I don't mean to be unfairly dismissive, but I've become highly skeptical of straightforward economic explanations for crime over time. I'd suggest checking out some of Devin Helton's essays on urban decay for a run-down on crime and homicides starting in the 1960s. Cross-ethnic comparisons also tend to be illuminating.
The early 1990s murder boom was due to crack. In places where crack arrived earliest -- NYC, DC, LA -- murders shot up in the very prosperous late 1980s.
No, it wasn't unemployment. The 2008 recession saw massive unemployment with a DECREASE in crime. The Ferguson effect IN FERGUSON was not preceded by a spike in unemployment.
You're just desperately clinging onto an explanation that doesn't contradict your ideology and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
"Peaks of unemployment correlate with peaks of homicide."
Nah, homicides fell pretty consistently during the Great Recession, as did traffic fatalities. Murders in modern America don't happen due to desperate Jean Valjean's holding up a bakery to feed their families but instead more because one or more jerks are feeling their oats.
Now, one thing that was weird about 2020 was how many people didn't have to get up in the morning to work but had a wallet full of cash from stimmy checks and not paying their rent.
Compare to previous years. Crime always rises a bit in April because it's warmer and more people are outside. This happens in every year, and then the very high rise in June doesn't happen until 2020.
(there's a separate effect where 7-day rolling averages make the June spike start a little earlier than it should)
The NYC shootings new normal didn't really get going until mid-June.
In NYC, like in many cities, shootings were up way more than murders. People shot were up 100% in 2020 in NY while people killed were up only 40%. This goes along with the idea of Deaths of Exuberance. Black shooters traditionally have the lowest killed to wounded ratio, so a very large fraction of the incremental shooting incidents in NYC were likely black.
First generation BLM Ferguson effects were sharply restricted in time and space to BLM triumphs in St. Louis area, Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee etc...
2nd generation BLM Floyd effects were near instantaneous and national.
One thing to keep in mind is that white murderers tend to be pretty old. I don't have statistics at hand, but white murderers who are career criminals tend to bring the term "hardened criminal" to mind: e.g., they worked their way up the scale of criminality until finally killing somebody at age 39 or whatever.
Lol this is retarded. It’s obviously racial. Your intuition of the causal chain is precisely backwards. The black crime spike (primarily by young blacks, I.e. 15-35) drives the youthfulness number of crime. Not vice versa
"For someone with the username "HL Mencken," you should really come up with more clever insults."
I don't know about that, the original Mencken was excessively fond of a fixed set of terms of contempt for the American tardoisie. Not the same one, but hey, you have to go with the times. "Booby" just doesn't sound right anymore.
I'm not saying it's not *good*, I'm just saying that e.g. "ignoramus" and "clod" are standing entries in Real Mencken's insult book. In the instance you've cited here he chose to expand on the subject; on other occasions, like False Mencken above, he was briefer.
Adjusting for age makes a modest difference, but race is the Big Factor: blacks die by homicide about an order of magnitude more than non-Hispanic whites. For young males, the difference is about 20 to 1.
Most educated Americans are not aware of the immense size of the racial gaps in likelihood of shooting and being shot. Or they are aware of them when thinking about their own real estate but they don't factor them in when thinking about public policy.
Part of the lower median age of black Americans is driven by the higher fertility of black immigrants though right? Nigerian-Americans and Jamaican-Americans have lower median age but also don't have anywhere near the ADOS crime rate. BirthGauge says that ADOS TFR = White TFR but higher black TFR is driven by immigrant populations. In general immigrant populations tend to be younger even controlling for TFR because the old people stay behind.
I remember Sailer had a chart showing that black traffic fatalities were a bit higher than white ones before Floyd, but after Floyd there was a massive divergence and a wave of black motor accidents because the police stopped their aggressive racial profiling.
Out of the frying pain and into the fire, I suppose. Hopefully self-driving cars will enable us to avoid the trade-off between racial profiling and motor vehicle accidents.
Fair enough, and that's what we should do in the short term. I'm for racial profiling if it saves lives. But I'd rather do less racial profiling if possible.
The police are complaining that one argument for legalizing marijuana was that there would be fewer car crashes because high drivers aren't as terrible drivers as drunk drivers, but now it appears that more bad drivers lately are both drunk and high.
<i>Out of the frying pain and into the fire, I suppose. Hopefully self-driving cars will enable us to avoid the trade-off between racial profiling and motor vehicle accidents.</i>
I think the NYT will say that the law enforcement is systematically racist, not the camera itself, and will just say more black people are profiled, this is unfair. At worse they might say that cameras are part of a system designed to surveil and control black bodies or whatever, the same way they complain whenever the law is enforced.
It's true that NYT already thinks that standardized tests are racist, even though Jews and Asians outscore Whites on them, that they think that Stuyvesant being 80% Asian is because of racism and "white supremacy", and they think that hate crimes against Asians and Jews in NYC are also caused by "white supremacy". Still we can point to actual school segregation in the past and actual hate crimes in the past for which white people can be blamed.
There is not a history of black people having cameras focused on them in the same way. If you install more of these cameras in black areas (which would make sense as that's where more crime is), the NYT will say it's monitoring black bodies or whatever and repeat their usual tripe about the criminal justice system.
Well if you really want to minimize driving deaths, speed cameras alone are probably insufficient as there are traffic issues other than speeding, and it makes sense to pull over random black people and figure out if they are suspicious. It's also good as a deterrent effect, as someone driving aberrantly or drunk is more likely to be scared of being pulled over, they might not be speeding. Obviously profiling like that has second-order effects.
Self driving cars are just another tech-sensationalism phantasy. Even if they do get introduced at some point, they’ll be a luxury item for upper middle class lib types to masturbate to about being “early adopters” of some “hip, cool” (read: ghey) new thing. They won’t be widely adopted by reckless driving blacks. So keep dreaming about getting “problematic” black stats down.
One thing that I've always wondered about is the following. So people don't like racial profiling and they also don't like road deaths. People don't like police killings and they don't like murder. People don't like super harsh drug laws and they don't like drug gangs around their community. Obviously I don't like any of those things either. Unfortunately in life, there are trade offs.
What is the correct tradeoff for these things? Is the right way to approach this from a preference utilitarian point of view? The median person (say, general American, black American, whatever) would probably not want to live in a world where there is no murder because the government is stalking you constantly, and also probably would not want to live in a police-free world. What's the right function to optimize here?
If we want to know how much racial profiling to do on the road, my first instinct would be whatever maximizes the utility function of the median Black American. How much do they value not getting pulled over vs being safe. I think though that this kind of preference utilitarian thing is hard because most people have inconsistent preferences. People say they want capitalism but don't like economic inequality, people say they want meritocracy but they don't like radically disparate outcomes (my friend describes this last one as "most people have no idea what normal distributions look like"; they'll say to a pollster universities should admit students on merit, but if a top school was 60% Asian and 1% Black they wouldn't be happy).
What ends up happening in the real world of course, is much messier. Among Black Americans community leaders pushed for harsh drug laws and now BLM pushes for defunding the police and removing those harsh drug laws.
You can see the same thing in other countries. In Israel, there was a big movement among Israeli Arabs about police brutality after 12 Arab-Israelis were killed during the October 2000 riots, but nowadays the Israeli Arabs (the leadership, and the street) is pushing "Arab Lives Matter" to get the cops to do more about their unacceptably high murder rate ... which was about 1/4 the murder rate of Black Americans at the peak (it's lower now, the Israelis succeeded in fixing it).
Curious if there is a way to operationalize this though. I mean, if you surveyed 100 random Black Americans and estimated their feelings on road accidents versus traffic stops, and adjusted policy accordingly, what would happen?
My feeling is that the result you would come up with is that the policy we had before George Floyd is much better, and maybe didn't go far enough. Same thing with the cops, you would probably find that we need a ton more cops. Anyway, I would like to know the X for which the average Black American values 1 police killing at X murders, and calibrate our race-police policies accordingly. It might be that they care much less when the cop is black, and then I'd want to hire a ton of black cops.
I think that a preference utilitarian approach for the population in question is generally the right answer. Not listening to the most well-organized voices.
Yeah exactly. This gets to the root of so much confusion. People complain about black incarceration rates not realizing this yields an enormous cut down in crime affecting mostly other blacks. The black community leaders were correct in calling for more policing. That is ultimately the best thing. But I think you’re just always gonna have problems w black America no matter which way you slice it unfortunately. And we are going backwards not forwards. The whole “March of progress” framing of the racial reckoning is a gigantic disgusting fucking lie.
I don't disagree, I think those community leaders were generally correct about increasing policing, though maybe they erred in calling for harsh punishments for consuming drugs rather than selling them. Indeed most American cities are under-policed. There is a police brutality problem but there is an even bigger crime problem. BLM has generally been a bad thing, though of course there are well-intentioned people who support it. I think it's not exactly a "gigantic disgusting fucking lie" in that to lie you have to actually know what the truth is, and the average woke actually thinks American cops kill hundreds of blacks every year for explicitly racial motivations (Zach Goldberg has done good work on this).
I think there also might be creative solutions, i.e. less incarceration, but more forced labor (or we can use the euphemism "community service") and even Singapore-style caning or other corporal punishment.
My view is that the first priority should be to encourage open discussion of data. Instead, our culture tries to cover up the facts.
For example, I discovered the strong evidence for BLM leading to increased black traffic fatalities on June 8, 2021. It's important for two reasons: because traffic deaths are bad and because it sheds light on the causes of the similar increase in homicides.
But in the year since, so far the furthest that important social science finding has penetrated into the mass media was that Tucker Carlson mentioned it a couple of months ago, which mad a bunch of people mad but didn't lead to further discussion.
People are used to driving in traffic, where a mistake means a scratch. But driving on uncongested streets during what used to be rush hour now means that a mistake leads to a dead pedestrian.
I don't see that that necessarily follows. Is it harder to avoid pedestrians if there are also fewer cars on the road? I could see an argument that people were driving faster and more recklessly on the emptier streets, but that argument assumes the increase in danger from recklessness is greater than the increase in safety from having fewer things on the road. Not to mention fewer pedestrians.
Further, wouldn't your theory suggest that most fatal accidents occur when people used to driving in traffic get into a quiet, less congested suburb? We should see that during normal times, as people used to driving in traffic are going to drive through a variety of lower congestion areas.
My claim isn't that recklessness increased - it's that with fixed recklessness, and higher speeds, you get more fatalities, even with fewer cars. Cars moving under 20 mph kill fewer than 10% of the people that they hit, while cars moving over 40 mph kill about 90% of the people that they hit. People inside a car usually don't die unless the vehicle is moving even faster.
I don't believe there were fewer pedestrians during early covid - I definitely saw a lot more people walking and biking during March/April/May 2020 than I did before or after.
Still, that doesn't explain why people would be driving so much faster if there was increased chances of going off the road or hitting pedestrians crossing the road. I am assuming "recklessness" is a measure of "the probability something bad happens I am willing to accept". If recklessness is fixed and speed increases, that implies that drivers are indifferent to the probability that they will hit more people, or that those hit will be more seriously injured.
