to increased information these days, lots of crime prevention is being done by individuals and businesses rather than the government protecting us .
People see where the crime is and avoid it. I see this in my own city where a certain downtown neighborhood used to be less dangerous than it is now. But when it crossed a certain point it became more dangerous. Then I and many others just stopped going there entirely. So the total crime being committed there is probably less even though the street is more dangerous. In my feelings. This is more crime even though statistically it's less crime.
In Plato's Republic, at the start, Socrates and friends go to the city. On their way to the city, they meet a servant of some local rich guy, who sent him to get Socrates to come to his house. Socrates says to the servant "can't I convince you to let me go to the city now instead of coming with you?"
The servant answers "how will you convince me if I won't listen?"
That's you! You won't let yourself be fooled by silly things like "data" or "proof", all you need is your trusty gut feeling! How will Scott possibly convince you if you simply refuse to listen?
Another possibility is that there is a lower proportion of young men around than in previous decades. As young men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes, fewer young men implies fewer crimes being committed.
Totally! I think that's part of it and is rarely mentioned. However, it can't be the whole story. The population as a whole has been getting steadily older for a very long time. Based on the data I can find, the "median age of the population" has been steadily increasing for hundreds of years. The increase has been accelerated with a declining birth rate, but the trend has been relatively constant thanks to modern medicine. However, there was a very clear reversal in crime rates in the early 90s and onwards. What exactly caused that rapid reversal?
While lead regulations line up really nicely with the reversal, I don't find that hypothesis extremely compelling either.
EDIT: Scott also has a pretty strong refutation of this point as well in a comment below
It's plausible said men also cause less trouble than in the past due to how they choose to spend time. Less booze, less getting in fights at bars, more time than ever spent online on social media, videogames and other forms of entertainment, porn, etc. that sedates them.
The population of young men has been stable tho, certainly not declining at the rate crime has declined.
I think the tech distraction hypothesis is really a huge part of this tho.
The young men are still here, they are just playing video games and on social media, displacing much time that might otherwise be used to commit violent crime on the streets.
Many Thanks! That was surprising! As the authors said:
>Higher BMI correlates with a lower parental socioeconomic status, lower intelligence, lower number of years of education, and lower family income. Since all those things positively correlate with a higher rate of crime1, one would expect people with higher BMI to have a higher rate of crime.
>Yet, in a sample of 43,992 male offenders from Austria, we see that a higher BMI is associated with a significantly lower risk of arrest for a variety of offenses.
Hmm... Does this argue for sentencing to a deep-fried diet? Gavage?
And to reward our junk food companies for crime prevention?
I should have been more specific. I think that once you adjust for age and medicine, 1950s homicide rates were better than today, not 1990s. 1990s are clearly the peak of American crime, I don't think you can plausibly think that 2025 was a more murderous period that 1994.
Very few people are alive today who remember the 50s. Our only reference is movies featuring the most beautiful people dressed in Mad Men suits and dresses, the equivalent of "Friends" living in huge, stylish apartments in NYC in the nineties.
If you compare the 50s to the 1900s, the 50s are an obvious outlier. Alcohol consumption before prohibition was catastrophically bad and has never returned to even a half that level. New York was full of disgusting slums and SROs where crimes were barely investigated. Teddy Roosevelt made his name as police commissioner in the late 1890s because he was the first to bother to do something about it. He made a dent, but abuses continued for long after.
"Very few people are alive today who remember the 50s. Our only reference is movies featuring the most beautiful people dressed in Mad Men suits and dresses..."
I literally helped create a collection of lynching postcards dated through the early 1970s for a local museum, it's absolutely hilarious to me when people make claims that the 1950s were some crime free era of peaceful living.
My former father-in-law, who'd attended an all-white high school in Queens during the 1950s, used to during the 1990s "get going" about how nobody back in his day had guns and the gangs were just having some innocent fun and schools didn't need security guards and disagreements were settled the old fashioned way, etc etc. Then one evening somebody happened to phrase the right followup question and that's when we heard that "well sure OF COURSE you always had a knife on you, would never leave the house without that...."
from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 documented lynchings.
In 1968 alone, there were 11,710 reported homicides.
As a terroristic means of sending a political message, lynchings have a significant place in American history. As a contributor to violent crime in general, they do not.
Criminologists have already age-adjusted the data.
The FBI started tracking US homicide rates in 1933, and they have data going back to 1931. Homicide rates were 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. The estimated homicide rates were equally high in the 1920s. The common explanation is that Prohibition and gang violence (gangs as in the Mafia, not teenage gangs) contributed to high homicide rates. They fell after Prohibition ended, dropping to ~5/100K in the 1940s and 1950s. Rising again in the 1960s, and peaking at 10.2/100,000 in 1980. Age-adjustment slightly amplifies the 1931–1933 peak, but does not erase the dramatic rise in estimated homicide rates from 1900 to 1931. It leaves the overall rise, fall, and then rise again intact. The early 1930s remain one of the highest homicide-rate periods in U.S. history prior to the late-20th-century crime wave.
Your answer, Scott, though useful in throwing more data out, seems too glib. Might the cause be multifactorial? If you use a "is it / isn't it" distinction, I'd guess all hypotheses will fail. The population is aging, and aging populations commit fewer crimes - seems very likely to explain some non-negligible portion of a trend, no? (Perhaps 18-22 isn't a broad enough window, or felony-arrest rate is too tight or...)
I think the answer is that the population is aging, and that's part of the effect, but that there's also an effect from genuinely lower crime even binned by age.
That’s mixing stats, and arrest rate is very dependant on police effectiveness. The key would be to look at the NCVS, but just remove everyone over 50 from the victim samples; old people aren’t generally the victims of crimes other than works/investment fraud that no-one cares about in this context.
Why? If the population is less criminal because it's older... it's still less criminal. Age is just a cause of the crime rate being lower, not a measurement artifact.
I think the Pinker level analysis is basically right, society is getting less violent as it becomes more civilised. I think a huge effect on the murder rate is the decreased acceptability of domestic violence. I also think that there are specific types of serious violence that have basically disappeared, bar fights and being set upon by bored teenagers.
Caveat: I haven’t read “Better Angels”, only consumed lots of discussion about it.
Also, my inclination is toward agreeing with Pinker; I just notice things and like poking at them regardless of my inclinations.
“ society is getting less violent as it becomes more civilised”
Seems strange there should be such marked decline in violence after 50 years (conveniently, approximately the typical alive-today-person’s memoryspan) when ”our society” is 500 years old, arguably much older than that (what time period is Pinker covering, again?) and even if we limit ourselves to the Industrial Revolution that’s still 250 years or so.
Pinker's book is a fascinating read (and his thesis seems to hold up to my admittedly limited fact-checking) and covers the history of humanity, from prehistoric times to today, in different levels of detail.
The way I've been describing it to people around me is "He makes a really convincing case about the decrease of violence. Then, you can:
- see the glass half-full and rejoice that life is so much peaceful now,
- or the glass half-empty and be HORRIFIED by how UNIMAGINABLY violent life was before, in a way that's distant enough that we don't normally imagine it."
If you look at the first graph in this post, it looks like there's a pretty marked decline from 250 years ago as well! The peak of the 1970s-80s is less than a third of the peak from 1780-1800.
Which seems plausible to me - our current society is probably less violent than a society where it was socially acceptable to murder someone in a duel, for example.
Duelling was completely unacceptable and illegal it just happened among the elite. There is an interesting hypothesis that for most of history the rich were more violent than the poor, your chance of killing someone in a Venetian bar fight, increased as you got richer for instance.
People really underrate the "kitchen sink" argument - most citizens and most police departments very much want murder rates to go down. They try lots and lots of different things, many of them not incredibly evidence-based and many of them not very effective, but it would be VERY surprising if working very deliberately for a long period of time to improve something would result in NOTHING working.
While that is true, institutions being completely ineffective is common and making progress on significant social problems is quite new in human history. The biggest shifts here has been long term social changes which sometimes interact with policing policy rather than the effectiveness of deliberate planned policies.
"why do people’s intuitions clash so violently with the statistics?"
I know you already know this, but dead horse, etc.... but like illness in health data, or in school/education data, how you segment the data is a huge factor.
All of these things have radically different rates of concentration, and also very different rates of transmission of information about them.
There are regions or populations - and we're a big enough country that it looks like a lot of people and we generalize from them - where the rates are very high, and ones where they are very low. Or where the rates of change, leading to our perceptions about "how things are going?", have changed massively.
There are millions of people who live in places where crime seems legitimately bad, and millions where it doesn't.
They have tracked every year since 1989. Almost every year, a majority of people think crime is getting worse, even though crime was getting less for almost that entire period.
Interestingly, the three exceptions, when only 40-something percent of people thought crime was getting worse, are 2000, 2001, and 2025.
Yep, my view on that is because almost no one is actually interpreting the question as "is crime getting worse nationwide?" and in fact couldn't answer that question without consulting nationwide data, they are actually answering the question "have I heard about crime more in places I care about?" and that difference is what explains the divergence between the poll response and reality.
It’s not even “have I heard about crime *more* in places I care about” but rather “have I heard about *too much* crime in places I care about” - even if it’s decreasing, if it’s “too much” they report “more”.
good point, and I think that is also a signal that people are mentally translating the question in another way - not just “what is my bloodless, objective measure of crime rates” - but as … kind thinking of it as a suggestion box of “what things I as a voter think should be improved on.” Squeaky wheels, get the grease - so I say “crime is increasing” because I think it is really important for leaders to focus on reducing crime, and I think that if I put “crime is getting better” they might be liable to slack off on it.
Well, if people looked at crime locally, and a mid-criminality group moved from a high-criminality area to a low criminality area, then in both places...
( not that I expect this to be an actual part of the explanation... )
I think a lot of American discourse is distorted by Metropolitan California, which has a high crime rate and also a very saliency via Hollywood, media, and tech companies. People who live there see a lot of crime and talk about crime and people who listen to them internalize it. If you listen to ten different sources that all complain about high crime rates, you might think everywhere has high crime, even if the majority of those sources originate from Californians.
Yep, that's one of the biggest examples. But people are so mobile, news of crimes is so easy to transmit, and rates are so geographically segregated that you see miniature versions of this everywhere.
Thank you. Very thoughtful. Quite curious about the data in the graph from the 1950s and up until the early 1960s that show was similarly low crime or murder rate. I wonder if that data was experiencing severe under reporting
I'll have a post that discusses that later, but short answer is I can't find evidence that anyone knows, but it might be related to the Baby Boom phenomenon (more people marrying and having kids instead of living dissolute crime-prone single lifestyles).
Would you please consider the age structure of the population? Most "visible crimes", which is what you seem to be discussing rather than, say, financial crimes, is committed by youthful males. (Well, except prostitution...which probably shouldn't be a crime anyway.)
Also, the move to the suburbs could either lead to a reduction in the geographic factors that enable crime, or a reduction in the local governance factors that enable crime reporting, or both.
Regarding the "two things changing in exactly opposite ways and canceling each other out": this is a bad rebuttal. There's nothing special about them *exactly* canceling each other out. If murder went down by 20%, this could correspond to 1.6x shootings and 0.5x lethality. The gist of the argument is that you can't understand the ground truth without breaking it down further.
I'm pretty sure it's mathematically valid. If you have a trend that's remaining steady and several independent underlying factors, and where you can model how much the factors change each year as a normal distribution (meaning, smaller changes are more likely than bigger changes), then it's less probably that the underlying factors diverged strongly than stayed mostly unchanged. The bigger the divergence, the more unlikely it is. So having 20x more shootings and 1/20th lethality is less likely than 2x more shootings and 1/2 lethality, and the maximum likelihood would peak at 1x shootings and 1x lethality.
It's an outside view argument, that works without any knowledge of the specific factors. If you investigate an find a reason why we'd expect these specific factors to diverge this way, the outside view might no longer apply, because we have better information. But that's true of all coincidences; once you can fully explain their causes, there is no uncertainty left, and no more reason for suspicion.
There was no statistical analysis on how much of a coincidence it is, so maybe you could argue it's only a small coincidence and isn't strong evidence of anything. But the general principle of "two things changing in exactly opposite ways and canceling each other out" being less likely is reasonable.
You don't tell us what the Victimization Survey says about whether crime has declined. That's essential. The FBI data used to be standard, but many cities stopped reporting their crime to the FBI, so it's dubious now as a way to get a national average. Rates of crime reporting *by victims* isn't the problem, it's rates of crime reporting *by police depatments* to the FBI. The FBI doesn't collect the data itself, it just accumulates what police departments tell it. That is the big reporting problem.
The problme is not that River City underreports its crime to the FBI, but htat River City tells the FBI "We're too busy to report anything". See my commnet to this comment.
But it could still be true that crime is low, and it probably is true.
Here's what Gemini says, which looks pretty good to me (I'm an economist who has worked with crime data): In 2021, the FBI officially retired its decades-old "Summary Reporting System" (SRS) and switched exclusively to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
The Issue: Many of the nation’s largest police departments (including the NYPD and LAPD) lacked the technical infrastructure to report through the new system initially.
The Result: In 2021, nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies did not submit data, making it difficult to determine if crime was actually rising or falling nationally. By 2024 and 2025, participation improved significantly, but some major agencies still struggle with full compliance.
2. Underreporting and Participation
Because participation is voluntary, the data is only as good as the local agencies' willingness and ability to provide it.
Missing Agencies: In some years, thousands of agencies (representing millions of people) have submitted no data or only partial data.
State-Level Disparities: Reporting rates vary wildly by state. For example, some states have near-perfect participation, while others have seen fewer than 10% of their agencies report in a given year.
"But the problem was largely confined to 2021. The FBI reversed course and began accepting both SRS and NIBRS data again starting in 2022. Along with an increase in the number of agencies submitting NIBRS data, population coverage improved to 94% by 2023. Council on Criminal Justice NIBRS population coverage specifically went from 76.9% in 2022 to 83.1% in 2023 Congress.gov, with remaining agencies still submitting through the old SRS format.
The practical upshot: The 2021 FBI data is genuinely unreliable for national trend analysis. But by 2022–2023, coverage was back to roughly normal levels, meaning FBI data from those years is about as reliable as it was pre-transition. The impact of the transition on our understanding of 2023 or 2024 crime trends is virtually nonexistent"
Presumably the behaviour you're referring to is game/porn/internet addiction. Are you saying this leads to increased criminality? Or decreased criminality. To first order, I would guess the latter, since these activities take a lot of time and tend to have depressive effects. I could sort-of see the negative downstream effects of being more isolated and mentally ill causing increased criminality, but I doubt this effect would predominate.
I’d venture to guess that these numbers have almost nothing to do with the lived experience of almost everyone reading this.
If you aren’t a gang member, don’t live in government-assisted housing, and don’t get into heated fights with your relatives, which probably corresponds to almost all the PMC-adjacent nature of people who read this blog, then the murder rate for you is a very tiny fraction of the murder rate for the country as a whole.
Some Americans are going to be living in a world where the murder rate is 5-10x higher than the national average, and many, even those in cities with high murder rates, are never going to even have an acquaintance who was murdered.
Exactly. The average is dominated by outliers. The (tiny) murder rate for ACX readers could go up 10x without even showing up as a blip in these broad statistics.
Maybe, but how big is the actual readership? Six (alleged?) murders is enough for 150k person-years of US murder rate at its current low (and they happened in 2022 and 2025, so 2-4 years depending on how you choose to think about it).
Getting mugged or burgled are things that used to be reasonable concerns of the PMC but are much less so now. Tracking murders just gives us another angle on a related issue that suggests that the decline in mugging and burglary isn’t just an illusion.
Came here to note exactly this. As with fertility, any theory here needs to hold globally, and that tends to undermine points based in local US political controversies.
The best long time series crime data is in Europe (e.g. you can use church records to reconstruct UK homicide rate back 500 years) and most of those places show a persistent long term decline in homicide (with volatility of course).
This past year was particularly good, with very sharp drops in homicide in Toronto, Stockholm, London, etc. in addition to most US metros. It is very interesting to try to think about why Stockholm and Baltimore would have correlated murder rates for the past 5-10 years.
regarding the National Crime Victimization Survey, this doesn't capture theft and vandalism of businesses, correct? You live in a neighborhood that used to be nice but then things change. You observe a bunch of shoplifting. You have to go find a store employee for them to unlock the deodorant case (!). The security guard scowls at everyone who enters the store. Your life is being affected negatively by crime, in a way your statistics don't capture.
Low crime and rule of law bring prosperity to an area, and when crime ruins that, you're well within your rights to say "this city is going to shit because of crime", even if you have never been a victim.
Ditto with people starting to feel the need to lock their doors. It makes you feel unsafe, and it may or may not be in response to actual danger.
Stuff like locks on the deodorant case are partly a result of other things going on, probably at least as much as response to crime.
Like, the store doesn’t just monitor deodorant shoplifting rates and then once it reaches a critical threshold, puts locks on the deodorant case; they also receive sales pitches from companies who market those specialized lock systems, and once the price is low enough (because technological innovation has made it so), and once the store’s anticipated revenues can justify the expense of purchasing and installing the systems and training employees to use them (because the economy is doing well or whatever), the store pulls the trigger and has them put in.
That can't be it. I have two Walmart stores, both supercenters, both in rural-ish towns. One with population abt. 10k, the other closer to 50k. Both within 15 miles of each other in central Oregon.
They differ wildly in how much is locked up and exactly what is locked up.
Locking stuff up also has a major cost in that people don't like it. It has negative net benefit unless the shoplifting rate is substantially higher than the general loss rate for goods, since it only protects from one form of loss and incurrs ongoing costs.
Even those two stores might have very different basic overhead costs (real estate, labor, etc.), management (or whoever approves purchase & installation of locking-up technology) almost certainly is not working with perfect information, etc.
I’m not saying it’s unrelated to shoplifting (it would be dumb to install such a system in a store where nobody ever steals), but there are other factors so shoplifting doesn’t totally explain it.
Sure. Shoplifting doesn't *totally* explain it. But what I responded to was saying (or so it seems) that shoplifting *isn't a substantial part of the equation at all*.
The two areas are fairly different as far as crime (in this case shoplifting by homeless people) goes. The place with the higher crime rate *also* has lots more stuff locked up. Real estate and labor costs are basically identical--the variance here isn't much and people live one place and work in the other all the time. Yet the distinction is nearly total--one store has almost nothing locked up except for the age-restricted and extremely valuable items (and even then most of those just have the anti-theft tags, not display locks). The small-town, low crime walmart has basically the razor blades, electric shavers, and condoms (and other such things), and game consoles locked up. The same items that have been under lock and key at every Walmart I've been in since I was a child 40-ish years ago.
The "big city" (small town) Walmart has those, everything in the video games/movies section (except the bargain bin), as well as a bunch of other things locked up. And increasingly large amounts--when I moved here 6 years ago, much of the difference wasn't locked up. Those were added much more recently. And security there is significantly tighter.
I said: "Stuff like locks on the deodorant case are partly a result of other things going on, probably at least as much as response to crime."
I don't think that can be fairly interpreted as me saying crime isn't a substantial part of the equation at all, but I think it'd be fair to argue I shouldn't have included the word "probably". I shouldn't have, that was me overstepping epistemic bounds.
While I feel the locking of items is plausibly a result of "more crime", I also agree with Nadav that "there are other factors to consider".
Of the top of my head:
Most shops (in places I've lived in : Spain, Ireland, France, UK) have many less cashiers today than they did 25 years ago. If it becomes cheaper to have locks on items + 1 security guard + 1 cashier than to have 5 cashiers, that's what shops will do.
Sure, there may be other factors. But when there's a 1:1 correlation with
* places with high(er) crime
and
* places where things are locked up
and there isn't a correlation in any direction with the other stuff as far as I can tell, my prior is pretty strongly that it's because of crime, dominantly.
Scott, this feels like half of a good post and you are alluding that you have a second post on this topic coming soon. I’m curious if you are intentionally shifting your content strategy to break up longer posts into shorter posts?
To the point of the article, I agree. Even anecdotally I hear about less crime than I used to. Especially post BLM crime felt rampant. I no longer see as many local stories of shootings, robberies, and everything feels safer.
I wanted to have this post on its own so I could link people who say crime is only down because of reporting bias to it, and they wouldn't have to search to find where I'm making the argument.
Have you ever considered a web format that allows section linking? I have wanted to do that on your blog but never can. Meanwhile even basic markdown supports it.
When I was a teenager it was fairly normal for young men to get in fights, many of which turned violent enough to rise to the level of a crime. I haven’t seen a physical fight at a bar in a decade. According to my young relatives fights in high school, once a weekly occurrence, are so rare they’re the talk of the whole school year. Domestic violence is way down.
Anyway, my point is I wonder if “crimes committed by a stranger”, which are a small minority of all crimes, are the same or have increased. That would explain the difference between perception and reality
That squares with my general impressions (though I'm not from the US), but how old are you? You were a teenager, when? and also, where?
Also, I'd like to ask any teenager present, do fight still happen? Or does the very notion of a fight feel like something out of a videogame rather than reality to you?
Not a teenager anymore (same age as Dr B I guess) but working with teenager for the past 16 years. My anecdotal evidence from different places I've been working in:
- among (French) teenagers from upper-class families, physical violence has declined. Think 1 fistfight / month in 2010-—> 1 fistfight / year in 2025
- among (French, majority Muslim) teenagers from poor neighbourhoods, physical violence has decreased but remained much higher. Think 4 fistfights / month in 2013 —> 1 fistfight / month in 2021
I graduated from high school in 2022 in a fairly affluent area and we had like five “fights” the whole time I was there. It was always kids who were troublemakers and struggling in school. I suspect many other small violent conflicts occurred but the administration prevented the student body at large from finding out through swift action and students not wanting to face the social consequences of doing something “cancellable”
Anecdotal, over, say, 2017-2023, many of my wife's friends in teaching said violence was up in schools (including down to elementary, though of course that level it's not going to usually be a crime), and quite famously schools do very little about this and try to avoid collecting too much data. I suspect this one is going to have wild regional variation (and within-district variation), not show up on any stats, but have meaningful impact on how parents rate the crime/disorder vibe of an area.
2017-2023 is the period that specifically bucked the longer trend. In the other crimes mentioned here, the drops in the years since 2023 have more than made up for the gains during those years.
Hum, when I was a kid fights were definitely a thing. Especially after a game between rival high schools. Police ignored it. Until some kid (Greg Sample?) who lost a fight and went to his car and pulled out a tire iron and beat some kid from Gainesville half to death. Then the tolerance by the police plummeted. This was the Missouri Ozarks in the early '70s. Fight after school at the bus stop was a weekly to bi-weekly occurrence. Almost always one-on-one and and other students would break it up if it got too rough.
Consensual violence was a major part of my (late 90s to mid 2000/ childhood) childhood. I remember thinking a lot about how to prevent anger or sadism leaking into it, since those lead to injury and injury got violence shut down. Particularly when I was maybe five to nine this was a lot of what i thought about.
Yes. This is something I think people underestimate. I’m 52 years old and I’ve seen maybe 5 actual fights in my life, and most of those in the early 1980s, where, not coincidentally I was in my early teens. If you go back even just to the 1960s, public brawling was a widely accepted form of recreation. The last time that happened on any scale was soccer hooliganism in the 80s but that was remarked on because it was anomalous. There’s a documentary about the violent Vietnam war protests outside the US embassy in London where both police and protestors talk about how much fun the fighting was. Go back even further to the late 1800s and groups of kids were going out in the evening to try to trap police officer and throw stones at them.
The overall level of violence in society has fallen dramatically over the last century and a half or so, and this is just slow enough that people don’t quite map their experience onto the societal trend
I don't know much about guns, but I suspect there are more guns available that are capable of killing more people more quickly today than 50 years ago. Related -- is the mass murder rate up or down?
Mass murder victims make up such a tiny percentage of murder victims that it shouldn't matter to public perceptions of crime, one way or the other. But of course it does.
Fragmentation of households which increases their raw count? Many more people live alone, especially in big cities where gun regulations tend to be more stringent.
Fewer people are willing to admit publicly that they own guns? This is the era of internet paranoia, after all; also, if you are known to have a gun, your house may get burglarized (probably in your absence) precisely because someone needs a gun for their, uh, illegal gig.
It is always so weird to read this stuff as an European. In most of Europe, you can live your whole life never holding a gun, and just seeing it a few times in your life. I know I only had a gun two times in my hands.
As someone who has lived in the United States for 40 years (and Texas for 9 of those years) I have never held a gun in my life! And by far the most common place for me to see guns in real life is the Charles de Gaulle airport, because the Gendarmes there carry their guns so visibly, while suburban Texans don’t usually bring guns to the kinds of businesses frequented by childless hipsters.
I am a Czech. We have some gun culture here, though not to the same extent as the US.
I don't own a gun, but I frequented both pistol and rifle ranges for fun, which is legal with an instructor. I liked shooting, but it was an expensive hobby.
"you can live your whole life never holding a gun"
Exceptions like the Yugoslav civil war and the current Russo-Ukrainian war are quite important, though.
Once the war in the East is over, expect some uptick in gun crime in the West as well. Surplus guns tend to move around on demand. Bosnia and Kosovo were a major source of illicit guns and grenades for at least 15 years.
It’s most likely because some gun owners have large gun collections. I don’t mean in the sense of having a huge arsenal intended to fight off the Zombie Apocalypse, at least not in most cases, but guns that one accumulates over time. Keep in mind that guns basically last forever, and that selling ones you don’t use can be somewhat complicated.
Also, guns are extremely durable, so when someone buys a new gun, their old one(s) usually stick around. It's a gun, why would you get rid of it just because you have another?
I'm in Seattle, I drive 50% out of my way to avoid not one but *two* open-air drug markets on my way to work, and said workplace had to hire a security company to post guards overnight on our downtown property after my weekend counterpart had his nose broken by an intruder. My best friend was woken up by gunshots in her apartment complex in a close Seattle suburb two weeks ago (no victims or suspects were so much as identified by the police or anyone in the neighborhood). My condo had its garage broken into three times in four years, and I had *FIVE* packages stolen from an Amazon "locker" in the parking lot of a grocery store across from a light rail station last month (the theft was reported to Amazon, not police). There are people visibly littering and loitering in hundreds of places in city streets and parks. I don't even visit my closest full-service grocery store because there is *always* fresh broken auto glass in the parking lot and an inconvenient number of items are locked up, despite the store always having three security guards standing around.
My family lives in a beach town in south Orange County, California, one of the more expensive regions of the US, and crime blight is increasingly happening there, too. I've been visiting the area for 35 years; I can see the goddamned difference.
The statistics are somehow wrong. Smarter people than you or I are going to have to figure out how.
I currently live in one American city and recently lived in another (NYC and Washington, D.C.) and regularly take public transit and visit a number of different parts of the cities, including parts that would be categorized as low-income or (at least comparatively) high-crime and I have to say that what a lot of people are saying about their experiences in these comments sounds bizarre to me. I haven't had anyone commit a crime against me or threaten me, I basically never feel unsafe walking around or on the subway/metro, and I really haven't seen people openly using drugs (other than pot). I've also never had a package stolen, including when I lived in a low-income area in an apartment building where packages were left out in the lobby and when I lived in a house near a metro station where packages were left outside the front door. I do see homeless people, some of whom are likely on drugs, and very rarely I'll encounter someone doing some schizophrenic shouting at the world, but they never seem like a danger to anyone around them and other people don't seem worried about them either. I also occasionally see street vendors who are selling (almost certainly) stolen goods, and I agree that's not great, but I have to say it seems like a pretty minor complaint. I'm somewhat open to the argument that being a man helps with the "never feeling unsafe," but I have friends who are women in both cities who I've discussed this with who feel the same way as me.
Are NYC and Washington that much better than the rest of the country? Or am I just super lucky or somehow unintentionally avoiding all the bad areas? Or... I don't know what other explanation there is.
DC and "vibes of crime" remind me of one of my old mentors, after he'd lived there about a month in a 'neighborhood in transition.' Dapper fellow, dresses well, wears a driving cap. He was walking down the street to pick up a pizza, nods politely at a passing local, and gets in reply "fuck you, you tweed-wearing gentrifying motherfucker." So he kept on walking.
It's certainly not a crime to be rude, but it affects one's perception of an area.
On the flip side, when i wear a tweed cap in the South, I usually get "nice hat, man, where can I get one of those?" and we have a nice chat. Depends on the local culture! Maybe I don't go to the 'wrong' neighborhoods, in that sense.
>I have friends who are women in both cities who I've discussed this with who feel the same way as me.
Are there areas they don't go? Things they don't do?
I went to a presentation by a Japanese youtuber last year, and he talked about how he nearly got mugged a couple days earlier. In Tokyo, if he can't sleep he doesn't think anything about just going for a walk at 3AM and taking some photos of the city at night. *Not* exactly the wisest thing to do in any US city, and he's approached by a tweaker proclaiming interest in his (quite expensive) camera. The youtuber reaches for his phone to call for help, but because he uses a shoulder holster wallet- the tweaker thinks he's going for a gun and high-tails out of there.
It's easy to think crime doesn't happen, when you shape your life to avoid it, or in the youtuber's case basically luck into an accidental deterrent.
Yes, I think this is a good response. I think we are both used to and accustomed to a certain level of street disorder in the US, and we also know how to avoid the worst of it. I didn't think anything of it until my husband and I started traveling and there were so many cities where I felt fine walking around by myself at midnight, or even sleeping at a train station to catch the early one out. Visiting San Francisco is particularly dystopian.....
Do you exclusively visit the Tenderloin? Having lived in San Francisco since 2012, my own anecdotal experience is that both crime and street disorder are sharply down. I personally had my car broken into in 2016, and had motorcycles successfully stolen twice between 2014 and 2018, along with several unsuccessful attempts (during one of which I caught the thief in flagrante delicto). In that same time period, an ex of mine was assaulted by a homeless man (he spat in her face), and many friends had their cars broken into, or catalytic converters stolen, etc.
Nothing of that magnitude has happened to me or within my friend circle since the end of lockdown. I live a few blocks from the projects in Potrero, and the biggest street disorder problem is annoying vehicle sounds, which are mostly the Hells Angels (they have a chapterhouse nearby and are admittedly very annoying). I walk around at night all the time, and feel fine. I almost never see homeless encampments, and the ones I do rarely see do not seem threatening. I think the SFPD's campaign against car break ins was in fact successful [1], and the anti-encampment supreme court ruling [2] has in fact led to a reduction in tent encampments.
Btw, last time I was in US,I was in NYC and DC, and then in Madison, WI. Never felt unsafe anywhere. In NY, black gentleman near subway asked me for something I can spare, but he was very composed and respectful. In my own town in the former EU, I would have been a tad worried if asked by a big buy to give him money.
> Statistically NYC is unusually safe and DC is unusually violent, as cities go.
DC violence is greatly segregated. In the NW portion, where all the bougie people with actual jobs live, it's basically unknown.
And if you go to the SE section, particularly wards 7 and 8, it's where all the violence, drugs, etc are. When I lived there many years ago, it also featured Aids / HIV rates as high as many African countries and sundry other astonishing statistics. Funnily enough, property values were still pretty high! I often wondered how people afforded rent.
This is to say, I think the median ACX-er who's ever lived in or visited DC would have found it to be about like NYC, because they would have been in the positively selected areas.
I strongly assume this is true of anywhere, though - NYC crime rates are not uniform either and frankly I imagine that even in the worst parts of the third world there's plenty of neighborhood-by-neighborhood variation.
(If Matt Lakeman is any indication, you can waltz through most countries in Africa and Eastern Europe, or even Afghanistan itself, without having serious problems, if you know what you're doing.)
The point is that frustrated City dwellers don't have anything to compare their experiences with besides idyllic Mad Men episodes and memories of their shelter chuldhoods. So these anecdotes of frustration shouldn't count for much.
Everyone's talking over each other. It's entirely possible for Christina's experience to be completely representative of the median, and for her to be wrong about "the statistics." "It used to be worse" is always an option.
But for the record, my experiences don't line up with Christina's. I've seen visible litter, but I haven't witnessed people littering. I haven't heard gunshots, though I have heard fireworks, and I wonder if people get the two mixed up.
I've frequently *been* the person loitering. I get lost in thought, sue me. I probably don't look homeless or high enough to frighten people like Christina, but that's only a probably.
I've seen people use drugs, I've never seen anyone openly buying or selling drugs. This does not bother me.
I have a concealed carry permit and have been shooting for 30 years. Aforementioned friend in the complex with the gunfire happens to processes discovery in criminal legal proceedings for a living and has thus heard plenty of gunfire. Without providing my exact home address, I live close enough to one large illegal encampment to actually *see* tents from my home, hear gunshots, hear police response to said gunshots, and see my block on maps giving context about where said shots occurred.
Neither my friend nor I are mixing up fireworks and gunfire, although it's possible other people do and that you might be, especially if your personal security privilege is so high you're speculating that looking "lost in thought" would read as predatory to others.
Ok, I believe you. I hope your neighborhood improves.
I'm not merely speculating that looking "lost in thought" could read as predatory. I have a habit of pacing, walking unevenly, and muttering to myself, and sometimes I dress oddly. I've had security "check up" on me, ask me if I'm intoxicated, or ask for my ID on private premises several times because I got lost in thought.
Naturally this is a "me problem", and I should just make more effort to act like a normal person in public if I want to be treated like it. But you may understand why I don't take fear of people loitering around that seriously.
A ton of people in this thread say they live in cities and it's great. I'll add one more - I've lived in NYC, Minneapolis, Reno, and LA in the last decade and had a great time overall. (I will admit somebody stole a package from in front of one of my NYC apartments one time. Otherwise I experienced no crime.)
I live in New York and have lived in Seattle, and I really haven’t noticed this.
Like yes I’ve seen people high on drugs… but I’ve never heard a gunshot, never had a package stolen or been robbed, never seen a broken glass storefront. And I promise I leave my apartment a lot and take the subway/bus/ and walk around!
Grocery items being locked is annoying, and certainly our cities are not very clean… but I think that more points to “there’s a lot of room for improvement” rather than “things getting worse”. Like I wasn’t alive back then but looking at pictures of 60/70’s America, cities didn’t exactly look like Singapore back then either
TBH Scott's stats do not claim that "nuisance crime" is down. His article concentrates on murder and aggravated assault, not on people who steal packages in order to support their drug habit. (This wasn't even a viable career before the e-shop economy.) Such small crime does not kill you, but definitely makes your everyday life more miserable.
That's false--the NCVS includes petty theft, like package theft. I was part of it once when I was a teenager and I reported that I had left my jacket at a restaurant and came back five minutes later and it was gone, and they asked about all the details it would've been included as "other theft."
It took me a long moment to even remember my package theft, despite its recency, because being made whole again by Amazon was a relatively quick and easy process. I have to wonder if I would have even remembered to note it on a survey in a year.
It's possible! I'll just say that from my experience taking the NCVS they are (or at least were when I took it!) very thorough and really try to push you to remember and include anything that might possibly qualify.
There's an obvious tension between "the murder rate and assault rate aren't what matter to people--having their packages stolen is the quality-of-life-affecting crime that people are actually mad about" and "most people might not even remember that they've had a package stolen recently".
I think it's a tension of you artificially cherry-picking separate concepts. I certainly wasn't complaining soley about my (and everyone else who used the lockers') stolen packages, but rather all of it, the relentlessness of *total* blight and the *total* low and high grade dangers down to moderate inconveniences.
Believe me, if stolen Amazon packages from crow-barred Amazon lockers were the worst crimes in my region, they would be top of mind, not a thing that happens so frequently Amazon doesn’t even investigate or ask for proof.
I think it’s worth also considering the crime in the middle, things like burglary and mugging. Those seem to be way down too (often for technological reasons - no point mugging someone who doesn’t carry cash and whose most expensive possession has a tracking device in it).
I dunno, I don't think crime is that complicated! All crime is too much crime, and national statistics about safety don't guarantee safety to you, the individual.
In some places retail theft is up, and others it's down, but there's no big increase overall in the stats.
Shrink losses (theft + errors) as a percentage of sales has remained overall steady since at least 1996. It fluctuates year to year between 1.3% and 1.8% but there's no trend of it increasing nationally.
The National Retail Security Survey results I linked are from the National Retailer Federation! They found shrink to be fairly stable over the past 30 years.
You're linking to a survey done by a company that sells shoplifting security systems and an anti-shoplifting lobbyist group asking vibe-based questions, with no data on actual number of thefts and only a single 2025 survey. That's not a better source.
>Additionally, police crime data reflects only those offenses reported to or observed by law enforcement. Roughly three-quarters of all thefts go undocumented.
Aggressive homeless people, tent cities and open drug use seem to be a mostly west coast thing. I noticed it when I was in SF and LA (It didn't help that I drove through Skid Row, but I saw it in West Hollywood as well), and I hear it's also bad in Portland and Seattle.
Other cities I'm familiar with — NYC (where I live), Boston, DC and Chicago — don't have this issue (though they have plenty of problems). And I'm sure the murder, assault and robbery rates are way higher in a place like Memphis then they are in LA or SF.
My best-friend-and-spiritual-twin-brother works in Chicago, and after a visit to him, I marveled to a Chicagoan customer of mine that Chicago was NOTHING like Seattle when it came to the drug ghouls causing blight.
He laughed at me and said, "oh, we have all those folk, but they're contained to a few small areas and they are not allowed to be in most neighborhoods."
I was active in a Providence litter cleanup group for a while, and we'd have to use some of the plastic containers we picked up as improvised sharps containers for all the needles we'd find. This was along public hiking trails past historic landmarks in Fox Point, not in the backwoods.
It's just way way way easier to be homeless anywhere west of the Rockies bc the weather is so much nicer year round. It barely ever rains and you are not going to die outside as long as you have a sleeping bag. Homeless in Chicago, NY, or anywhere in the northeast is horrible. Same reason I'd never go camping in the northeast but it's quite enjoyable out west is exactly why the homeless situation is worse, and it's not just the coasts, it's everywhere with low humidity and winters that don't go below 20 degrees at night.
Crime can be down nationwide, but still bad in particular places. Seattle is one of those particular places: in 2024 it had the 4th highest total crime rate in the country, just below Detroit and just above Baltimore. Seattle was not in the top 10 for violent crime, but was 3rd in the country for property crime, just below Portland. In 2024 Seattle's property crime rate was 184.5% higher than the national rate. It was higher than the national rate for violent crime as well, though I'm not sure by how much.
So when we break it down by city, your anecdote and the statistics match pretty well.
Yes - upon reflection (and sleeping on it), I am unusually *personally* and particularly annoyed with Scott for insisting that You Should Totally Stop Worrying About Crime! when we *both* live in cities blighted by Blue Team anti-policing policies.
And crime may be down nationwide, but however much it is down, it should absolutely be even more down. There is no victory here.
I've worked in downtown Seattle since 2011 and lived in Seattle until 2023 (moved to the Eastside) and I think lived not too far from your area based on some previous posts you've made. My impressions of crime here are quite a bit better than yours, but at the same time it looks like you are not really wrong. Looking into it, Seattle is somewhat of an outlier. The crime rate has gotten slightly better in the past couple years, but it is still quite a bit higher than 15 years ago. So, I don't think the statistics are wrong overall, but Seattle has bucked the nationwide trends. Also, if I'm right about the area you live, you've just had rotten luck with where the homeless and drug addicted have been pushed. Downtown seems genuinely much better than 2 or 3 years ago, but a couple other areas have gotten much worse.
I've been working nights in downtown Seattle for 20 years, and for a goodly chunk of that time, I was commuting via bus from West Seattle.
At night.
Walking several blocks from the downtown bus stop to my workplace.
*ALONE.*
*AT NIGHT.*
While I obviously felt safe to do so at the time, that would be wildly irresponsible to attempt now, from both West Seattle or especially from my current neighborhood. Aside from the threat of being preyed upon by a visibly higher number of fellow passengers and/or street loiterers, there's even the air on the buses themselves:
> "Researchers detected methamphetamine in 98% of surface samples and 100% of air samples, while fentanyl was detected in 46% of surface and 25% of air samples. One air sample exceeded federal recommendations for airborne fentanyl exposure at work established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "
We keep seeing statistics like this about America, but it doesn’t reconcile with (or maybe account for) the large amounts of street disorder.
Having spent the past 18 months traveling around the world, American cities feel least safe. Maybe I’m not being murdered, but I’ve been spit on, had a brick thrown at my car, been grabbed by a stranger, stepped over used needles, been yelled at by someone on drugs, had someone sleep on my porch, had to call an uber on a 15 minute walk because I accidentally stumbled into the wrong part of the tenderloin where people were openly fighting each other in the street.
We can’t just talk about crime rates. We have to talk about mental instability and homelessness and drug use and how tremendously unsafe all of that is and feels walking around in an American city, especially compared to many cities in the world that have little to none of it.
Travelers are constantly surprised by how unsafe American cities are. And it’s not because they are afraid of being murdered.
All of this is true, but many of the same people who point to the safety of American cities compared to European or Asian ones also refuse to implement the policies of those European and Asian cities. Also, none of this is related to whether or not American cities have become safer compared to American cities from 20 years ago. It's a bit of a non sequitur
Right, there are policies that could fix this. But the US also has some things that other countries don't—like cities that drugs are massively trafficked through. It's true that things can get safer at the same time that they can be a whole lot better!
If these areas are truly that dangerous wouldn't that be reflected in the statistics? So maybe it's not that it's less safe, it just feels less safe and it's less pleasant. Nobody likes being shouted at by crazy people.
I mean, this is like the thought experiment about having a man who follows you 24/7 with a gun pointed at your head, and who will shoot you if you ever fail to follow an order he gives--and then never gives an order.
If a man screams in your face 24/7 but never physically touches you (directly or indirectly, say by throwing something), are you truly safe? To me the answer in both cases is "What the hell kind of society is allowing this to happen?"
Not necessarily; it might be that people change their behaviour to compensate for the risks (by, e.g., getting an Uber instead of walking or using public transport). It's a bit like how there are no Rotherham-style rape scandals in Pakistan -- not because Pakistan's a safe place for women, but because the people there generally keep their women inside precisely so they can't be victimised.
American cities are in fact less safe than similar cities in Europe and east Asia. But that doesn’t contradict anything Scott said. He isn’t claiming that American cities are safer than similar cities in Europe or east Asia. He is claiming that American cities of 2025 are safer than American cities of any past year.
It is not hard to be the worst competitor in a contest but still doing better than you ever have before.
Right, but we can keep saying "cities are safer than ever before" and it doesn't change the fact that we still want them to be much much safer than this!
Nobody's mad because cities are better off than they were in the 1970s, they are mad because they still don't like the state of them in the 2020s.
Then we should talk about that! Don’t dispute the fact that you say isn’t in dispute! We can complain that crime isn’t down enough without making the claim that crime is up!
That IS what I'm talking about. I'm not disputing Scott's post, I'm saying that for bloggers to keep talking about the crime rates being down is to miss the point. They are responding to public outcry about the state of our cities, but that outcry isn't about crime rates. It's about street disorder.
I love how you white supremacist bozos always ignore that the fraud was all the work of a white woman. Not to mention that Nick Shirley clearly has an IQ around 15, "what is bellevolent".
Compared to what? It seems to me that grifting white supremacist, MAGA types is drastically more lucrative. You all are the easiest marks on planet earth. Now please support "daddy" by buying some DJT, some TRUMP, a Trump phone and don't forget to pickup a Trump watch while you're at it!
> I love how you white supremacist bozos always ignore that the fraud was all the work of a white woman.
I assume you're talking about Aimee Bock, the founder of Feeding Our Future, which committed massive fraud in 2020? It's common for people to use her as a scapegoat, but the claim that she was the sole perpetrator is completely false. You can find this even on Wikipedia, which has a long list of convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future#Defendants
You'll see that Aimee Bock was just one person in a long list of defendants, most of whom appear to be Somali males, and many of whom were convicted of more serious charges than Bock. The idea that the fraud was solely perpetrated by a white woman with no active Somali involvement at all isn't remotely true.
Even if it were true, it wouldn't be the gotcha that you think it is. People who are fed up with this type of grift already believe that white women are the biggest enablers of it. It's not a fact that gets ignored.
The median robbery and the median fraud are done by different people. But there is surely some overlap in the populations. And if the people in this overlap have moved from one to the other, that would affect the aggregate numbers.
I think you're overestimating the sophistication of most fraud. A lot of it doesn't take intelligence or skill, it just takes dishonesty and persistence.
I’ve heard that the decrease in domestic violence murder is part of it. That is, there are fewer obvious suspects for a drive-by vs a person murdered at home.
I would point out that US incarceration rates are still... what?... 5-6x higher than they were in the 1950s? And demographic ageing is presumably a significant contributor to lower crime rates, since young men commit the large majority of crimes.
Also, last I checked incarceration rates were still creeping up in nearly all other developed countries, just from a much lower baseline.
1. In the US a home can be cheap, dense or safe, pick two. When that's no longer the case crime and disorder won't be my number 1 issue.