It also still does not address that we would then expect more people getting hit and/or killed in low traffic areas than high traffic. Suburbs should be seeing people killed left and right, or hell, even just the regular areas as they change from high traffic to low traffic based on time of day (beyond the usual night time being more dangerous and drunker.)
As traffic lightened in March 2020, speeding increased with some people driving like bats out of hell. 2020 saw a 20% increase in the most spectacular way for motorists to die: by ejection.
But total traffic fatalities stayed pretty flat or declined until after George Floyd's death, when they exploded among blacks especially.
Not that everyone forgot how to drive, but that they forgot what driving is normally like. In my particular case, I felt like I got used to driving on mostly deserted roads during the lockdowns, then when those eased up after 2-3 months, it took me a while to get used to dealing with traffic again and not being able to cruise along at whatever speed I liked, and I think I got irritated by that and drove more aggressively, at least for a time.
According to CDC cause-of-death tracking, blacks have gotten 49% more likely to die by homicide from Jan-Nov 2018 to Jan-Nov 2021 (Dec 2021 won't be ready until July), and they’ve gotten 38% more likely to die in motor vehicle accidents.
Hispanics are up 40% in homicides and 30% in car crashes.
Whites are up 12% in homicide deaths and 10% in car crash deaths.
Asians are up 13% in homicide deaths and 4% in traffic fatalities.
Yeah, exactly. If your entire repertoire of responses to crimes is stuff that you think might get you prosecuted if the legal system finally stopped giving you essentially complete free rein, there is something seriously wrong with you and your training, because cops in many other countries manage to detain and arrest people with far fewer gunshots and choke holds.
They can most easily accomplish that by not leaving home at the start of their shift, so there's more to it than that.
What that is might be worth talking about, but not with someone who falsely insists that the "number one priority is to go home safely at the end of their shift".
I respect you immensely as a poster, but I'm extraordinarily confused as to what you mean by this.
Anyone who works a dangerous job could, I suppose, not do that job. But insofar as they do carry on doing the job, how does the possibility of refusal negate the assumption that their first priority is to get through the day alive?
I don't know if you're a badgelicker or just pretending to not understand the difference between a general and an absolute statement. I base my claim that "officer safety is paramount" on both the sworn testimony in numerous officer related shootings and multiple police officer self-defense/UoF trainings.
But hey, if you want to just randomly pop in and accuse people of bad faith, you do you.
I think it's very unrealistic to expect policemen not to have as two of their very top priorities:
a. Don't get murdered
b. Don't get sent to prison
We can reasonably expect them to take some risks of each, but we shouldn't be surprised when they act to decrease the risk of those very bad (and very salient) outcomes at the cost of less effective policing or more danger for civilians relative to them.
And people are *terrible* at risk calculations for rare events, so it's quite likely that most policemen are way overestimating their risk of being murdered or sent to jail.
Every use of force - whatsoever - counts as "stuff that might get you prosecuted". So, can police respond to crime exclusively without using force? I think not; and I don't think that's something "seriously wrong with [them] and [their] training". If they see reasonable uses of force getting prosecuted, they are justified in getting worried. (And to anticipate one response - when I say "reasonable uses of force getting prosecuted, I'm very much not talking about George Floyd. Rayshard Brooks is the key example.)
Finally, I'd be shocked if the "other countries" you're alluding to have violent crime rates anywhere near Minneapolis' (even before the protests). There's a tendency to hold up wealthy European countries as model solutions, but they don't even confront the same problems.
I always bring this up, but the rates police kill the people they are stopping in the US and Western Europe almost exactly tracks how often those people have a gun. In Germany "criminals" are killed ~100X less often, they also have guns ~100X less often. The relationship more or less holds up across several countries, though isn't perfect.
Nobody wants to get to the root of this disparity, but plainly stated, it’s the amount of criminally inclined blacks with guns america has that causes these numbers. And to a lesser extent Hispanics. Cut those out and the US stats normalize to only slightly above other first world numbers.
There’s far fewer feral blacks willing to resist arrest and fight with/shoot at police in other countries. Do you think police like having to deal with ghetto criminality? No, it’s dangerous, stressful (more than usual police work), and they’d prefer to just avoid the black ghetto altogether.
Not that police officers don't routinely do illegal things as you mentioned, but from my perspective, I think they had reason to worry, given that there seemed to be a kind of moral panic happening at the time. People began to advocate not just defunding the police, but abolishing the police entirely, and extreme rhetoric that invoked terms like "genocide," ACAB, etc.
Here's a nice example from the Gaurdian:
"The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted under international law, an inquiry into US police brutality by leading human rights lawyers from around the globe has found. "
It's also important to point out that public opinion/perception was becoming more and more detached from reality around this time. According to this survey, over 30% people who described themselves as liberal or very liberal believed that cops kill about 10,000 or more than 10,000 unarmed black people year:
BLM talking point, circa 2015: Every black family knows about having "the talk" with their sons, explaining that it's irrelevant whether they're actually doing something illegal or not, that given stereotypes and bias they need to be cognizant of avoiding situations where they might even risk the perception of illegality.
BLM talking point, circa 2022: Anyone worried about being perceived as doing something illegal due to stereotypes and bias, despite being perfectly innocent, is obviously just resentful over the curtailing of their prerogative to do illegal stuff.
I'm not a fan of BLM by any means but I don't know if this juxtaposition is being fair to them. Peoples' preferences change over time and it might not be the same people saying these things 7 years apart. The first thing (which is reasonable) sounds like something an average black family would say, and the second thing (which is unreasonable) sounds like something one of these BLM activists would say.
I think the 2015-era comment is extraordinarily and poignantly true. I think it was true then, and it's true now, and in my social circle I'm close to cops and prosecutors who as a practical matter devote their lives to making it true.
None of that means that the 2022-era comment is honest or just or correct.
Indeed. There was less of a defunding and more of a police strike/retirement, to my understanding. This is likely a selection effect, but I've also heard a lot more stories about police just refusing to do anything about obvious crimes in the last two years, particularly property crime but not solely property crime. Whether that is a reasonable reaction to e.g. DA behaviour on their part or a mean-spirited form of protest I'm not qualified to say.
We know police want respect. Could this mass retirement have been intentional so that new recruits and technology could be brought in? Drug addicts may have used violence to rob victims while they were stuck at home. Overcrowding after evictions and lost jobs could have affected tempers. Boredom, bars closed affect violence levels? Cops might fear losing their jobs or lives with restrictions on their crime fighting techniques?
Do all cops really agree Chauvin was guilty? Greg Cochran isn't a cop and says you can't asphyxiate someone by kneeling on their neck. There were other cops around Chauvin and I don't think any tried to stop him.
Are you talking about the US legal system? If so, that is definitely not the case - since Floyd had a fatal level of fentanyl in his blood, "hastening" his death is in no way grounds for a murder charge. If anything, involuntary manslaughter would be the appropriate charge.
The relevant question is whether kneeling on the back of someone else in the same manner who was not overdosing would have killed them, i.e. whether Chauvin took action that was the primary cause of Floyd's death, and whether he knew that it would cause his death.
For example, if I tase someone who has a rare heart condition I don't know about and they die, I definitely did not murder them, since I did not take an action that I could have reasonably known would kill them.
From there, the question would be whether or not I was justified in tasing them in the first place, which would then delineate between no charges at all or an involuntary manslaughter charge being justified.
That principle indicates that "the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them," but in the case of murder vs manslaughter, neither charge is contesting the seriousness of the injury caused (death). The factors that delineate between the two are the intentions and actions of the defendant, but not the seriousness of the injury.
Lol that still doesn’t constitute murder. Negligent homicide maybe. But how could chauvin have known when to lay off? Floyd’s tone was increasingly desperate and I can’t imagine staying on him that long myself. But he was saying “I can’t breathe” many times before being subdued. And street riff raff say shit all the time to get the cops to lay off. So what are we really talking about here as police error? To me it seems an enormous stretch to call that murder. Chauvin should’ve been released of charges but fired for questionable conduct with large consequences.
Because the video isn’t the only key piece of evidence. The toxicology report is crucial, as is Floyd’s behavior and words preceding the incident on the ground. Much of what you see the cops doing is plausibly justified or only marginally outside of protocol if you watch the full video (from when the police first arrive on the scene).
I'm not a cop, but my impression is that this is manslaughter, and that DC holding GF down like that certainly was not good for his heart and contributed to his death, though of course the fentanyl had something to do with it as well. The mainstream narrative that DC just murdered GF is wrong, and it's not true that GF asphyxiated. The second-degree murder seems like the wrong charge, it should be third-degree murder (and manslaughter if it was a different state). Holding down an unresponsive person for 7 minutes is really NOT OK.
Chauvin wasn't on Floyd's neck, he was on his upper back. It actually would have been preferable for him to have been on the neck, since the risk of positional asphyxia of the protected trachea would be much lower. The officers "around" DC were two brand new rookies days off of FTO who DID try to convince DC to change course, and DC's car partner who was watching the crowd and not the in custody. This is one of the (many) problems with the self appointed reform movement, is that the level of understanding of basic facts is very very low. "Solutions" are proposed to fix fictional versions of events.
There are 800k sworn in the US roughly, I'm sure you can find a handful that find nothing objectionable in DC's choices, but the general LE consensus is that he screwed the pooch.
Yeah that is an obviously false statement. That isn't even getting into how unreliable people's reports about their beliefs are on such a high stakes question.
Chauvin did show negligence but his actions were actually a pretty minor deviation from standard police protocol. You have a 6’3, 240 lb man on drugs who has resisted arrest, it’s totally normal to physically hold him down with bodyweight once he’s under control and while waiting for the ambulance. Chauvin only screws up minorly by being too callous to Floyd’s increasingly desperate tone. Floyd was saying “I can’t breathe” many times *before* ever being subdued on the ground. So what’s chauvin supposed to think?
With a toxicology report like Floyd’s, you never get a conviction of guilt for murder on any other case like this if it didn’t have the nuclear cultural ramifications. Chauvin was a mediocre cop who made a rather minor error of judgment but who found himself the wrong guy at the wrong place at the wrong time, where that had enormous consequences.
For seven minutes?!?! And after he was unresponsive?
Because of the way MN defines murder I think third-degree murder is fair, I agree second-degree murder was the wrong verdict and it would be manslaughter in most other states, and also that it was impossible for Chauvin to get a fair trial. There are other places I'd spend my political capital though than justice for this asshole police officer though.
Just out of curiosity, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the reason our elite oligarchs want to defund the police is because they are trying to make society transition from public policing to private policing? This way, when law and order in society collapses from waves of mass migration refugees, the only people with any level of protection will be the rich. They can isolate themselves in their bunkers while the rest of society kills itself off until hitting optimal depopulation levels. And the rest of us will accept it as normal because after a single generation, nobody will remember a time when you didn't have to pay private police dues to the homeowners association if you expected police to help you. So when somebody points out that maybe it's wrong that the increase in violence caused by open borders is predominantly impacting the poor, they can just shrug and say "Don't blame US because YOU weren't smart enough to buy police security!"
This is too conspiratorial. It’s not that well planned out. It’s more of a social hysteria driving this shit. Stop thinking every step of our societal decay is some masterminded chess move. The reality of the world is there’s more often nobody at the wheel than a malicious actor steering us.
Should we even care if private policing works in a way that public policing isn't?
Regardless, this just seems silly. This is a 'mistake' ('mistake theory' versus 'conflict theory') disagreement – "our elite oligarchs" really just do 'believe' (at least rhetorically and politically) that less policing would be strictly better overall.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but if we take this and Scott’s article as true, what’s the actual mechanism by which more murders occur? I know there are sometimes cases where officers get involved to stop a crime that is happening or about to happen (there was a case in my city a couple weeks ago). But surely most police action is after the fact? So how does reduced policing actually lead immediately to a large increase in murders?
I can imagine a case where potential murderers see that other murderers got off Scott free since no police followed up and so the potential murderers decide to commit. But wouldn’t that take months or years to happen? I think the proximal cause is not so much police not (being able to) doing their job but of a psychological change in the community - a feeling of recklessness or chaos perhaps?
But I also don’t know basically anything about police so maybe there is an actual mechanism?
"But surely most police action is after the fact?"
No police pro-actively patrol and deter crimes. As Alex Tabarrok notes, every step in the causal chain leading to Scott's conclusion has been verified through studies:
> Violent crimes show no response to increased police presence on high‐alert days. Among nonviolent crimes, auto theft and theft from autos show very large effects, a decline during high‐alert days of 43 percent. ... The large declines in crime involving automobile thefts and thefts from automobiles support the idea that increased police presence is the driving force in reducing crime during high‐alert periods because these are “street” crimes. Temporary increases in street police and closed‐circuit cameras are unlikely to deter crimes such as homicide, which often occur in homes among people who know one another, but are much more likely to deter street crimes.
Obviously they're not going to have data for murder specifically since that'll be too rare to pick up. But violent crime is obviously the closer category to what we're interested in so this seems pretty bad for the argument that police force reductions *quickly* increase murder rate, doesn't it? I still agree that the overall reduction in policing could plausibly have long-term effects of murder rates.
Honestly, this seems like a pretty dishonest mistake for Tabarrok to make.
Domestic homicides tend to occur at home, but the big increase in homicide in 2020 was not (in contrast to predictions about lockdowns) in domestic homicides (or even indoor mass-murders, though they get a lot of press) but instead "street" crimes.
That paper is still (modest) direct evidence against police affecting street violence (violent crime was not separated out by street versus indoor but did not decline). At the very least it is not evidence in favor of that assertion, in contrast to how Marginal Revolution is citing it. That link may still be true, of course, but we shouldn’t overstate the evidence for it.
Though I should add that the claim that street violence specifically is affected by cop activity is a priori sufficiently more likely so your comment has helped me understand this position better even if I think the claim is not yet “verified”.
More concretely than the other commenter mentioned, a lot of the 'low-level' mundane 'patrol activities' essentially involve 'hassling' the people likely to murder others, e.g. over gang turf or in retaliation for some ongoing gang feud.
If a cop makes a 'routine' traffic stop, and then suspects that the person or people they stopped has a gun, they can search for it, find it, and then make subsequent murders a little less likely if only because they're now less convenient for the potential murderers.
There's probably _also_ an effect whereby less police activity directly emboldens criminals, including murderers.
If people are crowded in the streets watching a couple of drivers do donuts in an intersection, and the police _don't_ break that up, that sure seems like the kind of environment in which murder is more likely! (There are several videos of 'pedestrians' being struck or run over by these drivers.)
Also, if it's risky to be walking around armed because the cops often stop and frisk people who look like you, and you'll be arrested if they find a gun on you, then you will probably leave the gun home unless you're on your way to carry out a planned crime right now. Which means that you won't have the gun with you when you get into a fistfight with some dude over looking at his girlfriend in a too-friendly way, and so you won't end up shooting him.
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests...I understand this is the opposite of what everyone else says, but I think they are wrong."
You must not be reading many conservatives. Pretty much a standard gripe of theirs is that of course it was all BLM, and the media lies about it and obfuscates what's going just like they do with everything that they find ideologically inconvenient.
Scott might be surprised to learn how many right-wingers only *became* right-wingers *after* examining sensitive issues and realizing that the respectable media & academia does nothing but lie and obfuscate, *then* concluding that these people can't be trusted on anything that threatens their dogma.
The reddening of the grey tribe (or at least, this blog's comment section) is a big part of why I don't visit this blog as much. I can't comment on the "evidence based" part, but right now it's reddening because many non-right-wing readers don't want to participate in a right-wing community.
I think the issue is not with the facts but with the tone and with the lack of hyperbole, and with not sounding like an alt-right frog Nazi. Better to avoid vulgar references to blacks as a group, there is plenty of variation on any trait we care about within each racial group, even if the distributions are not identical. If I were to say "many people on the left and in the NYT explicitly or implicitly attribute all discrepancies to discrimination, and this is a false and destructive belief, and discrepancies in average IQ and crime rate cannot be pinned only on racism", this comes off as a lot better than "the problem in the US is stupid blacks and black crime, and the anti-white racist NYT doesn't want you to know the truth and instead blood libels white people".
Good point. ACX is more rightwing than I like, but within my range of toleration. There's an ill-defined limit-- I'm fine with the lead article, but a lot of commenters seem to start with the idea that there's something wrong with black people in general.
Honestly it's not really that tolerable anymore. The comment section has been politically slanted for a long time, but the actual posts used to be interesting. Increasingly I feel lately Scott's MO for a quick high-engagement post is to go out and find controversial political issues; take a strong (contrarian and coincidentally [?] right-wing) position on them; then head out to the Internet to cherry-pick some evidence to support his strong initial belief. When his quick Google search turns up conflicting evidence he devotes paragraphs to tearing it apart. Meanwhile evidence that does support his hypothesis receives virtually zero skepticism. A good example is the "Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?" post, which is an absolute mess.
This is fine, I guess. But it's a failure mode I've seen on a lot of blogs and sites. First your comments get captured by people with a strong political bias, then 50% of the smart commenters exit the space, and then the main authors begin catering to their new audience. (This gets worse when the audience is paying for the site.)
The comments in this article are full of people aggressively defending Chauvin and Kyle Rittenhouse with little or qualified pushback. It's pretty far gone.
TL;DR Scott's schtick used to be "I am a liberal/libertarian in a sea of liberals, and I need to be contrarian to balance the issues for my overwhelmingly liberal audience." But his audience isn't liberal anymore.
I'm having trouble finding what comments you're referring to. The thread is now so long that I might be missing something. If there's a lot, would you mind linking a couple?
It’s rather mean and strange that to say that there is “something wrong with black people in general”. Obviously black people are human beings worthy of respect and of course I want them to have great lives. And obviously historically Black Americans have faced lots of discrimination.
Still the conclusion most consistent with an objective look at the available evidence is that black people in the US, *on average*, have persistently lower average educational attainment, lower income, and higher crime than other groups for reasons that are not entirely environmental, and generally not “racism” as traditionally understood insofar as they are environmental.
As a society we rightly accept Jews (and Asians) have higher EA and income and lower crime and opioid abuse than white Christian Americans, and we know this is not because of the Sacklers. Why can’t we accept Black-White disparities the same way? Granted the Sacklers did not enslave millions of White Christians and treat them awfully, and the situation is far from analogous, but my basic point still stands.
Or is it based on the standard “I don’t like what you say therefore you are a racist” syllogism of our times?
It tells you something that the community that’s loudest about supposed media bubbles on social media finds intolerable the existence of a site that tries to investigate issues in a evidence based, rather than a tribal shibboleth based way.
Glad you are tolerating outside your window! Cool!
People who follow data are not any "wing." To characterize resultant conclusions as "rightwing" or "leftwing" misses a really important point. I hope you will consider this.
Comments are always a mixed bag! I learn from many, and appreciate the opportunity to engage with people outside my immediate circle.
I have not read all these comments, to be honest, though the article was outstanding. Gosh, I would be surprised, though, if commenters here think "there is something wrong with black people...".
Are you sure you are interpreting their comments literally? Literal is a good way to go. Drawing inferences can lead one astray if one uses "people who state A automatically also believe B."
Comments like this are part of why people are becoming right-wing. You see evidence presented that leads to conclusions you don't like, and instead of coming up with a persuasive counterargument, you threaten to leave and reduce Scott's audience. Fine, go. If this is the quality of your contribution, I don't think it's any great loss.
Honestly this type of discussion is a good example of why people are leaving the Left. "Feelings over facts" is no way to live.
Are we certain it's actually getting redder, or is it does it just appear red-shifted to the blue tribe, due to their rapid movement leftward away from the grey tribe?
Yarvin often says that the left defines anything that is not left as right. It may not even be that actual positions are shifting drastically in either direction, but that with the cultural dominance of the left comes a much stronger focus on purity. You could agree with the left on every issue except for one, but that would still make you right-wing, in the same way that you can be a very devout Christian, but if you deny transubstantiation, you get burned at the stake. So even if grey tribe beliefs haven't changed at all, the tribe is essentially being redefined as red simply because it's not blue.
It's always been like that. The left is a coherent movement based first and foremost on human equality and egalitarianism as the ultimate virtue, and the right is a jumbled coalition of everyone who opposes that for various reasons. Free market enthusiasts, religious conservatives, racial conservatives, and so on (these groups have some overlap of course).
Probably some of both. It's hard to disentangle them. Probably more of the ACX community became less libertarian on crime. Was this just because the woke left went off the deep end so the ACX community seems more right-wing, or because many in the ACX community like dionysus saw firsthand the destructive effects of a lack of policing? Probably a combination.
Back in the day, when the red tribe had a lot of power, and the blue tribe was concerned with things like lessening the influence of christian dogma on policy, the blue tribe was happy to ally itself with grey types such as Dawkins. The "left/right" dividing line used to go through somewhere on the right end of the grey tribe. Now a days, the blue tribe has enough power that it doesn't need the grey tribe's help to stand up to the reds, and consequently the dividing line has been shifting ever leftward through the grey territory. Gradually more and more grey people have been told they're not welcome in blue company.
The grey people ousted from alliance with the blues, are then forced to choose between trying to carve out a distinct grey identity, or allying with the reds. The second option being the more likely outcome, I suspect.
Interestingly, this new left/right division that has emerged makes American politics more closely resemble politics in some other countries.
For instance, in Norway (to the extent that it maps onto the American situation), the grey tribe has historically tended to ally itself with the red tribe, since the blue tribe has been the stronger of the two for a long time.
In other words, I think what grey tribe members are experiencing is the blue tribe increasing its social/political power and thus being able to enforce greater ideological purity among its members/allies.
I certainly agree that it is evidence driven. Might be some selection effects. Normal lefties would read SSC but after the Great Awokening they stopped because HBD racism blah blah. And going on Substack likely attracts right-wingers who read other Substack.
I’d be really interested in an SSC survey where Scott figures out how much the community has moved right, and whether it’s individual people or election effects driving the change. It’s almost surely a combination of both.
I was on the right until I wasn't any longer and part of the shift for me was continental theory. I don't know that it's conducive to further conversation to say that all "respectable (whatever that is) media and academia" lies.