2. Disorder is terrible by the standards of Asia. Just like insta is making girls feel bad about not being thin, and men feel bad about not being with a 10, it's making me feel bad about safety, and density.
3. Moving to Asia would be great, but very inconvenient. So my first choice is functional cities.
4. Crime and disorder being concentrated in specific places is maddening because it limits my options. I won't live in SF, but I'd like too. But it's not a place I'd let my kids walk around in.
5. Zoning makes everything expensive and it's mostly about limiting disorder to specific places. Which again limits my options
6. Disorder will continue to exist as long as lefties feel like enforcing laws are an illegitimate use of power against those they see as oppressed. This ultimately hurts the people it's meant to help, and it's sincerely tragic.
7. If there disorder were actually policed without more abundance style housing policies bad neighborhoods in cities would gentrify immediately. Lefties are correct about this. Oakland is like 40% cheaper than SF, how much of that is the delta between crime rates?
8. I have not been the victim of a physical crime since the 1990s, it's still my number 1 issue, I want to live in a dense City again with my fucking kids, in safety, with good schools. I don't feel like I can, even though I've objectively pretty well off. Cities are for the 1% in the US, and that just isn't functional.
If crime is your “number 1 issue,” you should probably start by engaging with the actual data instead of narrating a vibes-based dystopia.
You’re responding to long-run homicide and crime data showing we’re at or near historic lows — and instead of disputing the numbers, you pivot to feelings. Asia on Instagram. Zoning as cosmic disorder containment. “Lefties” refusing to enforce laws. That’s not analysis; that’s aesthetic anxiety wrapped in politics.
Let’s walk through this.
1. “Pick two: cheap, dense, safe.”
This isn’t a law of physics. It’s a policy tradeoff. Tokyo is cheap for a major global city, extremely dense, and remarkably safe. So are parts of Seoul. Singapore. Even many European cities. The U.S. doesn’t fail because density and safety are incompatible — it fails because zoning, NIMBYism, and fragmented governance constrain supply while amplifying segregation. That’s a political choice, not an urban inevitability.
2. “Disorder by Asian standards.”
You’re comparing the most orderly megacities on earth to a country of 50 semi-autonomous states with wildly different policing models, gun laws, drug policy, and social services. Of course outcomes vary. But the relevant comparison here wasn’t Tokyo — it was the U.S. over time. And over time, violence has fallen dramatically. If your benchmark is “I want Singapore,” say that. But don’t pretend that wishing for a global outlier invalidates domestic longitudinal data.
3. “I won’t let my kids walk around SF.”
You haven’t been the victim of physical crime since the 1990s. So what exactly is driving your fear? Cable news? Twitter doom loops? Viral shoplifting clips? The availability heuristic is doing cardio in your brain.
Crime perception ≠ crime reality. The entire piece you’re responding to explains this gap: reporting bias, medical care arguments, NCVS validation. You didn’t challenge any of that. You just said, “but vibes.”
4. “Lefties think enforcing laws is illegitimate.”
This is the laziest possible framing of a complex debate about policing, sentencing, prosecutorial discretion, and civil rights. Most large cities — including the ones you’re worried about — still arrest, charge, and incarcerate people. The U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world. If “lefties won’t enforce laws” were the dominant variable, it would be visible in national data trends. Instead, crime dropped through the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s — including in very blue cities.
If your theory can’t survive contact with 30 years of declining violent crime across wildly different administrations, it’s not a serious theory.
5. “If disorder were policed, neighborhoods would gentrify immediately.”
So your complaint is that crime limits gentrification speed? That’s not a public safety argument. That’s a housing appreciation argument.
Oakland being cheaper than SF isn’t just “delta between crime rates.” It’s job concentration, transit access, school quality perceptions, municipal governance, tax structures, zoning capacity, and proximity to global tech capital. Reducing it to “crime explains 40% price gap” is cartoon economics.
6. “Cities are for the 1%.”
This one accidentally reveals the real issue. The constraint people feel isn’t violent crime — it’s cost. Housing. Schools. Childcare. Urban America is expensive, and that creates exclusion. But that’s not because murder rates are high. They’re not. It’s because desirable neighborhoods under-build housing and protect incumbents.
Blaming “disorder tolerance” for unaffordability flips causality. When housing supply is constrained, wealth concentrates spatially. That drives school disparities and price stratification. Crime rates nationally are historically low — but access to high-opportunity neighborhoods is limited by zoning and political incentives, not gangs lurking in 2025 murder data.
7. You’re arguing from fear against statistics without disputing the statistics.
The article didn’t say crime is zero. It said: by the best available longitudinal data — homicide, property crime, NCVS validation, cross-checks against medical lethality — rates are historically low.
If you believe those numbers are wrong, show how. If you believe they’re incomplete, show why. But saying “I feel less safe” while acknowledging you haven’t experienced crime in 30 years is basically an admission that media ecology shapes perception more than lived reality.
You want dense, functional cities with good schools and low crime. So does everyone. The data suggest we’re closer to that on the safety dimension than we’ve been in decades. The bottleneck is housing policy, not a collapse of civilization.
The irony is thick: the country is objectively safer than when you last experienced crime, and yet you feel it’s too unsafe to live in a city. That disconnect deserves introspection, not scapegoats.
You don’t demolish statistics with vibes. You demolish vibes with statistics.
1. THIS IS MY POINT, its an American thing and it doesn't have to be.
2. Asia is diverse. Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan. How many countries in Asia are less disordered than the US? 10-20-30?
3. I let my kids walk around my safe neighborhood alone, I want a City where I feel the same. They won't get mugged 11 times, because we live someplace where that doesn't happen. They also have less freedom because I have to drive them everyplace. I'd rather they have more freedom and be safe. It's possible.
4. This is an actual charitable interpretation of the base assumption among progressives. The base assumption is the illegitimacy of a state controlled by white supremacy against oppressed minorities. Yes this isn't often explicitly stated, (No one is illegal on stolen land), there is still a criminal justice system in Blue cities, but it's the reasoning behind much of progressive DA thought.
5. I am not complaining here, I'm saying there is a ton of demand to live in cities, Solving disorder would increase demand. So you still need Yimby/abundance stuff.
6. The direction of causality isn't so important. Both have to change. The issue is people don't want to allow housing to get cheaper because expensive housing keeps out disorder. Solve crime and their are fewer problems to not allow inyour backyard.
7. I'm not really scared of anything. Where should I live in the US that is dense affordable, and safe with access to good schools? When I grew up there were pockets like this scattered around. Remnants of a lost age, places like Sheepshead bay Brooklyn. My crime problem came because I was often leaving my neighborhood or passing through the bad areas. I want disorder punished to a level where I feel like I don't need to live in an economically segregated area, so my kids don't experience what I did.
Lastly in Criminology, their is something called the law of concentration of crime. Basically Crime concentrates geographically and that concentration doesn't change with rates. So the bad neightborhoods are still bad, just less so. But cover the same area of the city. So you are right we are closer than ever. However let's engage the data. The rate of robbery US to Japan was 175X in the 90s, and has fallen to only 50x. That is the data. Tell me it's vibes when it's only 2x or 3x. I'll say sure.
Going to just give you a name of a place. I don't live there, just know some folks who do. Frisco Texas. Super diverse, very safe, affordable enough for me, but not at all dense. In terms of density, think park Slope Brooklyn.
So I'd want a home big enough for my family, and it could be half the size of a Frisco house, so an 1800sqft 3 bedroom apartment instead of a 3600sqft house.
In my world you pick your place based on do you like trees, grass and cars? or do you like trains, parks, and walking. Price is close to the same because demand for building drives how much of each gets built. So the market clears, there are trade-offs, maybe size, but maybe Frisco in this world is more expensive than Brooklyn, because more people want their own yard. Who knows. But disorder can never be a trade-off that is just a policy failure.
Dense, most trips out of my house don't involve a car yet are equally convenient. I grew up where this was the case. Think parkslope.
Basically I want to live in Park slope and I want it cost what Frisco Texas costs. Park slope takes less land, less materials, and should not cost more money to build than Frisco does, if anything row houses should be cheaper because they are built together.
Safe, crime and disorder are equal to or better than Frisco Texas. Crime is currently about 3x-5x higher in park slope as it is in Frisco, still way too high, but if costs the same, and was maybe 2x, I'd move there tomorrow.
Crime is a policy failure I can no longer accept, home prices in big cities are a policy failure I no longer accept.
I have heard that reporting from local police departments to the FBI and other national databases suffered for a while. I'm not sure if that's gone away or if there's still missing/delayed reporting in there.
I see a lot of articles pointing to anecdotes about street disorder. I'm not trying to deny that's a big problem and one that likely doesn't show up in crime stats, but...as late as the 90's, weren't a lot of areas in big cities basically off limits after business hours? In my hometown, a huge swath of the downtown area was given to a local "community leader" who thought that criminals should have a place to do drugs and engage in antisocial behavior, and would show up at city council meetings with a group of thugs and rant at the council to get his way. In Bonfire Of the Vanities the courthouse is a beleaguered island in a sea of disorder, and one wrong turn almost gets the main character mugged. I know that's fiction, but as far as I can tell that is in fact how people perceived the situation at the time. Obviously open air drug markets are a big issue but it's not like cities were always pleasant places in the past either.
I'll toss into the mix that Baltimore has seen a *huge* drop in homicides starting in mid-2023. For the years 2015 - 2022 the homicide rate never dropped below 300. 2025 saw 133 homicides.
Just one city, but prior to 2023 Baltimore was horrible.
It is undeniable that shoplifting in cities and drug crime are up. You wouldn’t expect this to show up statistically because of drug legalization policy, lack of reporting from stores, and everything being locked up in cvs.
While the murder rate is down, I suspect a more granular analysis of cities (eg, the Upper East Side vs all of New York) would show the opposite trend for random acts of violence. As for aggravated assaults, they are of course down, because the payoff of robbing someone is much lower since no one has cash on them.
Suppose you're right, this is still a much weaker claim than the claim Scott is debunking. "Certain kinds of crime are up in certain parts of certain cities" is important for those cities but doesn't represent a problem of national significance.
Also, specifically on "everything being locked up in CVS", I've been to many major cities in recent years and haven't encountered that myself. Is it just a thing in SF?
I live in urban Austin and used to live near Denver and go downtown a lot. I've also visited Seattle and Boston in the past couple of years. None of these places seem enshittified to me. Sure, you see homeless people occasionally, but the cities are largely safe and clean, and even more so in the past few years compared to 2022-2023. I haven't seen broken windows or much graffiti. I don't know anyone who has been the victim of a violent crime.
When I talk to baby boomer relatives about what cities were like when they were in their 20s, it's clear that American cities are much better and have not regressed even close to where they were in the '80s and '90s.
So again I can't help but wonder if the complaints about "cities" are really just about the San Francisco Bay Area, plus maybe parts of New York City.
I have lived in New York for ten years, and there is a really obvious difference in the cleanliness and safety of the city.
Take seattle, since another commenter complained about living there. In the last twenty years, murder rates are way up (yes, lower than the 90s). Homelessness per capita is at an all time high, and nearly doubled since 2005. Every metric of crime in seattle is way higher than the national average.
Taken together, maybe your bar for being uncomfortable with crime is just higher than other people’s. But seattle has definitely, inarguably enshittified.
Wait you say this and you live in Austin? Over the last 20 years hasn't Austin undergone massive tech urbanization accompanied with significantly less safety, garbage everywhere, and disintegration of public trust?
It used to be totally peaceful downtown, but especially after COVID we started seeing homeless encampments on sidewalks, open drug use, etc. Follow r/austin where the typical complaint is homeowners complain about homeless burning garbage in their backyard.
Now I don't think this is egregiously bad compared to other major urban cities, but Austin has significantly changed recently and many would argue it has been enshittified.
I avoid major cities as much as possible, and I've seen stores in mid-size and smaller towns that weren't locked up 20 years ago that are now.
Highly variable, neighborhood by neighborhood. I notice it specifically comparing different Food Lion locations in my area; some will be free and open as ever, others have security gates at the entrance and permanent security.
I encourage you to have more of an open mind about cities. Yes, there are some sketchy urban neighborhoods. I'd avoid the south side of Chicago, the Tenderloin in SF, and large parts of Baltimore, for example. But the downtowns and surrounding neighborhoods of most American cities are pretty safe and clean these days, and offer a lot in terms of amenities for visitors. Yes, you will see the occasional homeless person, but they keep to themselves, and you won't see encampments much anymore.
I wonder if there's a sort of wisdom-of-the-crowd thing going on with the murder rate. If you ask people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, people individually will have very low confidence and make all sorts of wild guesses, but the average will tend to be shockingly accurate due to the non-signal parts of the guesses cancelling out. Maybe a lot of murderers guessing how much violence will cause a death tends to similarly closely track reality on average, even though they're individually uncertain and each only contributing a small amount of information.
Interestingly, people’s estimates of the change in crime rate don’t have this feature. In nearly every year since 1989, a majority of Americans thought that crime was increasing nationwide, even though crime was decreasing nationwide in nearly all those years.
But interestingly, in 2000, 2001, and 2025, the actual rate of crime was decreasing so much that it was no longer a majority but only a plurality who still thought crime was increasing.
I feel a bit ridiculous even writing this, but I don't really care about murder rates? Demographically I'm just not the sort of person who would have been murdered in 1900 or 1960 or 2020 or now, murder was a non issue in my life.
Murder may be a statistically reliable crime but it's also such an extreme crime that it isn't at all relevant to my or most people's lived experience. Property crime, small value theft, liberty, public intoxication, open air drug use, busking are very much on the upswing and have much more of an impact on me personally.
The post has a chart on property crime reported to the police, and defends the chart by pointing to car theft statistic. I don't think either have any bearing on needing a CVS employee to unlock a display cabinet for me, which didn't use to happen.
I think it's important to, instead of saying "property crime is up" say "burglary, robbery, larceny, car theft, and arson are all down, but shoplifting is either up, or at least only down because CVS has locks on their cases."
Absolutely! The core tenet of Rationalism is disregarding statistically insignificant albeit flashy long tail stuff and looking at what has the highest actual aggregate impact. I'd much rather the stuff that doesn't happen to me happen to other people slightly more often, and the stuff that impact me happen less
I would guess that most murder victims think they're "not the sort of person who gets murdered," since if you *did* think you're the sort of person who gets murdered, you'd probably take steps to defend yourself or get out of the likely-to-be-murdered situation.
Like, if someone dies in a mugging gone wrong, they probably didn't walk around the city thinking "yup... only a matter of time until someone comes at me with a knife... sucks, but what can you do about it..."
I live in generally nice areas in Middle America and my car has been broken into three times (work, apartment complex parking lot, grocery store parking lot) and my bike stolen once in the past decade, twice in the past couple of years. I reported the bike and first car break-in but stopped reporting after that because the cops don't do anything and filing an insurance claim isn't worth it, so my personal contribution to reported crimes is down. I also stopped responding to surveys. My in-laws' long time friend, who I knew, was just shot in the face in a retirement community. I when I was a kid and young adult our family car was never broken into, no one we knew was murdered, etc. My lived experience is more crime in the past decade than the decades before that despite living in similarly nice areas. Maybe I'm an exception...
I propose definition drift. More things are treated as if they aren't crimes than in previous eras.
This model would imply a shift from blue collar crime (man breaks your door, takes your stuff), towards white collar crime (man files a frivolous lawsuit, you settle because you're not confident in the courts, and in any case, defending yourself and winning is more expensive than paying him off)
At an extreme, if we count every scam email as a separate crime, modern crime rates would eclipse the entire history of pre-internet criminality.
made a point below that you've ended up making more succinctly. Those on the discord know that "is this one crime or lots of crimes?" is among my favorite legal questions, I've litigated it pretty extensively in real cases, and it's always fun in that dorm room heap-paradox way.
You're absolutely correct that each scam email *could* be charged as a separate instance of federal wire fraud, it's just that no one ever *would*. So, by this definition, Crime is absolutely through the roof, in fact, a single spam-scammer might be committing more crimes in a day than occurred in a year in like, 19th century Britain.
To the legal realist, it's inescapable that when we talk about "crime" we are talking about "crime of the sort that would actually get charged and result in a conviction" but that means to meaningfully talk about crime we have to know an awful lot about how very particular jurisdictions work .
Has the number of people without insurance gone up or down? If it’s a constant fraction, then this won’t bias the directional estimates, just the total number.
>The next question is: why do people’s intuitions clash so violently with the statistics? More on that soon.
It's glib and cliche to blame social media, but I assume much of the answer will be social media. More specifically, polarization and the way it plays out on social media, intensifying soft on crime/hard on crime attitudes, etc.
I might also suggest the role that more transparency interacting with social media might play, in that "judge lets out criminal on his 9th rape on probation" or "judge gives no sentence for 35th assault" or "judge cuts sentence in half for multiple murderer having [generational trauma]" *probably* aren't common enough to affect statistics but absolutely spread like wildfire among enough bubbles to impact the perception of crime.
Note that 2000, 2001, and 2025 are the only years when crime decreases were so significant that only a plurality of the public thought it was going up, rather than a majority.
It’s not constant! When crime rate really is going up substantially (like in the first few years of the survey, in the late 80s, and in the immediate post-pandemic years) it seems that more than 75% of people think it’s going up. In the years when it’s basically constant, about 70% of people think it’s going up. And in the 1990s and 2000s, when it was going down substantially, only about 50-60% of people thought it was going up.
Theres also a slight lag - it takes a couple years of increase or decrease to substantially move the numbers.
Something that I think people are underrating is that a large group of people in the US are at risk of being deported if they commit a crime
On the other hand a recent drop has been mentioned in Canada, coincident with a reduction in drug potentcy that people say is due to a precursor crackdown in China
I’ve always felt that the inverse relationship of any fact to its perception is a product of hyperawareness. Kidnappings weren’t omnipresent in media in the ‘70s when nobody worried about their kids being out and unsupervised. By the time Amber’s Law gave us near ubiquity in the reporting of kidnappings of minors, parents were terrified of it despite its drastic reduction in occurrence in the USA.
Scott's general point (murder, violent crime rates going down and he can't point to errors in the data to undermine that) remains intact, interesting and useful despite the following, but an observation:
These are still narrow definitions of crime, and probably miss most crime.
Police-reported (or FBI reported crimes) or murder or ... all fit some narrow/traditional convenient criterion.
An AI engine is telling me maybe 50-100 million fraudulent transactions on credit/debit cards per year in U.S. but only <10 million police reported traditional violent/property crimes. I don't trust those numbers, but suspect actual values are probably outside the stats folks are trawling through here when discussing "crime rates."
Hell, I suspect that in many (not all, and probably not even most) jurisdictions, many driving violations (including speeding, or texting while driving, etc.) are actually criminal acts. In which case, crime rates might be orders of magnitude higher and might be doing crazy things (perhaps up because we write more ways the law can be criminally broken each year?).
I make this point not just for semantic reasons, but because it might be important to understanding the trends Scott is remarking upon.
The word faces limited resources. Victims (future or past), enforcement, perpetrators, etc. - all have to make decisions on which crimes to defend/prosecute/perpetrate. Changes by any of those parties might make traditional/violent/reported crimes a different story simply because people are shifting attention to/from those different crime categories.
Demographics may be a major reason for the decline in crime rates. Most crimes are committed by young men. The US population is aging and fewer children are being born.
I have no hypothesis as to what the parameters of a formal model of crime rates would be just an intuition that the number of young men is an important parameter. I said major and that is not a good term. But I wouldn't build a model without it.
It's interesting that you refer to this as unintuitive. It's intuitive to me. Is there polling to support the idea that people's perceptions of crime rates over time "clash violently with the statistics"?
Lawyer here. I have to ask some questions about what an "unreported crime" is that will look like legal BS, but I think are kind of important to this question.
Let me start with why it matters: It matters because people will say things like "group X *in actuality* commits more crimes than Group Y, but these crimes are not reported" OR "time X actually had less crime than now, we simply don't report it as much these days."
so, we're arguing about "real" crime, as opposed to some kind of silly hypothetical possible/fake/theoretical crime. I'm a defense attorney operating in Minnesota. Here, and in every state, we live in a complete ocean of unreported crime, and end up arguing about the tiny swimming pool of "actual crimes people care about".
By way of illustration: I'm probably committing a crime right now, as I write this. I'm *very positive* someone reading this post is committing a crime as they read it (are you reading this at work? Your employer might like to know...). Mentally, I think we all kind of partition "abstract/theoretical crimes of the sort that no one cares about" from "real, actual crime that is obvious and people care about" but when you actually think about which crimes "count" for various categories...it becomes a bit unclear...
- Victim versus Non-victim?: DUIs, probably the most common crime charged, have no victim, but can be extremely serious. Insider Trading and Securities Fraud, crimes that are cliche for like, their ability to be hypothetically committed by everyone at all times, both have victims. Assault is a crime that varies pretty dramatically depending on severity: an unwelcome shove or poke or a thrown sandwich could be assault, but nobody ever reports those as crimes. So, I've probably been assaulted hundreds and hundreds of times in my life, many readers here from scrappier upbringings have been assaulted thousands of times...but it's weird to think of these as "crimes"
- Felony versus misdemeanor?: It's famously hard to tell in the moment for a lot of crimes whether something is a felony or a misdemeanor. My lawn furniture got stolen once. Is that a felony or a misdemeanor? Well, you need to know the value, since in Minnesota a theft of over $500 is a felony, but wait, a theft of ANY amount is a felony if it's a burglary. My lawn furniture was stolen out of my unlocked garage. Was that a burglary? You end up needing to know the specific facts of each case, and a lot of law, to tell them apart. Also, keep in mind that felonies in one state might be misdemeanors in another: some things aren't even crimes in one state and very serious crimes in another.
- "Process crimes" or Malum Prohibitum versus Malum In Se: I always have to go back to DUIs with this. DUIs are, to me, a paradigmatic process crime. You drive (technically, in MInnesota, Operate or physically control a vehicle in any way) with a BAC over .08 and the split-second you cross that bright line of blood alcohol content, it's a crime. Why? Because we decided that was the legal limit. It might not even be based on good science. DUIs are a crime, arguably a pretty serious one, even if you hit nothing, cause no damage, and arrive safely home. Are lies process crimes? Lies to banks? 18 USC 1410 false statements to banks are another one of those classic "crimes everyone commits" ("The Wire" fans, this is the Clay Davis "headshot") and they even have a victim (the bank). Some forms of tax fraud are very bad and quite obviously sinister. Other forms are very technical and arguably everyone commits them.
I realize a lot of rebuttals to this observation are that only the seriously lawbrained could misunderstand that difference between some theoretical ubiquitous crime "that would never get charged" and an actual crime that "would"...but of course, we are here discussing crimes that *won't* get charged. So what's the difference? My point is that there isn't actually a good way to systematically tell them apart (any recourse to whether the crime "would have gotten charged if reported" is even messier. You'd need to know the charging practices in the jurisdiction and the strength of the evidence for each report").
Some demarcator matters if the speaker purports to go on anything more than vibes. When I'm arguing about whether Group X or Group Y commits more CRIMES, I think I would consider DUI rates or mortgage fraud rates pretty important, but of course only ACTUAL mortgage fraud, you know the kind where you *really seriously* rip off the bank, instead of some technical thing...When arguing about whether there's more ACTUAL crime now, I think the rate of "theft" matters, but only actual, not "technical" theft.
SO importantly, I've tried very hard to make it clear that I'm not talking about weird or silly edge cases. DUIs are *VERY COMMON* as charged crimes, but I wouldn't be surprised if nearly all of them don't get "reported." It's almost a cliche that everyone is at all times and places committing securities fraud or mortgage fraud or tax fraud. Theft is probably *the number one crime* people complaining about social decay and crime complain about, but in Minnesota "theft" (of the kind where you shoplift from a drugstore) is charged out the same way as "theft" (of the kind where you technically overbill for performing some new medical procedure).
You and another guy (fraudconcern) above beat me too it but it needs to be said far and wide.
I should also point out that when people retort, as they will to you, "well nobody is prosecuted for these crimes so they don't matter", prisons are full (in the aggregate, even if all are 1's and 2's of 'weird' crimes) of edge cases from Puffy (nobody prosecuted on that law in what, decades?), "felony littering", "returning a can for refund across state lines", etc. My state recently criminalized both popping a wheeling on your bicycle and walking your dog without a leash for the third time in two years, by definition crime has just went up (the invention of new crimes) because you know what, I'm still seeing kids popping wheelies daily.
what I find so absolutely infuriating about this kind of argument...I must have it 3 times a day, is that when you're a lawyer people always spring this "the law is a human institution" thing on you like it's a truth bomb. It goes like "I know you think the law is all about statutes and rules but really the law is just what people believe it is. If everyone thought something was legal, it would be, did you ever think about that?"
and...that's absolutely true, but then 2 days later the same person will be getting very upset that jurisdictions aren't prosecuting crimes, and the world is going to hell because of it.
As a majoritarian legal realist I am *absolutely* of the opinion that one can only meaningfully talk about "crime" in the sense of "a crime that actually gets charged by real prosecutors and results in a conviction." But this means you need a fairly good understanding of what prosecutors will actually do, and what jurors will actually convict over, before you can talk about whether a particular act "is a crime."
...which feels very gatekeep-y but that's what follows from "the law is just what people think it is"
Given my particular subspecialty, which is federal white collar fraud law, I think the MOST common question I am engaged to answer is "is this behavior the sort of thing that gets charged as a crime." Far, far more people care about this question than "can you win my case at trial." IT's a hard question. It's not something that one can answer by looking at a stat book in the aggregate, you need to know the facts of the particular case and the patterns of what is happening in a particular jurisdiction. As an example Hunter Biden was charged with a violation of 18 USC 922 that is almost never prosecuted. In the abstract this is "not the kind of thing that is usually charged as a crime" but in the specific, his conduct and position is such that of course he's going to get charged. The specific is what matters.
I always point out to people this exact question is the problem: "is this behavior the sort of thing that gets charged as a crime", i.e. "I'm expected to follow the law but the law isn't written in a way I can understand it" coupled with an implied concern here by the "public" (your client) not on whether it's a crime or not, she assumes that it is by the very framing of the question, but more "can I get away with it".
BTW I hate this statement from you though I know it's true as well 'but this means you need a fairly good understanding of what prosecutors will actually do, and what jurors will actually convict over, before you can talk about whether a particular act "is a crime.""
Because what also follows from that is the part two of "whether it's a crime or not, the prosecution has charged you now anyways and this is why you should plead guilty even if factually actually innocent". I've been on the receiving end of that and while I always had a low opinion of the legal system, that real life exposure to it completely dissolved it lol. Now I'm with "might makes right" crowd which is effectively what you are saying above, i.e. we have the rule of Law, not law.
Either way what you are saying and fraudconcern is something not enough people internalize in America and they should as it holds up any sort of reform to the system. I used to have faith that Arnold Kling's "Legamorons" could solve the problem but as we've seen more and more lately (or maybe I've just been paying more attention), that's not going to work either.
>in every state, we live in a complete ocean of unreported crime, and end up arguing about the tiny swimming pool of "actual crimes people care about".
I appreciate the lengthy explanation you have given of the differences between actions that are crimes, as defined by the letter of the law, and reported (let alone prosecuted) crimes.
I'm not happy with treating unreported crimes and "actual crimes people care about" as if they were disjoint. A rape victim who doesn't report their rape, (e.g. out of no confidence that reporting it will help bring them closure or any other relief from the legal system) has still very much been the victim of an actual crime that they care about. Note that in the graph of Predicted Probability of Police Notification For Different Types of Violence _ONLY_ Robbery has a probability of >50% for most of the study period. All the other are below 50% for the whole period except for 2 years where aggravated assault barely crossed 50%. There is a _lot_ of violent crime, with real victims, that never gets reported.
I think you are misreading my post. I never said that there is a division between "unreported crimes" and "actual crimes people care about." There's no point up there where I say they're disjoint.
TO be clear: there are crimes that are not reported. Now... Some are very serious and important. Some rapes and assaults and burglaries and *lots* of domestic abuse is not reported. The fact that this crime is not reported is a big deal, because it screws up our impression of how much of this crime there is.
*other* unreported crimes are very dumb things nobody cares about. Surely every scam telemarketing call is not an "unreported crime" that we have to make sure is logged in our reckoning of social decay. Reporting these crimes would in fact OVERSTATE how much crime there is. If every fraudulent email was an "unreported fraud", then wire fraud would be VERY COMMON.
I'm saying that demarcating these two things: the "important" unreported crimes and the "unimportant" ones, is very hard, and requires a very specific analysis of the facts of *each crime*, such that it's hard to speak in the aggregate of how much unreported crime there is.
some unreported assaults are very serious (a husband beats his wife, she says nothing out of fear). Other unreported assaults are borderline comical (my friend shoves me in the shoulder when I make fun of his favorite football team). They would both be part of a statistic "unreported assaults" if we were somehow tracking "all unreported assaults"
>TO be clear: there are crimes that are not reported. Some are very serious and important. Some rapes and assaults and burglaries and lots of domestic abuse is not reported. The fact that this crime is not reported is a big deal, because it screws up our impression of how much of this crime there is.
Thank you. A lot of your comment (valuable though it is), looks primarily at
>_other_ unreported crimes are very dumb things nobody cares about.
I agree that there are a lot of them. Personally I view this as a problem with the _law_ . The the legislators chose to write the law so that
>It's almost a cliche that everyone is at all times and places committing securities fraud or mortgage fraud or tax fraud.
in addition to making nonsense out of crime statistics, this makes everyone a criminal and opens the door to malicious prosecution and lawfare.
I don't expect to ever see this fixed, but I'm not fond of what our legislators did.
Re:
>You'd need to know the charging practices in the jurisdiction and the strength of the evidence for each report
That gets very close to saying that what counts as crime is the customs and mores of individual jurisdiction, rather than the written law. Why have written law _at all_, if the written law is impossible to adhere to and what ultimately matters is local charging practices?
it's possible you can come up with something better, nobody is stopping you. You'll find that basically every jurisdiction in the US operates this way, with concepts like prosecutorial discretion and the jury right anchoring the law in common sense. There's a reason for this: alternatives are messy in their own way, and generally have unpopular consequences. NO one has come up with a good alternative, but maybe you can. I believe in you.
About half of it is about near-term impact of AI on law.
( This is _not_ to propose a solution to the problem with arbitrarily enforced laws. Zvi is looking at quite a different direction, and sees one possible UNfortunate possibility being AI-fueled legal arms races. )
Re:
>it's possible you can come up with something better, nobody is stopping you.
Actually, as a non-legislator I have essentially zero power here - 1/300,000,000th of the electorate.
Actually, along one parameter, there is at least one example from the past which was obviously better along that measure, though not solving arbitrarily enforced laws. Rome's Twelve Tables of law could at least be _read and remembered_ by its citizens, which is flatly impossible with >3,000 federal statutes alone (let alone _complying_ with all of these statutes).
While I am generally interested in the intersection of AI and the law, I do not see this as our salvation, as they tend to converge on the same problem: how we can articulate our wishes unambiguously. The AI will not save you because every time it suggests an interpretation of the law that seems like it defies common sense, the party that benefits from its interpretation will say "see, it is very wise" and the party that is harmed by its interpretation will cry "misalignment!" This is what already happens with judges, prosecutors, and attorneys.
so...it's the exact same problem, and its insoluble. Nothing delivers us from the ambiguity of our desires. I probably don't have space to articulate my full thoughts here.
>> _other_ unreported crimes are very dumb things nobody cares about.
>I agree that there are a lot of them. Personally I view this as a problem with the _law_ . The the legislators chose to write the law so that
And yet someone does care hence why the law exists, i.e. your roses is someone else's shit and vice versa.
> That gets very close to saying that what counts as crime is the customs and mores of individual jurisdiction, rather than the written law. Why have written law _at all_, if the written law is impossible to adhere to and what ultimately matters is local charging practices?
Actually he wrote pretty extensively on that and would agree with you, it's worth the read TBH regardless if you agree with it or not:
>We know from mock trials that jurors often spend hours arguing over the meaning of works like reasonable or knowingly.
s/works/words/ )
If jury trials were more frequent, I would have considerable sympathy with the argument that
>It [jury trials] is *this* safeguard that saves us from every prosecution being *purely* political.
Except I don't really believe the claim that the threat of a jury trial is really sufficient to materially influence the result in the very large fraction of cases that never see a jury, particularly agreeing with your point
>I find it amusing the SCOTUS once said something along the lines "not all plea deals are legal but we haven't draw the coercion line yet beyond 'plead guilty to jaywalking and a $10 fine or mandatory execution if found guilty'; maybe we will make that line in future" and yet most people would agree that line has been reached and long ago.
To all intents and purposes a judge can essentially coerce a plea deal.
( A large chunk of Theodidactus's essay more-or-less nets out to justifying the Stormy Daniels farce against Trump. Well, congrats, Trump wound up reciprocating the malicious prosecution now that he's in office. Enjoy! )
My main point is that, even without politically motivated selective malicious prosecution, even if it were just _random_, writing the law so that
>Here, and in every state, we live in a complete ocean of unreported crime, and end up arguing about the tiny swimming pool of "actual crimes people care about".
and
>It's almost a cliche that everyone is at all times and places committing securities fraud or mortgage fraud or tax fraud.
makes it to all intents and purposes _IMPOSSIBLE_ for anyone who even spends all their waking hours making a good faith effort to comply with the law to successfully comply. If this is what "rule of law" reduces to in the United States, may the devil take it.
For each law, either enforce it or repeal it. And don't write so many of them that not only is it impossible to comply with them; it isn't even possible to _remember_ them.
To put it another way: Each statute is essentially a command from the legislature to the people subject to their laws. If the legislature issues commands that they do not intend and expect to be obeyed, then what the legislators are doing is profoundly dishonest.
Should retort that to him so he sees it, not me lol. He wrote it (the Theo guy you have been having this convo with).
Btw you and I agree on juries here, they are worthless in the age of coercive plea deals and draconian trial penalties. And Theo intentionally ignores that.
Also I'm hyper cognizant of your crime point given I still have a couple years of probation left and the number one term in any probation order is "thou shall break no laws while on probation" which is of course, impossible. You can't even not break laws while incarcerated, in the highly controlled environment it is lol. It's annoying when you get issued a term of probation that is impossible to comply with which means you can get revoked any time which I assume is the point.
“All the criminals are too addicted to video games and IG” — phrased dismissively, but I think there’s something to the “soma” theory: atomized individuals sleepwalking through their lives, doped up on their virtual drug of choice, whether that’s social media, video games, porn, long chats with their AI boo, online shopping and gambling… while meanwhile, on the streets, fentanyl has people nodding off mid-stride. Weirdly…many crimes require people skills.
I live in the Baltics, and people perception is that the crime is very low. Statistics say crime rate dropped significantly since the fall of USSR.
Murder rate is still higher then average in Europe where I live, slightly below California. But anecdotically I hear about a murder just a few times per year. I guess it is because 96% of murders are domestic violence inside groups prone to them (lower income, alcohol involved etc). I honestly hear about murder of a middle class person just once per a few years.
I was almost assaulted once in my life, around 2019, for looking "foreign," ( I had dreadlocks). My friend was assaulted once and had a consussion, but it was many years ago.
In my country, the reason for crime rates dropping includes migration of insane counts of the young people prone to violence to UK and Ireland. I joke that in my town, no gopnicks left at all, they all went to the UK.
People are using examples like locked up detergent in stores as examples of crime getting worse, but on the contrary the security hypothesis explains how this kind of thing is leading to reduced crime.
No one carries cash, cars have better theft protection making hotwiring difficult for amateurs, ring/security cameras and cell phones are everywhere, etc.
The cost of theft protection has generally lowered faster than the crime rate so firms still invest more in it and there's a bit of herd protection.
Bike theft is an example of the opposite. With ebikes the average target value has gone up and hand held grinders have made theft trivial.
There'd probably be even more bike theft but bike theft is depressing bike usage.
I'd be interested to see how this compares to other developed countries. I've always heard America is more violent, but a lot of that is due to the availability of guns here. Like fights are could be about as frequent in London and NYC, but due to guns they're more likely to be lethal in NYC.
What I heard is that the more Euro-like parts of America, like Massachusetts, have a similar level of crime and violence to Europe (though with more guns). But other areas, like Louisiana, are considerably more violent, even accounting for guns. I am only vaguely remembering this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
> All the criminals are too addicted to video games and Instagram to commit any crimes.
I believe the last sentence is right. Today, young people who would otherwise do crimes, instead look at their smartphones and tablets. Almost all young people are addicted to these.
My experience as a public defender and prosecutor between the mid-00s and early 20s was that we had pretty steady numbers of cases, but the nature of cases changed in some ways I'll mention below. I think it held steady largely because the amount of hours cops can devote to policing bears on how crime is reported and the available legal system resources act as a thermostat to regulate how much law enforcement we can do.
Crime data is only much good if there's an arrest, because in those cases a charge code is submitted to the NCIC representing the officer's best guess at the offense for which he arrested the suspect. (If no arrest is made and the crime is never solved, there's an "incident-based" reporting system but it's not broadly adopted to my knowledge.) After arrest there'll be a new entry below the arrest code if/when formal charges are filed and again upon conviction, and these will ALL likely be different because A) cops aren't lawyers, B) plea bargains happen, and C) the NCIC charge codes are national and old and don't map perfectly to most states' current criminal law codes. Cop arrests somebody for burglarizing a shed, perp puts all the stolen goods in a tote bag in his trunk, the loot included a pistol from the shed. There's all sorts of ways that might end up being reported or charged, in some states walking out with the stolen gun counts as "using" a firearm to commit the burglary, in some places it's not even a burglary at all, the cop or lawyer may or may not include the gun modifier to the charge code, probably the code is "stealing" and modifier "from outbuildings" but in some cases the arrest code might be for felon in possession of firearm because the cop hasn't solved the burglary yet and knows the gun will get a high bond locally. Just to say all these stats are goofy, discretionary and have poor category fits.
During my time I saw a few major trends.
1. Drug manufacturing declined substantially and standard methods of drug interdiction declined as well. Methamphetamines in particular used to be commonly home-grown and had various supply constraints and attendant risks. When I started, manufacture was typically in well-ventilated sheds, gave off a lot of heat, often blew up sheds, and involved noticeable ether fumes, so it was both dangerous and detectable. Cooks were stealing anhydrous ammonia off farms. This arrangement caused a LOT of secondary crimes to occur to support the primary one, as well as having a high chance to be caught. 10 years later, cooking had shifted to "shake and bake" methods, using almost entirely things you could buy from Walmart, cooks could be completed in a pickup truck cab parked out in the woods, and pseudoephedrine was the only real supply constraint. Much lower chance to get caught and almost no need for secondary crimes to support the cook, so long as you were smart about it and didn't walk up to the Walgreen's cashier with nothing but instant cold packs, coleman fuel, coffee filters and lithium batteries.
By the early 2020s, cooking was almost extinct. Far cheaper and easier to import and distribute Mexican ice. This shifts all the secondary crimes onto narco gangs where it was redundant, or even out of the country. Now add in what Scott mentions about buying drugs almost exclusively from known contacts, officers could not as easily do an undercover buy by driving over to the corner and waiting for someone to come out and say "whatchu need?" which was genuinely common in 2004. Even in 2010 you could have a local task force work a UC into the local distribution network. By 2022 simple UC buys were practically non-existent.
2. Domestic Violence increased but the severity of incidents was lower and the prosecution success was wretched. At least in my area, I believe this was a response to having less other crime to work, and a new social push to treat DV seriously, there were also national mandates for reporting and special grants available to local departments to have dedicated DV response teams. Things which would've been blown off as "ol' Joe and Donna are at it again and the neighbors called, why dontcha swing by there and get him to sleep it off" ended, and instead Joe and Donna were responsible for several reports a year none of which led to anything because Donna wouldn't cooperate. And every one of these incidents required two cops to show up at the house because that's the new standard for DV, and outside major metros that means there may be at best one other overnight deputy doing any real policing while Joe and Donna are defused.
3. Lots of minor financial or property crimes plummeted, with the exception of shoplifting, because so many things went digital or otherwise improved security. Bad check fraud used to be rampant, but you couldn't kite checks reliably once instant check processing was implemented in ~2006 so this declined and now checks are barely used at all. Counterfeit bills used to trickle down to common criminals regularly, that dried up with heavy use of counterfeit pens as people either didn't risk it or found bills that weren't detectable. In 2009 it was easy to strip copper out of old houses or from irrigation pipes, but farmers switched to different pipes and scrapyards gradually became a little less like Sanford and Son and markets adjusted to the point it wasn't profitable.
I view this period as the underclass shifting its hustle from the periphery of crime into some variety of legally defrauding the government for money. Getting on disability seems to have totally substituted for what AFDC did before welfare reform, and section 8 housing is affordable if you have no standards. But that's kind of a crappy life! What the underclass always has is some group of people who don't exactly wanna work, but aren't willing to accept living on the baseline of welfare and section 8. That group used to be the ones taking the risks of smalltime financial crime or drug dealing or whatever. But now you get food stamp fraud, phony day cares. Your uncle just got disability on some exaggerated nonsense claim, so find an in-home care provider to arrange the Medicaid end of things and take their cut as you pick up 10 hours a week sitting on his couch scrolling tiktok for $15/hr. There's all sorts of ways to claim kids you don't really have in your household for food stamps, take the excess and sell it for cash! These crimes are all much harder to catch, and many times the government workers overseeing them are incentivized not to look too hard!
So all that's really left for law enforcement among those folks is dealing with the side-effects of their entire worthless BS existence, namely overdoses and minor domestic violence incidents that nobody wants to prosecute. We've bought them off, sedated them, and shipped the worst externalities to Mexico.
Do you think if the kind of benefits fraud you're describing were pursued by the state more vigorously, other sorts of crime would increase as a substitute?
Yes I do, although I can't venture a guess at the volume or do a cost-benefit analysis of that policy.
Part of why I intuitively don't think full equal-share welfare systems would ever work is based on my experience with this, people don't actually want to be equal, even the bottom rungs have people who will insist on finding a way to eke out an extra 20% over what everyone else is allotted. You could make an argument that allowing hustlers to get a little extra juice from the squeeze in this way has fewer negative externalities than traditional crime, and that a welfare system may work better if it allows a little bit of gamesmanship to operate unimpeded. The obvious downside is that this kind of thing is very offensive to normie rule-following types' sense of fairness, and tends to blowback on the entire system, so you have to do SOME policing of this.
I have the biggest objection to fraud in the way the in-home health services sector runs, having done some GAL work for older people. I think there are a lot who could be kept in their house with higher care levels, and every time Trailer Park Tina and Sleazy Middle-man Health Agency get together to bilk the government for her to sit on dad's couch that's taking away funds that would be going where it would make a difference in somebody's final years. My wife reviews care plans, and a lot of them are submitted by some lady in the city with little to no health care knowledge operating out of her apartment and just trying to claim the maximum hours they can get away with for any client they've signed up, and that puts pressure on the rest of the system to be stingier than it would be.
I think you're reading too much into both Scott's claim and mine. Scott is there specifically rebutting a hypothesis that a decline in reporting would make official stats go down while crime remained flat or rose. In that limited context, all you need to see in that survey data is that the trend line is moving downwards with the national trend, you don't need similar extrapolated raw numbers and it doesn't have to be accurate, the trendline alone is sufficient to undercut the hypo he's attacking. For that very limited purpose, if you are already holding a strong prior as Scott is, that's fine.
For my purposes, no the survey data isn't worth very much. I mentioned that even the NCIC arrest data is flawed bc cops aren't lawyers, and crime victims are much much worse in that regard. And that's on top of all the usual problems with self-reported data like this. If you're trying to get anything out of that survey *other* than a trend line, anything with real explanatory power, then it's not going to be useful.
Who are these Americans who are failing to mention crimes? Outside of sexual assault and maybe a couple of other crimes, there is no particular stigma to being a crime victim in American culture. On the contrary, people seem EAGER to share their victim experiences with all and sundry, even if they don't share every last detail.
Inasmuch as a minority of victims do have a hyperactive sense of dignity, and don't want to talk about ANY of their victim experiences, I find it hard to believe this would be more of an issue today than in 1983. This is the age of oversharing.
Sure, not everyone is a lawyer and closely familiar with the law. But if anything, it seems that when an American is on the receiving end of an unpleasant act of uncertain legality, they tend to err on the side of "you just committed a crime against me."
I am really not sure at this point what proposition you think you are arguing for or against. I made it pretty clear in my response that I don't have a problem with Scott using the trendline for the very limited purpose to which he employed it, and I explained why I wouldn't find much value in it for any more substantial purpose. You popped in and snipped out my claim that non-arrest data is weak, isolated from all of the context in which I discussed crime report data flaws, claimed this was "thoroughly debunked" on the grounds of a single citation to a survey which Scott only used for a narrow purpose to rebut a single hypothetical.
Again if all you're concerned with is arguing Scott's overall claim, you don't actually need the survey data to carry any water or have substantial reliability.