I'm one of those people. It was the BLM riots and the elite establishment's lying about them (e.g. "fiery but mostly peaceful protests", from CNN), all while I saw my city being looted on live CCTV footage, that turned me from center left to hardcore conservative.
There’s this funny thing with a lot of these Weinstein-tier thoughtful moderate/liberal/centrist types who last few years are dissenting from their libtard peers and think they’re hot shit. You’re like two fucking decades late to the party of what most Midwestern conservative grandmas have been saying a long long time ago. Great job being so “freethinking”.
Yeah, the whole BLM thing and the woke purges are a large part of what turned me from center-left to center-right, though I've always been more libertarian than anything else. I voted for Biden in 2020 but I will not vote Democrat again unless something big changes. I'll likely vote DeSantis in 2024. I'll write him in if Trump wins the nomination (I think Trump is an incompetent moron and I'd never vote for him either). I have my disagreements with the Republican party (e.g. on abortion) but the Democrats' views on race, gender, trans stuff in K-12 are too much for me. I'm out.
Oh, but Xiden is NOT "making mistakes." It is mathematically impossible for the results we see to arise out of innocent incompetence. Only years of careful malicious planning could bring the entire world down this quickly.
Yeah, I suspect in Trump's second term he will approach things far differently.
What I find most interesting is that this "new right" Republicanism is really just Classical Liberalism re-booted. People are finally re-discovering Individual Rights and the rule of law - shocking!
Classical liberalism is great, and I have pretty much always believed in it as an ideal, and I've always liked individual rights and the rule of law. I do think though that power matters sometimes and you have to do some illiberal things to fight the "woke left." You can only go so far when your opponents don't play by the same rules.
I like freedom of the press, but it's hard for me to have sympathy for Gawker. Not a big fan of public sector unions, but in this political climate I think police unions do more good than harm. I'm not a big fan of anti-discrimination laws, but I'm rooting for SFFA.
I am not happy about some of the wording in Florida's "don't say gay" bill and I don't want a lesbian teacher to be punished for casually mentioning she went on vacation with her wife. But given the choice between that and prescribing puberty blockers to teenagers, I think it's clear what the lesser evil is.
I should probably say "gender ideology" instead of "trans stuff", obviously there are plenty of trans people (e.g. Caitlyn Jenner, or many of our autistic lesbian transwomen friends in the ACX community) who are not on board with the insanity of gender ideology. Bill Maher's quip about peg leg surgery is priceless.
Yes. I used to vote D but I do research news articles, and read both left and right. This started when I read that Senator Hillary Clinton sponsored legislation to criminalize flag-burning and I did not believe it. It was true.
To my surprise, in spite of the unappealing tone, Fox News is consistently correct fact-wise. (It is likely that there are exceptions.) The NYT is worst, biased and clearly intentionally misleading, by omitting known and crucial facts to give a slanted view.
My favorite was the NYT article about the supposed female athlete being challenged on high testosterone levels. In principle I would not consider natural but exceptional testosterone levels disqualifying. Yet nowhere in the article did it mention that the person was a biological male, a suspicion that I confirmed elsewhere. I looked up testosterone levels and they were perfectly normal - for a male. This completely altered my perception of the reported debate and fairness of the respective positions. My spouse did not believe the NYT would omit this info and I had to show it to him.
Interesting footnote, he remembers the article as it was reported, and I have to continually remind him that I debunked it with facts.
As I said at the beginning, I know lots of right-wingers are saying this, it just hasn't made it into the mainstream. I'll correct that sentence to "lots of other people"
It's conventional in the prestige press to say that murders went up during the "pandemic rather than during the "racial reckoning," although the latter is more precisely accurate.
Considering the "racial reckoning" happened inside the pandemic, it's kind of a pretty big overlap. (BTW, exactly how do you date 'racial reckoning'? Floyd's murder? The date of protests? Which protests? Where? Were all 2020 protests BLM ones? Where did ANTIFA ever go?)
And this also opens up a rather odd question. If BLM protests caused a rise in crime, well what did the pandemic do? Like are we really going to assert that crime was totally unchanged by the pandemic? If that was the case, that would be a pretty shocking sociological event? I mean it's the only thing in 2020 totally where the pandemic had no impact?
Floyd's murder was the end of May 2020. After the first lockdowns and great fears about the virus, at the point when winter weather had broken and it was becoming clear outdoors was safer than indoors but both school and workplaces remained closed in many areas.
"If the crime increase was caused by the pandemic, then now that the pandemic is basically over why hasn't crime gone back down?"
Pandemic isn't over but when was the last time there was a BLM protest?
Hard to tell. I looked at this (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01139-z) which seems to show the harder the lockdown order, more crime went down after. But then the US didn't really have the same type of lockdown. People didn't go to work or school but police weren't telling people to stay off the streets or go out in public.
https://insightcrime.org/news/insight-crimes-2021-homicide-round-up/ says Latin America saw violent crime dramatically increase after decreasing in 2020. South America's winter is North America's summer so while US Americans we leaving their homes (but not going to work/school) in late May, the opposite may have been happening in Latin America leaving their increase to come in 2021.
Scott tried to address your odd question by looking at other countries. Limited data but that suggests pandemic experience didn't cause rise in crime there. More data would be good. In particular there are 2 lines of questioning that Scott didn't address which are 1) could pandemic have caused more crime only among poor populations - in which case DE/UK/DK may not be best bellweathers (although there is a lot of poverty in some parts of UK too that is very comparable to US poverty, maybe with less drugs/guns) and 2) could pandemic have caused a rise in crime but with a delay effect (not obvious to me that the very month something huge shifts criminals immediately adjust behavior). Occam's razor says 2) is not that likely, plus there are other similar episodes pre-2020 to fall back on, but still can't be excluded.
As I said a problem with comparing lockdowns is that many countries locked you in your house doing things like giving you digital or paper permission slips to leave to buy groceries. Many in the US stayed home early on but it was never like that anywhere. By May, it was clear many people were avoiding indoor places like school/work but they were not afraid to be on the street outdoors.
We are also confronted with the fact that the US did not respond to the pandemic as other nations did. In fact, we responded much worse. Our death rate was higher than others despite the fact that we have more hospitals, more resources and even had vaccines before anyone else (not counting Russia and China whose vaccines appear to not be very good).
In other words, it is pretty clear the pandemic was especially toxic socially to the US.
Occam's razor slices BLM protests just as hard. The pandemic can't have a delayed effect but BLM protests can? Crime happening two years after the last BLM protest in a city is, errr, because of BLM but not because of the pandemic or the general social distrust the pandemic both uncovered and increased?
AND the BLM protests were not exogeneous events. Conspiracy theories aside, there was no grand ANTIFA/BLM/Secret plan to do a bunch of protests in 2020. In other words, you can imagine a 2020 without a pandemic you can't imagine it without protests unless you're trying to imagine a different society. But if you're imagining a different society you can just as easily imagine one with protests but no crime increases.
I think the pandemic contributed to the rise in crime and traffic accidents in a few ways:
- Cops started social distancing in March -- i.e., were less proactive about getting in the faces of bad drivers and suspect characters.
- Lots of criminals and crazy people were released during lockdowns for fears of the pandemic sweeping through lockups
- Masking makes it easier for street criminals not to be identified by witnesses and by rapidly improving facial recognition software.
There are probably others.
But, still, the Racial Reckoning was a huge deal. As Scott says, the same increase in shootings ensued after Ferguson, just more localized to where BLM triumphed over local police forces. And, I'd add, the two BLM eras not only saw homicides increase, they also saw traffic fatalities go up.
The solve rate for murders has gone from nearly 80% in the 60's to early 80's down to the 50's for the last 20 years. This is despite all sorts of tools like DNA, cell phones pining geo-locations, using social media to circulate pictures of suspects caught on cameras.
Facial recognition? You're missing the plot. That sort of thing is the cherry on top of the sundae.
I can see social distancing creating a hands off approach to policing. Then again people really were scared and the streets were empty around the world. When I look at states for all types of crimes what I see in many places is a decrease from Jan-March 2020 to rock bottom levels (the immediate lockdown) and then a bounce up in May which would align with BLM protests near the end but also the facts that winter was breaking, people were generally not in work or school (but unlike other countries, business was open, I ate quite a bit of fast food all through the 'lockdown'). Most interesting, though, a lot of the crime seems to have bounced back to Q1 levels. It's a rapid and sudden increase but then the collapse was also sudden and dramatic.
My fav is how you can pinpoint the spike (or really new plateau) in crime/homicide to the precise fucking week when the riots broke out and you still have NPR types scratching their heads about it.
Wish I could be around to see what Han Chinese historians of the future will be writing about this period of Baizuo America.
Of the four possible causes of police pullback that Scott suggested (or others he may have missed), do you know of evidence favoring any of them in particular?
We have the audio tape of Mayor Lori Lightfoot and leading alderman discussing during the first weekend of the "raciaL reckoning" in Chicago in 2020 and they were terrified. As it turned out the political class was not massacred but 25 local citizens were murdered, Chicago's all time record.
If the 'massacre' was 25 incidents that's a pretty small number. You can actually examine the details of each of those cases and ask what they were about. Were they arguments that escalated? Were they 'hits'? Were they random murders by a serial killer? Did they happen on streets were protests were happening or somewhere else?
25 murders in one weekend in Chicago is a pretty big number by the standards of Chicago, which has a history of violence. E.g., the St. Valentine Day's Massacre of 1929, the most legendary crime of Al Capone, would have been only 28% of the first weekend of the racial reckoning's toll. The highest shooting (killed plus wounded) weekend toll in Chicago's history happened three weeks later on the Father's Day 2020 weekend with 113 shot.
You can look up on Gun Violence Archive or Hey Jackass the details of the killings. Much as Rick in "Casablanca" described Captain Renault as a man like any other man, only more so, the racial reckoning shootings in Chicago tended to be weekends like any other weekends in Chicago, only more so.
...Dude, the second is definitely true too. Probably not everywhere, but I've talked to officers who have flat out SAID such things (in Canada, but I'm going to guess that American ones can be more sensitive to stuff happening in America than Canadian ones).
And the fourth definitely isn't the cause, because nobody cut their police budgets that significantly that quickly.
"Blue flu" (that is the word, right?) has been way exaggerated. I don't think very much of the pullback was "to show everybody how much they needed them" (as the second bullet puts it), rather than just garden-variety demoralization. So it seems to me the second cause was way less powerful than the first and third. However, the same media that ignore the protests as a cause of the violence play up "blue flu" as a cause instead, since it lets them blame police, which is politically convenient.
With that said, I think you're moving the goalposts by saying you'll only accept a strike as evidence. Even without an Atlanta-style mass calling out, angry officers can decide to police less, thinking it will lead to medium-term political support once the consequences of depolicing are clear. Again, I don't think this was the biggest cause of police pullback - that's a narrative pushed for political reasons, rather than factual reasons. But I do believe there was *some* amount of it, even if it didn't take the form of a coordinated strike, specifically.