This conversation feels like another version of a conversation I sometimes have with people to my left about poverty. I point out some positive statistic, like that income inequality is declining, the poverty rate is shrinking, or unemployment is very low. They respond with (mostly anecdotal) statements about how there are still people who are very poor who are suffering a lot as a result of poverty. Sometimes talking about seeing homeless people on the streets, sometimes talking about people they know. Sometimes they also say things that I find very hard to believe (or perhaps indicative that they live a very different life than me), like that many people in their social circles are out of work and finding it impossible to find a job. I agree that poverty still exists, that it is bad that people are suffering, and explain that I also support an expanded social safety net in the US and other policies to further reduce poverty and address the suffering of those in poverty--but say, can't we still recognize that things are better now than they were in past decades, probably better than they've ever been, and appreciate that? And the response I usually get is "no, I don't believe your statistics (though I don't have anything to contradict them other than anecdotes), and even if I did, arguing things are better is insensitive to those who are still suffering."
This seems like the same argument applied to crime (and somewhat more right-coded, though certainly plenty of people on the left side of the spectrum also care about crime): people don't really have any specific argument against the statistics, but they don't feel true, and furthermore they're not really interested in engaging in the question of whether things are better than they are in the past. I think that's really unfortunate, because whether things are getting better or worse, and ideally for what reasons, seems very important to understand, and in particular both more important and more useful to have a discussion about than whether the current state of things is "bad."
i'm honestly conflicted about what ought to be done in these instances but I really hate how inconsistent everyone is.
If a group comes to me and says some horrible thing is getting worse, and there's a bunch of upset faces outside my door, I don't know whether I, an internet contrarian with a majoritarian legal philosophy, ought to join them and go "yeah! this is bad! because THEY think it is!" or stand there at my door and go "okay but how bad is it *really*"
It seemed like the rationalist community writ large used to solidly embrace the latter approach. We're gadflies. When someone says that inequality is rising or rape on campus is at epidemic proportions or racism is responsible for a lot of professional disparities, we dig into the statistics and look at all the interesting counterintuitive conclusions and go "well actually..."
and we do this even if it's some *really bad* thing to go "well actually" about: Campus sexual assault, racism, crushing poverty.
But it seems like lately I see a lot of people that enjoy doing that espouse a philosophy, when it comes to crime or illegal immigration, that the fact that people are upset about it is *ITSELF* a very serious problem that must be addressed without giving the grumbling masses a lesson on what the data *truly* shows. I applaud them for coming around to my majoritarian way of thinking, but I get annoyed they've come too late, and only on specific issues.
Either we're the kind of people that sit an outraged community down and explain to them that the statistics do not bear their concerns out...or we're the kind of people that take inchoate outrage seriously even if it's not founded on solid data. I honestly don't know which one I am some days, but I think it's VERY IMPORTANT to be consistent...
I think the answer is: rationalists should try and force people to articulate what they're mad about in a choate(?) way--depending on your sympathies this can be trying to make the nearest positive case that _is_ founded on solid data, or challenging the cases that aren't, or whatever in between.
like with this issue, I have a very hard time even understanding what is meant by an "unreported crime."
It makes sense for some things. I am hardly contrarian enough to see a murder and go "well technically that's not a crime because it wasn't charged." But it's hard for me to understand what an "unreported fraud" looks like, in many contexts. I have probably witnessed thousands and thousands of attempts to defraud people, from clearly-rigged three-card-monty games to calls where the voice at the other send says they've "been trying to reach me about my car's insurance." These are all crimes, just not ones that anyone *should* report, or they'd do nothing else. So: I really have to start by asking "what do you mean by crime"
Joseph Heath mentions this dynamic in his essay about populism [1]:
> What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.
Issues with the widest gap between common sense and elite consensus are also the most likely to be issues where the elites are correct.
Which is why I have come to believe that although non-majoritarian/elite opinion can often be wrong, it is far more likely to be correct and insightful than populist outrage if you had to pick one to consistently side with.
This is really social circle size dependant. For example: Income inequality is higher than it has ever been recorded, possibly higher than it has ever been in history, if your circle is the english speaking world.
If you include every human on earth, it's falling (although the fall has leveled off in recent years, controlling for RPP); if you include everyone you could conceivably have a conversation with, it has never been worse.
I was thinking about this the other day because since I moved to the bay area, I haven't gotten poorer but the chance that I'm talking to someone who's a billionaire has gone WAY up.
Yes, was thinking this myself: you're allowed to wish the US had a more comprehensive universal healthcare system or whatever while acknowledging that in fact, poverty is down, but a lot of lefties tie themselves in knots to avoid facing the statistics so they can maintain a doomer-ish vibe about "late capitalism".
So too, you're allowed to wish the US had Japan-level crime while acknowledging that, in fact, crime is down--but a lot of righties tie themselves in knots to avoid facing the statistics so they can maintain a doomer-ish vibe about "hellscape cities" or whatever.
You can continue to think that the things you don't like about cities are bad without having to say insane things like "I'd rather have more murder, assault, and rape and less shoplifting than vice versa".
>but a lot of righties tie themselves in knots to avoid facing the statistics so they can maintain a doomer-ish vibe about "hellscape cities" or whatever.
That's fair. And, as Scott showed, homicide really _IS_ down.
Hypothetically (I realize that this is impossibly impractical) what one would want to track over time is the sum of the impacts from all crimes plus the cost of all the measures people take to protect themselves from crime (and things like locked shelves at CVS, where the cost to install them is borne by the business but there is also a cost in time and effort to the shopper). How many million repeatedly-check-for-the Amazon-package-before-the-porch-pirate-sees-it are worth one homicide? Damned if I know, but both costs are real.
Rationalists are human like everyone else, they find it hard, and I dare say even harder, to kill their darlings compared to the simple masses.
I could give you a whole spiel about people's motivations, but these days I don't trust people's self-described labels about being open and curious until I witness them wrestle with their darlings.
Does a less violent society result in worse behavior, because people aren't afraid of being assaulted if they behave in anti-social ways?
Is it true that once upon a time someone blatantly shoplifting would find themselves physically attacked (assaulted) by either the store employees or random people around, and now that doesn't happen? Or was it always true that wouldn't happen?
Is it true that once upon a time someone going up to random people on the street and screaming at them or demanding money would find themselves physically attacked (assaulted) and now that doesn't happen? Or was it always true that wouldn't happen?
Those aren't rhetorical questions; I'm genuinely unsure of the social on-the-street dynamics of a more violent age. Was it easier or harder to get away with "being a jerk"?
Maybe "have you personally ever punched someone, not because they attacked you first but because you thought they had it coming" would be an interesting question in one of the surveys.
My hot take is actually this frees up our limited reserves of social opprobrium to be cast upon less severe behaviors (although not by lashing out violently against them).
This sounds like an important point. There may be less total crime, but also the victim may feel more *helpless* about it. Sometimes it feels like the police is on their side.
For example, there is a pawn shop next to my house that is known for buying stolen goods from nearby supermarkets and selling drugs. I was thinking, the obvious impulsive solution would be to smash their windows -- reduce their profits a little, and increase the general awareness of "something bad happens here". But obviously, the police that seems to do little about the theft and drugs would probably be happy to catch *me*, and improve their statistics of solved crime.
Maybe it's better overall; most people probably overestimate their ability to defend themselves against crime. But it feels frustrating.
Assuming the numbers are all true, I would still interpret things differently. The headline could as easily be "Crime returns to historic lows after decades of horrible backsliding". We should aim for things to get better over time, rather than desperately trying to achieve a standard set 80 years ago.
This is just a strange comment. 1) The 1950s are objectively the lowest homicide rate in American history. We have the stats. 2) Lynchings are a form of violence that are not ideal, but mostly in response to crime. We have good evidence to think they weren't even really racially targeted. Given the demographics of the deep south and crime differences between black men and white men, a 75/25 proportion of black lynchings to white lynchings is what we'd expect to find, and what we do find.
What about declining alcohol consumption and higher (heh) cannabis consumption? Alcohol has been associated with a tremendous amount of crime. I’d especially think that aggravated assault and the subsequent incidence of murder would go down with less drunkenness.
The banal conclusion is that in lots of way things have got worse and in lots of ways they have got better, but the net effect is that crime has reduced.
> If murders rose at the same rate as AAs, then the true murder rate could be up to 3x higher than reported.
I think this claim can be dismissed without even digging into the data. The US already has a very high homicide rate for a developed nation. It was even more elevated in the period 1960-1999. A homicide rate 3x of what it was during the crime wave would have pushed us into the territory of totally dysfunctional Latin American and sub-Saharan African states. While you can argue some inner cities might have been like that during this period, as an average over the whole country, this is clearly preposterous. Even more so now, since presumably medical care has improved in the past 25 years, which means our actual 5.7 homicides/100K would be even more than 3X5.7 = 17.1, while most big cities have largely cleaned themselves up since then.
I think it's telling that Sakran et al found an even higher increase in prehospital mortality for stabbing victims than for gunshot victims. I'm sure stabbing technology has gotten a bit more lethal over the past twenty years (Progress! It's literally a double-edged sword!), but there's no way it's the primary driver of that shift.
I’m surprised there were no observations about the current administration. Certainly there’s a rhetoric about the rule of law, with deployments of the national guard and so on. And at least some murders must be committed by illegal immigrants who now are being much more cautious.
I thought I read it. Not sure what I missed. There was an increase in murder rates during the Biden administration and now it’s back down. Yes, there is a long term trend. But also the current administration did things. ICE, while not something I endorse in its current form, probably has some sort of impact on the illegal population.
If true, it would only affect very premeditated crimes, like ones where the perpetrator first stops to think “gee, ICE seems a lot scarier now under Trump than they were under Biden…should I really go through with it?” Right?
I was thinking people are just more cautious. Don't stay out all night, don't go to bars as much, don't carry a gun in their car, and other high risk behaviors that correlate with both deportation and propensity to murder.
I do recall an article that said that crime rates in DC were down after the deployment of the Guard... but it also pointed out that foot traffic in commercial areas had fallen so low that local restaurants were going out of business. Because it turns out that law-abiding citizens are *also* afraid to go out when the military and the secret police are roaming the streets.
So, technically true that it reduces crime rates, not successful at helping ordinary people feel safe.
Here's a theory based purely on impressons (but after I post this I'm going to ask GPT for evidence for or against): Seems to me that face-to-face interactions have decreased a lot over the period you are talking about. Went out biking on a beautiful weekend one day last fall and saw very few other people. 30 years ago everyone I knew met the person they were dating at work, at school, at some group activity, or through friends. Now almost everyone I know who is dating met the person online. So I'm wondering whether crimes that must be committed physically and in person are down because people are spending more of their time with their noses pointed at a screen. Online abuse of others via insult, threat and violation of privacy sure doesn't seem to be decreasing. What about other crime that can be committed via electronics? is it down?
OK, asked GPT to take a quick look at large peer-reviewed studies of changes in face-to-face interaction, and turned up 8 in support of view that face-to-face interactions have decreased very substantially in the last 20 years. Then asked it for large peer-reviewed studies that contradict that view, and all it could find was a study finding that older adults are not reporting more loneliness than they did 20 years ago, and that visits to national parks have increased substantially since 2010.
Technically Scott mentioned that as "All the criminals are too addicted to video games and Instagram to commit any crimes." The one he really left out is the aging population (since young people commit most crimes).
The only thing I disagree with here is the initial claim that it’s counterintuitive to suppose we are at historically low crime rates. In general, things have been improving - we’re at historically high wealth, high education, high life expectancy, so why wouldn’t crime have this same general trend? I suppose we know there was a contrary trend for crime from about 1960-1990, but we’ve been back on trend in the good direction since then, with only a brief bump in the Trump I/pandemic years.
I think Scott mentioned vidya games as a potential outlet for antisocial tendencies, and IIRC there is actually some evidence for transient dips in petty crime around major GTA releases. I'm not sure what to make of that.
On the weapons technology front, it's also worth noting that hollow-point pistol bullets went from extremely rare in the 1960s, to pretty much standard in the 1980s. The lethality and destructiveness of hollow-point bullets is often overstated, but they are at least somewhat more lethal than round-nosed bullets and that may have somewhat compensated for better medical technology.
And a digression: Responsible use of hollow-point bullets should *reduce* the number of people being killed. The somewhat increased lethality is outweighed by A: the significantly increased probability that the target will be promptly incapacitated by one shot so it won't be necessary to keep shooting them, and B: the significantly reduced probability that the bullet will exit the target with enough velocity to maybe kill an innocent bystander standing behind them. So when you hear that your local police department uses hollow-points (they almost certainly do), that's probably a good thing. But most shootings are by criminals, who are kind of the opposite of responsible in their firearms use.
The fact is the same answer. The internet. Communication is at an all time high, video can be recorded anywhere, any time, from phones and mounted cameras, home cameras are accessibly cheap. Internet done right.
Internet done wrong: every bad and tragic story and crime not prevented spreads across the internet at a never before seen rate, it’s everywhere and everyone seems to want to know, so awareness of each crime spreads as if 5+ crimes actually happened. And people love sympathy so they will happily complain online to get it.
Internet with mixed results: Human distrust is also historically low, with all the crime and complaints online, all the movies and stories, there is little trust which hurts humanity as whole, but also prepares people to protect themselves from crime.
I think this is the correct explanation. Internet surveillance makes running domestic organized crime much more difficult in combination with RICO statutes over the decades making the mob and many gangs largely drop violent crimes. Non-organized criminals have to contend with the surveillance of virtually all communications, credit cards, cash, plus DNA identication.
I'm in a kinda weird cross class position due to my history, and the perceived differences in crime rates really make sense.
My white trash construction friends have all experienced one or multiple of the following in their immediate circle: death from OD, drug related violence, family violence, sexual assault from relatives or social authorities (Church leaders, bosses), etc and so forth; all the products of the lower class HuhWight country living experience.
The lower class latino immigrants I know have much stronger support networks, but are also much more patriarchal: They have basically no ODs and less SA (at least, less SA that gets talked about), but catch a decent amount of domestic violence that they just have to suck up, and WAY more property crime; people breaking into trucks and stealing tools mostly. These people are all lower class strivers, they have a Stalinist style 5 year plan to become the type of people that have embarrassing middle class posser cholo children, and that means they can't be spending money on drugs and getting blitzed in public.
All the Black/asian/indian/whatever your flavor of phrenology is people I know are PMC strivers/STEM autists, and experience basically no crime at all other than having to deal with lower class whites being loud and annoying, due to the place I live.
We all live in close proximity and interact at EG the market or the gas pump, but having totally separate social circles really exposes how different the perceived experience of it all is.
I think looking at national statistics is probably the wrong approach here for the same reason it's absurd to say Michigan is a low-crime state to reply to someone worried about crime in Detroit.
Also, possibly the victimization survey has gotten worse with time, in the same way as political polls have been way off in recent elections.
As personal anecdotes, I've been mildly assaulted and had multiple packages stolen from me since moving to the bay area, which certainly feels like an increase in my personal crime victimization rate, yet I've neither reported this to the cops nor been surveyed about it.
A lot of the crime discourse is Rightists who live in deep-blue urban areas and project those areas' dysfunctional crime policies onto the entire country. You see that strongly in this comment section, most of America isn't San Fransisco or Seattle.
Also, people who consume lots of media telling them there is high crime and dysfunctional policies and so on, and come to confuse these claims they hear about online with reality.
One more proposal for the final list: the Interstate Highway System led to a severe breakdown in ability to catch criminals who could flee (policing coordination didn't keep up with increased mobility), but eventually it caught up.
I don't think it's the full story but it contributes. Meshes well with "countermeasures actually work" and/or lead poisoning.
A minor factor, but worth mentioning, is the bipartisan hysteria over "sex trafficking." The smarter people know it's just a rebrand of prostitution, which has always existed, but joe average thinks it's a new thing that didn't exist 20 years ago.
I’m not all that smart, so take this for what it’s worth, but I thought sex trafficking was when people are coerced, abducted, or otherwise deceived into being transported long distances and then end up doing sex work (sometimes for money, sometimes on what is essentially a slavery basis) at the other end of that journey.
For example Paul Rosalie describes how women in Peru are told they can make tons of money being waitresses in logging camps, so they are loaded onto buses which take them days into the jungle to the camps, then when they get there they are informed they are not actually going to be paid much or at all for being waitresses and instead they are either enticed by dineros—the only way to pay for their transportation back home—or forced by threat of violence to be prostitutes to the loggers instead.
I differentiate this in my mind from, say, a woman who decides to exchange sex for money in the city where she lives, or who transports herself to a new city with the intention of doing sex work there.
At this point, an awful lot of ordinary prostitution gets classified as "sex trafficking" because it looks better in the press releases. If as you say a woman transports herself to a new city with the intention of doing sex work, you can always say her pimp told her to do that (doesn't have to be true) and so it's sex trafficking and stopping it makes you a Big Damn Hero like Liam Neeson in that movie, rather than just another vice cop living the sleaziest sort of cop life.
If there are specifics in the story, judge it on that basis. If not, it's probably just spin.
True, I should have read more carefully: "bipartisan hysteria" is always almost certainly a rebranded something-or-other; I was describing my mental model of the actual phenomenon. (I have no opinion on whether it's new and didn't exist 20 years ago, though "it" in this case must refer to "statistical uptick"; sex trafficking is of course not new.)
It occurs to me that police, prosecutors, and politicians have contradictory incentives in terms of classifying the severity of a crime, both for prostitution vs trafficking and for stuff like aggrevated assault vs attempted murder and murder vs manslaughter.
In general, and especially for politicians, serious crimes being committed on your watch makes you look bad. If you're doing your job, then all else being equal, serious crime rates should be going down or steady at tolerably low levels.
Unsolved serious crimes make you look particularly bad. On the other hand, you can use them to make the case that you (as a police chief or prosecutor) need more resources to deal with the problem or that you need the law changed to make your job easier.
On the other hand, for solved crimes, especially those where the suspect gets arrested and convicted, you're more of a hero for solving a more serious crimes and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
A number of people are making the case that the big trend of decreasing crime does not matter because X, where X is something they observe or are particularly angry about -- nasty homeless people in the park or whatever. I can certainly understand being very angry about various X's, but am impressed by the strength of some people's need not to be mollified or reassured. I get the feeling it's important to these people to contrinue to be Right and Indignant as Hell.
First their brains run a program that automatically checks whether their tribal identity dictates they should or should not be mollified or reassured. If not, then they continue to be RaIaH.
“Hey, wait, if crime has been going down doesn’t that mean we don’t get to say the niggers are committing more and more savagery the longer we coddle them? Well, that can’t be true.”
Well, I won't go so far as to put THOSE words in their mouths exactly, but that's the basic sentiment.
It works the other way too. Like, if Scott had listed out a bunch of evidence showing that raising the minimum wage doesn't help poor people or something, you'd get a barrage of righteously indignant comments from people who identify as some flavor of Leftist.
Or if Scott had listed out a bunch of evidence showing that tax cuts don't help the economy or whatever, you'd get a slew of angry comments from people who identify as some flavor of libertarian.
And so on. The tribal identity dictates the unwavering response, the reasoning is doggedly backfilled in later, even if it must ignore or discount the evidence presented.
Or instead of assuming that everyone is being hysterical for no reason, it’s because people are extremely skeptical of his claim and assume he’s missing something.
Sure, and there's no reason to assume he's right, just because he's Scott. But I think that if someone's main reason for believing someone is wrong is that the person's view makes them angry, rather than the person clearly has some facts wrong or is engaging in bad reasoning, the reader should STFU and reflect on that for a while.
Well, to say something is counter-intuitive just a fancy way of saying that the thing does not fit with someone's preferred unexamined and unproven beliefs. And yes, some of those people are disputing what Scott's saying, but their tone suggests personal annoyance, not simply doubt that his points are valid.
> Why are so many forms of crime (murder, violent crime, and property crime) at or near historic lows?
Update: I see you did mention the lead crime hypothesis. I guess I missed it the first time around.
When charting the amounts of tetraethyl lead in gasoline per capita, crime rates and teen pregnancies rose trailing the increase. Once tetraethyl lead was removed from gasoline, crime rates began to fall after the kids exposed to tetraethyl lead became less-violent older adults. High blood lead levels are associated with behavioral problems, including poor impulse control, and blood lead levels in children also have a strong negative impact on IQ.
If that were the primary cause, crime would increase by cohort as each generation got lead poisoned. The increase in violence in the 70's was a period effect, not a cohort effect.
It's hard to entirely rule out some effect of lead poisoning, but I think the lead-crime hypothesis mostly lives on (much like the abortion-crime hypothesis, which can also be mostly disproven by looking at birth year cohorts) in that it's a fashionable and counterintuitive thing to talk about, when the bigger sources of crime trends are much more mundane.
Like, the early 90's peak in homicide was mostly just driven by crack cocaine, but that's not interesting or controversial enough for anyone to talk about on reddit. Likewise, a big component of the late 90's decline in violence was mass incarceration (see http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf), but that's also not a fashionable or interesting theory to discuss.
I'm agnostic about the lead-crime hypothesis, but the link I provided showed that many European countries exhibited similar patterns in the rise and decline of crime rates in the late 20th century, yet they did not impose tougher sentencing guidelines as the US did. So, I think we can rule out the hypothesis that tough-on-crime strategies were the primary cause of the decline in crime after the early 1990s.
Likewise, except for cities like Amsterdam and London, the crack cocaine epidemic largely bypassed European countries, but they also saw the same sort of rise in crime and homicides starting in the 1970s and peaking in the 1990s (albeit that they started at a lower level and peaked at a lower level than the US). The paper I linked to claims these upward curves followed the introduction of lead additives into gasoline in European countries, but since per capita gasoline use was lower in European countries, they didn't see as much of a rise as the US did. European crime rates also dropped following the removal of lead from gasoline... But correlation is not necessarily causation.
What makes me doubt the lead-crime hypothesis is that the US also saw a big crime and homicide wave in the 1920s that peaked in 1932. Homicide rates in 1932 were just a hair below of the peak rates of the early 1980s (~9/100k vs ~10/100k). After 1932, crime and homicide rates steadily declined into the 1950s. Prohibition has been blamed on the rise in crime in the 20s and early 30s, but the fact that crime and homicide rates dropped at a relatively steady rate after Prohibition was repealed, make me doubt the Prohibition explanation. If Prohibition was the cause of the early 20th-century crime surge, we should have seen a sharp drop-off after Prohibition was repealed, but we didn't. As for tetraethyl lead, we started adding that to gasoline in 1921, but we were driving more and consuming more leaded gasoline in the late 40s and 1950s than we did in the 1920s and 1930s. So the tetraethyl lead correlation also weakens in face of the lull in crime and homicide rates in the 1950s.
The UK kept pretty good homicide stats throughout the 20th century. They don't show the early 20th-century crime wave that the US did, but they do show a late 20th-century rise in crime. Go figure.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with Nevin's graphs, I spent a few months looking at his ideas when writing the blog post I linked.
He's found a number of countries in western Europe where his theory fits. It does not fit in Japan or Hong Kong or Latin America. I've read it fails for Eastern Europe, but I haven't checked the data. Actually, Nevin outright lied about some of those trends, i.e. he tried to blame Mexico's cartel war deaths on lead poisoning.
His graphs are also not of measured blood lead, but a theoretical guess as to what measured blood lead would have been in the past, under the (likely incorrect) assumption that all blood lead comes from gasoline.
He also tried to make some theoretical "gasoline+paint" graph to fit to the US murder rates but he didn't apply this to any other country and, as you noted, the UK did not have the early 20th century crime wave (but, AFAIK, they also used leaded paint).
Nevin's work is pseudoscientific at best and fraudulent at worst.
I haven't tried comparing the rise and fall of crime between every western European country and the US to see how well they line up. I know there's a vague synchronization of violence trends that comes from all of them having a postwar baby boom around the same time and a post birth control birth rate decline around the same time. In the US that demographic wave of young people only explains about half of the rise in crime. I haven't checked to see how much on an unexplained residual there is in each country in Europe. I would guess there could also be some shared urbanization trends, but I'm not sure how much of an effect that has on crime, and I've also never studied rates of incarceration across Europe.
None of this disproves the possibility that lead does have some smaller (10%? 20%?) impact on crime, on top of the other trends, but Nevin's unified "lead as the source of all crime trends" work is simply wrong.
LOL! Many Thanks! ( On a carcenogenic, rather than criminality-inducing, front, Kent Micronite cigarettes included the extraordinary innovation of including a filter - made from asbestos, and crocidolite asbestos at that... )
Many Thanks! I asked Google what their reasoning was, and they said that the reported reasoning was:
>Superior Filtration Claims: The Lorillard Tobacco Company sought to create a filter that would trap more tar and nicotine than competitors. They believed that using crocidolite asbestos provided a finer, more effective filtration system, marketing the "Micronite" filter as the "greatest health protection in cigarette history".
In fairness, this was 1952-1956, so they had less information about asbestos hazards than we have now - though some information was available as early as 1920s (asbestosis) and 1930s (lung cancer).
Have guns (typical gun carried by a typical gun-carrying person) gotten better over the decades? I don’t mean “capable of firing more rounds per minute” because we’re not talking about mass shootings; I mean does your typical gun break or jam up less, is it more likely to have its sights calibrated properly, etc. (I own a gun but don’t keep up with guns as a topic.)
I could see arguments for yes: technological innovation tends to produce increased capability, including the capability of not breaking as much, requiring less maintenance, etc. It also often drives down the cost of capability, so that a lower-tier product produced more recently has the capability of a higher-tier product produced longer ago.
But I could see arguments for no as well: guns are a durable good, so lots of older guns might still be “in use”, though i don’t know at what rate. (That would be an interesting thing to learn about.) Also, there are lots of inexpensive relatively poorly made guns available now that were not available in the past.
Then the question is, does being shot with a better gun mean you are more likely to die, or less likely to die, and what impact would that have on the murder rate?
One thought is that ammo has improved, hollow point rounds are relatively easy to acquire, this is something that really only became true in the 80s. That may increase lethality in your typical shooting.
Hollow-point bullets have already been mentioned. Outside of the spectacular but statistically irrelevant mass shooting incidents, the increased magazine capacity of semiautomatic pistols is probably not significant but the better ergonomics lead to greater accuracy in quick-and-dirty shooting.
Reliability has always been high enough to not be a significant factor.
And yes, guns are very durable goods so all of this will substantially lag the introduction of new technology. But even the Glock is ~40 years old at this point, and I can't think of anything since that would have significantly moved the needle. Handgun optics might matter going forward, but they're still quite new.
Murders could be categorized as either "it could happen to you" or "it would not happen to you." The "it could happen to you" types of murders are the ones that highly influence people's thinking that murder rates are high. A black man being killed by a police officer might be in the "it could happen to you" category if you are black. Random killings are in the "it could happen to you" category. Mass murders might be in the "it could happen to you" category if the killings are random. "It would not happen to you" murders are often "routine" and "not noteworthy" such as gang-related killings (if you don't live in gang areas).
Could one explanation for “the statistics don’t align with my perception” be that modern information technology feeds us a different kind of perception about crime than in the past where you basically had the news in its various formats plus whatever you saw with your own eyes?
So there’s a memetic thing going on with perceptions of crime. Could it be that this is also what’s under the hood when it comes to the committing of crime as well? Like, it used to be there were lots of pickpockets; there is less of that now that people carry fewer easy-to-miss valuables (like cash) in their pockets, but a big reason is fewer young criminals learning the craft from experienced pickpockets. I imagine if you “hang around” people who commit a lot of assaults, you will learn the ways of assaulting—i put “hang around” in quotes because I’m really just referring to communication. Maybe that information doesn’t spread the same way it used to?
"There are three plausible explanations for gun injuries getting worse over [2003-2012]:"
and list first
"Improved weapons technology (e.g. switch to semi-automatics)"
is...is that supposed to be a joke? Or do you really not know that semi-automatic gun technology was invented in the 1800s and became common/standard over 100 years ago?
Semiautomatic weapons were not standard even in military applications a hundred years ago. More importantly, they didn't become standard for police and criminals until the 1970s or 1980s, which is in the timeframe of interest here.
Perhaps you have heard of the Colt M1911, which is named for the year 1911, the year it was formally adopted by the US army? It continues to be one of the most popular models of semi-auto pistol in the world and is still in production today. Therefore, it is safe to say that the relevant technology has not improved between 2003-2012, which is the timeframe of interest here.
I am quite familiar with the M1911, invented in ages past by God's own armorer, John Moses Browning. I own one, and enjoy shooting it. But it has never been more than a niche weapon among American shooters.
Including the military, where handguns of *all* sorts are niche weapons of little significance. Yes, really. The personal weapon that mattered to the United States Army a hundred years ago was the M1903 Springfield, a bolt-action rifle.
Outside of the military, the 1911 was being used by a few gun-savvy gangsters and G-men, with the vast majority of their colleagues using .38 revolvers.
Hardening/behavior changes should be considered as a proxy for crime. For instance, if a store invests in shelf guards, that means that the implied cost of shoplifting is at least the cost of the installation and maintenance and lost sales resulting from the shelf guards. However, in the data we would say that the shoplifting rate has fallen to 0, and the problem is solved.
If I freely wandered at night in certain neighborhoods in my city, I would almost be certainly a victim of crime over some set amount time, when I avoid those places or avoid a new neighborhood that has degenerated, crime has gone down but the implied rate of crime hasn't changed.
How do you measure this? Not easily, but looking at these examples we could easily see falling rates of crime while the implied disorder of the city goes increasingly up. You would then see conversations like we're seeing in these comments below where one person says, 'I dont feel safe going to my local park anymore' and another says, 'why not? crime has hugely gone down?' Well the answer is that now the park is much less used and is maybe dominated by a few intimidating anti-social types that harass anyone daring to go near the area. But data will say that crime in the local area is nonexistent.
The WSJ just had an article writing about how the Rich are apparently spending much more on home defenses than they have in the past, what does this say about direction our society is heading? Car companies now have to invest to protections against catalytic converter theft, what does that say? Supermarkets are removing self-checkout stations, what does that say?
I dont know that I can't really claim whether that implied crime is higher, lower, or unchanging, but if it were increasing, the discussion would look at lot like this one in my opinion.
You ignore that the age structure has changed over time. I assume that the large majority of murders are committed by young men, ages 17-28 (or some such). Probably not by 70-year olds.
>There are three plausible explanations for gun injuries getting worse over time:
>Improved weapons technology (e.g. switch to semi-automatics)
Semi-automatic weapons, depending on your classification of revolvers, have been the standard since the Civil War. If you really want to limit it to modern, magazine-fed pistols, you're still looking at a technology that hasn't changed all that much since the 1910s for rate of fire, and since the 1980s for magazine capacity.
Changes in firearms technology shouldn't have made any difference in crime statistics over the last two decades.
What about laser sights? I have very limited experience with guns, but one of the few things I do know from experience is that laser sights make a huge difference, at least if you're a lousy shooter like me. And presumably these have become more common?
Laser sights have kind of fallen out of fashion on handguns. Many more people are using red dot sights (the ones that go on top of a pistol) these days, but those are not that much more accurate at typical handgun distances compared to basic sights, although they are slightly faster to use if you're not that experienced.
-Especially in denser areas, drivers are reliant on publicly-accessible chargers (e.g., no plug at their apartment building).
-At least in Seattle, chargers being out of commission more often than not due to rampant copper theft is widespread. Sound Transit has also been significantly impacted by copper thieves.
Unambiguously actual (not deterred, prevented, or mitigated) crime where even if the *direct* victims are included in the NCVS it completely misses all the *indirect* victims (drivers who can't charge when/where they expected to; riders whose trains are abruptly cancelled).
What people base their assessment of "crime levels" is mostly publicly visible disorder/"petty crime". This is, I think, LITERALLY a question of semantics (with media & social media optimised harder and harder for outrage clicks on top of this). Are "disorder" statistics down?
How can you adjust for the fact people respond to crime rates by changing their behavior? Downtown St Louis would have a higher homicide rate of more regular people decided to take an evening stroll but they don’t for good reason.
People adjust their behavior pretty quickly. I'd expect the same effect to have worked at any point in the past and thus be already adjusted for at all points in the data. "no go zones" definitely existed at all points in the past.
I had a hard time finding data on the crime rate in Central Park in the year 1960, but overall murder rate in NYC is lower now than in 1960. Old newspaper articles suggest that Central Park was culturally perceived as dangerous around 1960.
"YOUTH IS STABBED TO DEATH IN PARK", NY Times, 1964
This article reports at least 4 murders in Central Park in the year 1964 (there were 0 in 2025 according to NYPD), and suggests that the public perceived the park as dangerous, "Residents of adjoining Central Park West apartments said the scene was a hangout for derelicts and degenerates and that it was dangerous to venture there after dusk. ... Police officials contended yesterday that Central Park was no more dangerous than other parts of the city."
"These Days: Apathy, Decay of Morals Cause Growth of Crime", George E. Sokolsky, The Evening News, 1961
In this article, a well-known columnist wrote, "Near where I live is a beautiful park, which cost the city millions of dollars to create and care for. But the children will not play there and adults are afraid to go there. It is absurd that parks should be occupied by drunks and homosexuals who frighten children and who abuse women. And there are packs of hoodlums who move about the parks, molesting girls, seizing clothes and committing mayhem and in the darker hours, rape. Central Park in New York City is one of the most beautiful parks in all the world, but no one enters it after dark, except in a few protected spots."
This doesn't prove any statistics, but suggests a mainstream viewpoint.
It’s a sanity test. Everyone knows that crime exploded in the 1960’s and that people generally felt safe walking around at night before then. That never returned.
What good is this sanity test if, according to our best data, you were more likely to be attacked in 1960?
Assuming people did feel safer then (which I can't find data on), you can't distinguish between whether they felt safer because they actually were safer, or if they felt safer for other reasons (e.g. no 24 hour national news cycle).
Gallup has been polling people about personal safety fears since 1965 [1], and it seems to be fairly detached from actual crime rates. One question asked is, "Is there any area near where you live where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?" The fraction who say yes is relatively stable, fluctuating between about 30% and 45%. 2017 scored slightly better (30%) than 1965 (34%), but the values fluctuate so much year to year that I'd say they're about the same, within the margin of error.
Risk substitution predicts that both increases and decreases in risk of crime are understated by empirical crime rates. Since crime rates have gone down, risk substitution would imply that we have gotten more safe than a simple glance at the statistics suggests, not less.
Regarding the possible explanations proposed by criminologists, I don't really see the mystery. Why not just "all of them, to some degree"?
That wouldn't require any kind of massive coincidence, just various changes in society and advances in medicine and technology all acting to support two pre-existing dynamics:
1. That the general public really hates crime -> incarceration, DNA testing, ubiquitous cameras, welfare programs.
2. That criminals will seize alternatives that make their not-great lives better in some other way than crime -> psychiatric drugs, endless free entertainment, cellphone convenience, freedom from unwanted kids.
Five of the above are technological / medical in nature and didn't hit the mainstream until the 90s. (The other two - abortion and mass incarceration - are social and political taboos that fell earlier, but with effects that weren't felt until the 90s.) Previous advances tended to mean "new street drugs" or "firearms escalation". These were markedly different.
I live in medium-sized town in the Pacific Northwest. We have one drug death on average every three days, despite Narcan being widely carried. Have you considered the possibility that the demographic that would have committed serious crimes is simply dead from contaminated drugs? There's fentanyl in everything now.
In the past 5 years about 400,000 people have died of opioid overdoses. That's 1/10 of a percent of the US population. And of course not all of those 400,000 were criminals.
Indeed! But two-thirds of crime is committed by 1% of the population. If that 1% gets reduced by 10% over 5 years, then you would get a 6.6% reduction in crime from those opioid overdose deaths alone.
However, I would suggest the figures you quoted are an underestimate, because deaths from polydrug exposure or multiple factors aren't recorded as overdoses even though blacking out on drugs was a contributing factor. Around here we routinely get deaths from assaults at homeless encampments, outdoor exposure, and car or motorbike crashes, in which the victim was under the influence. Those deaths aren't recorded as overdoses, but the person would probably have survived if it wasn't for their extreme intoxication.
Regarding your last point, anyone addicted to hard drugs is routinely committing a crime: by definition, all 400,000 are criminals whether you agree they should be labelled this way or not. We can reasonably assume they are within the 1%, given the routine nature of that form of criminality, plus all the theft and assaults that go along with funding their habits.
Actually, 2/3 of *violent* crime in *Sweden* is committed by 1% of the *Swedish* population. Sweden is overall much safer than the US, with a much lower rate of murder. It also has a very different criminal justice system with very different sentencing. So pretty silly to assume you’d get the same result if you calculated the US stat. Also, in the US only about 15% of crime is violent crime, so even if the stat you quote did hold in the US it does not tell us much at all how concentrated vs dispersed criminality is in the population.
With the exception of those huge inaccuracies, though, great point.
A peaceful town that immediately hangs any violent criminal has no crime.
A dangerous town where violent criminals receive light punishments and therefore has lots of criminals, can also have low crime if all of the law-abiding citizens have fortified their homes and lives against the criminal element so there are no opportunities for crime.
But the citizens in the second town will still complain about the criminality in their town, even if there no stats to back it up.
Or, if you like; The motte and the bailey both have zero bandits.
The bailey has no bandits because there are no bandits.
The motte has no bandits because the bandits all know they'll be shot if they approach it.
How much could it be that there was a 'prairie fire' effect, where a combination of (i) the substantial increase in violence/murder rate post covid/George Floyd and (ii) the significant amounts of fatal opioid overdoses in the late 2010s/early 2020's burned through individuals likely to commit crimes (violent and otherwise).
I believe that research has shown that relatively few individuals (I think it was something like 500 in Boston or a similar city) made up the vast majority of murderers and murder/aggravated assault victims (intuitively people likely to commit crimes of 'gang' type violence are also much more likely to be on its receiving end as well). If there was a big spike in violence in 2020/2021, could those individuals have just been wiped out, so there is just a smaller pool of likely victims/perpetrators? Like the fire burned but now there is no fuel for the fire to continue...especially if the crime bump was caused by the unusual circumstances of the pandemic and police pulling way back (but then things going back to more like normal) so there were not any long term secular trends that might keep crime elevated.
Similarly, could the big spike in fatal overdoses have significantly wiped out a subset of individuals (drug addicts) who are more likely to commit smaller property crimes? If previously, an addict would be have a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying on any particular act of taking drugs and in suddenly (because of fentanyl, etc.) it becomes 1 in 1,000 you suddenly lose a large population of individuals who are, at least stereotypically, more likely to commit property crime.
I was wondering similarly if the overall medical care chart was actually spiking in different regions at different times. When the Gambinis and Zoombinis have a turf war in New York, they get different hospitals than the Hatfields and McCoys fighting in Virgintucky.
In 2018 the American Medical Association published a comprehensive report on all 183 fatal non-justified non-suicide shootings for which firearms calibers were known* that had occurred in Boston between 2010 and 2014 inclusive. The report also looked at an equivalent number of non-fatal shootings, selected randomly from the larger number of such shootings.
* = In commissioning the report the AMA’s intent was to determine the lethality of various firearms calibers.
While there’s much interesting in the report, Table 2 touches on the issue of single vs. multiple hits. 72.8% of the non-fatal shootings involved single hits, as compared to just 35.0% of the fatal shootings; put differently, 65% of those unlucky enough to be shot two or more times died, compared to only 27.2% of those shot only once.
Careful; that study covered all fatal shootings within the study parameter, but was limited to 300 out of 1012 nonfatal shootings simply because they didn't have the manpower to assess all of the later. It's still possible to derive useful information from the study, but they really should have been more clear about that.
Assuming the roundfiled nonfatal shootings are statistically identical to those included in the study, I get 12.5% of single-hit shootings being fatal, vs 41.4% of multiple-hit shootings.
It doesn't seem to. I tried asking ChatGPT 3 times to generate images of a person, and all 3 were caucasian. I wonder if it takes your location into account. Maybe Japanese users get more Japanese generated people. But at least for me, it doesn't seem like only 30% of people generated by AI are white.
> Maybe Japanese users get more Japanese generated people. But at least for me, it doesn't seem like only 30% of people generated by AI are white.
Just as one data point here, I'm frequently in different countries, and it still defaults to white, prosperous PMC people when I generate images, unless specifically prompted otherwise.
But that could just be taking advantage of what it knows about me from past history - if it knows I'm American, speak in English, ask about PMC stuff, then it might be making that reasonable inference based on history regardless of geographical location.
On the intuitions vs. statistics question -- is it possible that people have simply adjust their behaviour enough to cancel out the increased risk from homeless drug addicts, thirty-six-times-felons who've been spared prison again, and other such dangerous people?
To use an analogy -- Say you have a country where violence against women is completely normalised, such that any woman walking around without a male relative is inevitably attacked by a gang of strange men. In consequence, women are pretty much always kept locked up at home. Statistically, this might look like a very safe country for women, but in terms of lived experience, it almost certainly wouldn't feel that way -- "I have to stay cooped up in home all day because if I set foot outside I'll inevitably be assaulted" is not exactly an attitude that produces a sense of security, even if it keeps you free from physical harm.
Similarly, if people in America are adjusting their behaviour -- say, by getting Ubers instead of walking or using public transport, or by moving to deliberately hard-to-get-around-in suburbs instead of walkable mixed-use neighbourhoods -- this might reduce the crime rate, but it would be arguably misleading to describe this as America getting safer, and it certainly wouldn't feel safer to the people having to adjust their behaviour so as to avoid getting victimised.
OK, I'm following up here an my earlier post where I suggested the fact that people have spent progressively less time with others and more with screens over the period of time Scott looked at is an important factor in the fall in rates of in-person crimes -- crimes out in the world where one person harms another of takes their property.
Asked GPT for stats on increase in crimes against US citizens committed entirely online against individuals, where the crime involved extracting money from the individual: so scams, phishing, identity theft, ransomware, financial fraud. Summary of 20 year trends:
total online crime complaints: increased from a few thousand to 860,000 per year
reported financial losses: from negligable to 16.6 billion
identify theft: increased from 325,000 to 6.5 million/year
Of course there is no reason that increase in online crime would have to be accompanied by a decrease in physical world crime. Still, this change is at least consistent with the theory that the decrease in physical world crime is the result of our all living and meeting our needs less in that world and more in the electronic one.
Of course online crime is up. Not online crime is harder to do.... ('cause of more cameras mostly, at least that's my premise.) So some people want to commit crime and online is the easiest way now.
Yeah this seems right to me. I live in rural america, not a big city. I don't hear about much crime. There are drunk drivers and such and domestic problems (fights). But mostly I feel pretty safe, I leave my keys in the car (in case someone needs to move it) and my door unlocked. I think the big thing that has changed is more cameras. If you're breaking into some place you very well might be seen. Someone always watching can make a difference.
Interesting that the Harris paper on reduced lethality of murder maybe doesn't hold up -- I've cited that one before to argue changing lethality it was part of the decline and now worry I was in error. The Harris paper did show that car crash lethality rates declined at the same rate as inferred assault/homicide lethality rates over the same 1960-2000 period, so that would be another interesting coincidence, if the lethality of murder did not actually go down.
It appears that Eckberg is using self reported serious injury rates to control for police reporting of assault, but one data source that could potentially be even more convincing would be "shootings per year". I don't think the FBI tracks that at a national level, but IIRC there are several cities that do, and one might be able to make homicide vs shooting graphs over time to look for lethality trends in those cities (that assumes that most homicides are shootings, which is close enough to correct that it shouldn't matter much if that ratio changes over time)
It could also be interesting to review how car crash lethality rates have changed since 2000, to see if those curves have decoupled with assault/homicide (IIRC, homicide and assault lethality, as measured by Harris' method, has not continued to decline since 2000).
Crime may be down but it seems to me that there is less fair-mindedness than there used to be. A larger share of the population is squatting in a trench somewhere, ready to hurl pieces of fire and shit at anyone they think is walking closer to the next trench over than to theirs.
Homicides reached a recent low in 2014, but then Black Lives Matter emerged at Ferguson in August, 2014 with Michael Brown's death. The Ferguson Effect of both increased black homicide deaths and increased black traffic fatalities (both likely stemming from less proactive policing due to Establishment endorsement of BLM) was first seen in the St. Louis area in late 2014, then spread to Baltimore in April 2025 with the Freddie Gray riots, to Chicago with the punishment of the Chicago Police Department from November 23, 2015 onward due to the bad shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Homicides and car crashes went up nationally by moderate amounts but by quite a bit where there were major BLM triumphs over the local cops.
But then BLM supporters started assassinating cops, as in NYC, Dallas, and Baton Rouge. The NYPD more or less mutinied against Mayor DiBlasio, and his police chief, Rudy Giuliani's first top cop Bill Bratton, backed the NYPD, the mayor gave in, and NYC's murder rate fell back to its usual low as the NYPD got back to business.
In July 2016, President Obama interrupted his trip to Poland to give a speech deploring recent police shootings of two black men. A few hours later, a BLM supporter in Dallas at a BLM march assassinated 5 Dallas cops and shot 8 more before becoming the first (but probably not the last) human being to be blown up by robot. Not long afterwards, another BLM supporter murdered three cops in Baton Rouge.