Let's just back up a moment, please. I'm far from naturally pro-cop, but I read Graham's linked piece and the explanations he gives there appear to be sufficient to cause the changes we see in the statistics. I'm sure there are other factors as well, but do please look at those.
In Minnesota my read (without much actual evidence other than being a bit tied into local government and also knowing a few officers), was less a strike, and more a "whatever you do, no citizens must be shot despite the rampant increase in disorder" as an instruction.
Now that instruction isn't specifically "police less", but you would have to be an idiot to not take that as your action when those are the orders and armed gangs with ACAB flags are openly running around the place.
If you tell cops "I don't care what you do, but make sure no black person dies", cops are just going to change the situations they get involved with, because in the real actual world policing (particularly in a place with so many guns), occasionally involves people dying.
I think you are the person I should ask the question I was intending to ask Scott to address. (I've subscribed and skimmed the above article and will get back to your stuff more fully later).
My point is that even if we grant the idea that the televised protests about police violence cause increase murder, how do we then measure, much less draw conclusions about, the role of police pullback?
Practically? You probably can't. Bar what None of the Above suggests.
Though, of course, if officers were being overly heavy-handed before the protests, them policing correctly will look like a pullback, because it'll be one.
Sadly, I genuinely think a lot of this stuff is more art than science.
Is there much effect from those communities becoming more hostile to police and hence harder to police? I can imagine a situation where otherwise law-abiding community members harass police (legally), so that police have to pay attention to them and get less done because of that. Otherwise, community members may be more reticent towards police, so that investigations are harder, or they might even act legally but suspiciously as a form of protest, so that police have to waste effort on them. But I can also imagine the total time cost of those options being small compared to the other factors.
I don’t think there’s much evidence for 4, there was an article somewhere that showed that police budgets didn’t move much. Policy change doesn’t happen that quickly. Other three seem very plausible.
I read #4, including "political capital" to imply top-down political pressure for less policing. This is opposed to #1-3 where the motivation is bottom-up from the police themselves rather than their supervisory political authorities.
Recently I had a few conversations on ACX about gun policy, and a couple of conservatives were arguing that homicide rates in general, and specifically gun crime, was not particularly high, or at least not high enough to be worried about. Do you think this might be an issue where politically-engaged people, maybe of multiple persuasions, may be experiencing cognitive dissonance?
It's not inconsistent to simultaneously think that the homicide rate is low and the homicide rate has gone up.
It's also not inconsistent to think that the homicide rate is on the average low enough not to worry about, but it's high enough to worry about if you're in a subgroup, such as living in a black inner city. I doubt that many of those conservatives live in such a place, after all.
I think it would be said in better faith if conservatives made it clear that: “where I live” homicide rates are low therefore my gun usage should not be restricted. Rather than saying broadly: homicide rates are low no changes are needed.
The second statement would preclude the creation of city-state-like laws that control arms in the mentioned areas. See Scott’s recent ZEDE post.
Thank you for putting this this way--I don't know that I've ever seen or heard anyone use this construction.
Most people simply conflate empirical evidence ("I can't see much if any gun crime" or "there were five murders where the murderer used a gun on the news last night") with statistical evidence (gun crime has historically declined quite a lot since the 1960s! gun sales are way up!) and not noticed that the reason these statements don't always align is the lack of context in the empirical evidence--both of those sample empirical statements are missing the word "locally," and both statistics don't mention that those are true if you look at the ENTIRE United States.
This makes it really hard to communicate, especially when one half of a conversation wants to use empirical evidence and the other statistical.
I don't know that most people would notice this linguistic quirk without some explicit mention of it.
There may also be a concept of thresholds; gun violence overall is low, is rising, and is more of a problem BUT has no reached a place where (whatever action or policy or law you are proposing or supporting) is justified.
For example - "gun violence is bad, gun violence is increasing, but the violence has not reached a point where deploying the military, declaring the constitution is no longer applicable, and putting machine gun guards on every street corner in America is justified."
I exaggerate that example, but I suspect some pro-gun folks see any infringement as equivalent to what I just wrote, so the threshold argument still applies. I can agree a thing is terrible and is a problem as completely disagree that <action A> is appropriate in any way.
I did not see your conversations but I do also know that conservatives argue that the gun policies often proposed affects a particular type of gun crime that is not high enough (i.e., school or mass shootings) to justify these policies.
This is also often used to signal that the only way you could really lower total gun deaths would be to ban something like handguns (I think this is responsible for 60+% of gun homicides) which would violate the 2nd amendment. Therefore, illustrating that in the end "liberal" or Democrat gun policies would ultimately have to go for their 2nd amendment rights to have any real impact on gun homicides.
Which seems disingenuous because all school shootings were legally acquired guns IIRC. If such restrictions force these killers to go to the black market, it seems implausible to say all of them will easily be able to do so, which means we can save plenty of lives at the cost of only a minor inconvenience for legal gun owners.
If a simple design or installation rule that incurs little to no inconvenience could prevent all or most vending machines from falling on customers, you're suggesting that we should not implement said rule because the outcome would be statistically insignificant? That seems pretty ridiculous.
Correct. There’s a few loopholes or marginal law adjustments that could shave off a bit of gun crime. But liberals vastly overestimate how much of the gun crime could be solved without blatant infringements on 2nd amendment.
Liberals also misunderstand the true causes of most gun crime, which is black and (to a lesser extent) Latino gun irresponsibility. The NRA types libs love to demonize have extremely low gun crime and a culture of gun responsibility and safety. This causes libs to profoundly misunderstand how to tackle the issue. Blacks get let off on illegal gun possession all the time cuz that would lead to more black incarceration. And this is in the most hysterical lib cities where calls for gun laws to tighten are highest. Bottom line: the liberal mind is way to infected with nonsense pseudo-reality to discern good policy from terrible.
Now, obviously if you own a gun illegally you are not going to tell the nice person from Pew who called you up about it, so there is probably more gun ownership in cities (where it is hard to own a gun legally) by everyone than reported, particularly minorities. Still, only 24% of black people reporting owning a gun, and 19% of city dwellers over all, combined with almost all the murders happening in cities between black people, suggest that legal gun ownership is not the issue.
In other words, murder rates are highest where gun policy is most restrictive and the fewest people own guns and among the people who report owning guns at a comparatively low rate. Gun control policy isn't going to fix that; one needs to fix the dysfunctions within the cities that cause the violence.
Note the first graph in Scott's post. Cities over 250,000 have a massively higher murder rate than the nation as a whole. I don't know where the break even point is where cities of a certain size start looking like suburban or rural areas, but at least the top 90 cities (how many US cities have >=250k) have a much higher rate.
Ah good, thanks. It looks like in recent years, the rate is double the national average, before the 1960s it was less than double, but during the late 20th century homicide surge it was more than double.
I don't know how that's affected by the increasing fraction of the country that lives in cities of 250,000 and above.
The fraction of people in cities over 250,000 shouldn't affect it as it is a rate, so an increasing number of people in cities just means murders in rural areas drive up those rates more; the higher fraction of the nation that lives in 250k+ cities, the more the national rate will approach the city rate.
What might be more misleading is how cities are divided up. The coast of CA is effectively one big city, likewise the DC or Philly metro area, but there are many smaller divisions for clerical purposes, many with <250k people. Should those little cities be rolled into one larger metro area? The boundaries of cities always make statistical questions about them awkward.
Lol how is this a question? Have you been living under a fucking rock for the last 30 years of rap music? They’ve been telling it to your face what’s “normal” gun culture in urban black areas.
Yes, urban murder rates are far higher than rural.
Yes, but there has been a fair amount of convergence in recent years, particularly in the black community. The homicide rate in 2020 in these more peripheral areas is pretty close to where large metros were before 2014. Quite the change IMO!
The huge gap in homicide rates is racial, so it overwhelms everything else. Blacks are known murder offenders at about 8 times the per capita rate of the nonblack rest of the U.S. population.
You can look up homicide victimizations by race by population of the town in the CDC's WONDER database. Urban whites don't get murdered very much.
During the peak of the Law & Order franchise on TV, somebody calculated that there were more white murderers each year in NYC in fictional Law & Order shows than in real life.
I also agree these B-W ratios have historically been substantially larger in large cities than small towns and rural areas. The point I'm making here is that while violence increased pretty much everywhere (especially for blacks), it's been increasing at a faster rate in more peripheral areas, i.e., places outside large cities and their surrounding suburbs, since around 2014. Large cities are still worse, overall and for blacks, but there's clearly been significant convergence in homicide rates so that homicide is significantly less concentrated in large cities than it was earlier. This seems an important trend that few (none?) have commented on.
I suspect gentrification of a large fraction of many large cities has been a substantial driver of this trend. That is, blacks and other less prosperous groups have been migrating towards lower cost housing in peripheral areas (small towns, rural areas), sometimes quite distant from the large cities they were raised in, so that their populations are becoming gradually less urban, and so that they are becoming an increasingly large percentage of these populations. Besides the other implications of this migration ceteris paribus, these groups are likely negatively selected on income, education, family structure, and, for the purposes of violent crime in the here and now, nativity.
The higher density of those more susceptible to violence in these peripheral regions on both margins can likely partially explain the increasing homicide rates in the periphery (even when restricted to just blacks!). The racial reckoning has likely only amplified these trends. Indeed, it’s possible the challenges resulting from this migration trend amplified the racial reckoning itself by stirring up resentment and creating more incidents that lead to outrage (I suspect the police departments and parties in many of these receiving areas are less accustomed to dealing with trouble and less staffed for it).
The thing about lying about if you have a gun is, we know how to design surveys so that people can answer truthfully without having to potentially confess to a crime. The trick is to have the respondent flip a coin: if it comes up heads, then answer truthfully, but if it comes up tails, just say "yes".
Let G be the event "posseses a gun", H is the coin flip coming up heads, and Y is a "yes" response. Then, P(Y) = P(Y|GH)P(GH) + P(Y|G~H)P(G~H) + P(Y|~GH)P(~GH) + P(Y|~G~H)P(~G~H) by the law of total probability. Owning a gun won't affect a coin flip [citation needed], so we can assume G and H are independent, giving us:
Okay looking good! So bringing in an axiom of probability, P(G) + P(~G) = 1, and even though we know Lizardman's constant is a thing, for simplicity we'll assume P(Y|~GH) = 0. So simplifying a bit, we now have:
P(Y) = P(Y|GH)P(G)(1/2) + 1/2.
Here's where we bring in a lesser known extension of Bayes' Rule. Specifically, how to use it on compound conditional probabilities:
P(A|BC) = P(B|AC)P(A|C)/P(B|C). This let's us convert our equation into:
P(Y) = (1/2)P(G|YH)P(Y|H)P(G)/P(G|H) + 1/2.
Using our assumption of independence, P(G|H) = P(G). Furthermore, by the design of the survey and the previous statement, P(Y|H) = P(G) and P(G|YH) =1! This allows us to reduce our equation down to:
P(Y) = (1/2)P(G) + 1/2 !