Although these ten BLM assassinations have largely been memoryholed by the media, it's probably not a coincidence that Donald Trump was elected in November 2016.
The Ferguson Effect faded, but then the Floyd Effect came in strong in late May 2020. For example, Chicago's all time worst day for murders, with 18, was Sunday May 31, 2020, six days after George Floyd's death. Traffic fatalities among blacks were about 50% higher in June 2020 than in June 2019.
According to the CDC, 44% more African-Americans died in 2021 than in 2019 by homicide and 39% more blacks died by motor vehicle accident. Looking at weekly data, this "Floyd Effect" for black homicide deaths started the weekend after George Floyd's demise on May 25, 2020.
When cops stop pulling over suspicious characters, suspicious characters feel more confident in carrying their illegal hand guns, and in driving more recklessly.
Blacks started to ease off slightly on carrying illegal handguns and speeding in 2022, with the increase in better behavior speeding up in 2023-2025 as the "racial reckoning" got increasingly memoryholed and the police were allowed to get back to work
Hispanics reacted more slowly than blacks to cops retreating to the donut shop under condemnation by The Establishment, with Hispanic deaths of exuberance peaking in 2022. But they've been falling since.
You can see modest upward trends in bad behavior for whites during the George Floyd era.
Asians appear to have totally ignored the Floyd Effect, other than in 2021 when they started getting murdered in hate crimes in increased numbers. But Asians didn't die more in traffic accidents.
So, American leadership got tens of thousands of incremental Americans, especially African-Americans killed, in pointless murders and car crashes from 2014-2023 during the Great Awokening by taking BLM seriously.
Have we learned any lessons? Barely anybody has mentioned that homicides and traffic fatalities have become closely correlated in this century depending upon police pro-activeness and cash in pockets.
So, it's quite likely that we could easily repeat these bloody events out of sheer ignorance.
The perception that crime is high seems delusional, probably originating to pessimistic narratives that people buy into rather than anything real. I spent years living in one of the highest crime areas of my city with large amounts of public housing full of drug addicts. The crime was supposedly so bad that they started having police patrolling the streets at night in a way I’d never experienced anywhere else. Yet I never experienced any crime or heard any second or third person anecdotes about crime. I don’t doubt there were problems, but they pale in comparison to what ive heard from boomers, where theft and burglaries were just something lots of people experienced. As far as I can tell theres no rational reason a person my age (30) and in my area could think crime is rampant.
Why did you state "these data are counterintuitive". Is it a reference to the idea that some people think crime is going up?
Fwiw, it seems perfectly intuitive to me. The 80s were peak crime panic culture. So many movies from that era have street crime as a central menace. Two consecutive bond movies with a drug dealer the villain!
I have also noticed and been annoyed by plexiglass in shops, but I remember far greater cultural penetration than that.
> It would be an extraordinary coincidence if [bias in the NCVS] exactly matched the proposed reporting bias to police
I don’t have a horse in this race, but I’ve seen the argument-by-coincidence pop up in a few articles now and it’s never as convincing to me as it apparently is to Scott. Why is it so improbable that two unrelated errors be in the same direction and similar in magnitude? And why not consider whether the errors are correlated - either affected by the same mechanism or by one institution using the other’s results as a sanity check?
Banned for this post.
Maybe the total amount of bans has not increased, but it does seems like the first few comments have a higher ban rate on most posts. Before I scrolled down, I asked myself "I wonder if the top comment will be banned again."
Looking at this person's profile description, it reads:
"9/11/01 truth, 2001 weaponized anthrax & unproven anthrax vaccine scam truth, Covid/mask/vaccine truth, worthless electronic voting machine truth, Republic no Democracy truth, sound money & we don't have capitalism truth."
I am 99% confident that this person did not contribute to this discussion in an honest and good faith manner, but why do these kinds of commenters always grab the top spot? Trying to capture attention? How are they so good at it? Are they running bots to comment as soon as you post an article?
Weird. Or maybe I'm just seeing patterns in the dark. Entirely plausible as well.
Could be bots, as well. I don't know why anyone would want that, but the level of dedication to rss watch and snipe for crankitude of that degree is weird.
This is the most likely explanation I think.
The cause is likely to be a mixture of increased policing by Scott, increasing lead levels, and better posting technology (LLMs). We need statistics and a post on this complex topic.
Is this satire? I'm unaware of any research showing lead levels are measurably increasing in the population. I believe the consensus is the opposite since the ban of lead based products in the mid 20th century.
This was satire.
Rhetorical lead. Platonic lead. Spiritual lead.
The lead of the Heart, one might say even mayhaps
Ok this was really funny. I'm sorry someone else missed your point. Just wanted to let you know it was appreciated.
(But have you considered it's lead levels in data centers causing the LLMs to get aggressive with their comments?)
>(But have you considered it's lead levels in data centers causing the LLMs to get aggressive with their comments?)
LOL! Cute... :-) Though, even if the solder on the PCBs is lead/tin, the rate of IQ rise of the LLMs would argue that it can't be doing them much harm...
Idiots can post really fast because they don't have to bother with actually reading the article. See a headline, make a post, get first post.
I think Scott's probably got more energy and attention to spend on comments right after he posts something. He probably pays more attention to the first hour's comments.
This is starting to suggest a comment string that replicates the arguments of the article. Is it worse/better or just worse/better reported/noticed?
Cranks don’t have to spend as long reading an article and arriving at valuable insights before they comment. As long as a decent population of cranks are on their Substack feeds, some of them should see these articles as they come out by chance.
It's the other way around, banned posts become the top post (or oldest post with how acx default sorts) right now the banned post is listed as being posted 20 hours ago, and falling knife's top thread says 21 hours ago for me.
Likely an artifact of the sorting algorithm. My guess is a deleted post is treated as empty, meaning in chronological order it floats to the top because a database thinks it's been there since the dawn of the unix era, or something like that.
Murder rate doesn't really matter. For the vast majority of the population who doesn't live in gang areas the murder rate is basically zero and is flat over time. The crime that matters is the crime people actually see. At the Mission and 24th BART station I see people selling stolen goods on blankets on the sidewalk and the police do nothing. I see people shooting heroin in full view of the public. I see videos of people stealing from CVS while security stands there watching and the police do nothing. When I go to the same CVS I see that everything is locked up and I have to go find an employee to buy it. It wasn't like this 20 years ago. Don't tell me crime is down. I'm not wrong. The statistics produced by the same police who do nothing about crime are wrong.
Jeff Bezos: When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
"The statistics produced by the same police who do nothing about crime are wrong."
The entire post is meant to be a refutation of this argument. Did you read it?
But couldn't this be whole to part fallacy? I live in Ohio. It's definitely (much) safer here in general than when I was growing up and the anecdotes follow the data. But is it wrong to say to someone who has lived in San Francisco their whole life and can see where the weak points of the broadscale data is that they're out-of-hand incorrect?
They're also directly reaffirming your safety culture argument from your last paragraph. I can, uh, anecdotally attest that almost nothing was locked up when I grew up inner city in the 80s and 90s, while today all sorts of products are lucite sealed. Ditto for cars - you may remember The Club - where the $1 car key of the past has been replaced by an annoying system that requires a $100 car key but definitely deters car theft to a substantial degree.
I said myself in the post that San Francisco was getting worse in many ways, I'm just objecting to the specific quote that I quoted about how the statistics are "produced by the same police who do nothing about crime".
Is the population of San Francisco increasing (relatively to the rest of USA)?
I'm thinking in the direction of "less crime happens, but it happens in more visible places", so there is less "crime" but more "observations of crime".
Have a sibling who's lived in SF since the late 1980s and been a homeowner in that city since the mid 90s. He and his friends and neighbors feel safer than they did a few years ago and _much_ safer than they did during the 1990s.
I'm a mostly-lifelong Chicagoan including now 15 years in as a homeowner in the central part of the city. My wife and neighbors and I all feel safer now than a few years ago, and there's no comparison at all now to how the city felt during the 1980s and 90s.
The white share of Chicago's population has held stable around 31.5% from 2000 thru 2020.
The black share dropped from 36.4% to 28.7% over those 20 years.
Asians and Hispanics are up.
So, Chicago should be getting less shooty.
New Orleanians also feel safer now than a few years ago. The crime wave that began in April 2020 definitely degraded quality of life for average residents of the cities that experienced the crime waves.
Btw, once the PPP fraud dollars ran out the criminals started breaking into vehicles to steal guns and so the criminal activity spread to other areas of life. And then you had young thugs that didn’t know how to use a gun holding people up and essentially accidentally shooting them because the adrenaline would lead to itchy trigger fingers. So before a terrible murder I read a Reddit post that essentially predicted the murder because the Redditor said if young thugs are holding you up you must consider your life in grave danger and so you have to kill the young thugs before they kill you.
I have lived in many places, including SF for the past decade. It is one of the safest places I've lived. My parents live in the midwest and have had their cars broken into in their driveway more times than I have had my car broken into in San Francisco.
I know people who grew up in SF. The stories of what this city were like in the 80s and 90s are honestly jaw dropping. A friend was born and raised in Bernal Heights in the 80s/90s. They told me that their friends were not allowed to visit their house because it was too dangerous. Today, this is one of the bougiest neighborhoods in the city. I had to move out because it became too expensive. This same thing is true for many, many neighborhoods across the city.
Of course, this is just my narrative. You have a narrative in your mind as well that says "San Francisco is unsafe." Rather than us trying to justify our own narratives, let's just look at the data. The purpose of this post was to analyze the data as thoroughly as possible, and it pretty clearly demonstrates that things are getting safer. Every piece of data I've ever been able to get my hands on regarding crimes rates say the same thing: crime across the US and developed world as a whole is rapidly declining (with the exception of a crime spike during and immediately after lockdowns).
San Francisco's black share of the population dropped from 13% in 1970 (which was about the national average) to 5% in recent years. African Americans comprise the majority of known murder offenders in the United States, so the demographics of San Francisco (lots of low crime Asians, lots of wealthy, educated whites, some Hispanics) are extremely favorable from a homicide standpoint.
San Francisco should be about as safe as Monaco, which has had one murder in 40 years.
I did. I do not dispute that murders and violent crimes are actually down. I dispute they relevant to the average person's perception of the level of crime. I do not dispute that car thefts are down. I think the NCVS is a much more accurate source than police reports, and I do not dispute that the percent of people victimized by violent or property crime victimization is flat (but not down) over the last 20 years as this survey reports.
But what about the owner of the store that is stolen from 100 times a year? Still counts as only one victim of property crime. What about all the heroin needles and thieves fencing goods out in the open that I see? If I were surveyed for the NCVS I would answer "no" because I have not been the victim of property or violent crime even though I see it all the time. And that's just a few statistical problems I can think of here. But still that's beside the point.
The point is that I see crime frequently and I didn't see it 20 years ago in the same places. I am inconvenienced by countermeasures that retail stores use to counter this crime that they didn't seem to need 20 years ago. I am victimized by this even though I am not the direct victim of the crimes in question.
The point is that I feel entitled to enforcement of the law in exchange for the tax money that is taken out of my pay check every two weeks, and I do not seem to be getting that. If the absolute rate of crime were higher, but those videos of shoplifters end with the security guard beating the crap out of the thief and the police coming to haul him away, I would probably be happier about the situation because at least thy are trying and we are all on the same side here fighting against the wave of degeneracy. Now I am very clear on the difference between this and the crime rate, but I am 50% autist. Most people aren't and I can totally sympathize when they conflate this situation with high crime rates.
The most important part of my comment is the Jeff Bezos quote. The fundamental problem with your analysis is that you are trying to disprove the claim that crime is rampant by looking at the absolute rate of crime as defined by statistical reporting. But that isn't the claim because when people talk about "crime" that isn't what we mean. (There is a similar problem when it comes to claims about "homeless" people). The fundamental problem is that you are trying to prove the public wrong here, but (other than some lizardman percentage) we aren't wrong. A better approach would be to look for statistics that match the public perception of crime and back into a definition from them. IMO the relevant question here is "how do we formally describe and measure this very real societal change that the public is describing as 'crime'?" I'm not really interested in debating whether or not it is real because it obviously is, but I'm very interested in analyzing exactly what happened and how to measure it.
"What about all the heroin needles and thieves fencing goods out in the open that I see?"
For a counter-anecdote, I live in an okay neighborhood where I don't see too much crime. I was told by a neighborhood veteran that the local park, which is perfectly nice and where I bring my children, was covered with strewn heroin needles and a no-go zone for normal citizens twenty years ago.
I don't know if your anecdote or my anecdote is more valid, which is why, contra Jeff Bezos, we sometimes need statistics. Although given how much data Amazon collects on its customers, my guess is that Bezos was making a subtler point than just "always trust your gut".
But here's a sneak preview of a post I have tentatively scheduled for tomorrow called "Crime As A Proxy For Disorder" - https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/7d5a6f4c-dcd3-49a1-b7e7-e409168d99b0
I concur with Fallingknife (and moonshadow below). Here in Chicago, the signs of societal rot are everywhere, and what was a reasonably comfortable middle-class existence 15 years ago is no longer viable. You avoid taking the EL as much as possible or walking back home after dark. Coffee places close because they can't deal with the disorder. The local Jewell now hands plastic bags (they are 15c each) to individual shoppers in advance, by the count. Murders are indeed down a bit, citywide, but when before they were almost completely concentrated in "bad" areas, it's no longer the case. You hear gunshots from around the corner. Not often, no, but then you just shrug: this is normal now. People living in safe suburbs don't experience any of this, but what am I to do? I don't drive and love what the city has to offer. My formerly nice and cozy neighborhood has been transformed, and I suspect, for good. Can this be reflected in the crime stats? I doubt it.
Every closed coffee place is lower crime because no crimes happen when they're closed!
Abandoned buildings are actually criminogenic, which is related to why fixing literal broken windows is the only RCT in criminology shown to be effective https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/uncontrolled/
I visited Chicago in November and took the EL after dark, both into downtown from Midway and out of downtown to O'Hare, as well as several times to get around downtown. I also walked around downtown, during the day and after dark. I didn't encounter anything concerning or that made me feel unsafe. Was I just really lucky?
You seem awfully certain about your ability to know how unsafe you are. How often do you recognize people carrying concealed weapons? A garrotte perhaps?
Very sorry your daily experience is feeling that way; been there, and it sucks.
Today I ride the L (not "El") many days and my youngest child rides it home from school almost every school day; I ride CTA busses on many other days. There are zero problems on the busses, and the L issues (quite serious 2021-2023) have been visibly declining during the past say 18 to 24 months. (It's not super clear to me why actually.)
No idea what the plastic shopping bags -- which are taxed by city ordinance for reasons unrelated to crime levels -- have to do with crime levels.
Coffee places close because for some years we had a stupid number of them being opened in this city and meanwhile US per-capita coffee consumption today is exactly the same as it was in 2002. But no worries, within a certain demographic there will always be new attempts to create that perfect young-adults city hangout like they had in "Friends". [How do you have a million-dollar cute restaurant in one of the most competitive dining locales in the world? Start with three million....]
My siblings and I heard gunshots all the time in the city during the 1980s and 90s. Now my wife and I have for 15 years resided in what used to be described by realtors as a "challenging" or "urban pioneer" neighborhood, and I am an obsessive about having fresh air and hence windows open, and we haven't heard one in years. [What we do hear _far_ more often than ever before is motorcycles backfiring which irritates me and drives our family dog crazy. I infer that tricked-out cycles have gotten cheaper in real dollars or something. A pox upon all the owners of same.]
Lived during the 2000s in one of Chicago's nicer suburbs and overall it felt about as safe as our city neighborhood does today. There were differences in specifics e.g. I knew many more people then who'd had their car or home broken into, than I do know.
Being a dog owner who does most of the daily walking, I have for years now regularly walked after dark across both our own city neighborhood and a neighboring one which was historically regarded as high-crime. Did the same throughout the 1990s when living in shall we say a "newly gentrifying maybe" portion of the city. That daily walking is definitely a safer daily experience now than a few years ago. (And compared to the 1990s, LOLOL....so many times in that era I arrived at home thinking "gonna need a bigger dog".)
I have lived in Chicago for 15 years, and my experience is more or less the opposite. I let my daughter wander the neighborhood on her own starting when she was 9. Now that she is 11, I taught her how to ride the El by herself. Coffee places are not, in actual fact, closed. I have never heard gunshots in Chicago and I'm not handed plastic bags in advance at the Jewel. I don't live in a particularly fancy neighborhood, although its by no means a dangerous neighborhood either. I'd probably describe it as transitional. People who have lived here longer than me say it used to be much rougher, which tracks with the visible gentrification I see.
There absolutely is serious crime happening in Chicago -- there have been shootings not all that far away from my house in recent years -- so I'm not trying to portray it as a paradise. Chicago has many, many problems. But no, signs of societal rot are certainly not everywhere in the city.
Maybe what you are observing is a local phenomenon. I really don't know. Since a lot of people seem to want to insist that their anecdotes give the lie to the broader statistics, it seems important to point out that your experience is far from universal.
I have no dog in this fight, having not been to Chicago in over a decade now, but I need to ask: what is this concept where receiving plastic bags sooner rather than later at this place called the Jewel serves as a harbinger of civilizational decline? As an outsider, I'm completely in the dark.
My experience is similar to Mutton's.
Lived in the same part of downtown Chicago for almost 10 years. Speaking purely on vibes and anecdotes as a normie-looking white dude:
- I can't really say violent crime is down, because I've never witnessed any instances. I think maybe 3 years ago I saw two dudes get into a scuffle on the L. In the 2010s, I knew two guys who each got mugged.
- Never heard of this Jewel bag thing
- Some coffee shops have closed, others have opened. I think my neighborhood is slightly down on volume, but up on quality.
- Either I don't know what gun shots sound like, or I've never heard them.
- Witnessed maybe 3 instances of shoplifting? In one case, it was the owner of a liquor store chasing a guy out with a broom and then calling the police. The remainder were dudes shoveling random items into bags at a CVS or Walgreens in the early post-COVID days.
- There was a spike in vandalism (window breaking) in the summer 2020
The only crime-related thing I have to complain about nowadays is public nuisance stuff on the L. It feels more common today to see people going up and down the cars begging, or selling drugs or candy.
Chicago tore down most of the public housing projects near the Loop, such as notorious Cabrini-Green, which was only a mile inland from the Magnificent Mile, the leading shopping street between the coasts.
So much of the inner city that was to be avoided when I lived in Chicago in 1982-2000 is now walkable. For example, on my book tour to Chicago in 2024, I stayed in a neighborhood 2 miles west of the Merchandise Mart that I had never thought to visit when I lived there because there was nothing of interest to a yuppie like myself.
On the other hand, places that were superb in the 1990s, like North Michigan Avenue, are looking worse for the wear. In 2020, Water Tower Mall, long Chicago's top shopping mall, got looted twice during the Summer of George and was looking depressed in 2024.
And I see more accounts of shootouts in River North lately, which was the capital of gentrifying yuppiedom in the 1980s-1990s.
So, if you'd told me in 2000 that the Daley and Emanuel Administrations would successfully tear down all the big housing projects within, say, a few miles of the Loop, I'd expect Chicago to be pretty utopian by 2026.
And in many ways it is pretty nice. But it is also falling apart in other ways.
Keep in mind that Chicago is doing pretty well relative to other Rust Belt big cities in the Mississippi and Great Lakes watersheds like New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cleveland, etc.
Old cities with great locations for water transport have been doing badly in the 21st Century relative to newer cities built around highway and air transport like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Dallas. In general.
In 2006 I was in NYC and one of the people I was working with got an apartment in Bed-Stuy so apparently it was already nicer by that time. I think a crappy 3/1 1200 square foot bungalow in Compton is now probably a million dollar home.
Here's the CDC's counts of deaths by homicide in Cook County, IL (Chicago plus inner ring suburbs) among non-Hispanic whites from 1999 thru 2024 (the CDC puts a 6 month lag on homicides so 2025 full year data is not yet available). The worst year was 2001 with 104 homicides (which may be related to 9/11 -- I'm unsure if these are people murdered in Cook County or residents of Cook County who were murdered). The best year was 2013 with 22 homicides, right before the rise of BLM. The big increase from 2015 (24 homicides) to 2016 (52 homicides) was due to Mayor Emanuel releasing the video of the deplorable shooting of Laquan McDonald on November 23, 2015, which led to the ACLU winning a big court order against the Chicago police department, which led to murders soaring in 2016.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D76;jsessionid=654C377E865D197DAD9727C15B3F
1999 90 2,641,785 3.4
2000 70 2,613,200 2.7
2001 104 2,568,140 4.0
2002 73 2,522,784 2.9
2003 89 2,481,005 3.6
2004 69 2,437,720 2.8
2005 67 2,396,108 2.8
2006 57 2,355,942 2.4
2007 46 2,336,838 2.0
2008 55 2,326,389 2.4
2009 47 2,322,451 2.0
2010 42 2,314,969 1.8
2011 36 2,310,843 1.6
2012 44 2,304,906 1.9
2013 22 2,306,124 1.0
2014 33 2,288,551 1.4
2015 24 2,268,860 1.1
2016 52 2,243,887 2.3
2017 46 2,239,612 2.1
2018 42 2,217,358 1.9
2019 42 2,200,143 1.9
2020 32 2,170,599 1.5
2018 41 2,180,074 1.9
(1.3 - 2.6)
2019 41 2,162,156 1.9
(1.4 - 2.6)
2020 32 2,131,758 1.5
(1.0 - 2.1)
2021 46 2,145,367 2.1
(1.6 - 2.9)
2022 46 2,098,822 2.2
(1.6 - 2.9)
2023 39 2,067,553 1.9
(1.3 - 2.6)
2024 34 2,082,924 1.6
(1.1 - 2.3)
Here are non-Hispanic black deaths by homicide in Cook County:
The worst year in 1999-2024 was 2021 during the "Racial Reckoning," when blacks were about 33 times as likely to be murdered as whites.
Heckuva job, Black Lives Matter!
1999 529 1,407,944 37.6
2000 528 1,408,513 37.5
2001 504 1,398,106 36.0
2002 499 1,388,015 36.0
2003 514 1,376,060 37.4
2004 399 1,361,597 29.3
2005 408 1,346,398 30.3
2006 442 1,330,004 33.2
2007 399 1,315,487 30.3
2008 430 1,302,931 33.0
2009 428 1,293,197 33.1
2010 420 1,287,791 32.6
2011 406 1,279,061 31.7
2012 446 1,275,890 35.0
2013 408 1,264,413 32.3
2014 413 1,256,320 32.9
2015 472 1,246,966 37.9
2016 684 1,239,639 55.2
2017 616 1,229,482 50.1
2018 538 1,193,642 45.1
(41.3 - 48.9)
2019 511 1,184,247 43.1
(39.4 - 46.9)
2020 759 1,174,662 64.6
(60.0 - 69.2)
2021 858 1,180,443 72.7
(67.8 - 77.5)
2022 708 1,159,072 61.1
(56.6 - 65.6)
2023 618 1,139,137 54.3
(50.0 - 58.5)
2024 519 1,137,704 45.6
(41.7 - 49.5)
One obvious observation is that the homicide death ratio of blacks to whites got _much_ worse in Cook County over the course of the 21st Century. The black homicide victimization rate was 11 times worse than the white rate in 1999 and 29 times worse in 2024.
This is no doubt due to FDR's redlining getting much more powerful from 1999-2024.
Or something.
I've lived in Chicago for almost 30 years now - there isn't sign of societal rot everywhere, in fact it is almost the opposite. You really should avoid relying on anecdotes.
I think your anecdote is equally as valid as mine or anyone else's. More relevant would probably be a comparison of anecdotes from people in your neighborhood over time vs others. My guess would be that you would find a lot of people in previously unaffected neighborhoods are now reporting "crime."* That would no longer be anecdotal, though. It would be statistical. And it's a great case for your point that statistics are important, which I very much agree with. But it's important to keep them in their place as a tool to analyze reality rather than the best representation of it. I think that is closer to Jeff Bezos's point here, along with the concept that it really doesn't matter if the customers are "right," it matters if they are satisfied, and you could say the same about the government and its citizens.
Your next post is exactly the type of analysis that I find interesting and I look forward to reading it.
*Another interesting angle here would be by class. I am going to make a guess that what you will see now is a lot more middle class people and above seeing this in their neighborhoods. (And from a public narrative angle those are the only people who matter). Gentrification might be an explanation here. People raised in suburbs moving into urban areas now seeing a lot more crime and disorder than they are used to.
"More relevant would probably be a comparison of anecdotes from people in your neighborhood over time vs others. "
I might ask about this on the next survey, any suggestions for wording?
I don't have a suggestion for wording, but I think you need some way to counter the selection bias where people who feel like crime has gone up are more likely to move away.
Is it possible what you value isn't anecdotes at all, but rather, qualitative data? Because we're getting a *lot* of anecdotes here from people who say crime is in fact down, and you have no way to answer them without aggregating anecdotes into some kind of data.
"It really doesn't matter if the customers are 'right,' it matters if they are satisfied, and you could say the same about the government and its citizens."
But it does matter whether the citizens are unsatisfied because there is some potentially measurable trend that is getting worse, or because the arrival of social media brought access to rage compilation videos of shoplifters getting away with it.
You claim that the former is happening, not just the latter, but anecdotes and personal narratives can be influenced by both types of effect. That's why we need data.
Anecdotes are better than statistics but what we really need is a large collection of anecdotes over time. Then we can achieve anecdotal significance.
very good, very good
What's wrong with graffiti? I feel like the main reason people other than those whose walls are being drawn on have to care about graffiti is that it might serve as a signal that there are criminals around, parsing the graffiti as essentially gang signs, thugs marking their territory. But if crime is down in those areas then the graffiti must be the work of harmless mischief-makers making the city a little more colorful. What's left to worry about?
Is ugly.
Perhaps I'm biased by the presence of a very nice wall painting of a robin near where I'm from. Still, while I'm no great fan of the "illegibly-scrawled spray-painted initials" kind of graffiti, its colorfulness still makes it a thousand times preferable to blank slate-grey walls as far as I'm concerned. If we had actually nice architecture, I might care more about the extents to which unattractive graffiti defaces it, but I'll take colourful manmade ugliness over greyscale machine-like ugliness.
What's wrong with graffiti is it's property destruction. Disgree? Give me your address and I will come graffiti your house, car, laptop.
I specifically said that "the people whose walls are being drawn on" have a very understandable complaint. But if I'm the owner of an eyesore, I would have a perfectly understandable complaint, in exactly the same "my rights as a private individual have been violated" way, if somebody remodeled it in my absence without permission into a beautiful palace the whole neighborhood admires. That's a completely different question from whether it makes random pedestrians' lives worse, as they walk about the streets, for there to be a lot of graffiti around.
My problem with graffiti is it is an individual claiming public space for their personal aggrandizement.
I like the wall art- San Francisco is full of it and it makes the city a more fun and vibrant place. What I dislike are the tags. They are just the person claiming that space as their own. That visual space belongs to all of us.
For me, the problem with graffiti is the egotism. The "artists" believe they have something to say that I need to hear. They do not.
It's a leading indicator of (more) lawlessness and lack of fear of being stopped by anyone.
I wonder if the problem is too much aggregation, and that the paradox would be resolved by looking at e.g. the neighborhood level, where maybe crime has increased in some neighborhoods and decreased in other neighborhoods.
My guess would be that Jeff Bezos, who has been one of the most talented business executives in the world for the last 30+ years, has a near-genius gift for noticing correct statistical patterns from mundane events, so he has often been right more than many of the professional statistical analysts he employs.
But, not everybody is Jeff Bezos.
DuPont Circle 30 years ago. There were many places in DC that were genuine "no go" places (needles and all). DC is unrecognizable. New York is unrecognizable from the 1970s (although the 1950's really did have people with dollar bills on strings, trying to lure little boys to you-know-what).
Could there be an effect where, in addition to crime decreasing overall, the crime that remains has become more concentrated in specific areas? To the people living there, crime has increased, it is super visible, and they rightfully cry bloody murder. Everyone else experiences no crime and therefore does not complain and is not visible on social media. So on an average day, the zeitgeist is full of “crime is much worse now”.
One of my theories is that reverse white flight (eg of white people into cities) means they are seeing cities for the first time in 60 years and being horrified at what's been there all along. I don't know if that's true.
Anecdotally, when I first came to New York City in 1978, union Square and Bryant Park were both disastrous. They were both called needle Park. Also I lived next to Tompkins Square Park in the east village of New York and it was a park you didn’t go into unless it was broad daylight and you stayed close to Avenue A. All three of them are very nice spaces these days. I brought my son up next to Tompkins Square Park and it was great. Meanwhile out in Queens there’s a massive increase in open air on the street prostitution which got a lot of press from the New York Post about two years ago. I think the police have cracked down on that, but I’m not really sure. These kinds of quality of life crimes are difficult to quantify.
There was a massive amount of bicycle theft during the 80s and that seems to have calmed down, although I do not have a bicycle anymore so I’m not sure about that.
Did someone steal your bike?
I went to college in the 90s. I still remember the safety lecture the police officer gave us during the orientation: "If you have a bike, it will get stolen. This is inevitable. We do not investigate bike theft because stopping it is impossible, and we can better utilize our limited resources on investigating murder and rape. Speaking of which, if you are walking along such-and-such street, do not take a shortcut through the parking structure. You are likely to be raped and murdered there".
The lecture really opened my eyes on the realities of crime and policing.
I don’t know a single person in nyc who rides a personal bike from place to place. The only people I see with personal bikes are those who do sports and train with it. So, they just go in a big loop and never stop anywhere.
If you’re in nyc, it’s well known that you can’t own a bike and lock it up anywhere - it’ll be stolen immediately. That’s why everyone uses the citi bike stuff if they want to get around via bike. I know lots of people - including myself - who use Citi bike a lot. I much prefer having my own but the city doesn’t allow that kind of safety for personal bikes. I’d assume general knowledge of theft and seeing it happen so much would be the reason why no one bikes here…
When I stayed in Greenwich Village to look for a job in 1982, I was advised by New Yorkers to never cross 2nd Avenue to the east side of the street. The existence of nightmarish avenues named after letters of the alphabet further to the east ("Alphabet City") was rumored to exist but nobody I knew had ever dared go there.
Also, nobody ever went west of about 8th avenue. Theoretically, the Hudson River had to be out there somewhere, but few had ever seen it from the ground.
While I was visiting in August 1982, Volcker cut interest rates and stocks started to rise for the time first time since the 1960s.
My wild ass speculation is that police forces are embarking on essentially a PR campaign, by concentrating their resources on the scariest crimes people care the most about (rape, murder, assault, etc), and taking their focus away from crimes that aren't as headline generating (drugs, prostitution, shoplifting, general public disorder). In particular, they're avoiding the things that actively give them *bad* PR, like kicking homeless people out of parks, or telling the schizophrenic guy on the subway that he has to leave, or generally doing the sort of "Broken Windows" policing that gets you accused of racism. Thus, certain forms of crime are down, while others are up.
Or crime went way up starting on May 25, 2020, but now the Floyd Effect is over and the cops are back to fighting crime, so crime is falling fast under Trump.
This is a fucking great theory
The opposite seems to me to be more likely, and to explain a lot of the observations.
When I moved to Richmond in 2001, it had one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country. But the vast majority murders were in a few square blocks which were basically an open-air wholesale drug market.
The murder rate for the whole city has gone down a lot. But I'm not sure that the murder rate for the city *excluding the open-air drug market* has gone down - and avoiding the open-air drug market was trivially easy.
Or less concentrated. If last year there were 100 murders in the ghetto and none in my neighborhood, and this year there are 80 murders in the ghetto and 10 in my neighborhood, that's going to feel to me like a huge and scary increase in crime, even though overall murders are down.
> I am inconvenienced by countermeasures that retail stores use to counter this crime that they didn't seem to need 20 years ago
I'm wondering if it's because, 20 years ago, they didn't think customers would put up with having things in locked cabinets but today they think people will.
Isn't it because of current laws like "you can steal stuff in the shop but not more than $900's worth". At some point corporate will have to do something. Like close the location or lock everything away.
I don't think Scott mentioned changed laws as a source of reduced crime for some reason. Or did I miss it?
That’s, like, not really true though. The change that happened was in the felony/misdemeanor threshold.
I don’t remember where I read it, but I once saw someone distinguish between crime and direct contact with crime. Their point was that if you have direct contact with crime, i.e. if you are aware of it in your vicinity so that you sacrifice behaviors you would prefer to protect against it.
One interpretation offered, that doesn’t seem to apply to SF, is it’s a consequence of greater urbanization, where we simply have contact with more people, so the likely hood we’re aware of crimes increases.
I've heard that, in large cities, people aren't more likely to be a victim of crime, but they are more likely to be a *witness* to crime...
>But what about the owner of the store that is stolen from 100 times a year? Still counts as only one victim of property crime.
Is this true? My instincts tell me he would almost certainly count 100 times, unless everybody doing these statistics is extremely stupid. Do all Walmart thefts really just count as 1 victim, 1 theft?
The above comment captures my thoughts on the matter as well. I don't think the "statistics ...are wrong", but the statistics do not quantify everything I experience as crime.
I have a neighbor who sells drugs and engages in prostitution, but the police do nothing no matter how many times we call them. My packages are continually stolen by thieves. The subway is full of antisocial people doing drugs in public and peeing in the station. Graffiti is replaced as quickly as it is painted over. There is dog shit everywhere from people not picking up after their animals (maybe not a crime, but it should be!).
While I'm happy that it's less likely I'll be murdered or assaulted, there are still many aggravations.
Maybe the problem is that the petty crimes have gotten more numerous. Everyone has their Amazon packages stolen now, whereas in the past the chances of being robbed, as in someone breaks into your house and takes your stuff, were quite low even though that sort of robbery was more common then than it is now.
Criminals being addicted to video games and instagrams sounds like it's intended as a joke, but should not be underrated as a cause of the decline.
Package thefts are included in the NCVS and the category that includes them seems to have a similar trend to all other categories. I've been a selected respondent to the NCVS before and they ask questions in a very thorough way, that I would expect to get folks to include package theft. I'll also say that I've never had a package stolen despite living in a city and not having any protections against it, so the claim that it's a universal experience seems questionable (maybe I'm a crazy outlier? but given that basically everyone gets fairly frequent deliveries these days, I'd expect it to show up more in the data if basically everyone was getting packages stolen).
Yeah, my theory about package theft is that it happens in particular areas that are prone to it, and those areas are not necessarily otherwise "high crime" areas where people are inured to it, and so we get some level of people being shocked that they're exposed to a crime rate which is not globally high, just sort of unevenly distributed in a way that feels novel.
That's very possible. I've literally never had a package stolen despite their being left outside my door, and I regularly see my neighbors' packages left outside unstolen. But, I hear about package theft all the time in the next city over.
There was that thing about some huge amount of shoplifting in NYC being driven by... Was it low hundreds of individuals? Sense of how common porch piracy is might be driven by being physically proximate to just one or two high-velocity offenders.
I've never had a package stolen either.
I believe you, I guess, but I am surprised to hear it. I live in a fairly good but "affordable" neighborhood and the buildings on my street have packages stolen relatively frequently. Not every day, but there's a spate of thefts every few months, especially around Christmas. Neighbors try to stop it by bringing packages out of the lobbies and moving them upstairs, but it's an imperfect solution.
I work at a college that is required to report crimes and I get an email at least once a week about packages being stolen from dormitories or college-occupied buildings.
I have family that lives in the suburbs in a different state and they've had packages taken off the doorstep - caught on camera.
Of course no one bothers reporting to the police - you just call Amazon and say it was lost. (They won't replace it if you tell them it was stolen.)
I'm surprised the NCVS statistics don't show a higher number. Maybe it's so common that people forgot to include it! I know my experience is only an anecdote, but it's made my sense that this is common so strong that I am really skeptical if someone says it's not. I can only say that I now do not understand this situation.
It's funny, after reading this post and a few of the comments, I was trying to remember the most recent time I personally had been the victim of a crime. And it wasn't until, like, two hours later that I remembered that I had to get a new credit card last year because someone halfway across the country was trying to make purchases with my information. As you say, credit card theft is so wildly commonplace that it doesn't even register as "crime" to me anymore - It's just something unfortunate that happens to you occasionally, like bad weather or a stomachache. I certainly wasn't so naive as to try to get the police involved.
I don't know how NCVS runs their survey, but if you had called me up yesterday and asked if I had been a victim of a crime in the last year, I probably would have said no.
I had some packages stolen for a time. Then my landlord finally managed to evict the literal murderer in the basement, and the theft stopped. We also got 5/6ths of a sixpack of laogama he'd I guess not found to his taste after Amazon refunded us, so that was nice.
Anyway, haven't experienced package theft before or since. Been alive 32 years. My little brother and mother experienced a bunch when they lived in West Oakland.
I've had something stolen from my doorstep, but it wasn't a package from Amazon; it was a new credit card from BankOfAmerica.
I ended up liveblogging the appearance of multiple fraudulent charges totaling a thousand or so dollars when accessing my account online, while I was on hold with BoA to have the card cancelled and arrange some other way to receive a new one. (They wouldn't simply mail it for some reason.)
As of my writing this, Scott's next article, "Crime as a Proxy for Disorder", is up, and I notice it does not mention fraud, which strikes me as a strong indicator of disorder, depending on the interpretation.
ETA: it was BankOfAmerica, not CitiBank; my memory was off.
> and engages in prostitution
I don't see how that's your problem (or anyone's, really).
Not properly zoned.
And, presuming this happens at their home, who are the customers? And do they take up all the parking spots?
I suppose you have not met the sort of people who have sex with their meth dealer. (Actually, it is not clear to me if they are paying for the meth with sex or buying sex in addition to meth but it makes little difference in its effects on the neighbors.) If you had, it would be quite clear why it is a problem. The "not properly zoned" comment is sort of correct.
Can't say that I have, but this seems to be a problem with meth dealers, not prostitutes. Drugs make everything worse.
Barring the one line about police looking the other way, doesn’t the rest of this comment explain why things are less safe? Street disorder is high. We can all see this.
You're using the words "less safe" to refer to a state of affairs where you're much less likely to be murdered, raped, or assaulted. I'm sympathetic to the more-disorder argument (and was planning to write about it as the second half of this post tomorrow) but people can't seem to make it without suggesting that it also applies to safety, which I am trying to establish is false.
Fine, Street unpleasantness street filth, street disgust, whatever you want to call it. If your only defense is that "murders which wouldn't happen to you happen to other people slightly less", it's meaningless to me. The degree to which I am "much less likely to be murdered, raped, or assaulted" is utterly insignificant
Right, the murder rate isn't the part of our cities that is making people feel unsafe.
Yeah. In the 90's the gangs that ran the Mission would never have let people sell stuff on the street (unless they knew them and the product was drugs). Lots of murders though, the vast majority over turf. Believe me, the city was a lot more dangerous in the previous millennium...even though it looked better.
Is it possible that people's perception of personal safety isn't perfectly coupled to the real statistical murder rate? I attend a tabletop gaming group every Saturday; twice in the last two months, we've had a guy come in and walk around the restaurant asking everybody for cash. When I turned him down the first time, he said "I hope the Devil rapes you". I don't know what he said to everybody else.
That's not going to show up in any statistics, but I don't think it's unreasonable for somebody to feel less safe after an encounter like that. We were in that restaurant during the shooting at Brown (which took place just a couple blocks away) and I was less concerned then than I was with this guy making the rounds.
I'd almost prefer a physical altercation. That's clear-cut, gives people implicit permission to intervene and restore order, and one way or another we wouldn't have to worry about seeing him again.
Exactly. Having someone say "I hope the Devil rapes you," is not a crime, but it is the kind of thing that makes people unsafe, and it is the kind of disorder people are begging for a fix to. Not the murder rate.
What kind of solution would you be looking for in a case like this? Even here in Germany, which is much less Free Speech absolutist than the US, what the guy did probably isn't a crime. I guess you could try to influence the general niceness of society somehow, including the lower classes, but that sounds like a huge and vague undertaking which I personally wouldn't know how to approach.
>"I hope the Devil rapes you"
I am pleasantly surprised to hear that someone actually uttered something like this in the wild.
Hear me out. There's this theory that the phrase "fuck you" came about analogously to "bless you", in that just as the latter is a shortening of "(may) God bless you", the former is a shortening of, well "(may) Devil fuck you", with the name of the devil consistently omitted for taboo reasons.
I find the theory appealing in many ways ("fuck you" makes no grammatical sense unless it's present subjunctive, at which point it makes a perfect one), but my one gripe was always - isn't that a fairly specific thing to wish on another person, who would actually do that? Well, someone apparently would, priors updated, thank you for your witness account.
I encourage everyone to read the great paper "English sentences without overt grammatical subjects". (I think this link works: https://babel.ucsc.edu/~hank/quangphucdong.pdf)
It provides, among other things, a counterargument to the idea that "damn you" has "God" as the implied subject: namely, in that case "damn God" would be ungrammatical and "damn Himself" would be fine.
Other than that, it contains an ample collection of counterexample ungrammatical sentences that I find highly amusing, with sentences like "Describe and fuck communism" or "Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy bear."
Yeah, when I hear people complain about the deterioration of their communities, it's rarely murder and rape that they're talking about. Littering, loitering, petty vandalism, small-time street harassment, crazies ranting on the bus, public drug use, aggressive panhandling, etc. - Such things are reflected in crime statistics poorly or not at all, but they have a HUGE impact on quality of life. If those sorts of things aren't accompanied by a corresponding increase in murder and rape, then that's great, but they're plenty bad on their own!
Unfortunately I doubt there's good data on this, and I'm not even sure how you would go about collecting it. I could give you plenty of anecdotes about how the places I've lived have gone downhill in the last decade, but they would be dismissed just like everybody else's anecdotes.
There is better data than you'd think, though it tends to be localized to the person (significant number of arrests (30+) tracks pretty well with "crazies on the street").
Pretty sure "public drug use" has gone down somewhat (at least when it's not marijuana or booze, both of which were "different" -- needles being a hazard).
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/puerto-rico-curfew
Here's good data on what happens when folks get riled up.
It's more like... every New Yorker who takes the train regularly has at one time or another (several times if during 2020) been on a train where a psychopath who might have been armed with a knife obscured by layers of what appear to be shit-stains on his clothing... threatening to kill someone. Options are a) Ignore and walk away. b) Call cops who will never arrest, or arrest and immediately release, or arrest and then have charges dropped immediately by a prosecutor (the man Daniel Penny killed had 40 fucking charges and had randomly punched passers-by). c) engage in combat (which will lead to dying or the person getting released anyway or being charged yourself if you brutalize the subject enough to actually reduce the likeliness of them doing the exact thing on the same train next week).
In other words, lefties have basically deputized the entire spectrum of underclass scum as DISORDER ENFORCERS; tasked with imposing regular ritual humiliation of citizens. And you just have to take it or exclude yourself from public life.
This actually sounds like a pretty good outcome to me. I've taken public transit for many years, and while it never particularly common to share a bus or compartment with somebody acting overtly weird and unstable, it certainly happened a handful of times over the years. And when I witnessed such, I pretty much just shrugged and moved on with my life. It didn't ruin my day. It didn't sour me on public transit. It certainly didn't inspire to write angry rants in blog comments about "lefties" ruining society.
If somebody had asked me yesterday if I'd prefer my public transit experience to be free of those sorts of incidents regardless, I'd have said "yes." But I now see they were providing considerable, hidden value. If the downstream effect of sharing a ride with the occasional uncouth passenger is the sort of person who considers it "ritual humiliation" and actively considers assaulting people over it "excludes themselves from public life," then I can't imagine a better bargain.
I generally expect the weirdo on the bus has had a very tough life, due to some combination of poverty, childhood abuse and neglect, mental health issues, personal mistakes and just plain bad luck. I'd prefer to live in a word where he promptly gets the help he needs and is never reduced to that state. But seeing as I don't, enduring an occasional awkward bus ride with him and minding my own business seems like the least I can do[1]. Meanwhile, the sort of person who sees the weirdo firmly and fervently believes that inflicting violence on him (whether via the state or personally) is the appropriate response usually has much less excuse. The underlying mindset--the mindset that really, genuinely believes it is only just and right and proper to meet a minor, harmless instance of public disorder with whatever amount violence is necessary to end it--is so maladjusted and indefensible that it verges on the cartoonishly evil.
[1] If he were to actually assault someone, that would be a very different animal. But your own comment describes it *entirely* as "ritual humiliation;" my assessment of the safety risk is quite low, and I think it's implicitly clear that yours is too.
When my city got serious about inviting the homeless to come and make their … home there, many things changed almost overnight.
One thing was that the walking trail along the lake that was the work of Ben Crenshaw’s stepmother and some other ladies of the town, with an assist by Lady Bird, became lined with people, mostly men, in tents, with charcoal grills, armchairs, even TVs, mysteriously.