From here, we can easily solve for the proportion of people who own a gun:
P(G) = 2*P(Y) - 1. In other words, with our given survey design, we need only count the number of "yes" responses, double the count, divide that result by the total number of responses, and then subtract 1, in order to get a good estimate for the actual proportion of our sample that possesses a gun! And the beauty of it is that the survey design also makes gun ownership completely anonymous since any individual "yes" respondent can just claim their coin landed on tails!
The point is we have ways of ensuring the trustworthiness of our surveys when it comes to questions about potentially incriminating topics. Assuming "shadow ownership" just lets you ignore the facts.
Also, without actual base rates relative to population sizes, saying "almost all murders" is meaningless.
Someday we might advance to that, but today we still struggle to get survey writers to even word the question properly. The methodology you describe is far and away not at all how surveys are done. I was actually unsure if you were performing elaborate satire until the end there.
Plus I don't know if you could get the respondents to understand and trust the coin flip methodology correctly. You are still going to have social desirability bias and just straight up "don't ever admit to doing illegal things" bias.
Scott amended his statement to include more rightward voices, but it seems to me that this entire post is directed at folks who aren't likely to click a link to the washington examiner. Despite the obvious quality of your writing, there's no way you can reach people in a silo built specifically to exclude you. Scott can, and it's worth him doing the work himself and showing it in public.
You make a good case, but I am left with the nagging feeling that you are affected by retrospective bias. It's not like in mid-March people said, "Pandemic! Argh! Kill! Kill!" At the time we all kind of thought we were talking about two weeks to flatten the curve. As weeks turned into months with no end in sight, lots more marginal behavior started, including the BLM riots themselves.
At least, I'd *like* to believe the BLM riots and both the overreaction and the underreaction to them were all ultimately caused by cabin fever, despair, and hopelessness, mixed with a certain amount of opportunism from some quarters.
I'm arguing from a sociohistorical point of view. I'm not going to say that evildoers get a pass because they were puppeted by the pandemic.
I don't think things were so different from the Ferguson and Baltimore events five years earlier that they need a separate explanation. The protests were bigger and more nationwide, but the Floyd killing had been caught on pretty graphic video, plus the US was five years further into the wokeness era. I won't deny that pandemic cabin fever might have been a contributor, but I'm not sure it was more of a contributor than those other factors.
The second one. Probably there were some murders during the protests themselves (eg Kyle Rittenhouse), but that wouldn't explain why the rates stay elevated so long.
This comment is such an anti-contribution. You've brought nothing on the topic of was-it-murder save for a naked agreement, but you *have* added an irrelevant attack on the people he killed by labelling them thugs. It's an injection of no substance and all spin, and it does nothing but lower the quality of discourse.
And to be clear, I am also of the belief that KR acted in self-defense. I just think your comment really sucks.
Come on folks. The Rittenhouse incident on its own wouldn't create a statistically noticeable blip at all.
What Scott's obviously gesturing at by shorthand is the idea that the breakdown of civil order created by the protests themselves could have conceivably created a very short-term spike in Rittenhouse-type situations where the very atmosphere of disintegration led to violence of some kind.
But that wouldn't explain a sustained spike that persisted beyond the point where people like Rittenhouse felt like they needed to step into the breach. AFAICT, that's all Scott was saying.
Right. There clearly was a spike of vandalism, robbery, arson, and assault during several days of riots, but after the riot was over, the murder rate seems to have remained a lot higher.
This feels obtuse to me; "murder" is both a legal term with a particular meaning and a common-use term with a much looser one. Referring to homicide that would not legally be murder as "murder" is common as dirt, and to me it seems pretty clear that whether or not these instances of homicide were legally murder is not pertinent to what Scott is conveying, so this is clearly the latter usage.
If you believe that Rittenhouse acted in legitimate self defense, then you believe he was in very real danger of being murdered, which makes his situation an example of the kind of thing that if common would lead to an increase in the murder rate.
I'm someone who has had a very low estimation of the MSM for most of my life, but I still found myself genuinely surprised by how unashamedly mendacious the MSM's reporting around Rittenhouse was. To me, it really felt like a new low for them. So it's easy for me to see how people who maintained a low level of engagement with the case and who are *somewhat* skeptical of the MSM were still insufficiently skeptical.
True, and yet many, many people on the Left believed that he had killed two black people. And were actually shocked to find out that was not true, and that they, and everybody in their ingroup, were *certain* of basic facts that were completely wrong.
One of my blackpill moments was reading the New York Times comment section for an article on the Rittenhouse situation. Top to bottom these NYT reader fools were completely brainwashed about it. Made me realize there is no communicating with these idiots.
Right. The Establishment demanded that cops hassle blacks less, so cops hassled blacks less.
Therefore, more characters (often with warrants out for their arrest) felt comfortable going out carrying their illegal handguns in their cars or waistbands, so more shootings ensued when they got angry at somebody.
The same thing happened in the 1960s and in the first Black Lives Matter era after Ferguson. It shouldn't have been a surprise when it happened a third time.
Yeah black people don't like to be hassled by cops (of course), and don't like to be shot (of course). Neither does anyone else. There are trade offs in life.
One major difference is that it happened in Minneapolis. Winters are bad here, and *every* May there’s a sort of collective city-wide release of pent up energy and rush back to large social events, which is usually channeled into festivals, concerts, patios, etc. Not to downplay George Floyd’s horrific murder, but I strongly suspect that Minneapolitans would riot any year where they’re told not to leave their house when the weather gets nice. Note how things didn’t flare up again (much) after Daunte Wright.
For what it’s worth, there are two other reasons the city is probably relevant here:
1. An existing, strong, well organized Black Liberation and anti-policing movement (see: Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, MPD150).
2. The MPD is particularly not well liked. 80% of officers do not live in the city they police, they have a long history of being an outlier in excessive force and brutality, and at the time their self-elected union president was openly a white nationalist. A large number of residents here (of all races) see them as an occupying force, not as allies for community safety.
The point here is that I wouldn’t expect to see a pandemic-related uptick in murders until mid-may (as Scott pointed out, never a lot of winter murders in MN), and since the MPD was already seen as an organization that had contempt for the city it policed, the pull-back in policing was mostly interpreted as a “well, see how you like your city without us” statement.
Which mostly worked, by the way. (Anti-policing mostly lost in the 2021 city elections.) But while I agree that there is a correlation between police pull-back and elevated murder rates, the pandemic, at least in MPLS, seems like SUCH a confounder that I think it’s far from certain to infer causation.
That's not in contradiction with them being mostly caused by the BLM riots. Causes are not zero sum. If A causes B causes C, then I think it's fine to say both that A is the main cause of C and that B is the main cause of C.
Personally I think that the link is from {cabin fever/despair/hopelessness/whatever} => {increased protest severity}, which means the protests can still be the proximal cause of the homicide spike
2. what do you mean by "general" and "domestic" homicide? what does that have to do with my comment?
3. I'm not sure what you mean. I'm saying that the BLM protests were bigger and more severe, which lead to increased effects. Unless you are claiming that the effects of Ferguson were smaller than the effects of the 2020 protests I don't really understand what you're saying
I’m thinking of the question, “if Covid hadn’t happened, would any of the rest of it?” I think the answer is no, but other countries’ stories don’t resolve that one way or the other.
>As weeks turned into months with no end in sight, lots more marginal behavior started, including the BLM riots themselves.
This theory sounds plausible, but if this was the mechanism behind the murder spike, you would expect to observe similar effects in other countries whose lockdowns dragged on and on after an initial two-week implementation. As Scott points out, the US's murder spike is a statistical outlier: there was no murder spike observed in any other country at the same time, even though many of those countries also went through long lockdowns which were repeatedly extended past their original sunset date.
-- A large internal demographic group with already high levels of violence,
-- Whose communities' already low employment and economic activity were crushed and unlikely to recover/survive
-- A very clear and video-simple incident to incite national protests right when NOBODY HAD ANYTHING ELSE TO DO
But most important: Clear statements by politicians all over the country (mostly local City mayors/boards) that
-- violent protests were understandable and would not be stopped.
-- the special victim status of these groups meant that even emergency laws that shut down the country didn't apply to them, and
-- Since the politicians declared that the local police could not be trusted, law enforcement was essentially suspended in cities with large black populations.
1. The NYC shootings graph show that shootings were steadily going up during the month of May? I see the spike you mention in the caption but it seems to have actually started in mid-May rather than May 25.
2. The Minneapolis aggravated assaults graph counter your thesis? Assaults were rapidly increasing even before the protests started; they just continued their upward trend afterwards before coming down to current levels.
Re: New York, if you look at previous years, you'll see there was always a small increase in May, probably due to warming weather. I think the increase was on par with previous years until the protests started in late May.
Re: Minneapolis, I agree this is confusing. It could be something similar to NY but moreso (the pre-protests spike doesn't seem much larger than other random spikes like March 2020 or August 2015-2019), or it could be that the "start of protests" line is too late (maybe because there were smaller protests before the main protests started? it looks a bit late to be May 26). Otherwise I'm not sure why aggravated assaults would start going up in mid-May of all times.
It's not a temperature effect, it is a seasonal effect. If you look at annual homicides in Chicago, which are public record, there's a clearly strong seasonal effect.
Presumably C_B was referring to the fact that spring comes later in Minneapolis than much of the US, including Chicago, because it's colder in April/May.
Couldn't the influence of the pandemic be muted in the winter months when there are fewer murders and only appreciable when the hot weather makes people start muttering kill kill kill? A pandemic psychological pressure x climate interaction is consistent with these observations. It was, incidentally, unseasonably hot in Minneapolis that week and I've always attributed the protests themselves in no small part to the pandemic and the miserable weather.
Related question: The Chicago arrests graph doesn't show arrests going down until a little after the protests started, whereas the murder graphs generally show a spike immediately after (or even before, but we can assume that's an artifact of weekly rolling averages or whatever). How does that square if declining arrests are the cause of the murders?
Even more so than the aforementioned two charts, the Chicago aggravated assault graph is evidence against the thesis that it's simply about the protests. The rate didn't rise at all after the protests - it *stopped* its previous rise, and then fell after a few weeks!
I don't think you can handwave this data point away so easily. Maybe there was something different about Chicago's policing response or about their reporting, but if so it deserves a discussion.
Also since this is in the context of San Fransicko, the Intercept asserts there wasn't a BLM Protest effect here, and I'm curious to see whether that was the case or not. (Also because that *would* perhaps shed light on the effect of Chesa - maybe SF's underpolicing just began in January and stayed on course after the protests.)
I want to know how those rolling averages are calculated - if they're centered rather than trailing averages, it can make the graph look like effects start gradually one (window radius) before the cause. If they are proper training averages, though, then yes, that's pretty weird and is evidence against the conclusion.
Scott pointed this same thing out in another recent post and now that you've reminded me of it, it's definitely something I think is worth looking out for when interpreting these kinds of graphs.
It’s not that complicated dude. There’s always a seasonal uptick in summer. Does not explain the persistent 30% higher new plateau of crime and homicide that has persisted ever since.
Didn't realize that was the time of the regularly scheduled uptick, that explains it too. Thanks! Does make it harder to pin the start time of whatever the effect is to a specific time, if it starts close to a big natural move.