I think they are not there now, but haven’t been back to see, but they would’ve happily lived there the rest of their lives. And I’m sure many or most people on here would say what’s it to you (always, what’s it to you?) whether there’s trash-free landscaping, flowers and relative urban peace or screaming crazy people.
But it was shocking the first time I happened to walk past - I was not a regular trail user - to be hollered at in a sort of rough lunatic cat call, and then having ignored it, have a guy screaming profanities at me.
Needless to say, this sort of thing would’ve been quashed quickly during the period when the ladies first made this trail, and for decades after. It is interesting that things go from being unimaginable - to the prior way becoming unimaginable, sometimes, one feels, prematurely.
I live in a different city now, where wokeness manifests differently; and the situation in my old city would not happen here, because a different demographic makeup (heavily Hispanic) has a different attitude towards policing overall, and less interest in performing empathy.
I don’t have a lot of rapport with Mexican women, it’s just always been that way. But Mexican women will certainly give a few dollars to any homeless person they come across, and there is no performance in it. It is genuine, pity, and charity.
And, an ancillary question, since I’m not particularly wired to feel fear: does it always have to be fear that one feels, and never anger? Is only fear legitimate as evidence?
I really have never been able to quite encapsulate this difference between cities because of demographics. A new theory popped in my head. My old city was dominated by its traditional Anglo liberal power base, morphing from liberal to progressive as to the rest of the country since the advent of multiculturalism (yes I’m aware they were precursor events elsewhere, but this is flyover country).
Nowadays, there’s power sharing with younger POC progressives, But they, too, as with the older Anglo, progressives, Are inclined to see POC as a monolith. In particular, Hispanic people in this mindset are a monolith, Whether they’ve been here 150 years or 100 years, working hard the whole time, or whether they just arrived from Central America to reenact and nausea their gang wars. Or whether they are upstanding people, or cartel. All equally sanctified in this crude scheme.
Where as in my current city being heavily Mexican, There is not the same feeling that “we are a monolith”. Why would there be? Do groups usually consider themselves a monolith?! Nor do they have the same guilt-ridden attitude towards another group which the left has tended, patronizingly, to view as a monolith.
So there’s no trouble making distinctions, and in particular the police are able to shoot people once or twice a week; and the attitude is generally, thanks for doing your job and putting that person down.
I don’t expect I should add that this will hold much longer, as younger people here have been through American public school, and so they will probably hew to the new ideology about such things,
I look forward to your second post, as I agree with Brenton and the others below that not being murdered or subject to a crime is not the only indication of personal safety. My friend sat down in a puddle of someone else's urine on a train, is that safe? Someone slapped my bottom as I walked by, is that safe?
Urine isn't dangerous unless you slip and fall.
I think you need to be clear if you're talking about actual danger, or just perception of danger. We can be more afraid of being a victim of a crime even if we're less likely to be victimized.
If people are urinating all over, that's a big problem. But it's a different problem and you're going to confuse everyone if you jump into a discussion on falling crime rates and say we're less safe from sitting in urine.
It's not clear to me whether by "unsafe" you mean unsafe from unpleasant but not criminal experiences, or if you mean events that make you worried you will be physically assaulted.
Someone slapping your bottom is sexual assault or assault.
Urine is a sanitation issue. All I'm saying is that the safety issue bloggers are often arguing against when they say "why are people so upset, crime is going down?" is that crime isn't actually what people are upset about. It's street disorder. But it sounds like that's what Scott is writing about tomorrow.
I would argue that being stolen from, verbally abused, stalked, or harassed on the regular basis, are all things that make people feel unsafe because they are *actually* unsafe. Granted, this is better than murder, but still worse than baseline.
Exactly.
How much do the headline crime numbers really say about the risk that *you* will be murdered, raped, or assaulted other than in a spherical cow kind of way?
I think the average person cares mostly about something along the lines of "What is the risk of violence from a stranger to a random, basically law-abiding person just going about their business?" I don't have any data, but I suspect that's a very small proportion of violent crimes and so it can plausibly move around in ways that are uncorrelated with the totals.
First off, a lot of violence is internal to the criminal ecosystem. If drug dealers are beefing over territory less often, that could dramatically reduce the overall murder rate but it doesn't really tell you anything about the risks faced by people who are not associated with the drug trade.
Then, there's the whole category of domestic violence. It's a disturbing and terrible category, but once again -- you already more or less know if you're in the at-risk group. If, for whatever reason, that goes way up or way down, it doesn't really have any impact on the risks faced by people outside that group.
I really don't think the average rat is in fact much less likely to be murdered, raped, or assaulted, and the arguments presented in this post don't actually disagree with that at all.
Since moving to Seattle four years ago, I've been assaulted like three times (I work from home) and my roommate like eight (she rides the light rail a lot). In the 2010s I've been assaulted once, ever, despite near-exclusively living in cities.
You can have a lot of models about why; I personally would guess that "fights" have gone down but unprovoked attacks from psychotic people imagining a problem have gone up. But it does include assault, and I do think that needs to be addressed.
Do you think street disorder is higher now than it was in the 1970s, 80s, 90s? I don't. And if so it seems very bizarre to describe a situation where street disorder is better and there is less crime as being somehow "less safe."
People are mad that street disorder is high, not that it used to be higher.
You don't have to walk around an American city in the 1970s to know that an American city in the 2020s still needs a lot of improvement.
Other cities have managed to nearly eradicate street disorder. If this is the best America can do in 50 years then our cities aren't improving fast enough.
Hmm I feel like that's a somewhat different aspect. Even in the post, Scott talks about crime being at an all-time low. People in the comments object that the murder rate isn't relevant, but nobody seems to object that the murder rate is still too high, so the post is pointless or something.
How low a certain statistic (eg feeling of unsafeness or sth) should be, and whether things are getting better or worse are two related but separate conversations, I think.
I'm talking about street disorder, not crime and murder. We can keep pointing out that crime is getting better, but people aren't mad about the crime and murder rates they are mad about the street disorder.
My position is that most cities in the United States are more pleasant to live in, walk around in, and spend time in than they've been at basically any point in history, that there still is crime and street disorder, and that we should address those things but that it's bad to act like things are worse than they were in the past.
Do you have sources for this, or is that just your impression? Not disagreeing mind you, it just seems that this kind of data would answer the objections of many commenters if true.
If you can’t connect perception of safety to outcomes I’m inclined to just think you are being kind of snobby.
“the tasteless poors are shitting up the vibes” is a valid but separate issue/claim
I think Fallingknife's broader point is that we're using a series of technocratic coping mechanisms to compensate for a deeper moral rot in our societies, and this would include things like surveillance systems, items locked up in stores, using credit cards instead of cash, possibly video games and even incarceration itself.
I don't think this is a crazy thing to be worried about.
I think this is an interesting thesis but that it deserves evidence, and the crime rate provides less than zero.
How is looking at incarceration rates (or anything else that would plausibly suppress crime) today vs. the 1950s not a category of evidence?
I think that if you could demonstrate that (adjusted for various suppressants), the crime rate had increased, that would be evidence. But I haven't seen anyone do this, just point to actual crime rates (which are declining).
Incarceration rates have been decreasing since 2006, which I think emphasizes the importance of doing these analyses instead of gesturing at them.
I'm aware of the decline in incarceration in the US specifically since 2006, I'm also aware it's still 5-6x higher than it was during the previous historic low, and I don't think the same decline is seen in other countries.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not/comment/216232287
>items locked up in stores
afaict there's no public database for this and that makes providing statistical evidence quite difficult, unless you've got connections to informants deep inside Target and Walgreens corporate offices.
All the evidence seems to be absolutely contrary to this idea, crime by any measure is falling. By your reasoning it would appear that if anything "religious morality" was a contributor to crime. As religiosity has declined, so has crime.
I don't recall mentioning religious morality specifically, but it's pretty well-known that religious people do give a larger fraction of their income to charity than atheists (although it's not that vast a difference.) Religion also motivates higher rates of family formation and lower rates of divorce once IQ is controlled for, so I'd be rather surprised if it led to higher rates of within-group violence.
Yes, they give a larger fraction to charity, because donating to their place of worship counts as charity. Ensuring you have a marble and gold building to sit in on Sunday doesn't contribute to the greater good. Correct for donations going to the place of worship and there is no difference between religious and non-religious charitable donations.
>Religion also motivates higher rates of family formation and lower rates of divorce
Yes, because nearly every religion values young marriage and reproduction and demonizes divorce. There's actually evidence that domestic violence is higher in religious households because there is pressure and shame preventing partners from dissolving a failing relationship.
> "Ensuring you have a marble and gold building to sit in on Sunday doesn't contribute to the greater good"
Assuming that churches as institutions do literally nothing with their donations aside from build more churches seems like a prodigiously ignorant and cynical statement, although frankly we could use more eye-pleasing architecture in the world.
> "Yes, because nearly every religion values young marriage and reproduction and demonizes divorce"
So what? Every society chooses particular behaviours to endorse and praise and other behaviours to condemn and stigmatise. Is it a failure of public health initiatives that they 'demonise' smoking?
The OECD has been in a demographic suicide spiral since around the mid-80s, btw, so encouraging young people to get married and have kids before they exit their reproductive window seems like a perfectly rational social priority to me.
As for the stats on domestic violence- again, I'd like to see those adjusted for IQ/SES and other confounders, and last I checked married women were self-reporting greater happiness, but if some non-zero disparity in domestic violence is supposed to be the greater evil compared to your species' extinction then I think you need your head examined.
Is there *any* way to objectively measure the thing you actually are concerned about (deeper moral rot)? Because otherwise you're just debating differing viewpoints with individuals which is really not going to lead anywhere conclusive.
What actual data would you expect to see that would either prove or disprove your view that some "x factor" has gotten worse, society-wide?
Well... disproving it would be simple enough. If the coping mechanisms went down at the same time the population's age composition was held constant *and* crime went down as well, for example.
Surveillance systems and items locked in stores as the primary coping mechanisms? (Presumably credit cards instead of cash is increasing for many reasons beyond fear of theft.)
I think that's fair - the problem is there isn't reliable data on those coping mechanisms, I imagine. Also some of those behaviors might be sticky (once you've started locking a bunch of things up, it takes a lot of effort to rearrange your store displays to do less of it)
Right, part of the disconnect here is that there are countermeasures that can successfully reduce crime, but are unpleasant in and of themselves. Stuff being locked up at the store is a great example. A town where everything needs to be locked up is worse than a town where nothing does, even if their shoplifting rates cash out as identical. Indeed, from the perspective of the non-criminal third party the countermeasure often "feels" worse than the crime. Everything at the store being locked up negatively impacts me as a customer much more directly and viscerally than the shoplifting did.
To further expand on this: Imagine two towns. In Town A, nobody bothers to lock their homes or vehicles. Stores are normal, and people run farm stands on the honor system. Anybody can walk around alone at any time of day.
Town B used to have a huge crime problem. But people responded with countermeasures. Not only does everyone lock their houses, they all have expensive security systems and bars on their windows. Stores lock up all their products, the cashier sits behind bulletproof glass, and many businesses have armed private security on the premises. People know not to go out alone after dark, and systematically avoid certain neighborhoods. Now, *after* the countermeasures have taken effect, Town B's crime rate is the same as Town A.
I don't think it's incorrect to say that Town B is "more dangerous" or "more criminal" than Town A is, even though their crime rates are now identical. Certainly, the quality of life in Town B is much lower. Not being a victim of crime because you're actively defending yourself against it is *very different* than not being a victim of crime because you live in an inherently safe place. It feels very different, and people sense it at a deep level.
The countermeasures can be annoying, sure, but it's more the indication that the people in your society are steadily trending in the direction of wanting to kill/harm eachother over time that worries me more. We can't just keep escalating the technocratic coping mechanisms forever.
School shootings are another example of this. I mean... yeah, the likelihood of dying in one is microscopic, but if you track the numbers decade-over-decade and adjust for population size they do seem to be slowly increasing in frequency and death toll. Household gun ownership has been basically static over the same period.
> we're using a series of technocratic coping mechanisms to compensate for a deeper moral rot in our societies
Frankly, I suspect this might be true but not that bad. I'm an atheist, but I don't deny the utility of many people believing they are under surveillance from God. Our more secular society just removed the "from God" part, among other things.
The only way the surveillance state could fully replace the psychological effect of religiosity is to surveil people 24/7, indoors and out, and then to read their thoughts. (And even that might not be enough, unless you're going to synthesise an afterlife as well.)
I don't personally love the idea of the average person being so constitutionally spineless that this level of external motivation is required to induce pro-social behaviour. e.g, if religiosity can induce women to have 6-10 kids then we only need to get ~10% of the way to that by non-religious methods to get above-replacement TFR. But I'm not going to pretend that declining religiosity had zero effect here.
I think he's saying that the decrease in average crime rates is driven primarily by poorer neighbourhoods, where murder and carjacking are daily occurrences. Meanwhile, theft and narcotics trafficking are rising in more prosperous neighbourhoods, and while this increase is not enough to drive up the national average, it's significant for people who live there. As it happens, most people who post comments on smart Substacks live in wealthier neighbourhoods, which explains the overall perception of rising crime.
Is it possible that on the lower end of the crime spectrum enforcement has weakened? To some extent petty crime is less a failure of police doing its job and more of a shift in the Overton window. San Francisco decided that shooting heroine in public is not a crime.
It sounds frustrating to write a post, and be met with a thousand comments debunking arguments you didn't make and/or complaining that you didn't talk about something else tangentially related to your post. I admire that you handle it gracefully.
I thought I read it. I thought it said absolutely nothing about theft except car theft. It seemed to mostly concentrate on murder, car theft, and violent crimes. It didn't seem to concentrate non-violent crimes, non car theft, traffic violations, and other visible to many people every day.
I know in my own anecdata, there's no reason to report these crimes. Your bike gets stolen? The police don't care. Your car gets broken into? It doesn't help to report this (1) the police won't do anything (2) if you report it your car insurance they'll just raise your rates to cover the check they claimed to cut you.
I've had my car broken into several times, didn't report because of the experience have trying once and getting the same result, nothing.
I've seen all the traffic violations. In fact the poster above mentions Mission and 24th. Try, Mission and 20th and Mission and 16 going downtown (north bound). You can look down on satellite view on google maps and verify that at both intersections no cars are allowed north of either intersection. You can then go stand on those corners and watch 3 of 5 cars just drive through ignoring both the signs and the painted street lines.
You might not care about this particular "crime". I only brought it up because it's trivially provable where as I can't prove all of the other more dangerous traffic violations I see everyday. I only know, everytime I drive, I see 3-8 violations per 30 minute drive and I believe that is way up from 20 years ago.
Anyway, I can fully accept that murders and car theft are down and yet still believe that other crime is up.
Also also, maybe some percentage of crime moved online? (probably not a reasonable displacement)
>I know in my own anecdata, there's no reason to report these crimes.
read the post again, carefully this time
What would convince you I read it, carefully, twice?
Note that none of those (selling stolen goods, using illegal drugs, shoplifting) are mentioned in the crime statistics. Probably because they aren't reported (ie did you file a police report with a description of the person you saw shoplifting? Why not?)
Wouldn't it obviously be possible that "crime is down nationwide" and that "crime is up in the place you live?"
Weirdly, that's actually the opposite of what most people believe. People are actually in general *more* positive about local crime than they are about national.
Sure, I bet it can go the other way too, I just feel like the most prominent "belief" mode about it is "crime is pretty low in my local area, but I've heard about another place nearby where crime is up - regardless of what nation rates say."
That makes sense given the premise. Anecdotal observation shows that locally, crime is down for most places (SF excluded). But our safetyist culture means that distant/national crime is reported loudly and alarmingly, without the context that these things have always happened and are happening less frequently now.
Now I'm curious if it's because crimes "near me" are down, crimes "in places I care of" go up (maybe urbanites only care about other urban, suburban to suburbs, etc), and crimes overall in the nation goes down. Maybe there can be some Simpson paradox sprinkled in somewhere.
I would also expect that when crime goes up at place X, and down at place Y, people living at place X will be louder about their experience online, regardless of the national statistics.
I wanted to say something similar. In several European countries, the police does not care at all about smaller crimes, like someone beaten up, so it does not go into the stats. And this is what affects most people. Burglary happens to mostly empty second homes. Assault is something the police is not interested it, and we know rape is underreported.
Crime from the average person's perspective is not something dramatic like murder. That is too movie-centric. In real life it is the aggressive homeless who punches you.
READ THE POST! Actually, just read the title of the post! I say in the title that it's going to demonstrate that it isn't just reporting bias! Then I have a whole section giving three arguments showing that that's true!
This is why both Fallingknife and me focused on OTHER crimes that you wrote about, not murder, not burglary, not rape.
Aggressive homeless punching you is a form of assault! That's worse than burglary!
And "assault is something the police are not interested in" and "rape are underreported" are exactly the sorts of arguments that the NCVS data are supposed to counter.
Exactly.
Actually, does the NCVS data compensate well against underreporting rape? Replying on the phone¹ is, I assume, less traumatic than going to the police (even though I'm judging by Russia where the situation might be unusually bad in that regard?..), but there's still a significant amount of stigma and shame around it. (It took me a very long time to tell someone about some of the things that happened to me, for example.) Imagine someone selected more or less randomly who's asked about it on a survey and finds it significantly less painful to just not say what happened. Or perhaps they're not admitting it to themselves, even.
UPD:
¹ looks like NCVS's initial interview is in person and subsequent ones are either in person or by phone. more importantly, it looks like they interview by households, and a rape victim may be hiding the fact from someone in the household. i don't know if they ask people individually or just talk to them as a group, but even in the former case it might feel like "this is not mentioned here" if it's done in their house.
This type of low quality comment ends up not getting reported and not showing up on the ban statistics. This contributes to a pervasive sense I have that the comments are much worse. I say we prioritize my felt sense over the data or mere things like "principles".
I find the NCVS argument entirely unconvincing. For one thing, seeing people stealing from CVS or every time I go in is not me being a victim of anything, but it is in fact crime that I witness. Not mention the fact that everything is locked up behind cabinets in every nearby store; this isn't crime, but it's a highly visible and disturbing loss of social trust.
There are whole categories of anti-social behavior that constitute crimes that I witness that don't victimize me, like people shooting up drugs in the street or picking up prostitutes. I worked in a kitchen in college where every single person was an illegal immigrant using a stolen or borrowed social security number. Again, I would report that I was not a victim of anything.
I actually find the argument that murder, burglary, assault, etc. is down entirely convincing. There are just so many illegal activities which are completely ignored to the point that things feel less trusted and more lawless, and the "major" crimes being down is a technicality that I don't care about because it never impacts me.
Yes, but note that while you have given us the data for homicide and for property crimes, and for the probabilities of reporting robbery, simple assault, aggravated assault, and sexual offenses, and the graph showing the rates for both homicide and aggravated assault, (all of which are much appreciated!!), to the extent that quality of life issues track simple assault (and aggressive panhandling, with a credible threat of assault), all of these statistics, though much appreciated, may miss an important part of everyday criminal threat.
I don't believe that police does not care about "beaten up" in Europe. Maybe "slightly punched", yeah, I don't even cared to report this. But certainly police cares about real punches that left bruises.
Exactly.
"I'm not wrong" is an interesting thing to feel the need to say. I think it's worth asking, bluntly, if there is any evidence that crime is actually down that you would accept besides your own vibes? I note that your description of events ("I see...") is all present tense, with no comparison point to the past. I also note that there is a long history of research that explains how human perception is often biased and wrong. And if we're going off wisdom from tech moguls, Larry and Sergei both believed in hard data over basically anything else (https://cloud.google.com/resources/building-a-data-driven-culture)
What would convince you the stats are wrong, or that they are some how not including our lived experience?
I lived in SF from 2007-2013 and again from 2021-2024. The first time the block on Mission betwen 15th and 16th was normal city block. Now, the entire block is one large illegal market with people selling stolen goods (assuming it hasn't been cleaned up since 2024). Is that one crime per seller, per day? They're out in the open, every day. They weren't there before.
Is this an exception, crime is down over all but just not in SF?
I'm now in LA. There are illegal food stalls over over the place. Some people like them but irrelevant, a crime is being committed, nothing is being done. So every day I see these crimes. They weren't here 10 years ago. Hence, my experience is crime is up since I visibly see it every time I go out.
I see homeless parking on Washington Blvd. I can feel sorry for them but it is a crime and it's visible, and it's more than it was in the past.
I give those examples because they're easy to verify where as bike theft or broken into cars are not. Maybe murder is down. Maybe crime is down overall but not in the places I live. Maybe the crime I see is not counted.
I feel like some of this dicussion is kind of like when TPTB tell us prices aren't goiing up. Then I go to a food truck and the price for one entree and a drink is > $20. I went to a bakery this weekend. One BLT + one coffee + one cookie, $37. So sorry if I don't believe the TPTB when they tell me prices are not rising. And, in the same way, it's hard to believe crime is low when I see it every day. I feel like somewhere there has to be something missing from the data.
I also feel like sometimes Americans are like the whole asking a fish "how's the water". Fish: "What's water?" Go live in Japan or Singapore for a few years, then move back. Suddently you see all the crime and similar issues you were just taking for granted. Like the idea that you should need to make sure there's nothing visible in your car otherwise it will get broken into and that if you did leave something out it's really your fault beacuse that's just the way the world is. It's not! There are places where you can leave stuff in your car and not worry about it getting stolen. But, people have been victims for so long the crime is just all taken as normal. Every parking garage has signs up "not responsible for crime". Those signs shouldn't exist. The fact that they do is just proof we're swimming in it and we no longer see it.
What would convince you the stats are wrong
Careful meta analysis (beware the man of one study) or a convincing explanation for why the stats are all biased in the same direction cf Nate Silver
I've mostly been in NYC, and I'm younger than you, but as a rough counterpoint Morningside heights and downtown Brooklyn were both considered so dangerous you couldn't go out past 8 without risk of getting mugged, and that's just not true at all now
People of a recent generation, living in the Bay Area and complaining about mostly aesthetic crime that doesn’t affect them directly. In the 80s and early 90s in NYC you could get mugged in the upper west side, just walking down Broadway.
This "disorder" seems to be a mostly west coast thing[1]. Here in NYC we do have homelessness of course, but not more than usual and not the tent cities and open shooting up people discuss (and I've seen some of) in LA and SF.
Our signs of disorder include:
• Toiletries under lock and key at CVS and Duane Reade: Annoying but this likely reduced shoplifting
• Filth everywhere: NYC is a famously dirty city, but not more than before
• Weed smoke in public: Kind of annoying, but not illegal now.
• Reckless delivery drivers on sidewalks: Illegal, but a very petty crime
[1]: Ilya did mention seeing more disorder in Chicago where I spent a lot of time in 2022-2024 (I worked remotely for a company there). I didn't really see a lot of that (it seemed way better than LA), though I was in mostly nice neighborhoods.
Your first bullet point is the most important. Why is it suddenly necessary to put things under lock and key which historically did not require such measures? Clearly something has changed for the worse.
i can easily think of 5 reasons for this that arent "clearly something has changed for the worse". why would you immediately jump to that conclusion?
Because it's clearly worse. It's harder to buy the product. It's more expensive to supply the product. It's harder to stalk the selves. It requires an employee to open the shelves. In other words, it costs more money than doing nothing unless crime went up to the point that guarding the product saves more that it loses in the extra costs and lost sales.
No store would add those selves unless theft was up. All customers hate them. All employees hate them. They reduce sales and increase costs.
Its leftover from Martin v. Boise and Johnson v. Grants Pass. From 2018 until it was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2024, the 9th Circuit had effectively made it impossible to arrest homeless people for sleeping or camping in public areas. The 9th Circuit's jurisdiction covers the entire West Coast. So for six years cities in the West Coast couldn't really do much about homeless camps and people sleeping on the sidewalks, so there was a lot more obvious "public disorder" than in NYC, where there are just as many homeless people but the police were allowed to keep them from camping in Central Park and whatnot. Since 2024 many cities have started cracking down on the obvious homeless disorder, so there has been a good deal of improvement. Of course some cities don't want to crack down to hard for cultural/political reasons, like Seattle.
And yet, you’re much less likely to get mugged than you were 20 years ago, despite possibly being victimized by being forced to see an unhappy person.
Thank you! I believe all the posts above to the effect that life is grimier and closer to the edge of chaos in the cities than it used to be are basically saying those people who's very existence is a low-level crime are difficult for me to be around. It turns out the murder rate was easier to fix than the rate at which marginally functional people are chiseled into being submarginal.
That Bezos comment could use some context. He is saying that when anecdotes conflict with data, it's not saying that the data is being miscollected, it's that you're not measuring the right thing. The prescription he'd push is not "trust your vibes over statistics", it is "anecdotes are a signal that you should go investigate your methodology and figure out what you're actually failing to capture".
Bezos would probably agree with you that the stats are missing something - his whole point is that's what anecdotal friction usually means (the data is incomplete, not fake).
Don't throw out the statistics, but maybe we need better metrics that reflect what actually affects your daily lived experience.
Anecdotes are just data points. So when you say that some anecdotes don't align with the data, what are you saying? You are saying that the anecdotes fall outside of some statistical measure of the data. So what? That has zero statistical significance, unless you show that it does. And until you do show that, that observation should be given about as much attention as any other baseless claim without evidence.
The problem is entirely the overloading of the words "safe" and "crime".
>The crime that matters is the crime people actually see
Arguably true, as is almost everything else in your post
>Don't tell me crime is down. I'm not wrong.
This is not correct.
Certain subsets of crime are way up, particularly in certain urban areas. This is _extremely_ visible in London, and John Burn-Murdoch in the FT did some excellent reporting of it here:
https://www.ft.com/content/7488fe4c-5e1d-4b2b-adab-f42ad5273fc9 https://archive.is/yZM8M
(the key graph, which doesn't get archived is here: https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ajw7ndeyylsd4ps5cautnpt2/bafkreic2gtrit3uhy37dokz6z3nnmifavhqp2lfaalfmajkvox5hnfdolu@jpeg)
Phone snatching and shoplifting *are* way up and are essentially decriminalised. As this is the crime we are most likely to see or be victim to, we feel a decaying of the social fabric, although violent crime is generally down.
Potentially it then gets exacerbated by social media and the fact that journalists tend to live in these urban areas, but I have nothing to back that up.
This discourse is constant in London and most of it seems to be that people are talking at cross-purposes, as far as I can see it's 3 clusters shouting past each other.
The first group, largely socially conservative, who have an agenda to push and are using the growing perception of crime to their own ends.
The second group, largely socially liberal, reacting against the first, pointing out that violent crime and overall crime has fallen, but dismissing the petty stuff as unimportant.
The third, who genuinely feel something has changed, can't fully articulate it, and mostly get drowned out by the other two in any online discussion.
> When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
My anecdote from suburban america for past 16 years, is that as far as I can tell, crime basically does not exist.
I, for one, would like to read a Substack article about crime that isn’t essentially someone in the Bay Area complaining about aesthetics. Come to Baltimore and look at our crime! (Dropping relentlessly as well!)
The remark about stuff being locked up is interesting. In many ways, due to increased information these days, lots of crime prevention is being done by individuals and businesses rather than the government protecting us .
People see where the crime is and avoid it. I see this in my own city where a certain downtown neighborhood used to be less dangerous than it is now. But when it crossed a certain point it became more dangerous. Then I and many others just stopped going there entirely. So the total crime being committed there is probably less even though the street is more dangerous. In my feelings. This is more crime even though statistically it's less crime.
In Plato's Republic, at the start, Socrates and friends go to the city. On their way to the city, they meet a servant of some local rich guy, who sent him to get Socrates to come to his house. Socrates says to the servant "can't I convince you to let me go to the city now instead of coming with you?"
The servant answers "how will you convince me if I won't listen?"
That's you! You won't let yourself be fooled by silly things like "data" or "proof", all you need is your trusty gut feeling! How will Scott possibly convince you if you simply refuse to listen?
Another possibility is that there is a lower proportion of young men around than in previous decades. As young men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes, fewer young men implies fewer crimes being committed.
Totally! I think that's part of it and is rarely mentioned. However, it can't be the whole story. The population as a whole has been getting steadily older for a very long time. Based on the data I can find, the "median age of the population" has been steadily increasing for hundreds of years. The increase has been accelerated with a declining birth rate, but the trend has been relatively constant thanks to modern medicine. However, there was a very clear reversal in crime rates in the early 90s and onwards. What exactly caused that rapid reversal?
While lead regulations line up really nicely with the reversal, I don't find that hypothesis extremely compelling either.
EDIT: Scott also has a pretty strong refutation of this point as well in a comment below
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not/comment/216203846
It's plausible said men also cause less trouble than in the past due to how they choose to spend time. Less booze, less getting in fights at bars, more time than ever spent online on social media, videogames and other forms of entertainment, porn, etc. that sedates them.
https://dexa.ai/s/et-8gTdV - the male sedation hypothesis.
If this is true then we should be seeing crime drop around the globe, at least in developed countries where young men have access to all of the above.
Sounds like an interesting hypotheses to text next
The population of young men has been stable tho, certainly not declining at the rate crime has declined.
I think the tech distraction hypothesis is really a huge part of this tho.
The young men are still here, they are just playing video games and on social media, displacing much time that might otherwise be used to commit violent crime on the streets.
You have to at least age adjust crime rates. Our population is substantially older now.
Older and fatter: https://www.lefineder.com/p/more-calories-less-crime
Many Thanks! That was surprising! As the authors said:
>Higher BMI correlates with a lower parental socioeconomic status, lower intelligence, lower number of years of education, and lower family income. Since all those things positively correlate with a higher rate of crime1, one would expect people with higher BMI to have a higher rate of crime.
>Yet, in a sample of 43,992 male offenders from Austria, we see that a higher BMI is associated with a significantly lower risk of arrest for a variety of offenses.
Hmm... Does this argue for sentencing to a deep-fried diet? Gavage?
And to reward our junk food companies for crime prevention?
This isn't it. "The violent felony arrest rate for young adults (ages 18–22) dropped by more than 50 percent over the last 25 years, from 1,712 per 100,000 residents in 1994 to 840 in 2019." Source: https://www.ppic.org/publication/are-younger-generations-committing-less-crime/
I should have been more specific. I think that once you adjust for age and medicine, 1950s homicide rates were better than today, not 1990s. 1990s are clearly the peak of American crime, I don't think you can plausibly think that 2025 was a more murderous period that 1994.
Very few people are alive today who remember the 50s. Our only reference is movies featuring the most beautiful people dressed in Mad Men suits and dresses, the equivalent of "Friends" living in huge, stylish apartments in NYC in the nineties.
If you compare the 50s to the 1900s, the 50s are an obvious outlier. Alcohol consumption before prohibition was catastrophically bad and has never returned to even a half that level. New York was full of disgusting slums and SROs where crimes were barely investigated. Teddy Roosevelt made his name as police commissioner in the late 1890s because he was the first to bother to do something about it. He made a dent, but abuses continued for long after.
"Very few people are alive today who remember the 50s. Our only reference is movies featuring the most beautiful people dressed in Mad Men suits and dresses..."
Hey.
'When you're a Jet you're a Jet all the way ...'
I literally helped create a collection of lynching postcards dated through the early 1970s for a local museum, it's absolutely hilarious to me when people make claims that the 1950s were some crime free era of peaceful living.
My former father-in-law, who'd attended an all-white high school in Queens during the 1950s, used to during the 1990s "get going" about how nobody back in his day had guns and the gangs were just having some innocent fun and schools didn't need security guards and disagreements were settled the old fashioned way, etc etc. Then one evening somebody happened to phrase the right followup question and that's when we heard that "well sure OF COURSE you always had a knife on you, would never leave the house without that...."
I didn't even know lynching postcards existed. Really messed up stuff. Thanks for the info!
from 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 documented lynchings.
In 1968 alone, there were 11,710 reported homicides.
As a terroristic means of sending a political message, lynchings have a significant place in American history. As a contributor to violent crime in general, they do not.
Criminologists have already age-adjusted the data.
The FBI started tracking US homicide rates in 1933, and they have data going back to 1931. Homicide rates were 9.7 per 100,000 in 1933. The estimated homicide rates were equally high in the 1920s. The common explanation is that Prohibition and gang violence (gangs as in the Mafia, not teenage gangs) contributed to high homicide rates. They fell after Prohibition ended, dropping to ~5/100K in the 1940s and 1950s. Rising again in the 1960s, and peaking at 10.2/100,000 in 1980. Age-adjustment slightly amplifies the 1931–1933 peak, but does not erase the dramatic rise in estimated homicide rates from 1900 to 1931. It leaves the overall rise, fall, and then rise again intact. The early 1930s remain one of the highest homicide-rate periods in U.S. history prior to the late-20th-century crime wave.
Your answer, Scott, though useful in throwing more data out, seems too glib. Might the cause be multifactorial? If you use a "is it / isn't it" distinction, I'd guess all hypotheses will fail. The population is aging, and aging populations commit fewer crimes - seems very likely to explain some non-negligible portion of a trend, no? (Perhaps 18-22 isn't a broad enough window, or felony-arrest rate is too tight or...)
I think the answer is that the population is aging, and that's part of the effect, but that there's also an effect from genuinely lower crime even binned by age.
Totally agreed.
Note: criminologists have already age-adjusted the data. The pattern holds despite demographic changes.
Would be good to include this in a post/update
That’s mixing stats, and arrest rate is very dependant on police effectiveness. The key would be to look at the NCVS, but just remove everyone over 50 from the victim samples; old people aren’t generally the victims of crimes other than works/investment fraud that no-one cares about in this context.
Fewer young men also means they're outnumbered more often. So they may feel less safe about getting away with it.
You feel unsafe being around a large group of young men hanging around and eying you with few other people around. For good reason.
But that’s because arrest rates dropped! Arrest rates aren’t crime rates!
Why? If the population is less criminal because it's older... it's still less criminal. Age is just a cause of the crime rate being lower, not a measurement artifact.
Both statistics would be of interest. What is the rate of people being victimized by crime? What is the rate of young people being criminal?
The former is more relevant for actually living a good life. The latter is more relevant for understanding causes and interventions.
Sure, but that's not relevant to the point being made in this post.
I think the Pinker level analysis is basically right, society is getting less violent as it becomes more civilised. I think a huge effect on the murder rate is the decreased acceptability of domestic violence. I also think that there are specific types of serious violence that have basically disappeared, bar fights and being set upon by bored teenagers.
Caveat: I haven’t read “Better Angels”, only consumed lots of discussion about it.
Also, my inclination is toward agreeing with Pinker; I just notice things and like poking at them regardless of my inclinations.
“ society is getting less violent as it becomes more civilised”
Seems strange there should be such marked decline in violence after 50 years (conveniently, approximately the typical alive-today-person’s memoryspan) when ”our society” is 500 years old, arguably much older than that (what time period is Pinker covering, again?) and even if we limit ourselves to the Industrial Revolution that’s still 250 years or so.
Pinker's book is a fascinating read (and his thesis seems to hold up to my admittedly limited fact-checking) and covers the history of humanity, from prehistoric times to today, in different levels of detail.
The way I've been describing it to people around me is "He makes a really convincing case about the decrease of violence. Then, you can:
- see the glass half-full and rejoice that life is so much peaceful now,
- or the glass half-empty and be HORRIFIED by how UNIMAGINABLY violent life was before, in a way that's distant enough that we don't normally imagine it."
If you look at the first graph in this post, it looks like there's a pretty marked decline from 250 years ago as well! The peak of the 1970s-80s is less than a third of the peak from 1780-1800.
Which seems plausible to me - our current society is probably less violent than a society where it was socially acceptable to murder someone in a duel, for example.
Duelling was completely unacceptable and illegal it just happened among the elite. There is an interesting hypothesis that for most of history the rich were more violent than the poor, your chance of killing someone in a Venetian bar fight, increased as you got richer for instance.
People really underrate the "kitchen sink" argument - most citizens and most police departments very much want murder rates to go down. They try lots and lots of different things, many of them not incredibly evidence-based and many of them not very effective, but it would be VERY surprising if working very deliberately for a long period of time to improve something would result in NOTHING working.
While that is true, institutions being completely ineffective is common and making progress on significant social problems is quite new in human history. The biggest shifts here has been long term social changes which sometimes interact with policing policy rather than the effectiveness of deliberate planned policies.
"why do people’s intuitions clash so violently with the statistics?"
I know you already know this, but dead horse, etc.... but like illness in health data, or in school/education data, how you segment the data is a huge factor.
All of these things have radically different rates of concentration, and also very different rates of transmission of information about them.
There are regions or populations - and we're a big enough country that it looks like a lot of people and we generalize from them - where the rates are very high, and ones where they are very low. Or where the rates of change, leading to our perceptions about "how things are going?", have changed massively.
There are millions of people who live in places where crime seems legitimately bad, and millions where it doesn't.
The interesting thing is that almost always, a majority of people think that crime is getting worse. Here is Gallup’s polling on whether people think crime is getting worse: https://news.gallup.com/poll/697124/crime-seen-less-serious-second-straight-year.aspx
They have tracked every year since 1989. Almost every year, a majority of people think crime is getting worse, even though crime was getting less for almost that entire period.
Interestingly, the three exceptions, when only 40-something percent of people thought crime was getting worse, are 2000, 2001, and 2025.
Yep, my view on that is because almost no one is actually interpreting the question as "is crime getting worse nationwide?" and in fact couldn't answer that question without consulting nationwide data, they are actually answering the question "have I heard about crime more in places I care about?" and that difference is what explains the divergence between the poll response and reality.
It’s not even “have I heard about crime *more* in places I care about” but rather “have I heard about *too much* crime in places I care about” - even if it’s decreasing, if it’s “too much” they report “more”.
good point, and I think that is also a signal that people are mentally translating the question in another way - not just “what is my bloodless, objective measure of crime rates” - but as … kind thinking of it as a suggestion box of “what things I as a voter think should be improved on.” Squeaky wheels, get the grease - so I say “crime is increasing” because I think it is really important for leaders to focus on reducing crime, and I think that if I put “crime is getting better” they might be liable to slack off on it.
> almost always, a majority of people think that crime is getting worse
I wonder if this is a very basic example of the recall bias where you remember events that are "special".
So you accumulate anecdotes of crime over your life like you do heavy metal. People don't measure frequency very well.
<mildSnark>
Well, if people looked at crime locally, and a mid-criminality group moved from a high-criminality area to a low criminality area, then in both places...
( not that I expect this to be an actual part of the explanation... )
</mildSnark>
The worst crime you’ve ever experienced can only get worse with age. And we have a whole media industry devoted to crime stories.
I think people are reporting how much they think about crime. Maybe that just tends to get worse with age, and we have an aging population.
I think a lot of American discourse is distorted by Metropolitan California, which has a high crime rate and also a very saliency via Hollywood, media, and tech companies. People who live there see a lot of crime and talk about crime and people who listen to them internalize it. If you listen to ten different sources that all complain about high crime rates, you might think everywhere has high crime, even if the majority of those sources originate from Californians.
Yep, that's one of the biggest examples. But people are so mobile, news of crimes is so easy to transmit, and rates are so geographically segregated that you see miniature versions of this everywhere.
Thank you. Very thoughtful. Quite curious about the data in the graph from the 1950s and up until the early 1960s that show was similarly low crime or murder rate. I wonder if that data was experiencing severe under reporting
I'll have a post that discusses that later, but short answer is I can't find evidence that anyone knows, but it might be related to the Baby Boom phenomenon (more people marrying and having kids instead of living dissolute crime-prone single lifestyles).
Would you please consider the age structure of the population? Most "visible crimes", which is what you seem to be discussing rather than, say, financial crimes, is committed by youthful males. (Well, except prostitution...which probably shouldn't be a crime anyway.)
See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not/comment/216203846
Also, the move to the suburbs could either lead to a reduction in the geographic factors that enable crime, or a reduction in the local governance factors that enable crime reporting, or both.
Regarding the "two things changing in exactly opposite ways and canceling each other out": this is a bad rebuttal. There's nothing special about them *exactly* canceling each other out. If murder went down by 20%, this could correspond to 1.6x shootings and 0.5x lethality. The gist of the argument is that you can't understand the ground truth without breaking it down further.
I'm pretty sure it's mathematically valid. If you have a trend that's remaining steady and several independent underlying factors, and where you can model how much the factors change each year as a normal distribution (meaning, smaller changes are more likely than bigger changes), then it's less probably that the underlying factors diverged strongly than stayed mostly unchanged. The bigger the divergence, the more unlikely it is. So having 20x more shootings and 1/20th lethality is less likely than 2x more shootings and 1/2 lethality, and the maximum likelihood would peak at 1x shootings and 1x lethality.
It's an outside view argument, that works without any knowledge of the specific factors. If you investigate an find a reason why we'd expect these specific factors to diverge this way, the outside view might no longer apply, because we have better information. But that's true of all coincidences; once you can fully explain their causes, there is no uncertainty left, and no more reason for suspicion.
There was no statistical analysis on how much of a coincidence it is, so maybe you could argue it's only a small coincidence and isn't strong evidence of anything. But the general principle of "two things changing in exactly opposite ways and canceling each other out" being less likely is reasonable.
You don't tell us what the Victimization Survey says about whether crime has declined. That's essential. The FBI data used to be standard, but many cities stopped reporting their crime to the FBI, so it's dubious now as a way to get a national average. Rates of crime reporting *by victims* isn't the problem, it's rates of crime reporting *by police depatments* to the FBI. The FBI doesn't collect the data itself, it just accumulates what police departments tell it. That is the big reporting problem.
The problme is not that River City underreports its crime to the FBI, but htat River City tells the FBI "We're too busy to report anything". See my commnet to this comment.
But it could still be true that crime is low, and it probably is true.
I said the victimization survey agrees with the conventional statistics. It also shows that crime has declined by the same amount.
Here's what Gemini says, which looks pretty good to me (I'm an economist who has worked with crime data): In 2021, the FBI officially retired its decades-old "Summary Reporting System" (SRS) and switched exclusively to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).
The Issue: Many of the nation’s largest police departments (including the NYPD and LAPD) lacked the technical infrastructure to report through the new system initially.
The Result: In 2021, nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies did not submit data, making it difficult to determine if crime was actually rising or falling nationally. By 2024 and 2025, participation improved significantly, but some major agencies still struggle with full compliance.
2. Underreporting and Participation
Because participation is voluntary, the data is only as good as the local agencies' willingness and ability to provide it.
Missing Agencies: In some years, thousands of agencies (representing millions of people) have submitted no data or only partial data.
State-Level Disparities: Reporting rates vary wildly by state. For example, some states have near-perfect participation, while others have seen fewer than 10% of their agencies report in a given year.
I counter your Gemini with my Claude, who says:
"But the problem was largely confined to 2021. The FBI reversed course and began accepting both SRS and NIBRS data again starting in 2022. Along with an increase in the number of agencies submitting NIBRS data, population coverage improved to 94% by 2023. Council on Criminal Justice NIBRS population coverage specifically went from 76.9% in 2022 to 83.1% in 2023 Congress.gov, with remaining agencies still submitting through the old SRS format.
The practical upshot: The 2021 FBI data is genuinely unreliable for national trend analysis. But by 2022–2023, coverage was back to roughly normal levels, meaning FBI data from those years is about as reliable as it was pre-transition. The impact of the transition on our understanding of 2023 or 2024 crime trends is virtually nonexistent"
Young men are being sucked into screens and the corresponding degenerate behaviour that results in negative effects and outcomes downstream.
Presumably the behaviour you're referring to is game/porn/internet addiction. Are you saying this leads to increased criminality? Or decreased criminality. To first order, I would guess the latter, since these activities take a lot of time and tend to have depressive effects. I could sort-of see the negative downstream effects of being more isolated and mentally ill causing increased criminality, but I doubt this effect would predominate.
Decreasing crime rates in short term. Crime isn't the only bad thing.
At what point in a person's life does game/porn/internet addiction flip over to violent crime?
It doesn't, the contrary.
I wrote up something (not quite so data-driven) on this last year:
https://andrewcurrall.substack.com/p/perception-of-crime-risk
Thanks for the trawl through the data.
I’d venture to guess that these numbers have almost nothing to do with the lived experience of almost everyone reading this.
If you aren’t a gang member, don’t live in government-assisted housing, and don’t get into heated fights with your relatives, which probably corresponds to almost all the PMC-adjacent nature of people who read this blog, then the murder rate for you is a very tiny fraction of the murder rate for the country as a whole.
Some Americans are going to be living in a world where the murder rate is 5-10x higher than the national average, and many, even those in cities with high murder rates, are never going to even have an acquaintance who was murdered.
Exactly. The average is dominated by outliers. The (tiny) murder rate for ACX readers could go up 10x without even showing up as a blip in these broad statistics.
I suspect that the inclusion of the Zizians makes the murder rate for ACX readers substantially higher than the population average, actually.
Oh, I'd forgotten all about that. So the 10x has already happened I guess. Depends if we consider the rate of murderers or victims though.
Maybe, but how big is the actual readership? Six (alleged?) murders is enough for 150k person-years of US murder rate at its current low (and they happened in 2022 and 2025, so 2-4 years depending on how you choose to think about it).
Seems like intersectionality analysis would help here.
Getting mugged or burgled are things that used to be reasonable concerns of the PMC but are much less so now. Tracking murders just gives us another angle on a related issue that suggests that the decline in mugging and burglary isn’t just an illusion.
It looks like there is declining homicide globally (at least where I could find data)
Out of 12 countries that had recent data, 10 had decreases larger than 5%, and only Ecuador had an increase (although a big increase).
https://gdea.substack.com/p/global-homicide-2025-so-far
Country----------2024 Rate(per 100k) --2025 Rate so far--(Rate of Change)
Jamaica------------40.1--------------------23.3--------------(−42%)
Canada-------------1.9---------------------1.4---------------(−23%)
United States-------5.0--------------------4.0----------------(−20%)
Honduras----------25.3--------------------20.5--------------(−19%)
The Philippines-----4.3--------------------3.5----------------(−19%)
Mexico--------------19.3------------------16.2---------------(−16%)
South Africa--------43.5-------------------38.1---------------(−12%)
Spain----------------0.61-------------------0.54--------------(−12%)
Bangladesh---------2.4--------------------2.2----------------(−8%)
England and Wales-0.94------------------0.88---------------(−6%)
Costa Rica----------16.6-------------------16----------------(−4%)
Ecuador-------------38.8-------------------57----------------(+47%)
Came here to note exactly this. As with fertility, any theory here needs to hold globally, and that tends to undermine points based in local US political controversies.
The best long time series crime data is in Europe (e.g. you can use church records to reconstruct UK homicide rate back 500 years) and most of those places show a persistent long term decline in homicide (with volatility of course).
This past year was particularly good, with very sharp drops in homicide in Toronto, Stockholm, London, etc. in addition to most US metros. It is very interesting to try to think about why Stockholm and Baltimore would have correlated murder rates for the past 5-10 years.
Did they also have a COVID-era crime surge like the US?
regarding the National Crime Victimization Survey, this doesn't capture theft and vandalism of businesses, correct? You live in a neighborhood that used to be nice but then things change. You observe a bunch of shoplifting. You have to go find a store employee for them to unlock the deodorant case (!). The security guard scowls at everyone who enters the store. Your life is being affected negatively by crime, in a way your statistics don't capture.
Low crime and rule of law bring prosperity to an area, and when crime ruins that, you're well within your rights to say "this city is going to shit because of crime", even if you have never been a victim.
Ditto with people starting to feel the need to lock their doors. It makes you feel unsafe, and it may or may not be in response to actual danger.
Stuff like locks on the deodorant case are partly a result of other things going on, probably at least as much as response to crime.
Like, the store doesn’t just monitor deodorant shoplifting rates and then once it reaches a critical threshold, puts locks on the deodorant case; they also receive sales pitches from companies who market those specialized lock systems, and once the price is low enough (because technological innovation has made it so), and once the store’s anticipated revenues can justify the expense of purchasing and installing the systems and training employees to use them (because the economy is doing well or whatever), the store pulls the trigger and has them put in.
That can't be it. I have two Walmart stores, both supercenters, both in rural-ish towns. One with population abt. 10k, the other closer to 50k. Both within 15 miles of each other in central Oregon.
They differ wildly in how much is locked up and exactly what is locked up.
Locking stuff up also has a major cost in that people don't like it. It has negative net benefit unless the shoplifting rate is substantially higher than the general loss rate for goods, since it only protects from one form of loss and incurrs ongoing costs.
Even those two stores might have very different basic overhead costs (real estate, labor, etc.), management (or whoever approves purchase & installation of locking-up technology) almost certainly is not working with perfect information, etc.
I’m not saying it’s unrelated to shoplifting (it would be dumb to install such a system in a store where nobody ever steals), but there are other factors so shoplifting doesn’t totally explain it.
Sure. Shoplifting doesn't *totally* explain it. But what I responded to was saying (or so it seems) that shoplifting *isn't a substantial part of the equation at all*.
The two areas are fairly different as far as crime (in this case shoplifting by homeless people) goes. The place with the higher crime rate *also* has lots more stuff locked up. Real estate and labor costs are basically identical--the variance here isn't much and people live one place and work in the other all the time. Yet the distinction is nearly total--one store has almost nothing locked up except for the age-restricted and extremely valuable items (and even then most of those just have the anti-theft tags, not display locks). The small-town, low crime walmart has basically the razor blades, electric shavers, and condoms (and other such things), and game consoles locked up. The same items that have been under lock and key at every Walmart I've been in since I was a child 40-ish years ago.
The "big city" (small town) Walmart has those, everything in the video games/movies section (except the bargain bin), as well as a bunch of other things locked up. And increasingly large amounts--when I moved here 6 years ago, much of the difference wasn't locked up. Those were added much more recently. And security there is significantly tighter.
I said: "Stuff like locks on the deodorant case are partly a result of other things going on, probably at least as much as response to crime."
I don't think that can be fairly interpreted as me saying crime isn't a substantial part of the equation at all, but I think it'd be fair to argue I shouldn't have included the word "probably". I shouldn't have, that was me overstepping epistemic bounds.
While I feel the locking of items is plausibly a result of "more crime", I also agree with Nadav that "there are other factors to consider".
Of the top of my head:
Most shops (in places I've lived in : Spain, Ireland, France, UK) have many less cashiers today than they did 25 years ago. If it becomes cheaper to have locks on items + 1 security guard + 1 cashier than to have 5 cashiers, that's what shops will do.
Sure, there may be other factors. But when there's a 1:1 correlation with
* places with high(er) crime
and
* places where things are locked up
and there isn't a correlation in any direction with the other stuff as far as I can tell, my prior is pretty strongly that it's because of crime, dominantly.
Scott, this feels like half of a good post and you are alluding that you have a second post on this topic coming soon. I’m curious if you are intentionally shifting your content strategy to break up longer posts into shorter posts?
To the point of the article, I agree. Even anecdotally I hear about less crime than I used to. Especially post BLM crime felt rampant. I no longer see as many local stories of shootings, robberies, and everything feels safer.
I wanted to have this post on its own so I could link people who say crime is only down because of reporting bias to it, and they wouldn't have to search to find where I'm making the argument.
Have you ever considered a web format that allows section linking? I have wanted to do that on your blog but never can. Meanwhile even basic markdown supports it.
There is some section linking here - see for example https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/187622533/could-this-be-an-artifact-of-improving-medical-care . You need to wait until the post loads fully, hover your mouse over the name of a big bolded section, and a little chain icon will appear to the left of it. If you press that, it will copy a section URL to the clipboard.
I am embarrassed. Did this change or has substack always had this? I swear I tried this a while ago...
When I was a teenager it was fairly normal for young men to get in fights, many of which turned violent enough to rise to the level of a crime. I haven’t seen a physical fight at a bar in a decade. According to my young relatives fights in high school, once a weekly occurrence, are so rare they’re the talk of the whole school year. Domestic violence is way down.
Anyway, my point is I wonder if “crimes committed by a stranger”, which are a small minority of all crimes, are the same or have increased. That would explain the difference between perception and reality
That squares with my general impressions (though I'm not from the US), but how old are you? You were a teenager, when? and also, where?
Also, I'd like to ask any teenager present, do fight still happen? Or does the very notion of a fight feel like something out of a videogame rather than reality to you?
I was in high school in the South, from a smaller city in a middle-class area. Think something like Tallahassee. I graduated high school in 2007.
2007? I'm in shock, because that is not long ago. I thought you were talking about the 20th century.
Not a teenager anymore (same age as Dr B I guess) but working with teenager for the past 16 years. My anecdotal evidence from different places I've been working in:
- among (French) teenagers from upper-class families, physical violence has declined. Think 1 fistfight / month in 2010-—> 1 fistfight / year in 2025
- among (French, majority Muslim) teenagers from poor neighbourhoods, physical violence has decreased but remained much higher. Think 4 fistfights / month in 2013 —> 1 fistfight / month in 2021
Very helpful observations!
I graduated from high school in 2022 in a fairly affluent area and we had like five “fights” the whole time I was there. It was always kids who were troublemakers and struggling in school. I suspect many other small violent conflicts occurred but the administration prevented the student body at large from finding out through swift action and students not wanting to face the social consequences of doing something “cancellable”
As a public high school teacher in Chicago for the last 20 years, I can anecdotally attest to the truth of this.
Anecdotal, over, say, 2017-2023, many of my wife's friends in teaching said violence was up in schools (including down to elementary, though of course that level it's not going to usually be a crime), and quite famously schools do very little about this and try to avoid collecting too much data. I suspect this one is going to have wild regional variation (and within-district variation), not show up on any stats, but have meaningful impact on how parents rate the crime/disorder vibe of an area.
2017-2023 is the period that specifically bucked the longer trend. In the other crimes mentioned here, the drops in the years since 2023 have more than made up for the gains during those years.
Hum, when I was a kid fights were definitely a thing. Especially after a game between rival high schools. Police ignored it. Until some kid (Greg Sample?) who lost a fight and went to his car and pulled out a tire iron and beat some kid from Gainesville half to death. Then the tolerance by the police plummeted. This was the Missouri Ozarks in the early '70s. Fight after school at the bus stop was a weekly to bi-weekly occurrence. Almost always one-on-one and and other students would break it up if it got too rough.
Consensual violence was a major part of my (late 90s to mid 2000/ childhood) childhood. I remember thinking a lot about how to prevent anger or sadism leaking into it, since those lead to injury and injury got violence shut down. Particularly when I was maybe five to nine this was a lot of what i thought about.
Yes. This is something I think people underestimate. I’m 52 years old and I’ve seen maybe 5 actual fights in my life, and most of those in the early 1980s, where, not coincidentally I was in my early teens. If you go back even just to the 1960s, public brawling was a widely accepted form of recreation. The last time that happened on any scale was soccer hooliganism in the 80s but that was remarked on because it was anomalous. There’s a documentary about the violent Vietnam war protests outside the US embassy in London where both police and protestors talk about how much fun the fighting was. Go back even further to the late 1800s and groups of kids were going out in the evening to try to trap police officer and throw stones at them.
The overall level of violence in society has fallen dramatically over the last century and a half or so, and this is just slow enough that people don’t quite map their experience onto the societal trend
<mildSnark>
Phytoestrogens! It has to be phytoestrogens!
</mildSnark>
( no, I don't really believe that. Could be any of a thousand things. )
So, what about gun control and gun ownership? Is gun ownership up or down? Do these statistics help with the gun control debate?
Percent of households who own guns is down, but number of guns is up. I don't really know what to make of this.
I don't know much about guns, but I suspect there are more guns available that are capable of killing more people more quickly today than 50 years ago. Related -- is the mass murder rate up or down?
Mass murder victims make up such a tiny percentage of murder victims that it shouldn't matter to public perceptions of crime, one way or the other. But of course it does.
Fragmentation of households which increases their raw count? Many more people live alone, especially in big cities where gun regulations tend to be more stringent.
Fewer people are willing to admit publicly that they own guns? This is the era of internet paranoia, after all; also, if you are known to have a gun, your house may get burglarized (probably in your absence) precisely because someone needs a gun for their, uh, illegal gig.
It is always so weird to read this stuff as an European. In most of Europe, you can live your whole life never holding a gun, and just seeing it a few times in your life. I know I only had a gun two times in my hands.
As someone who has lived in the United States for 40 years (and Texas for 9 of those years) I have never held a gun in my life! And by far the most common place for me to see guns in real life is the Charles de Gaulle airport, because the Gendarmes there carry their guns so visibly, while suburban Texans don’t usually bring guns to the kinds of businesses frequented by childless hipsters.
I am a Czech. We have some gun culture here, though not to the same extent as the US.
I don't own a gun, but I frequented both pistol and rifle ranges for fun, which is legal with an instructor. I liked shooting, but it was an expensive hobby.
"you can live your whole life never holding a gun"
Exceptions like the Yugoslav civil war and the current Russo-Ukrainian war are quite important, though.
Once the war in the East is over, expect some uptick in gun crime in the West as well. Surplus guns tend to move around on demand. Bosnia and Kosovo were a major source of illicit guns and grenades for at least 15 years.
In the US, that's mostly true, except that police officers usually carry guns, so you're more likely to *see* them in public.
The US combines a gun fanatic subpopulation with a subpopulation that doesn't touch guns. It's a big country.
It’s most likely because some gun owners have large gun collections. I don’t mean in the sense of having a huge arsenal intended to fight off the Zombie Apocalypse, at least not in most cases, but guns that one accumulates over time. Keep in mind that guns basically last forever, and that selling ones you don’t use can be somewhat complicated.
Concealed carry has become *much* more widely legal. My mother started carrying a pistol in her purse in her 60s (2010s).
More potentially-armed victims/bystanders deterring violent crime seems straightforward.
Gun people really like guns.
Also, guns are extremely durable, so when someone buys a new gun, their old one(s) usually stick around. It's a gun, why would you get rid of it just because you have another?
A LOT of older guns are lost in boating accidents…
iykyk
Lol. Especially when an atf rule change is about to go into effect.
I'm in Seattle, I drive 50% out of my way to avoid not one but *two* open-air drug markets on my way to work, and said workplace had to hire a security company to post guards overnight on our downtown property after my weekend counterpart had his nose broken by an intruder. My best friend was woken up by gunshots in her apartment complex in a close Seattle suburb two weeks ago (no victims or suspects were so much as identified by the police or anyone in the neighborhood). My condo had its garage broken into three times in four years, and I had *FIVE* packages stolen from an Amazon "locker" in the parking lot of a grocery store across from a light rail station last month (the theft was reported to Amazon, not police). There are people visibly littering and loitering in hundreds of places in city streets and parks. I don't even visit my closest full-service grocery store because there is *always* fresh broken auto glass in the parking lot and an inconvenient number of items are locked up, despite the store always having three security guards standing around.
My family lives in a beach town in south Orange County, California, one of the more expensive regions of the US, and crime blight is increasingly happening there, too. I've been visiting the area for 35 years; I can see the goddamned difference.
The statistics are somehow wrong. Smarter people than you or I are going to have to figure out how.
"The statistics are wrong because of my personal anecdotes."
Classic.
You’re saying you don’t notice this in American cities?
I currently live in one American city and recently lived in another (NYC and Washington, D.C.) and regularly take public transit and visit a number of different parts of the cities, including parts that would be categorized as low-income or (at least comparatively) high-crime and I have to say that what a lot of people are saying about their experiences in these comments sounds bizarre to me. I haven't had anyone commit a crime against me or threaten me, I basically never feel unsafe walking around or on the subway/metro, and I really haven't seen people openly using drugs (other than pot). I've also never had a package stolen, including when I lived in a low-income area in an apartment building where packages were left out in the lobby and when I lived in a house near a metro station where packages were left outside the front door. I do see homeless people, some of whom are likely on drugs, and very rarely I'll encounter someone doing some schizophrenic shouting at the world, but they never seem like a danger to anyone around them and other people don't seem worried about them either. I also occasionally see street vendors who are selling (almost certainly) stolen goods, and I agree that's not great, but I have to say it seems like a pretty minor complaint. I'm somewhat open to the argument that being a man helps with the "never feeling unsafe," but I have friends who are women in both cities who I've discussed this with who feel the same way as me.
Are NYC and Washington that much better than the rest of the country? Or am I just super lucky or somehow unintentionally avoiding all the bad areas? Or... I don't know what other explanation there is.
>Washington, D.C.
DC and "vibes of crime" remind me of one of my old mentors, after he'd lived there about a month in a 'neighborhood in transition.' Dapper fellow, dresses well, wears a driving cap. He was walking down the street to pick up a pizza, nods politely at a passing local, and gets in reply "fuck you, you tweed-wearing gentrifying motherfucker." So he kept on walking.
It's certainly not a crime to be rude, but it affects one's perception of an area.
On the flip side, when i wear a tweed cap in the South, I usually get "nice hat, man, where can I get one of those?" and we have a nice chat. Depends on the local culture! Maybe I don't go to the 'wrong' neighborhoods, in that sense.
>I have friends who are women in both cities who I've discussed this with who feel the same way as me.
Are there areas they don't go? Things they don't do?
I went to a presentation by a Japanese youtuber last year, and he talked about how he nearly got mugged a couple days earlier. In Tokyo, if he can't sleep he doesn't think anything about just going for a walk at 3AM and taking some photos of the city at night. *Not* exactly the wisest thing to do in any US city, and he's approached by a tweaker proclaiming interest in his (quite expensive) camera. The youtuber reaches for his phone to call for help, but because he uses a shoulder holster wallet- the tweaker thinks he's going for a gun and high-tails out of there.
It's easy to think crime doesn't happen, when you shape your life to avoid it, or in the youtuber's case basically luck into an accidental deterrent.
Yes, I think this is a good response. I think we are both used to and accustomed to a certain level of street disorder in the US, and we also know how to avoid the worst of it. I didn't think anything of it until my husband and I started traveling and there were so many cities where I felt fine walking around by myself at midnight, or even sleeping at a train station to catch the early one out. Visiting San Francisco is particularly dystopian.....
Do you exclusively visit the Tenderloin? Having lived in San Francisco since 2012, my own anecdotal experience is that both crime and street disorder are sharply down. I personally had my car broken into in 2016, and had motorcycles successfully stolen twice between 2014 and 2018, along with several unsuccessful attempts (during one of which I caught the thief in flagrante delicto). In that same time period, an ex of mine was assaulted by a homeless man (he spat in her face), and many friends had their cars broken into, or catalytic converters stolen, etc.
Nothing of that magnitude has happened to me or within my friend circle since the end of lockdown. I live a few blocks from the projects in Potrero, and the biggest street disorder problem is annoying vehicle sounds, which are mostly the Hells Angels (they have a chapterhouse nearby and are admittedly very annoying). I walk around at night all the time, and feel fine. I almost never see homeless encampments, and the ones I do rarely see do not seem threatening. I think the SFPD's campaign against car break ins was in fact successful [1], and the anti-encampment supreme court ruling [2] has in fact led to a reduction in tent encampments.
1: https://abc7news.com/post/san-francisco-car-break-ins-historic-22-year-low-heres-look-police-data/16112998/
2: https://calmatters.org/housing/2024/06/california-homeless-camps-grants-pass-ruling/
Btw, last time I was in US,I was in NYC and DC, and then in Madison, WI. Never felt unsafe anywhere. In NY, black gentleman near subway asked me for something I can spare, but he was very composed and respectful. In my own town in the former EU, I would have been a tad worried if asked by a big buy to give him money.
I saw people apparently using drugs on the sidewalk in SF once.
Statistically NYC is unusually safe and DC is unusually violent, as cities go.
> Statistically NYC is unusually safe and DC is unusually violent, as cities go.
DC violence is greatly segregated. In the NW portion, where all the bougie people with actual jobs live, it's basically unknown.
And if you go to the SE section, particularly wards 7 and 8, it's where all the violence, drugs, etc are. When I lived there many years ago, it also featured Aids / HIV rates as high as many African countries and sundry other astonishing statistics. Funnily enough, property values were still pretty high! I often wondered how people afforded rent.
This is to say, I think the median ACX-er who's ever lived in or visited DC would have found it to be about like NYC, because they would have been in the positively selected areas.
I strongly assume this is true of anywhere, though - NYC crime rates are not uniform either and frankly I imagine that even in the worst parts of the third world there's plenty of neighborhood-by-neighborhood variation.
(If Matt Lakeman is any indication, you can waltz through most countries in Africa and Eastern Europe, or even Afghanistan itself, without having serious problems, if you know what you're doing.)
The point is that frustrated City dwellers don't have anything to compare their experiences with besides idyllic Mad Men episodes and memories of their shelter chuldhoods. So these anecdotes of frustration shouldn't count for much.
Everyone's talking over each other. It's entirely possible for Christina's experience to be completely representative of the median, and for her to be wrong about "the statistics." "It used to be worse" is always an option.
But for the record, my experiences don't line up with Christina's. I've seen visible litter, but I haven't witnessed people littering. I haven't heard gunshots, though I have heard fireworks, and I wonder if people get the two mixed up.
I've frequently *been* the person loitering. I get lost in thought, sue me. I probably don't look homeless or high enough to frighten people like Christina, but that's only a probably.
I've seen people use drugs, I've never seen anyone openly buying or selling drugs. This does not bother me.
I have a concealed carry permit and have been shooting for 30 years. Aforementioned friend in the complex with the gunfire happens to processes discovery in criminal legal proceedings for a living and has thus heard plenty of gunfire. Without providing my exact home address, I live close enough to one large illegal encampment to actually *see* tents from my home, hear gunshots, hear police response to said gunshots, and see my block on maps giving context about where said shots occurred.
Neither my friend nor I are mixing up fireworks and gunfire, although it's possible other people do and that you might be, especially if your personal security privilege is so high you're speculating that looking "lost in thought" would read as predatory to others.
Ok, I believe you. I hope your neighborhood improves.
I'm not merely speculating that looking "lost in thought" could read as predatory. I have a habit of pacing, walking unevenly, and muttering to myself, and sometimes I dress oddly. I've had security "check up" on me, ask me if I'm intoxicated, or ask for my ID on private premises several times because I got lost in thought.
Naturally this is a "me problem", and I should just make more effort to act like a normal person in public if I want to be treated like it. But you may understand why I don't take fear of people loitering around that seriously.
A ton of people in this thread say they live in cities and it's great. I'll add one more - I've lived in NYC, Minneapolis, Reno, and LA in the last decade and had a great time overall. (I will admit somebody stole a package from in front of one of my NYC apartments one time. Otherwise I experienced no crime.)
I live in New York and have lived in Seattle, and I really haven’t noticed this.
Like yes I’ve seen people high on drugs… but I’ve never heard a gunshot, never had a package stolen or been robbed, never seen a broken glass storefront. And I promise I leave my apartment a lot and take the subway/bus/ and walk around!
Grocery items being locked is annoying, and certainly our cities are not very clean… but I think that more points to “there’s a lot of room for improvement” rather than “things getting worse”. Like I wasn’t alive back then but looking at pictures of 60/70’s America, cities didn’t exactly look like Singapore back then either
TBH Scott's stats do not claim that "nuisance crime" is down. His article concentrates on murder and aggravated assault, not on people who steal packages in order to support their drug habit. (This wasn't even a viable career before the e-shop economy.) Such small crime does not kill you, but definitely makes your everyday life more miserable.
That's false--the NCVS includes petty theft, like package theft. I was part of it once when I was a teenager and I reported that I had left my jacket at a restaurant and came back five minutes later and it was gone, and they asked about all the details it would've been included as "other theft."
It took me a long moment to even remember my package theft, despite its recency, because being made whole again by Amazon was a relatively quick and easy process. I have to wonder if I would have even remembered to note it on a survey in a year.
It's possible! I'll just say that from my experience taking the NCVS they are (or at least were when I took it!) very thorough and really try to push you to remember and include anything that might possibly qualify.
There's an obvious tension between "the murder rate and assault rate aren't what matter to people--having their packages stolen is the quality-of-life-affecting crime that people are actually mad about" and "most people might not even remember that they've had a package stolen recently".
I think it's a tension of you artificially cherry-picking separate concepts. I certainly wasn't complaining soley about my (and everyone else who used the lockers') stolen packages, but rather all of it, the relentlessness of *total* blight and the *total* low and high grade dangers down to moderate inconveniences.
Believe me, if stolen Amazon packages from crow-barred Amazon lockers were the worst crimes in my region, they would be top of mind, not a thing that happens so frequently Amazon doesn’t even investigate or ask for proof.
I think it’s worth also considering the crime in the middle, things like burglary and mugging. Those seem to be way down too (often for technological reasons - no point mugging someone who doesn’t carry cash and whose most expensive possession has a tracking device in it).
More like "the conclusions are based on insufficient statistics."
I double-dog dare Scott to pull theft statistics from retailers and then say "crime is down."
I think an even more correct sentence would be 'crime is complicated'. If shoplifting is up but hold-ups are down, would you say the world is safer ?
I dunno, I don't think crime is that complicated! All crime is too much crime, and national statistics about safety don't guarantee safety to you, the individual.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth-vs-reality-trends-retail-theft
In some places retail theft is up, and others it's down, but there's no big increase overall in the stats.
Shrink losses (theft + errors) as a percentage of sales has remained overall steady since at least 1996. It fluctuates year to year between 1.3% and 1.8% but there's no trend of it increasing nationally.
https://archive.news.ufl.edu/articles/1997/11/survey-finds-shoplifting-and-employee-theft-cost-retailers-billions.html
I didn't do an in-depth search, but it looks like retail theft has been roughly stable nationwide.
Let's ask retailers, not a progressive think tank.
From the National Retailer Federation:
https://a-us.storyblok.com/f/1021220/x/1d1b065f26/nrf_impact_of_retail_theft_violence_10-31-2025.pdf
The National Retail Security Survey results I linked are from the National Retailer Federation! They found shrink to be fairly stable over the past 30 years.
You're linking to a survey done by a company that sells shoplifting security systems and an anti-shoplifting lobbyist group asking vibe-based questions, with no data on actual number of thefts and only a single 2025 survey. That's not a better source.
>Additionally, police crime data reflects only those offenses reported to or observed by law enforcement. Roughly three-quarters of all thefts go undocumented.
( from https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth-vs-reality-trends-retail-theft , Many Thanks for the URL! )
Aggressive homeless people, tent cities and open drug use seem to be a mostly west coast thing. I noticed it when I was in SF and LA (It didn't help that I drove through Skid Row, but I saw it in West Hollywood as well), and I hear it's also bad in Portland and Seattle.
Other cities I'm familiar with — NYC (where I live), Boston, DC and Chicago — don't have this issue (though they have plenty of problems). And I'm sure the murder, assault and robbery rates are way higher in a place like Memphis then they are in LA or SF.
My best-friend-and-spiritual-twin-brother works in Chicago, and after a visit to him, I marveled to a Chicagoan customer of mine that Chicago was NOTHING like Seattle when it came to the drug ghouls causing blight.
He laughed at me and said, "oh, we have all those folk, but they're contained to a few small areas and they are not allowed to be in most neighborhoods."
I was active in a Providence litter cleanup group for a while, and we'd have to use some of the plastic containers we picked up as improvised sharps containers for all the needles we'd find. This was along public hiking trails past historic landmarks in Fox Point, not in the backwoods.
We have a touch of it in Philly, but the West coast is way worse
It's just way way way easier to be homeless anywhere west of the Rockies bc the weather is so much nicer year round. It barely ever rains and you are not going to die outside as long as you have a sleeping bag. Homeless in Chicago, NY, or anywhere in the northeast is horrible. Same reason I'd never go camping in the northeast but it's quite enjoyable out west is exactly why the homeless situation is worse, and it's not just the coasts, it's everywhere with low humidity and winters that don't go below 20 degrees at night.
Crime can be down nationwide, but still bad in particular places. Seattle is one of those particular places: in 2024 it had the 4th highest total crime rate in the country, just below Detroit and just above Baltimore. Seattle was not in the top 10 for violent crime, but was 3rd in the country for property crime, just below Portland. In 2024 Seattle's property crime rate was 184.5% higher than the national rate. It was higher than the national rate for violent crime as well, though I'm not sure by how much.
So when we break it down by city, your anecdote and the statistics match pretty well.
https://www.security.org/resources/most-dangerous-cities/
Yes - upon reflection (and sleeping on it), I am unusually *personally* and particularly annoyed with Scott for insisting that You Should Totally Stop Worrying About Crime! when we *both* live in cities blighted by Blue Team anti-policing policies.
And crime may be down nationwide, but however much it is down, it should absolutely be even more down. There is no victory here.
I've worked in downtown Seattle since 2011 and lived in Seattle until 2023 (moved to the Eastside) and I think lived not too far from your area based on some previous posts you've made. My impressions of crime here are quite a bit better than yours, but at the same time it looks like you are not really wrong. Looking into it, Seattle is somewhat of an outlier. The crime rate has gotten slightly better in the past couple years, but it is still quite a bit higher than 15 years ago. So, I don't think the statistics are wrong overall, but Seattle has bucked the nationwide trends. Also, if I'm right about the area you live, you've just had rotten luck with where the homeless and drug addicted have been pushed. Downtown seems genuinely much better than 2 or 3 years ago, but a couple other areas have gotten much worse.
I've been working nights in downtown Seattle for 20 years, and for a goodly chunk of that time, I was commuting via bus from West Seattle.
At night.
Walking several blocks from the downtown bus stop to my workplace.
*ALONE.*
*AT NIGHT.*
While I obviously felt safe to do so at the time, that would be wildly irresponsible to attempt now, from both West Seattle or especially from my current neighborhood. Aside from the threat of being preyed upon by a visibly higher number of fellow passengers and/or street loiterers, there's even the air on the buses themselves:
> "Researchers detected methamphetamine in 98% of surface samples and 100% of air samples, while fentanyl was detected in 46% of surface and 25% of air samples. One air sample exceeded federal recommendations for airborne fentanyl exposure at work established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "
(https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/09/07/uw-assessment-finds-fentanyl-and-methamphetamine-smoke-linger-on-public-transit-vehicles/)
Agreed, it's slightly better in early 2026 than it was in 2023, but compared to 15 years ago, it's 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead.
We keep seeing statistics like this about America, but it doesn’t reconcile with (or maybe account for) the large amounts of street disorder.
Having spent the past 18 months traveling around the world, American cities feel least safe. Maybe I’m not being murdered, but I’ve been spit on, had a brick thrown at my car, been grabbed by a stranger, stepped over used needles, been yelled at by someone on drugs, had someone sleep on my porch, had to call an uber on a 15 minute walk because I accidentally stumbled into the wrong part of the tenderloin where people were openly fighting each other in the street.
We can’t just talk about crime rates. We have to talk about mental instability and homelessness and drug use and how tremendously unsafe all of that is and feels walking around in an American city, especially compared to many cities in the world that have little to none of it.
Travelers are constantly surprised by how unsafe American cities are. And it’s not because they are afraid of being murdered.
All of this is true, but many of the same people who point to the safety of American cities compared to European or Asian ones also refuse to implement the policies of those European and Asian cities. Also, none of this is related to whether or not American cities have become safer compared to American cities from 20 years ago. It's a bit of a non sequitur
Right, there are policies that could fix this. But the US also has some things that other countries don't—like cities that drugs are massively trafficked through. It's true that things can get safer at the same time that they can be a whole lot better!
If these areas are truly that dangerous wouldn't that be reflected in the statistics? So maybe it's not that it's less safe, it just feels less safe and it's less pleasant. Nobody likes being shouted at by crazy people.
I mean, this is like the thought experiment about having a man who follows you 24/7 with a gun pointed at your head, and who will shoot you if you ever fail to follow an order he gives--and then never gives an order.
If a man screams in your face 24/7 but never physically touches you (directly or indirectly, say by throwing something), are you truly safe? To me the answer in both cases is "What the hell kind of society is allowing this to happen?"
Not necessarily; it might be that people change their behaviour to compensate for the risks (by, e.g., getting an Uber instead of walking or using public transport). It's a bit like how there are no Rotherham-style rape scandals in Pakistan -- not because Pakistan's a safe place for women, but because the people there generally keep their women inside precisely so they can't be victimised.
American cities are in fact less safe than similar cities in Europe and east Asia. But that doesn’t contradict anything Scott said. He isn’t claiming that American cities are safer than similar cities in Europe or east Asia. He is claiming that American cities of 2025 are safer than American cities of any past year.
It is not hard to be the worst competitor in a contest but still doing better than you ever have before.
Right, but we can keep saying "cities are safer than ever before" and it doesn't change the fact that we still want them to be much much safer than this!
Nobody's mad because cities are better off than they were in the 1970s, they are mad because they still don't like the state of them in the 2020s.
Then we should talk about that! Don’t dispute the fact that you say isn’t in dispute! We can complain that crime isn’t down enough without making the claim that crime is up!
That IS what I'm talking about. I'm not disputing Scott's post, I'm saying that for bloggers to keep talking about the crime rates being down is to miss the point. They are responding to public outcry about the state of our cities, but that outcry isn't about crime rates. It's about street disorder.
Could be that modern crooks find it easier to make money through fraud than (violent) robbery.
I think these require different skill sets and are done by different people.
Somali-Americans. Average IQ 87.
"Pro-Babies, Pro-West, Pro-Normal, Pro-White."
I love how you white supremacist bozos always ignore that the fraud was all the work of a white woman. Not to mention that Nick Shirley clearly has an IQ around 15, "what is bellevolent".
BLM and race hustling is getting lucrative. Just saying.
Compared to what? It seems to me that grifting white supremacist, MAGA types is drastically more lucrative. You all are the easiest marks on planet earth. Now please support "daddy" by buying some DJT, some TRUMP, a Trump phone and don't forget to pickup a Trump watch while you're at it!
> I love how you white supremacist bozos always ignore that the fraud was all the work of a white woman.
I assume you're talking about Aimee Bock, the founder of Feeding Our Future, which committed massive fraud in 2020? It's common for people to use her as a scapegoat, but the claim that she was the sole perpetrator is completely false. You can find this even on Wikipedia, which has a long list of convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future#Defendants
You'll see that Aimee Bock was just one person in a long list of defendants, most of whom appear to be Somali males, and many of whom were convicted of more serious charges than Bock. The idea that the fraud was solely perpetrated by a white woman with no active Somali involvement at all isn't remotely true.
Even if it were true, it wouldn't be the gotcha that you think it is. People who are fed up with this type of grift already believe that white women are the biggest enablers of it. It's not a fact that gets ignored.
The median robbery and the median fraud are done by different people. But there is surely some overlap in the populations. And if the people in this overlap have moved from one to the other, that would affect the aggregate numbers.
I think you're overestimating the sophistication of most fraud. A lot of it doesn't take intelligence or skill, it just takes dishonesty and persistence.
Testosterone levels ever falling.
First, I agree with the premise and crime (including violent crime) is just down. This seems to me to be extremely well-supported by the evidence.
Even assuming some mild amount of decreased lethality, the point stands.
Going on a side tangent: Homicide closure rates are starting to tick up a bit.
But man, there's been a crazy-long trend of police closures going down over the last 60+ years. At https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-022422-122744 they argue that the standards for arrest have gone up as police clearances now tend to be more likely to result in convictions.
That seems right, but anyone have more thoughts on this?
I’ve heard that the decrease in domestic violence murder is part of it. That is, there are fewer obvious suspects for a drive-by vs a person murdered at home.
I'm confused. Wouldn't a smaller fraction of the murders being domestic violence tend to make homicide closure rates go down, not tick up?
I would point out that US incarceration rates are still... what?... 5-6x higher than they were in the 1950s? And demographic ageing is presumably a significant contributor to lower crime rates, since young men commit the large majority of crimes.
Also, last I checked incarceration rates were still creeping up in nearly all other developed countries, just from a much lower baseline.
Your ultimate point about disorder is correct.
1. In the US a home can be cheap, dense or safe, pick two. When that's no longer the case crime and disorder won't be my number 1 issue.
2. Disorder is terrible by the standards of Asia. Just like insta is making girls feel bad about not being thin, and men feel bad about not being with a 10, it's making me feel bad about safety, and density.
3. Moving to Asia would be great, but very inconvenient. So my first choice is functional cities.
4. Crime and disorder being concentrated in specific places is maddening because it limits my options. I won't live in SF, but I'd like too. But it's not a place I'd let my kids walk around in.
5. Zoning makes everything expensive and it's mostly about limiting disorder to specific places. Which again limits my options
6. Disorder will continue to exist as long as lefties feel like enforcing laws are an illegitimate use of power against those they see as oppressed. This ultimately hurts the people it's meant to help, and it's sincerely tragic.
7. If there disorder were actually policed without more abundance style housing policies bad neighborhoods in cities would gentrify immediately. Lefties are correct about this. Oakland is like 40% cheaper than SF, how much of that is the delta between crime rates?
8. I have not been the victim of a physical crime since the 1990s, it's still my number 1 issue, I want to live in a dense City again with my fucking kids, in safety, with good schools. I don't feel like I can, even though I've objectively pretty well off. Cities are for the 1% in the US, and that just isn't functional.
If crime is your “number 1 issue,” you should probably start by engaging with the actual data instead of narrating a vibes-based dystopia.
You’re responding to long-run homicide and crime data showing we’re at or near historic lows — and instead of disputing the numbers, you pivot to feelings. Asia on Instagram. Zoning as cosmic disorder containment. “Lefties” refusing to enforce laws. That’s not analysis; that’s aesthetic anxiety wrapped in politics.
Let’s walk through this.
1. “Pick two: cheap, dense, safe.”
This isn’t a law of physics. It’s a policy tradeoff. Tokyo is cheap for a major global city, extremely dense, and remarkably safe. So are parts of Seoul. Singapore. Even many European cities. The U.S. doesn’t fail because density and safety are incompatible — it fails because zoning, NIMBYism, and fragmented governance constrain supply while amplifying segregation. That’s a political choice, not an urban inevitability.
2. “Disorder by Asian standards.”
You’re comparing the most orderly megacities on earth to a country of 50 semi-autonomous states with wildly different policing models, gun laws, drug policy, and social services. Of course outcomes vary. But the relevant comparison here wasn’t Tokyo — it was the U.S. over time. And over time, violence has fallen dramatically. If your benchmark is “I want Singapore,” say that. But don’t pretend that wishing for a global outlier invalidates domestic longitudinal data.
3. “I won’t let my kids walk around SF.”
You haven’t been the victim of physical crime since the 1990s. So what exactly is driving your fear? Cable news? Twitter doom loops? Viral shoplifting clips? The availability heuristic is doing cardio in your brain.
Crime perception ≠ crime reality. The entire piece you’re responding to explains this gap: reporting bias, medical care arguments, NCVS validation. You didn’t challenge any of that. You just said, “but vibes.”
4. “Lefties think enforcing laws is illegitimate.”
This is the laziest possible framing of a complex debate about policing, sentencing, prosecutorial discretion, and civil rights. Most large cities — including the ones you’re worried about — still arrest, charge, and incarcerate people. The U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world. If “lefties won’t enforce laws” were the dominant variable, it would be visible in national data trends. Instead, crime dropped through the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s — including in very blue cities.
If your theory can’t survive contact with 30 years of declining violent crime across wildly different administrations, it’s not a serious theory.
5. “If disorder were policed, neighborhoods would gentrify immediately.”
So your complaint is that crime limits gentrification speed? That’s not a public safety argument. That’s a housing appreciation argument.
Oakland being cheaper than SF isn’t just “delta between crime rates.” It’s job concentration, transit access, school quality perceptions, municipal governance, tax structures, zoning capacity, and proximity to global tech capital. Reducing it to “crime explains 40% price gap” is cartoon economics.
6. “Cities are for the 1%.”
This one accidentally reveals the real issue. The constraint people feel isn’t violent crime — it’s cost. Housing. Schools. Childcare. Urban America is expensive, and that creates exclusion. But that’s not because murder rates are high. They’re not. It’s because desirable neighborhoods under-build housing and protect incumbents.
Blaming “disorder tolerance” for unaffordability flips causality. When housing supply is constrained, wealth concentrates spatially. That drives school disparities and price stratification. Crime rates nationally are historically low — but access to high-opportunity neighborhoods is limited by zoning and political incentives, not gangs lurking in 2025 murder data.
7. You’re arguing from fear against statistics without disputing the statistics.
The article didn’t say crime is zero. It said: by the best available longitudinal data — homicide, property crime, NCVS validation, cross-checks against medical lethality — rates are historically low.
If you believe those numbers are wrong, show how. If you believe they’re incomplete, show why. But saying “I feel less safe” while acknowledging you haven’t experienced crime in 30 years is basically an admission that media ecology shapes perception more than lived reality.
You want dense, functional cities with good schools and low crime. So does everyone. The data suggest we’re closer to that on the safety dimension than we’ve been in decades. The bottleneck is housing policy, not a collapse of civilization.
The irony is thick: the country is objectively safer than when you last experienced crime, and yet you feel it’s too unsafe to live in a city. That disconnect deserves introspection, not scapegoats.
You don’t demolish statistics with vibes. You demolish vibes with statistics.
Not buying what your selling.
1. THIS IS MY POINT, its an American thing and it doesn't have to be.
2. Asia is diverse. Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan. How many countries in Asia are less disordered than the US? 10-20-30?
3. I let my kids walk around my safe neighborhood alone, I want a City where I feel the same. They won't get mugged 11 times, because we live someplace where that doesn't happen. They also have less freedom because I have to drive them everyplace. I'd rather they have more freedom and be safe. It's possible.
4. This is an actual charitable interpretation of the base assumption among progressives. The base assumption is the illegitimacy of a state controlled by white supremacy against oppressed minorities. Yes this isn't often explicitly stated, (No one is illegal on stolen land), there is still a criminal justice system in Blue cities, but it's the reasoning behind much of progressive DA thought.
5. I am not complaining here, I'm saying there is a ton of demand to live in cities, Solving disorder would increase demand. So you still need Yimby/abundance stuff.
6. The direction of causality isn't so important. Both have to change. The issue is people don't want to allow housing to get cheaper because expensive housing keeps out disorder. Solve crime and their are fewer problems to not allow inyour backyard.
7. I'm not really scared of anything. Where should I live in the US that is dense affordable, and safe with access to good schools? When I grew up there were pockets like this scattered around. Remnants of a lost age, places like Sheepshead bay Brooklyn. My crime problem came because I was often leaving my neighborhood or passing through the bad areas. I want disorder punished to a level where I feel like I don't need to live in an economically segregated area, so my kids don't experience what I did.
Lastly in Criminology, their is something called the law of concentration of crime. Basically Crime concentrates geographically and that concentration doesn't change with rates. So the bad neightborhoods are still bad, just less so. But cover the same area of the city. So you are right we are closer than ever. However let's engage the data. The rate of robbery US to Japan was 175X in the 90s, and has fallen to only 50x. That is the data. Tell me it's vibes when it's only 2x or 3x. I'll say sure.
Not disputing your argument, but did you run it through an LLM? This is full of common AI patterns.
Could you quantify what you consider to be "cheap", "dense", and "safe"? These are all highly relative/subjective criteria.
Going to just give you a name of a place. I don't live there, just know some folks who do. Frisco Texas. Super diverse, very safe, affordable enough for me, but not at all dense. In terms of density, think park Slope Brooklyn.
So I'd want a home big enough for my family, and it could be half the size of a Frisco house, so an 1800sqft 3 bedroom apartment instead of a 3600sqft house.
In my world you pick your place based on do you like trees, grass and cars? or do you like trains, parks, and walking. Price is close to the same because demand for building drives how much of each gets built. So the market clears, there are trade-offs, maybe size, but maybe Frisco in this world is more expensive than Brooklyn, because more people want their own yard. Who knows. But disorder can never be a trade-off that is just a policy failure.
Dense, most trips out of my house don't involve a car yet are equally convenient. I grew up where this was the case. Think parkslope.
Basically I want to live in Park slope and I want it cost what Frisco Texas costs. Park slope takes less land, less materials, and should not cost more money to build than Frisco does, if anything row houses should be cheaper because they are built together.
Safe, crime and disorder are equal to or better than Frisco Texas. Crime is currently about 3x-5x higher in park slope as it is in Frisco, still way too high, but if costs the same, and was maybe 2x, I'd move there tomorrow.
Crime is a policy failure I can no longer accept, home prices in big cities are a policy failure I no longer accept.
I have heard that reporting from local police departments to the FBI and other national databases suffered for a while. I'm not sure if that's gone away or if there's still missing/delayed reporting in there.
I'm sure it's gotten better now that the bulk of FBI agents have been tasked with scanning the Epstein files to protect Trump.
I see a lot of articles pointing to anecdotes about street disorder. I'm not trying to deny that's a big problem and one that likely doesn't show up in crime stats, but...as late as the 90's, weren't a lot of areas in big cities basically off limits after business hours? In my hometown, a huge swath of the downtown area was given to a local "community leader" who thought that criminals should have a place to do drugs and engage in antisocial behavior, and would show up at city council meetings with a group of thugs and rant at the council to get his way. In Bonfire Of the Vanities the courthouse is a beleaguered island in a sea of disorder, and one wrong turn almost gets the main character mugged. I know that's fiction, but as far as I can tell that is in fact how people perceived the situation at the time. Obviously open air drug markets are a big issue but it's not like cities were always pleasant places in the past either.
I'll toss into the mix that Baltimore has seen a *huge* drop in homicides starting in mid-2023. For the years 2015 - 2022 the homicide rate never dropped below 300. 2025 saw 133 homicides.
Just one city, but prior to 2023 Baltimore was horrible.
It is undeniable that shoplifting in cities and drug crime are up. You wouldn’t expect this to show up statistically because of drug legalization policy, lack of reporting from stores, and everything being locked up in cvs.
While the murder rate is down, I suspect a more granular analysis of cities (eg, the Upper East Side vs all of New York) would show the opposite trend for random acts of violence. As for aggravated assaults, they are of course down, because the payoff of robbing someone is much lower since no one has cash on them.