No it doesn’t make it hard. Compare to other years. The uptick in may in other years is predictably uniform. The uptick in may 2020 goes up way further. This isn’t difficult. Don’t be dense.
Is the spike timed according to the calendar, or the weather, or the school schedule? Is it always the same size and duration? These questions make it harder to judge than if the situation was "it's always flat except for this one effect." Not impossible. I agree there is an effect. I'm just *less* certain we have the exact timing and cause than if the baseline was flat and we got a jump.
Overall I don't believe "people just took a little bit to start murdering because of COVID", but "people started murdering because of COVID gradually around the same time as the usual May spike, and the riots were a coincidence" is *more* plausible than "people started murdering because of COVID exactly on the day of the riots, and the riots were a coincidence"
Go look at the data. Since late May 2020, the homicide and crime rates have followed the shape of seasonal fluctuations of previous years, but at appx 30% higher, at any given time during the year of what the typical rate would have been at that seasonal time in previous years. It has virtually nothing to do with Covid and everything to do with black crime and the lid that was previously being kept on it by policing, which was lifted partially due to BLM phony rhetoric.
I don’t consume a lot of right wing News but I do read the local newspaper. Mpls police were taking early retirement, going on disability or simply quitting in large numbers. Everyone in this area knows that the TC police are short staffed and trying to actively recruit. Those still on duty do feel unloved. It’s not just known by right wing media consumers but by everyone paying attention. Those people also know that the spike in murders is largely black on black violence.
It’s more complicated than what you are presenting here though. The scale of the riots was probably increased by the COVID lockdown. A lot of the young people that participated were available because things were locked down. The young were told they ran a less serious risk if they contracted Covid and they made up the majority of the civil unrest.
Then there was the timing of George Floyd’s death, right around Memorial Day. Weather is generally good at that time of year. If the death had occurred in February the reaction would have been less severe.
For a conspiracy theory view: Trump supported both the Minneapolis city newspaper and also one in Seattle that were losing money. What if it was time to have a protest because people wanted a reason to party? And everyone needed black people to stand up for themselves and say, hire me. Increase online shopping by getting rid of local stores, releasing owners from failing businesses and getting insurance money. I notice a lack of movie stars and more normal black people in advertising and in movies. Minneapolis was the perfect place to shed light on this issue because it's doesn't have a reputation for black criminals. If this had happened in the south, we might attribute it to a "southern" problem.
Older people are leaving their jobs, replaced by young people willing to use technology. I wonder how many policemen retired from lack of respect. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming in fast.
It’s not crazy to think that powerful people use the masses to advance their agenda. Once you accept that, it’s easy to fall into scapegoat mode. Those damn libs! Those idiot right wingers! If you want to know what’s really going on have to get past that. It’s not easy for anyone - I’d posit as we are often unaware of the bedrock assumptions that influence our perceptions.
After the BLM protests, Baltimore residents suddenly found that their city had become the murder capital of the world, and I never really heard anyone there question the connection.
The last ~750,000 residents of St. Louis know that the Lou is the most violent place in the US now. It just doen't get counted because its population has dropped down around #35-40 largest metropolitan areas.
Why does an observation have to be right wing? Maybe all those mealy mouthed “it’s complicated” articles prove that the so called mainstream is in fact afraid to deal in reality. So much of reality seems to increasingly be relegated, by our self-appointed explainers, to this fantasy right-wing land. Meanwhile those supposedly in the mainstream know don’t seem to understand the depth of the groupthink they’re swimming in.
Agreed, especially given the wide range of interpretations for the knock-on effects of the protests. It'd be perfectly easy for a liberal to recognize the stats and attribute it to Scott's second suggestion, that cops just got hurt feelings and didn't like being protested so they counter-protested by not doing their jobs.
I personally protested in 2020 with accountability and racial targeting in mind, knowing full well that to some extent policing does reduce crime. I was appalled at how many police showed up at the peaceful protests instead of doing their normal jobs, and figured crime might increase in the neighborhoods they were being called away from as a result. The idea going around then was that the police were purposely escalating, in terms of tactics and numbers, in order to provoke riots and make the protests look violent. No comment on whether that's true or makes any sense, just saying there are plenty of ways to spin the May crime spike instead of just pretending the numbers don't exist.
It was not my interpretation that jake was, himself, claiming this. More so saying that left-oriented news could recognize ground reality (post BLM murders spiking) but still keep their politicized position by unfalsifiably attributing it to bad cops rather than the predictable consequence of 'reform' demands.
What is done instead - sticking their heads firming in the sand - just makes them appear foolish.
Bob Kroll, the long standing head of the police union in the twin cities, said as much. He recently retired, but was a magnet for controvery and egging the local cops on to unprofesional and illegal conduct (e.g., coordinating bounties for particularly disfavored activities which is illegal in his jurisdiction, approriating police funds (not union funds) to extend Killology training after the mayor issued an executive order to end that training, the list goes on).
Remember, a work slowdown is just as much of a labor action as a strike.
Okay, and defund the police *NECESSARILY* wanted less policing, and they got it. You cannot complain about the consequences of something that you were advocating for.
> cops just got hurt feelings and didn't like being protested so they counter-protested by not doing their jobs
Even supposing this was exactly what happened, so what?
Suppose Darrell Issa or somebody organizes the Defund the Fruit Pickers protest. The whole thing is massive groups of people marching to complain about fruit pickers' rampant immigration violations, plus statistically trivial incidents of individual fruit pickers who turn out to be actually guilty of heinous crimes.
As a result, all the fruit pickers in California say, fuck this noise. I guess they don't want us to work anymore, fine. Let's see them put there mouth where their money is -- how are they gonna like it when the price of fruit triples?
Would you regard that reaction as damning of the fruit pickers? And if not, why so with regard to the cops?
Fruit pickers aren't entrusted and given special deference in their use of violence and don't have specific carveouts in their ability to be held accountable.
So slightly different.
It's the spiderman argument. Police have greater power so they have greater responsibility.
People go into the streets carrying signs saying, "Stop what you're doing. Just don't do it. Let's defund you to make sure you can't even try to do what you're nominally supposed to."
Maybe the thing you were doing is trivial and silly. Maybe it was profound and serious. What difference does that make?
We have structured society around the fiction that police are doing a particuarly deadly job and doing it well enough to enjoy specific legal immunities and generalized social deference (including being told what good boys and girls they are on a regular basis). They, like lawyers, soldiers, and doctors are supposed to be mature enough to operate under heady, complex philosophical frameworks like "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Words Will Never Hurt Me".
Turns out, we've inadvertantly set up a system that attracts people who want to have legal immunity for kicking low-class folks in the teeth, and people who can't function like an adult if they don't get repeated, universal fawning.
If you're a lawyer, clients come to you asking to deal with whatever. They may have very unrealistic expectations of what you'll be able to do, and yell at you a lot for failing to do it. This indeed comes with the territory and you need to be able to stand there and take it. But if they tell you to get lost because they don't want to litigate the issue anymore, then you can 100% get lost and stop working for them.
If you're a cop, it's often the case that none of the people you're interacting with has specifically asked you to intervene in their affairs, and often they're positively aiming to thwart your involvement. The equivalent of the client's asking you to work for them is a general background sense that the community as a whole wants you to prevent/solve crimes. If as a cop you get the sense that a particular community is telling you to get lost, we don't want this service from you anymore, why is it irrational to take them at their word?
If you expect cops to conduct their affairs with the same level of professionalism as doctors and lawyers you are going to need a totally different compensation structure and training structure where you replace most of the current cops with people who are from the upper echelons of their cohort instead of middle echelons.
Cops absolutely do have some special permissions and responsibilities, but we need to accept and understand a lot of slop in how that gets executed given how we staff that role.
Only take people from the top 20% of their classes to be cops and you would certainly get better policing. It would also cost twice as much or more.
This shows a fatal injury rate of 13.4 per 100,000. National average is 3.4. There are deadlier occupations, logging tops the list at 132.1.
But probably none of those logging deaths are from homicide, and can't be prevented by fighting off an attacker.
Also keep in mind that fatal shootings are a subset of all shootings. If channels like Active Self Protection are even somewhat representative, then a small amount of gunfights with police end with police fatalities. Even with the little training police typically get, they're still far better in gunfights than the people that try to kill them.
If by "having hurt feelings" you mean "dozens of police being killed due to Democrat rhetoric" then it seems to be a pretty reasonable response.
Also, wasn't the whole point of the rioting to stop the police from doing their jobs? "Don't do your jobs, you pigs! You should be abolished!" .... "but actually you should keep doing your job so this doesn't become Mad Max, I just want to whine and complain and riot for a while." You seem more like the child here, biting the hand that feeds you and then coming back and begging for daddy to come back and save you.
Right. It seems to me the protestors' whole theory was, let's create an extremity of hurt feelings -- perhaps "crushing shame" would be closer to it -- as our desired vector for producing less doing of policemen's jobs.
They can't now be heard to complain if it turns out their theory worked.
I admittedly have never understood the mindset of the protestor, but I am pretty sure their goal was not "let's make the police feel bad." Among other things, if killing people doesn't make the police feel bad, you being demonstrably mad about it certainly won't.
Sigh. 19 people total appear to have been killed during BLM protests. You're telling me all of them were police? And even then that wouldn't be dozens.
The point of rioting and protests generally seems to be letting everyone get their feelings out. I don't think much of that, personally. That said, I think the protests were far more on the "stop killing people" side of things than on the "stop policing" side of things.
I in fact don't live in the US, and work in the criminal justice system. I deal with police far more regularly than you do.
There is an overwhelming tone amongst many police officers of sulking that people don't tell them how wonderful they are for saving society from the barbarians. Leaving aside the questionableness of whether they do save society from the barbarians, wanting people to worship you for doing your job is...not the sign of someone mentally well. You see it a lot with nurses, too, oddly. Not sure why.
I am 100% prepared to believe that no one sane would want to do policing as it is currently practiced in society. It's lots of getting second guessed outdoors in bad weather with frustrating people and often doesn't pay that well.
Remember Scott's writeup long ago where he pointed out that after Medicare stopped paying hospitals for treating old people who were injured falling out of bed, hospitals quickly started taking precautions to stop old people from falling out of bed? Doctors and hospitals are also given a high-status place in our society, entrusted with vital things, and yet, incentives mattered for them. Similarly, consider defensive medicine--doctors absolutely do change their behavior to avoid lawsuits, even when it harms their patients.
This is what we should expect everywhere--if the incentives facing you are that you can either do a good job and get screwed over, or a lousy job and get rewarded, most people are going to do a lousy job. The solution to this is rarely to demand that everyone stop responding to incentives and instead be a selfless martyr. Instead, it's to change the damned incentives.
There is a difference between following incentives and being petulant because your feelings have been hurt. The analogy here seems much closer to the doctors deciding to no longer admit old people, rather than to stopping them from falling out of bed. While making public statements about how people need to appreciate all they do for elder care.
I would concur that changing the incentives would help. At the same time, I think a core problem is that a lot of police officers are, bluntly, bad people. Because jobs where you get to exercise power attract people who want to do that. There is a serious problem in modern policing, where it IS viewed as "thin blue line against the barbarians" and "enforcement of the rules of society against those who would tear it down" and I don't think it's a healthy attitude.