Suppose you're right, this is still a much weaker claim than the claim Scott is debunking. "Certain kinds of crime are up in certain parts of certain cities" is important for those cities but doesn't represent a problem of national significance.
Also, specifically on "everything being locked up in CVS", I've been to many major cities in recent years and haven't encountered that myself. Is it just a thing in SF?
The enshittification of America’s cities is one of our most important national problems, in my opinion.
I live in urban Austin and used to live near Denver and go downtown a lot. I've also visited Seattle and Boston in the past couple of years. None of these places seem enshittified to me. Sure, you see homeless people occasionally, but the cities are largely safe and clean, and even more so in the past few years compared to 2022-2023. I haven't seen broken windows or much graffiti. I don't know anyone who has been the victim of a violent crime.
When I talk to baby boomer relatives about what cities were like when they were in their 20s, it's clear that American cities are much better and have not regressed even close to where they were in the '80s and '90s.
So again I can't help but wonder if the complaints about "cities" are really just about the San Francisco Bay Area, plus maybe parts of New York City.
I have lived in New York for ten years, and there is a really obvious difference in the cleanliness and safety of the city.
Take seattle, since another commenter complained about living there. In the last twenty years, murder rates are way up (yes, lower than the 90s). Homelessness per capita is at an all time high, and nearly doubled since 2005. Every metric of crime in seattle is way higher than the national average.
Taken together, maybe your bar for being uncomfortable with crime is just higher than other people’s. But seattle has definitely, inarguably enshittified.
Wait you say this and you live in Austin? Over the last 20 years hasn't Austin undergone massive tech urbanization accompanied with significantly less safety, garbage everywhere, and disintegration of public trust?
It used to be totally peaceful downtown, but especially after COVID we started seeing homeless encampments on sidewalks, open drug use, etc. Follow r/austin where the typical complaint is homeowners complain about homeless burning garbage in their backyard.
Now I don't think this is egregiously bad compared to other major urban cities, but Austin has significantly changed recently and many would argue it has been enshittified.
Anyone that lived in an American city in the 90s vs today will laugh in your face at this completely absurd fantasy.
I avoid major cities as much as possible, and I've seen stores in mid-size and smaller towns that weren't locked up 20 years ago that are now.
Highly variable, neighborhood by neighborhood. I notice it specifically comparing different Food Lion locations in my area; some will be free and open as ever, others have security gates at the entrance and permanent security.
I encourage you to have more of an open mind about cities. Yes, there are some sketchy urban neighborhoods. I'd avoid the south side of Chicago, the Tenderloin in SF, and large parts of Baltimore, for example. But the downtowns and surrounding neighborhoods of most American cities are pretty safe and clean these days, and offer a lot in terms of amenities for visitors. Yes, you will see the occasional homeless person, but they keep to themselves, and you won't see encampments much anymore.
I find it plausible that shoplifting and drug crime are up. But random acts of violence?
I'll deny it. Where's your evidence?
I wonder if there's a sort of wisdom-of-the-crowd thing going on with the murder rate. If you ask people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, people individually will have very low confidence and make all sorts of wild guesses, but the average will tend to be shockingly accurate due to the non-signal parts of the guesses cancelling out. Maybe a lot of murderers guessing how much violence will cause a death tends to similarly closely track reality on average, even though they're individually uncertain and each only contributing a small amount of information.
Interestingly, people’s estimates of the change in crime rate don’t have this feature. In nearly every year since 1989, a majority of Americans thought that crime was increasing nationwide, even though crime was decreasing nationwide in nearly all those years.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/697124/crime-seen-less-serious-second-straight-year.aspx
But interestingly, in 2000, 2001, and 2025, the actual rate of crime was decreasing so much that it was no longer a majority but only a plurality who still thought crime was increasing.
I feel a bit ridiculous even writing this, but I don't really care about murder rates? Demographically I'm just not the sort of person who would have been murdered in 1900 or 1960 or 2020 or now, murder was a non issue in my life.
Murder may be a statistically reliable crime but it's also such an extreme crime that it isn't at all relevant to my or most people's lived experience. Property crime, small value theft, liberty, public intoxication, open air drug use, busking are very much on the upswing and have much more of an impact on me personally.
Property crime is on the decline! See the post!
The post has a chart on property crime reported to the police, and defends the chart by pointing to car theft statistic. I don't think either have any bearing on needing a CVS employee to unlock a display cabinet for me, which didn't use to happen.
Nor stores closing citing high retail theft.
Retailers are not in the habit of spending money on store security for no reason.
I think it's important to, instead of saying "property crime is up" say "burglary, robbery, larceny, car theft, and arson are all down, but shoplifting is either up, or at least only down because CVS has locks on their cases."
Fair enough. I do think it's not quite a dichotomy but I'd prefer the inverse and vote accordingly
You would … prefer that burglary, larceny, car theft, and arson be up while shoplifting is down?!
Absolutely! The core tenet of Rationalism is disregarding statistically insignificant albeit flashy long tail stuff and looking at what has the highest actual aggregate impact. I'd much rather the stuff that doesn't happen to me happen to other people slightly more often, and the stuff that impact me happen less
I would guess that most murder victims think they're "not the sort of person who gets murdered," since if you *did* think you're the sort of person who gets murdered, you'd probably take steps to defend yourself or get out of the likely-to-be-murdered situation.
Like, if someone dies in a mugging gone wrong, they probably didn't walk around the city thinking "yup... only a matter of time until someone comes at me with a knife... sucks, but what can you do about it..."
I live in generally nice areas in Middle America and my car has been broken into three times (work, apartment complex parking lot, grocery store parking lot) and my bike stolen once in the past decade, twice in the past couple of years. I reported the bike and first car break-in but stopped reporting after that because the cops don't do anything and filing an insurance claim isn't worth it, so my personal contribution to reported crimes is down. I also stopped responding to surveys. My in-laws' long time friend, who I knew, was just shot in the face in a retirement community. I when I was a kid and young adult our family car was never broken into, no one we knew was murdered, etc. My lived experience is more crime in the past decade than the decades before that despite living in similarly nice areas. Maybe I'm an exception...
I propose definition drift. More things are treated as if they aren't crimes than in previous eras.
This model would imply a shift from blue collar crime (man breaks your door, takes your stuff), towards white collar crime (man files a frivolous lawsuit, you settle because you're not confident in the courts, and in any case, defending yourself and winning is more expensive than paying him off)
At an extreme, if we count every scam email as a separate crime, modern crime rates would eclipse the entire history of pre-internet criminality.
made a point below that you've ended up making more succinctly. Those on the discord know that "is this one crime or lots of crimes?" is among my favorite legal questions, I've litigated it pretty extensively in real cases, and it's always fun in that dorm room heap-paradox way.
You're absolutely correct that each scam email *could* be charged as a separate instance of federal wire fraud, it's just that no one ever *would*. So, by this definition, Crime is absolutely through the roof, in fact, a single spam-scammer might be committing more crimes in a day than occurred in a year in like, 19th century Britain.
To the legal realist, it's inescapable that when we talk about "crime" we are talking about "crime of the sort that would actually get charged and result in a conviction" but that means to meaningfully talk about crime we have to know an awful lot about how very particular jurisdictions work .
>>And car theft is consistently reported to the police, because insurances require a police report before they will compensate the lost car.
But many people don't have car insurance, and I expect those people to be poorer and more often victims of car theft
Even without insurance you still have to report a stolen car in order to cancel the registration.
Has the number of people without insurance gone up or down? If it’s a constant fraction, then this won’t bias the directional estimates, just the total number.
>The next question is: why do people’s intuitions clash so violently with the statistics? More on that soon.
It's glib and cliche to blame social media, but I assume much of the answer will be social media. More specifically, polarization and the way it plays out on social media, intensifying soft on crime/hard on crime attitudes, etc.
I might also suggest the role that more transparency interacting with social media might play, in that "judge lets out criminal on his 9th rape on probation" or "judge gives no sentence for 35th assault" or "judge cuts sentence in half for multiple murderer having [generational trauma]" *probably* aren't common enough to affect statistics but absolutely spread like wildfire among enough bubbles to impact the perception of crime.
I doubt it’s social media - for as long as people have been collecting statistics on public opinion about changes in crime rate, the public has systematically estimated crime to be increasing even when it is decreasing: https://news.gallup.com/poll/697124/crime-seen-less-serious-second-straight-year.aspx
Note that 2000, 2001, and 2025 are the only years when crime decreases were so significant that only a plurality of the public thought it was going up, rather than a majority.
Is it constant even when crime rate IS actually going up (1960s)? If so, I guess it's really an unreliable metric then.
It’s not constant! When crime rate really is going up substantially (like in the first few years of the survey, in the late 80s, and in the immediate post-pandemic years) it seems that more than 75% of people think it’s going up. In the years when it’s basically constant, about 70% of people think it’s going up. And in the 1990s and 2000s, when it was going down substantially, only about 50-60% of people thought it was going up.
Theres also a slight lag - it takes a couple years of increase or decrease to substantially move the numbers.
I guess we can have 70% as our baseline then, and treat anything below it as good enough. Like another lizardman constant but this one is huge.
Something that I think people are underrating is that a large group of people in the US are at risk of being deported if they commit a crime
On the other hand a recent drop has been mentioned in Canada, coincident with a reduction in drug potentcy that people say is due to a precursor crackdown in China
I’ve always felt that the inverse relationship of any fact to its perception is a product of hyperawareness. Kidnappings weren’t omnipresent in media in the ‘70s when nobody worried about their kids being out and unsupervised. By the time Amber’s Law gave us near ubiquity in the reporting of kidnappings of minors, parents were terrified of it despite its drastic reduction in occurrence in the USA.
Scott's general point (murder, violent crime rates going down and he can't point to errors in the data to undermine that) remains intact, interesting and useful despite the following, but an observation:
These are still narrow definitions of crime, and probably miss most crime.
Police-reported (or FBI reported crimes) or murder or ... all fit some narrow/traditional convenient criterion.
An AI engine is telling me maybe 50-100 million fraudulent transactions on credit/debit cards per year in U.S. but only <10 million police reported traditional violent/property crimes. I don't trust those numbers, but suspect actual values are probably outside the stats folks are trawling through here when discussing "crime rates."
Hell, I suspect that in many (not all, and probably not even most) jurisdictions, many driving violations (including speeding, or texting while driving, etc.) are actually criminal acts. In which case, crime rates might be orders of magnitude higher and might be doing crazy things (perhaps up because we write more ways the law can be criminally broken each year?).
I make this point not just for semantic reasons, but because it might be important to understanding the trends Scott is remarking upon.
The word faces limited resources. Victims (future or past), enforcement, perpetrators, etc. - all have to make decisions on which crimes to defend/prosecute/perpetrate. Changes by any of those parties might make traditional/violent/reported crimes a different story simply because people are shifting attention to/from those different crime categories.
Bingo
Take a look at the Jeff-alytics Substack. He’s been looking at the same stuff for quite awhile and has reached the same conclusions.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jasher?r=8p0vc&utm_medium=ios
Demographics may be a major reason for the decline in crime rates. Most crimes are committed by young men. The US population is aging and fewer children are being born.
Yes, I made that point as well. I'm not sure if it accounts for all of the dip over the past 20 years, though.
I have no hypothesis as to what the parameters of a formal model of crime rates would be just an intuition that the number of young men is an important parameter. I said major and that is not a good term. But I wouldn't build a model without it.
Agreed.
@_browsing: You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Well thank you, Walter. Have a nice day.
It's interesting that you refer to this as unintuitive. It's intuitive to me. Is there polling to support the idea that people's perceptions of crime rates over time "clash violently with the statistics"?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/697124/crime-seen-less-serious-second-straight-year.aspx
Lawyer here. I have to ask some questions about what an "unreported crime" is that will look like legal BS, but I think are kind of important to this question.
Let me start with why it matters: It matters because people will say things like "group X *in actuality* commits more crimes than Group Y, but these crimes are not reported" OR "time X actually had less crime than now, we simply don't report it as much these days."
so, we're arguing about "real" crime, as opposed to some kind of silly hypothetical possible/fake/theoretical crime. I'm a defense attorney operating in Minnesota. Here, and in every state, we live in a complete ocean of unreported crime, and end up arguing about the tiny swimming pool of "actual crimes people care about".
By way of illustration: I'm probably committing a crime right now, as I write this. I'm *very positive* someone reading this post is committing a crime as they read it (are you reading this at work? Your employer might like to know...). Mentally, I think we all kind of partition "abstract/theoretical crimes of the sort that no one cares about" from "real, actual crime that is obvious and people care about" but when you actually think about which crimes "count" for various categories...it becomes a bit unclear...
- Victim versus Non-victim?: DUIs, probably the most common crime charged, have no victim, but can be extremely serious. Insider Trading and Securities Fraud, crimes that are cliche for like, their ability to be hypothetically committed by everyone at all times, both have victims. Assault is a crime that varies pretty dramatically depending on severity: an unwelcome shove or poke or a thrown sandwich could be assault, but nobody ever reports those as crimes. So, I've probably been assaulted hundreds and hundreds of times in my life, many readers here from scrappier upbringings have been assaulted thousands of times...but it's weird to think of these as "crimes"
- Felony versus misdemeanor?: It's famously hard to tell in the moment for a lot of crimes whether something is a felony or a misdemeanor. My lawn furniture got stolen once. Is that a felony or a misdemeanor? Well, you need to know the value, since in Minnesota a theft of over $500 is a felony, but wait, a theft of ANY amount is a felony if it's a burglary. My lawn furniture was stolen out of my unlocked garage. Was that a burglary? You end up needing to know the specific facts of each case, and a lot of law, to tell them apart. Also, keep in mind that felonies in one state might be misdemeanors in another: some things aren't even crimes in one state and very serious crimes in another.
- "Process crimes" or Malum Prohibitum versus Malum In Se: I always have to go back to DUIs with this. DUIs are, to me, a paradigmatic process crime. You drive (technically, in MInnesota, Operate or physically control a vehicle in any way) with a BAC over .08 and the split-second you cross that bright line of blood alcohol content, it's a crime. Why? Because we decided that was the legal limit. It might not even be based on good science. DUIs are a crime, arguably a pretty serious one, even if you hit nothing, cause no damage, and arrive safely home. Are lies process crimes? Lies to banks? 18 USC 1410 false statements to banks are another one of those classic "crimes everyone commits" ("The Wire" fans, this is the Clay Davis "headshot") and they even have a victim (the bank). Some forms of tax fraud are very bad and quite obviously sinister. Other forms are very technical and arguably everyone commits them.
I realize a lot of rebuttals to this observation are that only the seriously lawbrained could misunderstand that difference between some theoretical ubiquitous crime "that would never get charged" and an actual crime that "would"...but of course, we are here discussing crimes that *won't* get charged. So what's the difference? My point is that there isn't actually a good way to systematically tell them apart (any recourse to whether the crime "would have gotten charged if reported" is even messier. You'd need to know the charging practices in the jurisdiction and the strength of the evidence for each report").
Some demarcator matters if the speaker purports to go on anything more than vibes. When I'm arguing about whether Group X or Group Y commits more CRIMES, I think I would consider DUI rates or mortgage fraud rates pretty important, but of course only ACTUAL mortgage fraud, you know the kind where you *really seriously* rip off the bank, instead of some technical thing...When arguing about whether there's more ACTUAL crime now, I think the rate of "theft" matters, but only actual, not "technical" theft.
SO importantly, I've tried very hard to make it clear that I'm not talking about weird or silly edge cases. DUIs are *VERY COMMON* as charged crimes, but I wouldn't be surprised if nearly all of them don't get "reported." It's almost a cliche that everyone is at all times and places committing securities fraud or mortgage fraud or tax fraud. Theft is probably *the number one crime* people complaining about social decay and crime complain about, but in Minnesota "theft" (of the kind where you shoplift from a drugstore) is charged out the same way as "theft" (of the kind where you technically overbill for performing some new medical procedure).
Amen
maybe I should do a blog post on this...
You and another guy (fraudconcern) above beat me too it but it needs to be said far and wide.
I should also point out that when people retort, as they will to you, "well nobody is prosecuted for these crimes so they don't matter", prisons are full (in the aggregate, even if all are 1's and 2's of 'weird' crimes) of edge cases from Puffy (nobody prosecuted on that law in what, decades?), "felony littering", "returning a can for refund across state lines", etc. My state recently criminalized both popping a wheeling on your bicycle and walking your dog without a leash for the third time in two years, by definition crime has just went up (the invention of new crimes) because you know what, I'm still seeing kids popping wheelies daily.
what I find so absolutely infuriating about this kind of argument...I must have it 3 times a day, is that when you're a lawyer people always spring this "the law is a human institution" thing on you like it's a truth bomb. It goes like "I know you think the law is all about statutes and rules but really the law is just what people believe it is. If everyone thought something was legal, it would be, did you ever think about that?"
and...that's absolutely true, but then 2 days later the same person will be getting very upset that jurisdictions aren't prosecuting crimes, and the world is going to hell because of it.
As a majoritarian legal realist I am *absolutely* of the opinion that one can only meaningfully talk about "crime" in the sense of "a crime that actually gets charged by real prosecutors and results in a conviction." But this means you need a fairly good understanding of what prosecutors will actually do, and what jurors will actually convict over, before you can talk about whether a particular act "is a crime."
...which feels very gatekeep-y but that's what follows from "the law is just what people think it is"
Given my particular subspecialty, which is federal white collar fraud law, I think the MOST common question I am engaged to answer is "is this behavior the sort of thing that gets charged as a crime." Far, far more people care about this question than "can you win my case at trial." IT's a hard question. It's not something that one can answer by looking at a stat book in the aggregate, you need to know the facts of the particular case and the patterns of what is happening in a particular jurisdiction. As an example Hunter Biden was charged with a violation of 18 USC 922 that is almost never prosecuted. In the abstract this is "not the kind of thing that is usually charged as a crime" but in the specific, his conduct and position is such that of course he's going to get charged. The specific is what matters.
I always point out to people this exact question is the problem: "is this behavior the sort of thing that gets charged as a crime", i.e. "I'm expected to follow the law but the law isn't written in a way I can understand it" coupled with an implied concern here by the "public" (your client) not on whether it's a crime or not, she assumes that it is by the very framing of the question, but more "can I get away with it".
BTW I hate this statement from you though I know it's true as well 'but this means you need a fairly good understanding of what prosecutors will actually do, and what jurors will actually convict over, before you can talk about whether a particular act "is a crime.""
Because what also follows from that is the part two of "whether it's a crime or not, the prosecution has charged you now anyways and this is why you should plead guilty even if factually actually innocent". I've been on the receiving end of that and while I always had a low opinion of the legal system, that real life exposure to it completely dissolved it lol. Now I'm with "might makes right" crowd which is effectively what you are saying above, i.e. we have the rule of Law, not law.
Either way what you are saying and fraudconcern is something not enough people internalize in America and they should as it holds up any sort of reform to the system. I used to have faith that Arnold Kling's "Legamorons" could solve the problem but as we've seen more and more lately (or maybe I've just been paying more attention), that's not going to work either.
>in every state, we live in a complete ocean of unreported crime, and end up arguing about the tiny swimming pool of "actual crimes people care about".
I appreciate the lengthy explanation you have given of the differences between actions that are crimes, as defined by the letter of the law, and reported (let alone prosecuted) crimes.
I'm not happy with treating unreported crimes and "actual crimes people care about" as if they were disjoint. A rape victim who doesn't report their rape, (e.g. out of no confidence that reporting it will help bring them closure or any other relief from the legal system) has still very much been the victim of an actual crime that they care about. Note that in the graph of Predicted Probability of Police Notification For Different Types of Violence _ONLY_ Robbery has a probability of >50% for most of the study period. All the other are below 50% for the whole period except for 2 years where aggravated assault barely crossed 50%. There is a _lot_ of violent crime, with real victims, that never gets reported.
I think you are misreading my post. I never said that there is a division between "unreported crimes" and "actual crimes people care about." There's no point up there where I say they're disjoint.
TO be clear: there are crimes that are not reported. Now... Some are very serious and important. Some rapes and assaults and burglaries and *lots* of domestic abuse is not reported. The fact that this crime is not reported is a big deal, because it screws up our impression of how much of this crime there is.
*other* unreported crimes are very dumb things nobody cares about. Surely every scam telemarketing call is not an "unreported crime" that we have to make sure is logged in our reckoning of social decay. Reporting these crimes would in fact OVERSTATE how much crime there is. If every fraudulent email was an "unreported fraud", then wire fraud would be VERY COMMON.
I'm saying that demarcating these two things: the "important" unreported crimes and the "unimportant" ones, is very hard, and requires a very specific analysis of the facts of *each crime*, such that it's hard to speak in the aggregate of how much unreported crime there is.
some unreported assaults are very serious (a husband beats his wife, she says nothing out of fear). Other unreported assaults are borderline comical (my friend shoves me in the shoulder when I make fun of his favorite football team). They would both be part of a statistic "unreported assaults" if we were somehow tracking "all unreported assaults"
Many Thanks!
>TO be clear: there are crimes that are not reported. Some are very serious and important. Some rapes and assaults and burglaries and lots of domestic abuse is not reported. The fact that this crime is not reported is a big deal, because it screws up our impression of how much of this crime there is.
Thank you. A lot of your comment (valuable though it is), looks primarily at
>_other_ unreported crimes are very dumb things nobody cares about.
I agree that there are a lot of them. Personally I view this as a problem with the _law_ . The the legislators chose to write the law so that
>It's almost a cliche that everyone is at all times and places committing securities fraud or mortgage fraud or tax fraud.
in addition to making nonsense out of crime statistics, this makes everyone a criminal and opens the door to malicious prosecution and lawfare.
I don't expect to ever see this fixed, but I'm not fond of what our legislators did.
Re:
>You'd need to know the charging practices in the jurisdiction and the strength of the evidence for each report
That gets very close to saying that what counts as crime is the customs and mores of individual jurisdiction, rather than the written law. Why have written law _at all_, if the written law is impossible to adhere to and what ultimately matters is local charging practices?
it's possible you can come up with something better, nobody is stopping you. You'll find that basically every jurisdiction in the US operates this way, with concepts like prosecutorial discretion and the jury right anchoring the law in common sense. There's a reason for this: alternatives are messy in their own way, and generally have unpopular consequences. NO one has come up with a good alternative, but maybe you can. I believe in you.
Many Thanks! As I said earlier:
>I don't expect to ever see this fixed, but I'm not fond of what our legislators did.
On a side note, you may be interested in Zvi's current post,
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-156-part-1-they-do-mean-the-effect
About half of it is about near-term impact of AI on law.
( This is _not_ to propose a solution to the problem with arbitrarily enforced laws. Zvi is looking at quite a different direction, and sees one possible UNfortunate possibility being AI-fueled legal arms races. )
Re:
>it's possible you can come up with something better, nobody is stopping you.
Actually, as a non-legislator I have essentially zero power here - 1/300,000,000th of the electorate.
Actually, along one parameter, there is at least one example from the past which was obviously better along that measure, though not solving arbitrarily enforced laws. Rome's Twelve Tables of law could at least be _read and remembered_ by its citizens, which is flatly impossible with >3,000 federal statutes alone (let alone _complying_ with all of these statutes).
While I am generally interested in the intersection of AI and the law, I do not see this as our salvation, as they tend to converge on the same problem: how we can articulate our wishes unambiguously. The AI will not save you because every time it suggests an interpretation of the law that seems like it defies common sense, the party that benefits from its interpretation will say "see, it is very wise" and the party that is harmed by its interpretation will cry "misalignment!" This is what already happens with judges, prosecutors, and attorneys.
so...it's the exact same problem, and its insoluble. Nothing delivers us from the ambiguity of our desires. I probably don't have space to articulate my full thoughts here.
>> _other_ unreported crimes are very dumb things nobody cares about.
>I agree that there are a lot of them. Personally I view this as a problem with the _law_ . The the legislators chose to write the law so that
And yet someone does care hence why the law exists, i.e. your roses is someone else's shit and vice versa.
> That gets very close to saying that what counts as crime is the customs and mores of individual jurisdiction, rather than the written law. Why have written law _at all_, if the written law is impossible to adhere to and what ultimately matters is local charging practices?
Actually he wrote pretty extensively on that and would agree with you, it's worth the read TBH regardless if you agree with it or not:
https://broodingomnipresence.substack.com/p/unanimous-juries-and-other-complete
Many Thanks! It was an interesting read.
(as proof of reading, typo detection in:
>We know from mock trials that jurors often spend hours arguing over the meaning of works like reasonable or knowingly.
s/works/words/ )
If jury trials were more frequent, I would have considerable sympathy with the argument that
>It [jury trials] is *this* safeguard that saves us from every prosecution being *purely* political.
Except I don't really believe the claim that the threat of a jury trial is really sufficient to materially influence the result in the very large fraction of cases that never see a jury, particularly agreeing with your point
>I find it amusing the SCOTUS once said something along the lines "not all plea deals are legal but we haven't draw the coercion line yet beyond 'plead guilty to jaywalking and a $10 fine or mandatory execution if found guilty'; maybe we will make that line in future" and yet most people would agree that line has been reached and long ago.
To all intents and purposes a judge can essentially coerce a plea deal.
( A large chunk of Theodidactus's essay more-or-less nets out to justifying the Stormy Daniels farce against Trump. Well, congrats, Trump wound up reciprocating the malicious prosecution now that he's in office. Enjoy! )
My main point is that, even without politically motivated selective malicious prosecution, even if it were just _random_, writing the law so that
>Here, and in every state, we live in a complete ocean of unreported crime, and end up arguing about the tiny swimming pool of "actual crimes people care about".
and
>It's almost a cliche that everyone is at all times and places committing securities fraud or mortgage fraud or tax fraud.
makes it to all intents and purposes _IMPOSSIBLE_ for anyone who even spends all their waking hours making a good faith effort to comply with the law to successfully comply. If this is what "rule of law" reduces to in the United States, may the devil take it.
For each law, either enforce it or repeal it. And don't write so many of them that not only is it impossible to comply with them; it isn't even possible to _remember_ them.
To put it another way: Each statute is essentially a command from the legislature to the people subject to their laws. If the legislature issues commands that they do not intend and expect to be obeyed, then what the legislators are doing is profoundly dishonest.
Should retort that to him so he sees it, not me lol. He wrote it (the Theo guy you have been having this convo with).
Btw you and I agree on juries here, they are worthless in the age of coercive plea deals and draconian trial penalties. And Theo intentionally ignores that.
Also I'm hyper cognizant of your crime point given I still have a couple years of probation left and the number one term in any probation order is "thou shall break no laws while on probation" which is of course, impossible. You can't even not break laws while incarcerated, in the highly controlled environment it is lol. It's annoying when you get issued a term of probation that is impossible to comply with which means you can get revoked any time which I assume is the point.
Many Thanks! I've written a further comment (partially a reply to an essay you wrote, partially a reply to a comment of Peter's on your essay) in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/record-low-crime-rates-are-real-not/comment/217961059
“All the criminals are too addicted to video games and IG” — phrased dismissively, but I think there’s something to the “soma” theory: atomized individuals sleepwalking through their lives, doped up on their virtual drug of choice, whether that’s social media, video games, porn, long chats with their AI boo, online shopping and gambling… while meanwhile, on the streets, fentanyl has people nodding off mid-stride. Weirdly…many crimes require people skills.
I live in the Baltics, and people perception is that the crime is very low. Statistics say crime rate dropped significantly since the fall of USSR.
Murder rate is still higher then average in Europe where I live, slightly below California. But anecdotically I hear about a murder just a few times per year. I guess it is because 96% of murders are domestic violence inside groups prone to them (lower income, alcohol involved etc). I honestly hear about murder of a middle class person just once per a few years.
I was almost assaulted once in my life, around 2019, for looking "foreign," ( I had dreadlocks). My friend was assaulted once and had a consussion, but it was many years ago.
In my country, the reason for crime rates dropping includes migration of insane counts of the young people prone to violence to UK and Ireland. I joke that in my town, no gopnicks left at all, they all went to the UK.
People are using examples like locked up detergent in stores as examples of crime getting worse, but on the contrary the security hypothesis explains how this kind of thing is leading to reduced crime.
No one carries cash, cars have better theft protection making hotwiring difficult for amateurs, ring/security cameras and cell phones are everywhere, etc.
The cost of theft protection has generally lowered faster than the crime rate so firms still invest more in it and there's a bit of herd protection.
Bike theft is an example of the opposite. With ebikes the average target value has gone up and hand held grinders have made theft trivial.
There'd probably be even more bike theft but bike theft is depressing bike usage.
I'd be interested to see how this compares to other developed countries. I've always heard America is more violent, but a lot of that is due to the availability of guns here. Like fights are could be about as frequent in London and NYC, but due to guns they're more likely to be lethal in NYC.
What I heard is that the more Euro-like parts of America, like Massachusetts, have a similar level of crime and violence to Europe (though with more guns). But other areas, like Louisiana, are considerably more violent, even accounting for guns. I am only vaguely remembering this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
> All the criminals are too addicted to video games and Instagram to commit any crimes.
I believe the last sentence is right. Today, young people who would otherwise do crimes, instead look at their smartphones and tablets. Almost all young people are addicted to these.
The Tyler administration really dropped the ball on crime
My experience as a public defender and prosecutor between the mid-00s and early 20s was that we had pretty steady numbers of cases, but the nature of cases changed in some ways I'll mention below. I think it held steady largely because the amount of hours cops can devote to policing bears on how crime is reported and the available legal system resources act as a thermostat to regulate how much law enforcement we can do.
Crime data is only much good if there's an arrest, because in those cases a charge code is submitted to the NCIC representing the officer's best guess at the offense for which he arrested the suspect. (If no arrest is made and the crime is never solved, there's an "incident-based" reporting system but it's not broadly adopted to my knowledge.) After arrest there'll be a new entry below the arrest code if/when formal charges are filed and again upon conviction, and these will ALL likely be different because A) cops aren't lawyers, B) plea bargains happen, and C) the NCIC charge codes are national and old and don't map perfectly to most states' current criminal law codes. Cop arrests somebody for burglarizing a shed, perp puts all the stolen goods in a tote bag in his trunk, the loot included a pistol from the shed. There's all sorts of ways that might end up being reported or charged, in some states walking out with the stolen gun counts as "using" a firearm to commit the burglary, in some places it's not even a burglary at all, the cop or lawyer may or may not include the gun modifier to the charge code, probably the code is "stealing" and modifier "from outbuildings" but in some cases the arrest code might be for felon in possession of firearm because the cop hasn't solved the burglary yet and knows the gun will get a high bond locally. Just to say all these stats are goofy, discretionary and have poor category fits.
During my time I saw a few major trends.
1. Drug manufacturing declined substantially and standard methods of drug interdiction declined as well. Methamphetamines in particular used to be commonly home-grown and had various supply constraints and attendant risks. When I started, manufacture was typically in well-ventilated sheds, gave off a lot of heat, often blew up sheds, and involved noticeable ether fumes, so it was both dangerous and detectable. Cooks were stealing anhydrous ammonia off farms. This arrangement caused a LOT of secondary crimes to occur to support the primary one, as well as having a high chance to be caught. 10 years later, cooking had shifted to "shake and bake" methods, using almost entirely things you could buy from Walmart, cooks could be completed in a pickup truck cab parked out in the woods, and pseudoephedrine was the only real supply constraint. Much lower chance to get caught and almost no need for secondary crimes to support the cook, so long as you were smart about it and didn't walk up to the Walgreen's cashier with nothing but instant cold packs, coleman fuel, coffee filters and lithium batteries.
By the early 2020s, cooking was almost extinct. Far cheaper and easier to import and distribute Mexican ice. This shifts all the secondary crimes onto narco gangs where it was redundant, or even out of the country. Now add in what Scott mentions about buying drugs almost exclusively from known contacts, officers could not as easily do an undercover buy by driving over to the corner and waiting for someone to come out and say "whatchu need?" which was genuinely common in 2004. Even in 2010 you could have a local task force work a UC into the local distribution network. By 2022 simple UC buys were practically non-existent.
2. Domestic Violence increased but the severity of incidents was lower and the prosecution success was wretched. At least in my area, I believe this was a response to having less other crime to work, and a new social push to treat DV seriously, there were also national mandates for reporting and special grants available to local departments to have dedicated DV response teams. Things which would've been blown off as "ol' Joe and Donna are at it again and the neighbors called, why dontcha swing by there and get him to sleep it off" ended, and instead Joe and Donna were responsible for several reports a year none of which led to anything because Donna wouldn't cooperate. And every one of these incidents required two cops to show up at the house because that's the new standard for DV, and outside major metros that means there may be at best one other overnight deputy doing any real policing while Joe and Donna are defused.
3. Lots of minor financial or property crimes plummeted, with the exception of shoplifting, because so many things went digital or otherwise improved security. Bad check fraud used to be rampant, but you couldn't kite checks reliably once instant check processing was implemented in ~2006 so this declined and now checks are barely used at all. Counterfeit bills used to trickle down to common criminals regularly, that dried up with heavy use of counterfeit pens as people either didn't risk it or found bills that weren't detectable. In 2009 it was easy to strip copper out of old houses or from irrigation pipes, but farmers switched to different pipes and scrapyards gradually became a little less like Sanford and Son and markets adjusted to the point it wasn't profitable.
I view this period as the underclass shifting its hustle from the periphery of crime into some variety of legally defrauding the government for money. Getting on disability seems to have totally substituted for what AFDC did before welfare reform, and section 8 housing is affordable if you have no standards. But that's kind of a crappy life! What the underclass always has is some group of people who don't exactly wanna work, but aren't willing to accept living on the baseline of welfare and section 8. That group used to be the ones taking the risks of smalltime financial crime or drug dealing or whatever. But now you get food stamp fraud, phony day cares. Your uncle just got disability on some exaggerated nonsense claim, so find an in-home care provider to arrange the Medicaid end of things and take their cut as you pick up 10 hours a week sitting on his couch scrolling tiktok for $15/hr. There's all sorts of ways to claim kids you don't really have in your household for food stamps, take the excess and sell it for cash! These crimes are all much harder to catch, and many times the government workers overseeing them are incentivized not to look too hard!
So all that's really left for law enforcement among those folks is dealing with the side-effects of their entire worthless BS existence, namely overdoses and minor domestic violence incidents that nobody wants to prosecute. We've bought them off, sedated them, and shipped the worst externalities to Mexico.
Do you think if the kind of benefits fraud you're describing were pursued by the state more vigorously, other sorts of crime would increase as a substitute?
Yes I do, although I can't venture a guess at the volume or do a cost-benefit analysis of that policy.
Part of why I intuitively don't think full equal-share welfare systems would ever work is based on my experience with this, people don't actually want to be equal, even the bottom rungs have people who will insist on finding a way to eke out an extra 20% over what everyone else is allotted. You could make an argument that allowing hustlers to get a little extra juice from the squeeze in this way has fewer negative externalities than traditional crime, and that a welfare system may work better if it allows a little bit of gamesmanship to operate unimpeded. The obvious downside is that this kind of thing is very offensive to normie rule-following types' sense of fairness, and tends to blowback on the entire system, so you have to do SOME policing of this.
I have the biggest objection to fraud in the way the in-home health services sector runs, having done some GAL work for older people. I think there are a lot who could be kept in their house with higher care levels, and every time Trailer Park Tina and Sleazy Middle-man Health Agency get together to bilk the government for her to sit on dad's couch that's taking away funds that would be going where it would make a difference in somebody's final years. My wife reviews care plans, and a lot of them are submitted by some lady in the city with little to no health care knowledge operating out of her apartment and just trying to claim the maximum hours they can get away with for any client they've signed up, and that puts pressure on the rest of the system to be stingier than it would be.
Good summary of your experience, thank you
"Crime data is only much good if there's an arrest..."
Scott thoroughly debunked this through NCVS data.
I think you're reading too much into both Scott's claim and mine. Scott is there specifically rebutting a hypothesis that a decline in reporting would make official stats go down while crime remained flat or rose. In that limited context, all you need to see in that survey data is that the trend line is moving downwards with the national trend, you don't need similar extrapolated raw numbers and it doesn't have to be accurate, the trendline alone is sufficient to undercut the hypo he's attacking. For that very limited purpose, if you are already holding a strong prior as Scott is, that's fine.
For my purposes, no the survey data isn't worth very much. I mentioned that even the NCIC arrest data is flawed bc cops aren't lawyers, and crime victims are much much worse in that regard. And that's on top of all the usual problems with self-reported data like this. If you're trying to get anything out of that survey *other* than a trend line, anything with real explanatory power, then it's not going to be useful.
Who are these Americans who are failing to mention crimes? Outside of sexual assault and maybe a couple of other crimes, there is no particular stigma to being a crime victim in American culture. On the contrary, people seem EAGER to share their victim experiences with all and sundry, even if they don't share every last detail.
Inasmuch as a minority of victims do have a hyperactive sense of dignity, and don't want to talk about ANY of their victim experiences, I find it hard to believe this would be more of an issue today than in 1983. This is the age of oversharing.
Sure, not everyone is a lawyer and closely familiar with the law. But if anything, it seems that when an American is on the receiving end of an unpleasant act of uncertain legality, they tend to err on the side of "you just committed a crime against me."
I am really not sure at this point what proposition you think you are arguing for or against. I made it pretty clear in my response that I don't have a problem with Scott using the trendline for the very limited purpose to which he employed it, and I explained why I wouldn't find much value in it for any more substantial purpose. You popped in and snipped out my claim that non-arrest data is weak, isolated from all of the context in which I discussed crime report data flaws, claimed this was "thoroughly debunked" on the grounds of a single citation to a survey which Scott only used for a narrow purpose to rebut a single hypothetical.
Again if all you're concerned with is arguing Scott's overall claim, you don't actually need the survey data to carry any water or have substantial reliability.
Many Thanks for all of the detailed information!
This conversation feels like another version of a conversation I sometimes have with people to my left about poverty. I point out some positive statistic, like that income inequality is declining, the poverty rate is shrinking, or unemployment is very low. They respond with (mostly anecdotal) statements about how there are still people who are very poor who are suffering a lot as a result of poverty. Sometimes talking about seeing homeless people on the streets, sometimes talking about people they know. Sometimes they also say things that I find very hard to believe (or perhaps indicative that they live a very different life than me), like that many people in their social circles are out of work and finding it impossible to find a job. I agree that poverty still exists, that it is bad that people are suffering, and explain that I also support an expanded social safety net in the US and other policies to further reduce poverty and address the suffering of those in poverty--but say, can't we still recognize that things are better now than they were in past decades, probably better than they've ever been, and appreciate that? And the response I usually get is "no, I don't believe your statistics (though I don't have anything to contradict them other than anecdotes), and even if I did, arguing things are better is insensitive to those who are still suffering."
This seems like the same argument applied to crime (and somewhat more right-coded, though certainly plenty of people on the left side of the spectrum also care about crime): people don't really have any specific argument against the statistics, but they don't feel true, and furthermore they're not really interested in engaging in the question of whether things are better than they are in the past. I think that's really unfortunate, because whether things are getting better or worse, and ideally for what reasons, seems very important to understand, and in particular both more important and more useful to have a discussion about than whether the current state of things is "bad."
i'm honestly conflicted about what ought to be done in these instances but I really hate how inconsistent everyone is.
If a group comes to me and says some horrible thing is getting worse, and there's a bunch of upset faces outside my door, I don't know whether I, an internet contrarian with a majoritarian legal philosophy, ought to join them and go "yeah! this is bad! because THEY think it is!" or stand there at my door and go "okay but how bad is it *really*"
It seemed like the rationalist community writ large used to solidly embrace the latter approach. We're gadflies. When someone says that inequality is rising or rape on campus is at epidemic proportions or racism is responsible for a lot of professional disparities, we dig into the statistics and look at all the interesting counterintuitive conclusions and go "well actually..."
and we do this even if it's some *really bad* thing to go "well actually" about: Campus sexual assault, racism, crushing poverty.
But it seems like lately I see a lot of people that enjoy doing that espouse a philosophy, when it comes to crime or illegal immigration, that the fact that people are upset about it is *ITSELF* a very serious problem that must be addressed without giving the grumbling masses a lesson on what the data *truly* shows. I applaud them for coming around to my majoritarian way of thinking, but I get annoyed they've come too late, and only on specific issues.
Either we're the kind of people that sit an outraged community down and explain to them that the statistics do not bear their concerns out...or we're the kind of people that take inchoate outrage seriously even if it's not founded on solid data. I honestly don't know which one I am some days, but I think it's VERY IMPORTANT to be consistent...
I think the answer is: rationalists should try and force people to articulate what they're mad about in a choate(?) way--depending on your sympathies this can be trying to make the nearest positive case that _is_ founded on solid data, or challenging the cases that aren't, or whatever in between.
like with this issue, I have a very hard time even understanding what is meant by an "unreported crime."
It makes sense for some things. I am hardly contrarian enough to see a murder and go "well technically that's not a crime because it wasn't charged." But it's hard for me to understand what an "unreported fraud" looks like, in many contexts. I have probably witnessed thousands and thousands of attempts to defraud people, from clearly-rigged three-card-monty games to calls where the voice at the other send says they've "been trying to reach me about my car's insurance." These are all crimes, just not ones that anyone *should* report, or they'd do nothing else. So: I really have to start by asking "what do you mean by crime"
Joseph Heath mentions this dynamic in his essay about populism [1]:
> What is noteworthy about populists is that they do not champion all of the interests of the people, but instead focus on the specific issues where there is the greatest divergence between common sense and elite opinion, in order to champion the views of the people on these issues.
Issues with the widest gap between common sense and elite consensus are also the most likely to be issues where the elites are correct.
Which is why I have come to believe that although non-majoritarian/elite opinion can often be wrong, it is far more likely to be correct and insightful than populist outrage if you had to pick one to consistently side with.
[1] Populism fast and slow https://josephheath.substack.com/p/populism-fast-and-slow
This is really social circle size dependant. For example: Income inequality is higher than it has ever been recorded, possibly higher than it has ever been in history, if your circle is the english speaking world.
If you include every human on earth, it's falling (although the fall has leveled off in recent years, controlling for RPP); if you include everyone you could conceivably have a conversation with, it has never been worse.
I was thinking about this the other day because since I moved to the bay area, I haven't gotten poorer but the chance that I'm talking to someone who's a billionaire has gone WAY up.
Yes, was thinking this myself: you're allowed to wish the US had a more comprehensive universal healthcare system or whatever while acknowledging that in fact, poverty is down, but a lot of lefties tie themselves in knots to avoid facing the statistics so they can maintain a doomer-ish vibe about "late capitalism".
So too, you're allowed to wish the US had Japan-level crime while acknowledging that, in fact, crime is down--but a lot of righties tie themselves in knots to avoid facing the statistics so they can maintain a doomer-ish vibe about "hellscape cities" or whatever.
You can continue to think that the things you don't like about cities are bad without having to say insane things like "I'd rather have more murder, assault, and rape and less shoplifting than vice versa".
>but a lot of righties tie themselves in knots to avoid facing the statistics so they can maintain a doomer-ish vibe about "hellscape cities" or whatever.
That's fair. And, as Scott showed, homicide really _IS_ down.
Hypothetically (I realize that this is impossibly impractical) what one would want to track over time is the sum of the impacts from all crimes plus the cost of all the measures people take to protect themselves from crime (and things like locked shelves at CVS, where the cost to install them is borne by the business but there is also a cost in time and effort to the shopper). How many million repeatedly-check-for-the Amazon-package-before-the-porch-pirate-sees-it are worth one homicide? Damned if I know, but both costs are real.
+1
Rationalists are human like everyone else, they find it hard, and I dare say even harder, to kill their darlings compared to the simple masses.
I could give you a whole spiel about people's motivations, but these days I don't trust people's self-described labels about being open and curious until I witness them wrestle with their darlings.
Does a less violent society result in worse behavior, because people aren't afraid of being assaulted if they behave in anti-social ways?
Is it true that once upon a time someone blatantly shoplifting would find themselves physically attacked (assaulted) by either the store employees or random people around, and now that doesn't happen? Or was it always true that wouldn't happen?
Is it true that once upon a time someone going up to random people on the street and screaming at them or demanding money would find themselves physically attacked (assaulted) and now that doesn't happen? Or was it always true that wouldn't happen?
Those aren't rhetorical questions; I'm genuinely unsure of the social on-the-street dynamics of a more violent age. Was it easier or harder to get away with "being a jerk"?
Maybe "have you personally ever punched someone, not because they attacked you first but because you thought they had it coming" would be an interesting question in one of the surveys.
My hot take is actually this frees up our limited reserves of social opprobrium to be cast upon less severe behaviors (although not by lashing out violently against them).
This sounds like an important point. There may be less total crime, but also the victim may feel more *helpless* about it. Sometimes it feels like the police is on their side.
For example, there is a pawn shop next to my house that is known for buying stolen goods from nearby supermarkets and selling drugs. I was thinking, the obvious impulsive solution would be to smash their windows -- reduce their profits a little, and increase the general awareness of "something bad happens here". But obviously, the police that seems to do little about the theft and drugs would probably be happy to catch *me*, and improve their statistics of solved crime.
Maybe it's better overall; most people probably overestimate their ability to defend themselves against crime. But it feels frustrating.
Assuming the numbers are all true, I would still interpret things differently. The headline could as easily be "Crime returns to historic lows after decades of horrible backsliding". We should aim for things to get better over time, rather than desperately trying to achieve a standard set 80 years ago.
This is just a strange comment. 1) The 1950s are objectively the lowest homicide rate in American history. We have the stats. 2) Lynchings are a form of violence that are not ideal, but mostly in response to crime. We have good evidence to think they weren't even really racially targeted. Given the demographics of the deep south and crime differences between black men and white men, a 75/25 proportion of black lynchings to white lynchings is what we'd expect to find, and what we do find.
What about declining alcohol consumption and higher (heh) cannabis consumption? Alcohol has been associated with a tremendous amount of crime. I’d especially think that aggravated assault and the subsequent incidence of murder would go down with less drunkenness.
The banal conclusion is that in lots of way things have got worse and in lots of ways they have got better, but the net effect is that crime has reduced.
> If murders rose at the same rate as AAs, then the true murder rate could be up to 3x higher than reported.
I think this claim can be dismissed without even digging into the data. The US already has a very high homicide rate for a developed nation. It was even more elevated in the period 1960-1999. A homicide rate 3x of what it was during the crime wave would have pushed us into the territory of totally dysfunctional Latin American and sub-Saharan African states. While you can argue some inner cities might have been like that during this period, as an average over the whole country, this is clearly preposterous. Even more so now, since presumably medical care has improved in the past 25 years, which means our actual 5.7 homicides/100K would be even more than 3X5.7 = 17.1, while most big cities have largely cleaned themselves up since then.
I think it's telling that Sakran et al found an even higher increase in prehospital mortality for stabbing victims than for gunshot victims. I'm sure stabbing technology has gotten a bit more lethal over the past twenty years (Progress! It's literally a double-edged sword!), but there's no way it's the primary driver of that shift.
I’m surprised there were no observations about the current administration. Certainly there’s a rhetoric about the rule of law, with deployments of the national guard and so on. And at least some murders must be committed by illegal immigrants who now are being much more cautious.
Yeah, well, if so they did not begin being more cautious in 1980, when the downward tend began. Did you even read the post?
I thought I read it. Not sure what I missed. There was an increase in murder rates during the Biden administration and now it’s back down. Yes, there is a long term trend. But also the current administration did things. ICE, while not something I endorse in its current form, probably has some sort of impact on the illegal population.
If true, it would only affect very premeditated crimes, like ones where the perpetrator first stops to think “gee, ICE seems a lot scarier now under Trump than they were under Biden…should I really go through with it?” Right?
I was thinking people are just more cautious. Don't stay out all night, don't go to bars as much, don't carry a gun in their car, and other high risk behaviors that correlate with both deportation and propensity to murder.
I do recall an article that said that crime rates in DC were down after the deployment of the Guard... but it also pointed out that foot traffic in commercial areas had fallen so low that local restaurants were going out of business. Because it turns out that law-abiding citizens are *also* afraid to go out when the military and the secret police are roaming the streets.
So, technically true that it reduces crime rates, not successful at helping ordinary people feel safe.
I mean, any stats shifts whatsoever in the COVID era almost certainly have more to do with COVID than any other area of public policy.
Also unauthorized immigrants are less than 10% of the population and have half the murder rate of citizens:
https://share.google/fFghd6cIHgHYg23FJ
So even if current enforcement stopped all murders they would have committed, it wouldn't do much to the overall murder rate.
Here's a theory based purely on impressons (but after I post this I'm going to ask GPT for evidence for or against): Seems to me that face-to-face interactions have decreased a lot over the period you are talking about. Went out biking on a beautiful weekend one day last fall and saw very few other people. 30 years ago everyone I knew met the person they were dating at work, at school, at some group activity, or through friends. Now almost everyone I know who is dating met the person online. So I'm wondering whether crimes that must be committed physically and in person are down because people are spending more of their time with their noses pointed at a screen. Online abuse of others via insult, threat and violation of privacy sure doesn't seem to be decreasing. What about other crime that can be committed via electronics? is it down?
OK, asked GPT to take a quick look at large peer-reviewed studies of changes in face-to-face interaction, and turned up 8 in support of view that face-to-face interactions have decreased very substantially in the last 20 years. Then asked it for large peer-reviewed studies that contradict that view, and all it could find was a study finding that older adults are not reporting more loneliness than they did 20 years ago, and that visits to national parks have increased substantially since 2010.
Technically Scott mentioned that as "All the criminals are too addicted to video games and Instagram to commit any crimes." The one he really left out is the aging population (since young people commit most crimes).
The only thing I disagree with here is the initial claim that it’s counterintuitive to suppose we are at historically low crime rates. In general, things have been improving - we’re at historically high wealth, high education, high life expectancy, so why wouldn’t crime have this same general trend? I suppose we know there was a contrary trend for crime from about 1960-1990, but we’ve been back on trend in the good direction since then, with only a brief bump in the Trump I/pandemic years.
Yeah the next interesting question is if whatever happened in 1960-1990 also happened in other countries
Scott's last potential explanation should be summarized as:
Grand Theft Auto replaces grand theft auto
(edited to clarify I'm referring to Scott's last bullet point rather than adding a new one)
I think Scott mentioned vidya games as a potential outlet for antisocial tendencies, and IIRC there is actually some evidence for transient dips in petty crime around major GTA releases. I'm not sure what to make of that.
On the weapons technology front, it's also worth noting that hollow-point pistol bullets went from extremely rare in the 1960s, to pretty much standard in the 1980s. The lethality and destructiveness of hollow-point bullets is often overstated, but they are at least somewhat more lethal than round-nosed bullets and that may have somewhat compensated for better medical technology.
And a digression: Responsible use of hollow-point bullets should *reduce* the number of people being killed. The somewhat increased lethality is outweighed by A: the significantly increased probability that the target will be promptly incapacitated by one shot so it won't be necessary to keep shooting them, and B: the significantly reduced probability that the bullet will exit the target with enough velocity to maybe kill an innocent bystander standing behind them. So when you hear that your local police department uses hollow-points (they almost certainly do), that's probably a good thing. But most shootings are by criminals, who are kind of the opposite of responsible in their firearms use.
Glad you posted this, I had a related question about gun technology above.
The fact is the same answer. The internet. Communication is at an all time high, video can be recorded anywhere, any time, from phones and mounted cameras, home cameras are accessibly cheap. Internet done right.
Internet done wrong: every bad and tragic story and crime not prevented spreads across the internet at a never before seen rate, it’s everywhere and everyone seems to want to know, so awareness of each crime spreads as if 5+ crimes actually happened. And people love sympathy so they will happily complain online to get it.
Internet with mixed results: Human distrust is also historically low, with all the crime and complaints online, all the movies and stories, there is little trust which hurts humanity as whole, but also prepares people to protect themselves from crime.
I think this is the correct explanation. Internet surveillance makes running domestic organized crime much more difficult in combination with RICO statutes over the decades making the mob and many gangs largely drop violent crimes. Non-organized criminals have to contend with the surveillance of virtually all communications, credit cards, cash, plus DNA identication.
I'm in a kinda weird cross class position due to my history, and the perceived differences in crime rates really make sense.
My white trash construction friends have all experienced one or multiple of the following in their immediate circle: death from OD, drug related violence, family violence, sexual assault from relatives or social authorities (Church leaders, bosses), etc and so forth; all the products of the lower class HuhWight country living experience.
The lower class latino immigrants I know have much stronger support networks, but are also much more patriarchal: They have basically no ODs and less SA (at least, less SA that gets talked about), but catch a decent amount of domestic violence that they just have to suck up, and WAY more property crime; people breaking into trucks and stealing tools mostly. These people are all lower class strivers, they have a Stalinist style 5 year plan to become the type of people that have embarrassing middle class posser cholo children, and that means they can't be spending money on drugs and getting blitzed in public.
All the Black/asian/indian/whatever your flavor of phrenology is people I know are PMC strivers/STEM autists, and experience basically no crime at all other than having to deal with lower class whites being loud and annoying, due to the place I live.
We all live in close proximity and interact at EG the market or the gas pump, but having totally separate social circles really exposes how different the perceived experience of it all is.
I think looking at national statistics is probably the wrong approach here for the same reason it's absurd to say Michigan is a low-crime state to reply to someone worried about crime in Detroit.
Also, possibly the victimization survey has gotten worse with time, in the same way as political polls have been way off in recent elections.
As personal anecdotes, I've been mildly assaulted and had multiple packages stolen from me since moving to the bay area, which certainly feels like an increase in my personal crime victimization rate, yet I've neither reported this to the cops nor been surveyed about it.
My understanding is the most inaccurate presidential polls in a long time were in 2020 and they were still only about four points off.
Fraud pays better
A lot of the crime discourse is Rightists who live in deep-blue urban areas and project those areas' dysfunctional crime policies onto the entire country. You see that strongly in this comment section, most of America isn't San Fransisco or Seattle.
“Like”
Also, people who consume lots of media telling them there is high crime and dysfunctional policies and so on, and come to confuse these claims they hear about online with reality.
One more proposal for the final list: the Interstate Highway System led to a severe breakdown in ability to catch criminals who could flee (policing coordination didn't keep up with increased mobility), but eventually it caught up.
I don't think it's the full story but it contributes. Meshes well with "countermeasures actually work" and/or lead poisoning.
A minor factor, but worth mentioning, is the bipartisan hysteria over "sex trafficking." The smarter people know it's just a rebrand of prostitution, which has always existed, but joe average thinks it's a new thing that didn't exist 20 years ago.
I’m not all that smart, so take this for what it’s worth, but I thought sex trafficking was when people are coerced, abducted, or otherwise deceived into being transported long distances and then end up doing sex work (sometimes for money, sometimes on what is essentially a slavery basis) at the other end of that journey.
For example Paul Rosalie describes how women in Peru are told they can make tons of money being waitresses in logging camps, so they are loaded onto buses which take them days into the jungle to the camps, then when they get there they are informed they are not actually going to be paid much or at all for being waitresses and instead they are either enticed by dineros—the only way to pay for their transportation back home—or forced by threat of violence to be prostitutes to the loggers instead.
I differentiate this in my mind from, say, a woman who decides to exchange sex for money in the city where she lives, or who transports herself to a new city with the intention of doing sex work there.
At this point, an awful lot of ordinary prostitution gets classified as "sex trafficking" because it looks better in the press releases. If as you say a woman transports herself to a new city with the intention of doing sex work, you can always say her pimp told her to do that (doesn't have to be true) and so it's sex trafficking and stopping it makes you a Big Damn Hero like Liam Neeson in that movie, rather than just another vice cop living the sleaziest sort of cop life.
If there are specifics in the story, judge it on that basis. If not, it's probably just spin.
True, I should have read more carefully: "bipartisan hysteria" is always almost certainly a rebranded something-or-other; I was describing my mental model of the actual phenomenon. (I have no opinion on whether it's new and didn't exist 20 years ago, though "it" in this case must refer to "statistical uptick"; sex trafficking is of course not new.)
It occurs to me that police, prosecutors, and politicians have contradictory incentives in terms of classifying the severity of a crime, both for prostitution vs trafficking and for stuff like aggrevated assault vs attempted murder and murder vs manslaughter.
In general, and especially for politicians, serious crimes being committed on your watch makes you look bad. If you're doing your job, then all else being equal, serious crime rates should be going down or steady at tolerably low levels.
Unsolved serious crimes make you look particularly bad. On the other hand, you can use them to make the case that you (as a police chief or prosecutor) need more resources to deal with the problem or that you need the law changed to make your job easier.
On the other hand, for solved crimes, especially those where the suspect gets arrested and convicted, you're more of a hero for solving a more serious crimes and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
A number of people are making the case that the big trend of decreasing crime does not matter because X, where X is something they observe or are particularly angry about -- nasty homeless people in the park or whatever. I can certainly understand being very angry about various X's, but am impressed by the strength of some people's need not to be mollified or reassured. I get the feeling it's important to these people to contrinue to be Right and Indignant as Hell.
First their brains run a program that automatically checks whether their tribal identity dictates they should or should not be mollified or reassured. If not, then they continue to be RaIaH.
“Hey, wait, if crime has been going down doesn’t that mean we don’t get to say the niggers are committing more and more savagery the longer we coddle them? Well, that can’t be true.”
Well, I won't go so far as to put THOSE words in their mouths exactly, but that's the basic sentiment.
It works the other way too. Like, if Scott had listed out a bunch of evidence showing that raising the minimum wage doesn't help poor people or something, you'd get a barrage of righteously indignant comments from people who identify as some flavor of Leftist.
Or if Scott had listed out a bunch of evidence showing that tax cuts don't help the economy or whatever, you'd get a slew of angry comments from people who identify as some flavor of libertarian.
And so on. The tribal identity dictates the unwavering response, the reasoning is doggedly backfilled in later, even if it must ignore or discount the evidence presented.
Or instead of assuming that everyone is being hysterical for no reason, it’s because people are extremely skeptical of his claim and assume he’s missing something.
Sure, and there's no reason to assume he's right, just because he's Scott. But I think that if someone's main reason for believing someone is wrong is that the person's view makes them angry, rather than the person clearly has some facts wrong or is engaging in bad reasoning, the reader should STFU and reflect on that for a while.
People aren’t disputing what he says because they are being irrationally angry. It’s because it is extremely counter intuitive.
Well, to say something is counter-intuitive just a fancy way of saying that the thing does not fit with someone's preferred unexamined and unproven beliefs. And yes, some of those people are disputing what Scott's saying, but their tone suggests personal annoyance, not simply doubt that his points are valid.
Lots of things are counter intuitive for a reason.
And if being mad means you shouldn’t take people seriously, then I could easily say the same about you right now.
> Why are so many forms of crime (murder, violent crime, and property crime) at or near historic lows?
Update: I see you did mention the lead crime hypothesis. I guess I missed it the first time around.
When charting the amounts of tetraethyl lead in gasoline per capita, crime rates and teen pregnancies rose trailing the increase. Once tetraethyl lead was removed from gasoline, crime rates began to fall after the kids exposed to tetraethyl lead became less-violent older adults. High blood lead levels are associated with behavioral problems, including poor impulse control, and blood lead levels in children also have a strong negative impact on IQ.
https://pic.plover.com/Nevin/Nevin2007.pdf
The lead-crime hypothesis is highly overrated:
https://medium.com/p/949e6fc2b0dc
If that were the primary cause, crime would increase by cohort as each generation got lead poisoned. The increase in violence in the 70's was a period effect, not a cohort effect.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15216841/
It's hard to entirely rule out some effect of lead poisoning, but I think the lead-crime hypothesis mostly lives on (much like the abortion-crime hypothesis, which can also be mostly disproven by looking at birth year cohorts) in that it's a fashionable and counterintuitive thing to talk about, when the bigger sources of crime trends are much more mundane.
Like, the early 90's peak in homicide was mostly just driven by crack cocaine, but that's not interesting or controversial enough for anyone to talk about on reddit. Likewise, a big component of the late 90's decline in violence was mass incarceration (see http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf), but that's also not a fashionable or interesting theory to discuss.
I'm agnostic about the lead-crime hypothesis, but the link I provided showed that many European countries exhibited similar patterns in the rise and decline of crime rates in the late 20th century, yet they did not impose tougher sentencing guidelines as the US did. So, I think we can rule out the hypothesis that tough-on-crime strategies were the primary cause of the decline in crime after the early 1990s.
Likewise, except for cities like Amsterdam and London, the crack cocaine epidemic largely bypassed European countries, but they also saw the same sort of rise in crime and homicides starting in the 1970s and peaking in the 1990s (albeit that they started at a lower level and peaked at a lower level than the US). The paper I linked to claims these upward curves followed the introduction of lead additives into gasoline in European countries, but since per capita gasoline use was lower in European countries, they didn't see as much of a rise as the US did. European crime rates also dropped following the removal of lead from gasoline... But correlation is not necessarily causation.
What makes me doubt the lead-crime hypothesis is that the US also saw a big crime and homicide wave in the 1920s that peaked in 1932. Homicide rates in 1932 were just a hair below of the peak rates of the early 1980s (~9/100k vs ~10/100k). After 1932, crime and homicide rates steadily declined into the 1950s. Prohibition has been blamed on the rise in crime in the 20s and early 30s, but the fact that crime and homicide rates dropped at a relatively steady rate after Prohibition was repealed, make me doubt the Prohibition explanation. If Prohibition was the cause of the early 20th-century crime surge, we should have seen a sharp drop-off after Prohibition was repealed, but we didn't. As for tetraethyl lead, we started adding that to gasoline in 1921, but we were driving more and consuming more leaded gasoline in the late 40s and 1950s than we did in the 1920s and 1930s. So the tetraethyl lead correlation also weakens in face of the lull in crime and homicide rates in the 1950s.
The UK kept pretty good homicide stats throughout the 20th century. They don't show the early 20th-century crime wave that the US did, but they do show a late 20th-century rise in crime. Go figure.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with Nevin's graphs, I spent a few months looking at his ideas when writing the blog post I linked.
He's found a number of countries in western Europe where his theory fits. It does not fit in Japan or Hong Kong or Latin America. I've read it fails for Eastern Europe, but I haven't checked the data. Actually, Nevin outright lied about some of those trends, i.e. he tried to blame Mexico's cartel war deaths on lead poisoning.
His graphs are also not of measured blood lead, but a theoretical guess as to what measured blood lead would have been in the past, under the (likely incorrect) assumption that all blood lead comes from gasoline.
He also tried to make some theoretical "gasoline+paint" graph to fit to the US murder rates but he didn't apply this to any other country and, as you noted, the UK did not have the early 20th century crime wave (but, AFAIK, they also used leaded paint).
Nevin's work is pseudoscientific at best and fraudulent at worst.
I haven't tried comparing the rise and fall of crime between every western European country and the US to see how well they line up. I know there's a vague synchronization of violence trends that comes from all of them having a postwar baby boom around the same time and a post birth control birth rate decline around the same time. In the US that demographic wave of young people only explains about half of the rise in crime. I haven't checked to see how much on an unexplained residual there is in each country in Europe. I would guess there could also be some shared urbanization trends, but I'm not sure how much of an effect that has on crime, and I've also never studied rates of incarceration across Europe.
None of this disproves the possibility that lead does have some smaller (10%? 20%?) impact on crime, on top of the other trends, but Nevin's unified "lead as the source of all crime trends" work is simply wrong.
<mildSnark>
>Like, the early 90's peak in homicide was mostly just driven by crack cocaine
but, but, but - hey, all is not lost, it is still a _chemical_ explanation! :-)
</mildSnark>
I'll go quietly now...
I shudder to think how bad things would have been if people had smoked leaded crack.
LOL! Many Thanks! ( On a carcenogenic, rather than criminality-inducing, front, Kent Micronite cigarettes included the extraordinary innovation of including a filter - made from asbestos, and crocidolite asbestos at that... )
Crazy. Why did that make sense at the time? Because asbestos is fireproof? Or is it actually good at filtering tar, or something like that?
Many Thanks! I asked Google what their reasoning was, and they said that the reported reasoning was:
>Superior Filtration Claims: The Lorillard Tobacco Company sought to create a filter that would trap more tar and nicotine than competitors. They believed that using crocidolite asbestos provided a finer, more effective filtration system, marketing the "Micronite" filter as the "greatest health protection in cigarette history".
In fairness, this was 1952-1956, so they had less information about asbestos hazards than we have now - though some information was available as early as 1920s (asbestosis) and 1930s (lung cancer).
Have guns (typical gun carried by a typical gun-carrying person) gotten better over the decades? I don’t mean “capable of firing more rounds per minute” because we’re not talking about mass shootings; I mean does your typical gun break or jam up less, is it more likely to have its sights calibrated properly, etc. (I own a gun but don’t keep up with guns as a topic.)
I could see arguments for yes: technological innovation tends to produce increased capability, including the capability of not breaking as much, requiring less maintenance, etc. It also often drives down the cost of capability, so that a lower-tier product produced more recently has the capability of a higher-tier product produced longer ago.
But I could see arguments for no as well: guns are a durable good, so lots of older guns might still be “in use”, though i don’t know at what rate. (That would be an interesting thing to learn about.) Also, there are lots of inexpensive relatively poorly made guns available now that were not available in the past.
Then the question is, does being shot with a better gun mean you are more likely to die, or less likely to die, and what impact would that have on the murder rate?
One thought is that ammo has improved, hollow point rounds are relatively easy to acquire, this is something that really only became true in the 80s. That may increase lethality in your typical shooting.
Hollow-point bullets have already been mentioned. Outside of the spectacular but statistically irrelevant mass shooting incidents, the increased magazine capacity of semiautomatic pistols is probably not significant but the better ergonomics lead to greater accuracy in quick-and-dirty shooting.
Reliability has always been high enough to not be a significant factor.
And yes, guns are very durable goods so all of this will substantially lag the introduction of new technology. But even the Glock is ~40 years old at this point, and I can't think of anything since that would have significantly moved the needle. Handgun optics might matter going forward, but they're still quite new.
Murders could be categorized as either "it could happen to you" or "it would not happen to you." The "it could happen to you" types of murders are the ones that highly influence people's thinking that murder rates are high. A black man being killed by a police officer might be in the "it could happen to you" category if you are black. Random killings are in the "it could happen to you" category. Mass murders might be in the "it could happen to you" category if the killings are random. "It would not happen to you" murders are often "routine" and "not noteworthy" such as gang-related killings (if you don't live in gang areas).
Could one explanation for “the statistics don’t align with my perception” be that modern information technology feeds us a different kind of perception about crime than in the past where you basically had the news in its various formats plus whatever you saw with your own eyes?
So there’s a memetic thing going on with perceptions of crime. Could it be that this is also what’s under the hood when it comes to the committing of crime as well? Like, it used to be there were lots of pickpockets; there is less of that now that people carry fewer easy-to-miss valuables (like cash) in their pockets, but a big reason is fewer young criminals learning the craft from experienced pickpockets. I imagine if you “hang around” people who commit a lot of assaults, you will learn the ways of assaulting—i put “hang around” in quotes because I’m really just referring to communication. Maybe that information doesn’t spread the same way it used to?
When you say
"There are three plausible explanations for gun injuries getting worse over [2003-2012]:"
and list first
"Improved weapons technology (e.g. switch to semi-automatics)"
is...is that supposed to be a joke? Or do you really not know that semi-automatic gun technology was invented in the 1800s and became common/standard over 100 years ago?
Semiautomatic weapons were not standard even in military applications a hundred years ago. More importantly, they didn't become standard for police and criminals until the 1970s or 1980s, which is in the timeframe of interest here.
Perhaps you have heard of the Colt M1911, which is named for the year 1911, the year it was formally adopted by the US army? It continues to be one of the most popular models of semi-auto pistol in the world and is still in production today. Therefore, it is safe to say that the relevant technology has not improved between 2003-2012, which is the timeframe of interest here.
I am quite familiar with the M1911, invented in ages past by God's own armorer, John Moses Browning. I own one, and enjoy shooting it. But it has never been more than a niche weapon among American shooters.
Including the military, where handguns of *all* sorts are niche weapons of little significance. Yes, really. The personal weapon that mattered to the United States Army a hundred years ago was the M1903 Springfield, a bolt-action rifle.
Outside of the military, the 1911 was being used by a few gun-savvy gangsters and G-men, with the vast majority of their colleagues using .38 revolvers.
We are all chugging so many microplastics that no one’s balls can drop to sufficient level to induce criminal behavior.
Hardening/behavior changes should be considered as a proxy for crime. For instance, if a store invests in shelf guards, that means that the implied cost of shoplifting is at least the cost of the installation and maintenance and lost sales resulting from the shelf guards. However, in the data we would say that the shoplifting rate has fallen to 0, and the problem is solved.
If I freely wandered at night in certain neighborhoods in my city, I would almost be certainly a victim of crime over some set amount time, when I avoid those places or avoid a new neighborhood that has degenerated, crime has gone down but the implied rate of crime hasn't changed.
How do you measure this? Not easily, but looking at these examples we could easily see falling rates of crime while the implied disorder of the city goes increasingly up. You would then see conversations like we're seeing in these comments below where one person says, 'I dont feel safe going to my local park anymore' and another says, 'why not? crime has hugely gone down?' Well the answer is that now the park is much less used and is maybe dominated by a few intimidating anti-social types that harass anyone daring to go near the area. But data will say that crime in the local area is nonexistent.
The WSJ just had an article writing about how the Rich are apparently spending much more on home defenses than they have in the past, what does this say about direction our society is heading? Car companies now have to invest to protections against catalytic converter theft, what does that say? Supermarkets are removing self-checkout stations, what does that say?
I dont know that I can't really claim whether that implied crime is higher, lower, or unchanging, but if it were increasing, the discussion would look at lot like this one in my opinion.
Agreed.
You ignore that the age structure has changed over time. I assume that the large majority of murders are committed by young men, ages 17-28 (or some such). Probably not by 70-year olds.
"This is an unsolved question among criminologists, but proposed answers include..."
Your list of proposed answers omitted societal aging. Older people commit crimes at lower rates, and the average age is higher now than in the past.
>There are three plausible explanations for gun injuries getting worse over time:
>Improved weapons technology (e.g. switch to semi-automatics)
Semi-automatic weapons, depending on your classification of revolvers, have been the standard since the Civil War. If you really want to limit it to modern, magazine-fed pistols, you're still looking at a technology that hasn't changed all that much since the 1910s for rate of fire, and since the 1980s for magazine capacity.
Changes in firearms technology shouldn't have made any difference in crime statistics over the last two decades.
What about laser sights? I have very limited experience with guns, but one of the few things I do know from experience is that laser sights make a huge difference, at least if you're a lousy shooter like me. And presumably these have become more common?
Laser sights have kind of fallen out of fashion on handguns. Many more people are using red dot sights (the ones that go on top of a pistol) these days, but those are not that much more accurate at typical handgun distances compared to basic sights, although they are slightly faster to use if you're not that experienced.
One more anecdotal point for the pile:
-An increasing number of cars are EVs.
-Especially in denser areas, drivers are reliant on publicly-accessible chargers (e.g., no plug at their apartment building).
-At least in Seattle, chargers being out of commission more often than not due to rampant copper theft is widespread. Sound Transit has also been significantly impacted by copper thieves.
Unambiguously actual (not deterred, prevented, or mitigated) crime where even if the *direct* victims are included in the NCVS it completely misses all the *indirect* victims (drivers who can't charge when/where they expected to; riders whose trains are abruptly cancelled).
What people base their assessment of "crime levels" is mostly publicly visible disorder/"petty crime". This is, I think, LITERALLY a question of semantics (with media & social media optimised harder and harder for outrage clicks on top of this). Are "disorder" statistics down?
Crime is a young person’s game and there are fewer young people today
Alcohol is often associated with crime and people are drinking far less today (particularly the young)
Crime is also about opportunity as much as anything else and with less young people socializing in public, there are fewer opportunities
How can you adjust for the fact people respond to crime rates by changing their behavior? Downtown St Louis would have a higher homicide rate of more regular people decided to take an evening stroll but they don’t for good reason.
People adjust their behavior pretty quickly. I'd expect the same effect to have worked at any point in the past and thus be already adjusted for at all points in the data. "no go zones" definitely existed at all points in the past.
Let’s do something I’m calling The Central Park test: would you rather walk alone at night in Central Park today or in 1960? I think obviously 1960.
Why do you say that?
I had a hard time finding data on the crime rate in Central Park in the year 1960, but overall murder rate in NYC is lower now than in 1960. Old newspaper articles suggest that Central Park was culturally perceived as dangerous around 1960.
"YOUTH IS STABBED TO DEATH IN PARK", NY Times, 1964
https://archive.ph/nTJkb
This article reports at least 4 murders in Central Park in the year 1964 (there were 0 in 2025 according to NYPD), and suggests that the public perceived the park as dangerous, "Residents of adjoining Central Park West apartments said the scene was a hangout for derelicts and degenerates and that it was dangerous to venture there after dusk. ... Police officials contended yesterday that Central Park was no more dangerous than other parts of the city."
"These Days: Apathy, Decay of Morals Cause Growth of Crime", George E. Sokolsky, The Evening News, 1961
https://www.loc.gov/item/sn83031463/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Sokolsky
(No direct clean link, sorry).
In this article, a well-known columnist wrote, "Near where I live is a beautiful park, which cost the city millions of dollars to create and care for. But the children will not play there and adults are afraid to go there. It is absurd that parks should be occupied by drunks and homosexuals who frighten children and who abuse women. And there are packs of hoodlums who move about the parks, molesting girls, seizing clothes and committing mayhem and in the darker hours, rape. Central Park in New York City is one of the most beautiful parks in all the world, but no one enters it after dark, except in a few protected spots."
This doesn't prove any statistics, but suggests a mainstream viewpoint.
That’s interesting but I can’t find the source for that first link.
The first link is an archived page from the New York Times website, I'm not sure why you're having problems.
The second article you should be able to find here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=KDpRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=RTMNAAAAIBAJ&pg=571%2C3392951
I have no idea what it's like there right now OR 1960. But probably now. At least I have a cell phone.
Also that test covers 1.3 sq miles when the discussion was about a 3.8 million sq mile zone.
I certainly hope you wouldn't have tried to extrapolate anything based on this test.
It’s a sanity test. Everyone knows that crime exploded in the 1960’s and that people generally felt safe walking around at night before then. That never returned.
What good is this sanity test if, according to our best data, you were more likely to be attacked in 1960?
Assuming people did feel safer then (which I can't find data on), you can't distinguish between whether they felt safer because they actually were safer, or if they felt safer for other reasons (e.g. no 24 hour national news cycle).
Gallup has been polling people about personal safety fears since 1965 [1], and it seems to be fairly detached from actual crime rates. One question asked is, "Is there any area near where you live where you would be afraid to walk alone at night?" The fraction who say yes is relatively stable, fluctuating between about 30% and 45%. 2017 scored slightly better (30%) than 1965 (34%), but the values fluctuate so much year to year that I'd say they're about the same, within the margin of error.
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/544415/personal-safety-fears-three-decade-high.aspx
Can you provide evidence for your claims, rather than asserting that "everyone knows" you're correct? I sure don't know that.
Risk substitution predicts that both increases and decreases in risk of crime are understated by empirical crime rates. Since crime rates have gone down, risk substitution would imply that we have gotten more safe than a simple glance at the statistics suggests, not less.
Regarding the possible explanations proposed by criminologists, I don't really see the mystery. Why not just "all of them, to some degree"?
That wouldn't require any kind of massive coincidence, just various changes in society and advances in medicine and technology all acting to support two pre-existing dynamics:
1. That the general public really hates crime -> incarceration, DNA testing, ubiquitous cameras, welfare programs.
2. That criminals will seize alternatives that make their not-great lives better in some other way than crime -> psychiatric drugs, endless free entertainment, cellphone convenience, freedom from unwanted kids.
Five of the above are technological / medical in nature and didn't hit the mainstream until the 90s. (The other two - abortion and mass incarceration - are social and political taboos that fell earlier, but with effects that weren't felt until the 90s.) Previous advances tended to mean "new street drugs" or "firearms escalation". These were markedly different.
I live in medium-sized town in the Pacific Northwest. We have one drug death on average every three days, despite Narcan being widely carried. Have you considered the possibility that the demographic that would have committed serious crimes is simply dead from contaminated drugs? There's fentanyl in everything now.
In the past 5 years about 400,000 people have died of opioid overdoses. That's 1/10 of a percent of the US population. And of course not all of those 400,000 were criminals.
Indeed! But two-thirds of crime is committed by 1% of the population. If that 1% gets reduced by 10% over 5 years, then you would get a 6.6% reduction in crime from those opioid overdose deaths alone.
However, I would suggest the figures you quoted are an underestimate, because deaths from polydrug exposure or multiple factors aren't recorded as overdoses even though blacking out on drugs was a contributing factor. Around here we routinely get deaths from assaults at homeless encampments, outdoor exposure, and car or motorbike crashes, in which the victim was under the influence. Those deaths aren't recorded as overdoses, but the person would probably have survived if it wasn't for their extreme intoxication.
Regarding your last point, anyone addicted to hard drugs is routinely committing a crime: by definition, all 400,000 are criminals whether you agree they should be labelled this way or not. We can reasonably assume they are within the 1%, given the routine nature of that form of criminality, plus all the theft and assaults that go along with funding their habits.
Actually, 2/3 of *violent* crime in *Sweden* is committed by 1% of the *Swedish* population. Sweden is overall much safer than the US, with a much lower rate of murder. It also has a very different criminal justice system with very different sentencing. So pretty silly to assume you’d get the same result if you calculated the US stat. Also, in the US only about 15% of crime is violent crime, so even if the stat you quote did hold in the US it does not tell us much at all how concentrated vs dispersed criminality is in the population.
With the exception of those huge inaccuracies, though, great point.
One possible explanation:
A peaceful town that immediately hangs any violent criminal has no crime.
A dangerous town where violent criminals receive light punishments and therefore has lots of criminals, can also have low crime if all of the law-abiding citizens have fortified their homes and lives against the criminal element so there are no opportunities for crime.
But the citizens in the second town will still complain about the criminality in their town, even if there no stats to back it up.
Or, if you like; The motte and the bailey both have zero bandits.
The bailey has no bandits because there are no bandits.
The motte has no bandits because the bandits all know they'll be shot if they approach it.
These are not the same.
How much could it be that there was a 'prairie fire' effect, where a combination of (i) the substantial increase in violence/murder rate post covid/George Floyd and (ii) the significant amounts of fatal opioid overdoses in the late 2010s/early 2020's burned through individuals likely to commit crimes (violent and otherwise).
I believe that research has shown that relatively few individuals (I think it was something like 500 in Boston or a similar city) made up the vast majority of murderers and murder/aggravated assault victims (intuitively people likely to commit crimes of 'gang' type violence are also much more likely to be on its receiving end as well). If there was a big spike in violence in 2020/2021, could those individuals have just been wiped out, so there is just a smaller pool of likely victims/perpetrators? Like the fire burned but now there is no fuel for the fire to continue...especially if the crime bump was caused by the unusual circumstances of the pandemic and police pulling way back (but then things going back to more like normal) so there were not any long term secular trends that might keep crime elevated.
Similarly, could the big spike in fatal overdoses have significantly wiped out a subset of individuals (drug addicts) who are more likely to commit smaller property crimes? If previously, an addict would be have a 1 in 5,000 chance of dying on any particular act of taking drugs and in suddenly (because of fentanyl, etc.) it becomes 1 in 1,000 you suddenly lose a large population of individuals who are, at least stereotypically, more likely to commit property crime.
I was wondering similarly if the overall medical care chart was actually spiking in different regions at different times. When the Gambinis and Zoombinis have a turf war in New York, they get different hospitals than the Hatfields and McCoys fighting in Virgintucky.
In 2018 the American Medical Association published a comprehensive report on all 183 fatal non-justified non-suicide shootings for which firearms calibers were known* that had occurred in Boston between 2010 and 2014 inclusive. The report also looked at an equivalent number of non-fatal shootings, selected randomly from the larger number of such shootings.
* = In commissioning the report the AMA’s intent was to determine the lethality of various firearms calibers.
While there’s much interesting in the report, Table 2 touches on the issue of single vs. multiple hits. 72.8% of the non-fatal shootings involved single hits, as compared to just 35.0% of the fatal shootings; put differently, 65% of those unlucky enough to be shot two or more times died, compared to only 27.2% of those shot only once.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2688536
Careful; that study covered all fatal shootings within the study parameter, but was limited to 300 out of 1012 nonfatal shootings simply because they didn't have the manpower to assess all of the later. It's still possible to derive useful information from the study, but they really should have been more clear about that.
Assuming the roundfiled nonfatal shootings are statistically identical to those included in the study, I get 12.5% of single-hit shootings being fatal, vs 41.4% of multiple-hit shootings.
At the risk of revisiting a tired discussion, the image makes me wonder about the racial demographics of criminals generated by image models.
Is it one of those things like "Despite being only 30% of the population of people generated by AI, white people commit 90% of AI-generated crimes".
It doesn't seem to. I tried asking ChatGPT 3 times to generate images of a person, and all 3 were caucasian. I wonder if it takes your location into account. Maybe Japanese users get more Japanese generated people. But at least for me, it doesn't seem like only 30% of people generated by AI are white.
> Maybe Japanese users get more Japanese generated people. But at least for me, it doesn't seem like only 30% of people generated by AI are white.
Just as one data point here, I'm frequently in different countries, and it still defaults to white, prosperous PMC people when I generate images, unless specifically prompted otherwise.
But that could just be taking advantage of what it knows about me from past history - if it knows I'm American, speak in English, ask about PMC stuff, then it might be making that reasonable inference based on history regardless of geographical location.
On the intuitions vs. statistics question -- is it possible that people have simply adjust their behaviour enough to cancel out the increased risk from homeless drug addicts, thirty-six-times-felons who've been spared prison again, and other such dangerous people?
To use an analogy -- Say you have a country where violence against women is completely normalised, such that any woman walking around without a male relative is inevitably attacked by a gang of strange men. In consequence, women are pretty much always kept locked up at home. Statistically, this might look like a very safe country for women, but in terms of lived experience, it almost certainly wouldn't feel that way -- "I have to stay cooped up in home all day because if I set foot outside I'll inevitably be assaulted" is not exactly an attitude that produces a sense of security, even if it keeps you free from physical harm.
Similarly, if people in America are adjusting their behaviour -- say, by getting Ubers instead of walking or using public transport, or by moving to deliberately hard-to-get-around-in suburbs instead of walkable mixed-use neighbourhoods -- this might reduce the crime rate, but it would be arguably misleading to describe this as America getting safer, and it certainly wouldn't feel safer to the people having to adjust their behaviour so as to avoid getting victimised.
OK, I'm following up here an my earlier post where I suggested the fact that people have spent progressively less time with others and more with screens over the period of time Scott looked at is an important factor in the fall in rates of in-person crimes -- crimes out in the world where one person harms another of takes their property.
Asked GPT for stats on increase in crimes against US citizens committed entirely online against individuals, where the crime involved extracting money from the individual: so scams, phishing, identity theft, ransomware, financial fraud. Summary of 20 year trends:
total online crime complaints: increased from a few thousand to 860,000 per year
reported financial losses: from negligable to 16.6 billion
identify theft: increased from 325,000 to 6.5 million/year
Of course there is no reason that increase in online crime would have to be accompanied by a decrease in physical world crime. Still, this change is at least consistent with the theory that the decrease in physical world crime is the result of our all living and meeting our needs less in that world and more in the electronic one.
Of course online crime is up. Not online crime is harder to do.... ('cause of more cameras mostly, at least that's my premise.) So some people want to commit crime and online is the easiest way now.
Good point.
Yeah this seems right to me. I live in rural america, not a big city. I don't hear about much crime. There are drunk drivers and such and domestic problems (fights). But mostly I feel pretty safe, I leave my keys in the car (in case someone needs to move it) and my door unlocked. I think the big thing that has changed is more cameras. If you're breaking into some place you very well might be seen. Someone always watching can make a difference.
Interesting that the Harris paper on reduced lethality of murder maybe doesn't hold up -- I've cited that one before to argue changing lethality it was part of the decline and now worry I was in error. The Harris paper did show that car crash lethality rates declined at the same rate as inferred assault/homicide lethality rates over the same 1960-2000 period, so that would be another interesting coincidence, if the lethality of murder did not actually go down.
It appears that Eckberg is using self reported serious injury rates to control for police reporting of assault, but one data source that could potentially be even more convincing would be "shootings per year". I don't think the FBI tracks that at a national level, but IIRC there are several cities that do, and one might be able to make homicide vs shooting graphs over time to look for lethality trends in those cities (that assumes that most homicides are shootings, which is close enough to correct that it shouldn't matter much if that ratio changes over time)
It could also be interesting to review how car crash lethality rates have changed since 2000, to see if those curves have decoupled with assault/homicide (IIRC, homicide and assault lethality, as measured by Harris' method, has not continued to decline since 2000).
"The next question is: why do people’s intuitions clash so violently with the statistics?"
Fwiw I always assumed that crime rates have gone down over time from looking at the data and this mostly tracks my own lived experience.
But even if it didn't, I don't think I'd trust my anecdotes and dumb verbal arguments over the data.
I'd guess that most people I respect would feel similarly.
Crime may be down but it seems to me that there is less fair-mindedness than there used to be. A larger share of the population is squatting in a trench somewhere, ready to hurl pieces of fire and shit at anyone they think is walking closer to the next trench over than to theirs.
Homicides reached a recent low in 2014, but then Black Lives Matter emerged at Ferguson in August, 2014 with Michael Brown's death. The Ferguson Effect of both increased black homicide deaths and increased black traffic fatalities (both likely stemming from less proactive policing due to Establishment endorsement of BLM) was first seen in the St. Louis area in late 2014, then spread to Baltimore in April 2025 with the Freddie Gray riots, to Chicago with the punishment of the Chicago Police Department from November 23, 2015 onward due to the bad shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Homicides and car crashes went up nationally by moderate amounts but by quite a bit where there were major BLM triumphs over the local cops.
But then BLM supporters started assassinating cops, as in NYC, Dallas, and Baton Rouge. The NYPD more or less mutinied against Mayor DiBlasio, and his police chief, Rudy Giuliani's first top cop Bill Bratton, backed the NYPD, the mayor gave in, and NYC's murder rate fell back to its usual low as the NYPD got back to business.
In July 2016, President Obama interrupted his trip to Poland to give a speech deploring recent police shootings of two black men. A few hours later, a BLM supporter in Dallas at a BLM march assassinated 5 Dallas cops and shot 8 more before becoming the first (but probably not the last) human being to be blown up by robot. Not long afterwards, another BLM supporter murdered three cops in Baton Rouge.
Although these ten BLM assassinations have largely been memoryholed by the media, it's probably not a coincidence that Donald Trump was elected in November 2016.
The Ferguson Effect faded, but then the Floyd Effect came in strong in late May 2020. For example, Chicago's all time worst day for murders, with 18, was Sunday May 31, 2020, six days after George Floyd's death. Traffic fatalities among blacks were about 50% higher in June 2020 than in June 2019.
According to the CDC, 44% more African-Americans died in 2021 than in 2019 by homicide and 39% more blacks died by motor vehicle accident. Looking at weekly data, this "Floyd Effect" for black homicide deaths started the weekend after George Floyd's demise on May 25, 2020.
When cops stop pulling over suspicious characters, suspicious characters feel more confident in carrying their illegal hand guns, and in driving more recklessly.
Blacks started to ease off slightly on carrying illegal handguns and speeding in 2022, with the increase in better behavior speeding up in 2023-2025 as the "racial reckoning" got increasingly memoryholed and the police were allowed to get back to work
Hispanics reacted more slowly than blacks to cops retreating to the donut shop under condemnation by The Establishment, with Hispanic deaths of exuberance peaking in 2022. But they've been falling since.
You can see modest upward trends in bad behavior for whites during the George Floyd era.
Asians appear to have totally ignored the Floyd Effect, other than in 2021 when they started getting murdered in hate crimes in increased numbers. But Asians didn't die more in traffic accidents.
So, American leadership got tens of thousands of incremental Americans, especially African-Americans killed, in pointless murders and car crashes from 2014-2023 during the Great Awokening by taking BLM seriously.
Have we learned any lessons? Barely anybody has mentioned that homicides and traffic fatalities have become closely correlated in this century depending upon police pro-activeness and cash in pockets.
So, it's quite likely that we could easily repeat these bloody events out of sheer ignorance.
The perception that crime is high seems delusional, probably originating to pessimistic narratives that people buy into rather than anything real. I spent years living in one of the highest crime areas of my city with large amounts of public housing full of drug addicts. The crime was supposedly so bad that they started having police patrolling the streets at night in a way I’d never experienced anywhere else. Yet I never experienced any crime or heard any second or third person anecdotes about crime. I don’t doubt there were problems, but they pale in comparison to what ive heard from boomers, where theft and burglaries were just something lots of people experienced. As far as I can tell theres no rational reason a person my age (30) and in my area could think crime is rampant.
Why did you state "these data are counterintuitive". Is it a reference to the idea that some people think crime is going up?
Fwiw, it seems perfectly intuitive to me. The 80s were peak crime panic culture. So many movies from that era have street crime as a central menace. Two consecutive bond movies with a drug dealer the villain!
I have also noticed and been annoyed by plexiglass in shops, but I remember far greater cultural penetration than that.
> It would be an extraordinary coincidence if [bias in the NCVS] exactly matched the proposed reporting bias to police
I don’t have a horse in this race, but I’ve seen the argument-by-coincidence pop up in a few articles now and it’s never as convincing to me as it apparently is to Scott. Why is it so improbable that two unrelated errors be in the same direction and similar in magnitude? And why not consider whether the errors are correlated - either affected by the same mechanism or by one institution using the other’s results as a sanity check?