I mean, you can if only because the police have not been defunded. They are, instead, still getting paid.
I am 100% fine if officers want to quit and explain why they did so. I am not fine if officers want to keep drawing a salary but not do their jobs because their feelings are hurt.
>I personally protested in 2020 with accountability and racial targeting in mind,
There's little evidence of racial targetting once you control for crime rates, and no evidence of disproportionately being victims of police force. Blacks make up a smaller % of people killed by police than people who kill police (a good proxy for violence against police generally and resistance to arrest).
>It'd be perfectly easy for a liberal to recognize the stats and attribute it to Scott's second suggestion
No, it contradicts a central liberal narrative - police don't reduce crime. Even if its the police throwing a tantrum, their absence shouldn't be reducing crime.
>I was appalled at how many police showed up at the peaceful protests instead of doing their normal jobs
Are police to know in advance which peaceful protests turn violent?
I think its more appalling to attend these protests knowing the tremendous harm they have been doing in other cases. None of BLM's gripes are worth the death and destruction the protests caued.
There is a LOT of evidence that not many people actually care about police murdering black people, and the sentence "None of BLM's gripes are worth the death and destruction the protests caused" could arguably be added to the pile.
Likewise, your comment can and should be added to the pile of "not many people actually care about black people murdering black people."
It seems like you only believe black lives matter when it's the police killing them. If you were to think black lives matter in both cases, then you'd recognize that the section you quoted isn't just true, but obviously true.
I'm curious how you justify that. Over 25 murders by rioters alone, plus thousands more dead from the still-elevated murder rate, vs. one black guy allegedly killed by the police.
Do you just weigh Floyd's life 25x more than other people's lives? How many people should we be willing to kill to have saved his life? 50? 500? Really, I'd like to know the number.
Because we attribute responsibility to people for the things they willingly do. This is known to be metaphysically dubious but is quite central to how we construct the concept of agency
Again, many of the murders were directly committed by those protesting police violence.
And the reason the general increase in murder rate is relevant is because when something like this inevitably happens again in the future, we will once again face similar options: 1. go riot, loot, kill people, and advocate for abolishing the police, knowing full well that this will cause many more deaths than it will save, or 2. not do those things, and instead take some other action to solve this problem that doesn't cause hundreds/thousands more to die.
What is the evidence police specially murder black people? Police certainly do kill some people, and the people killed are disproportionately black compared to everyone. But violent criminals are also disproportionately black compared to everyone. Such that the police rate of violence against blacks is almost identical to what you would expect if no one knew what anyone's races were.
I cannot remember the exact figures, but when I did a big analysis of stop rates during summer 2020 with no really prior expectation about how much racism to expect in police violence, I think I found that police in Minneapolis and Chicago were actually every so slightly MORE likely to kill white people during stops ~3%.
People love to throw around "police murder blacks all the time", even in reference specifically to the Minneapolis PD. In a situation where the MPD was killing ~1 person a year, only a small portion of those killings were found to be murders, and most of the victims of police killings were non-black in a city where the crime and especially violent crime is hugely black.
>There is a LOT of evidence that not many people actually care about police murdering black people
It's an extremely rare thing - much MUCH rarer than white people being murdered by black people. And people care about that much much less than they do black people being murdered by the police.
I guess I'll reply here instead of writing a similar OP comment. Scott writes well on many topics, but CW-type stuff is a particular guilty pleasure of mine, for this reason. It's just fun to watch him scrap-by-proxy with The Establishment and demonstrate at least some plausible level of Obvious Nonsense going on. Sometimes it's even convincing enough to reverse my priors, since I keep finding a lot of my old lefty beliefs were built on shaky assumptions rather than explicit reasoning; even half-assed analysis collapses the house of implication cards.
But ultimately it's sorta extra sad too, cause personal edification comes at the cost of increased social friction with my friends, family, coworkers, etc. Nearly all of them are MSM-pilled, or much further left than that. No matter how carefully I try to make an empirical case for something Politically or Ideologically Inconvenient, it will almost always get dismissed as "right-wing propaganda" or "conservative talking points". If one is determined to believe in social reality, what does it matter ceding actual reality to the Reality-Based Community? They already claimed that ground anyway! So in that regard, this is definitely a "right wing" observation, and Scott would be a dead letter reference if I cared enough to try linking him.
Which is ironic, cause I first got exposed to SSC via being linked to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by same friendgroup. "This proves progressivism is factually correct!", was the vibe back then. Those innocent days when facts didn't care about your feelings.
The trick is to present them with an unassailable syllogism, a piece of logic so simple that no human being could possibly misunderstand it. If they hear this syllogism and understand the premises and structure of the argument and still don't change their mind, then you have the right to treat them like an animal, because by forsaking their rationality they have abandoned the right to be treated like a human.
I'm not sure unassailable syllogisms would be effective on people whose idea of infallible logic is, say, "[culture war] women are women!", "Love is love!", "My body, my choice!", and...so on. Nevermind all the logic-based arguments for socialism which I won't even try to simplify into slogans. Trying to poke holes in their own claims gets met with the same sort of hostility, the accusations of Intentionally Not Getting It or Being A Shill, as advancing any of my own. I guess that's what motte-and-Bailey's Irish Cream (my favourite rational cocktail) feels like in real life.
Could be less charitable and say that step 2 of "understanding the premises and structure of the argument" isn't possible, since all such discussion gets headed off at the pass in step 1, which is You're Not Allowed To Discuss My Sacred Cows (Speech Is Violence). This is based on the principle of solidarity, as far as I can tell; the siege-bunker mentality of those who sincerely believe civilization always hangs by a thread of Damocles and it's always those perfidious right-wing nutjobs filing away at the string. So dissent in the ranks is not to be tolerated by the tolerant.
...which I guess is also my response to your latter assertion, I feel it'd be uncharitable. Like, yes, maybe my friends etc. are all p(rogressive)-zombies. But they're also my friends, and to the extent that's a valuable non-fungible social resource due to living in Bluetopia, I prefer to just not have those sorts of arguments as much as possible. If we *waves at Scott's readership* claim to believe in evaluating others' actions based on steelmanning their sincerely held beliefs about the world, which are very different from our own, then I think it'd be really disingenuous to not try and live up to that nobly charitable ideal in everyday life.
I'll proffer the opinion that planning to treat anyone like an animal is counterproductive to one's own happiness in the long run. I have no unassailable logic to support my opinion, but 50 years of life experience leads me to that conclusion.
No – they haven't abandoned any 'rights'. You should/probably-need to _workaround_ their 'sacred beliefs', and that's sad and sucks, but it's not even effective, so even _less_ moral than _were_ it effective, to treat people "like an animal".
I feel like 'it's complicated' is almost always the start of the correct answer for questions of this type, and answers that take the form of single sentences pointing at singular causes are almost always appealing but wrong.
Sure, but the answer that might be correct still has an advantage over the answer that's almost certainly wrong, in my book.
More to the point: I think it's better to cultivate a point of view that acknowledges complexity and tries to grapple with it, over a point of view that latches onto intuitively-appealing singular causes and ignores everything else. Even if you don't come to the perfectly correct balance of different causal factors in the former case, you are more likely to at least discover, acknowledge, talk about and come to understand the *actual* causal factor at play, than if you just latch onto the one thing that sounds good and laugh off everything else.
Because "reality" is just a giant assortment of events, whereas an observation is somebody's interpretation of some subset of those events, i.e. a narrative. I guess it's possible in principle to construct narratives that fall exactly in between of the left-right spectrum, but that is highly unlikely to happen by chance, and few people strive to do so purposefully (Wikipedia may have had once attempted something like it, but has long since abandoned those ambitions).
I think they were more _lamenting_ that ideas are 'labeled' as "right wing" instead of just being 'true' or 'false' (or some kind of complicated, and hopefully more accurate, somewhat-true and somewhat-false).
But surely after all this time people here should understand that such notions are naive? It's like, on one hand, conflict vs mistake and high vs low decoupling have been done to death, but on the other, still acting as if all those blinkered fanatics will finally see the light after being show one more spike on one more graph? Or maybe, some minuscule fraction of fanatic-adjacents is good enough? Or the level of cynicism that comes with truly accepting the black pill is too unbearable?
I've learned that a LOT (maybe all) of people _need_ to 'vent'.
Yes, it's naive. But also, yes, it does suck; is very sad.
I remember, at the beginning of the pandemic, a kind of camaraderie among everyone suffering under the lockdowns. And I dreaded what eventually happened – everything becoming politically partisan, i.e. the opening of _yet another_ fucking front in the damned interminable Culture War.
But it really does seem like the only effective option for engaging with one's political enemies, short of mass murder/torture/imprisonment, is slowly, patiently changing their minds.
But people shouldn't be "truly accepting the black pill" _because_ it's 'maximally cynical'. We should aim to be _accurately_ cynical! :)
I agree that the BLM protests and follow-on effects are the most parsimonious explanation. That said:
> rising gun sales (but guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black)
There were many articles indicating that gun sales spiked particularly for blacks. I have not done a deep dive, but just to suggest I'm not talking out of my ass:
Yep. Guns for private citizens are sort of like nukes for sovereign states, in the sense that you buy them mostly in the sincere hope that you'll never need to use them. Therefore the buying patterns are largely unrelated to the emergence of a new use case, and very much related to anticipated changes in the regulatory scheme.
Very accurate, I've got a number of guns bought on semi impulse for exactly that reason, a new Dem in office bumps the perceived need to prioritize the purchase.
In addition to these factors, I'll hypothesize that gun sales likely benefited from the same factors that helped sales of some other categories of goods during 2020.
Specifically, a combination of stimulus checks and people redirecting some of the disposable income that they would have otherwise spent on travel and in-person services.
Annother voice that says this is 100% in line with my experience as a "gun person" with a large number of armed liberal friends who do the exact same thing. "I voted for Biden, but I purchased my new Deserttech before I did," was a joke one made to me, because he correctly identified that this rifle would go from "Expensive precision tool" price to "unavailable at any price."
Again though, you can easily look at the numbers, guns used in crime are typically not bought legally, and it takes many years for guns to filter down to the black market.
Do you have any reason other than your own prejudice that "increased desire to do crimes" was a larger contributor than increased interest in shooting sports (of which sharpshooting is a minor contribution)? Maybe watch/read some David Yamane.
>Time to crime on the average gun recovered from a crime scene is something like 7-9 years, as most crime guns aren't legally purchased.
To be pedantic, this is the time to the last-use-in-a-crime, before Police recover the weapon and try to trace its history.
The reports are published annually, I think by the FBI. And most years, the reports say that most guns recovered by Police and traced were purchased in the same State, with an average time-of-purchase between 7 and 9 years prior to the Police trying to trace the purchase.
There are other reasons to deduce that gun sales don't directly affect the rates of guns used in crimes like homicide: generally, homicide numbers in the United States have gone down, then up, with no correlation to annual rates of guns manufactured and purchased.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/4/black-gun-ownership-fuels-record-number-firearms-p/ says that white gun buying increased 51% over the same period, so there's not a lot of difference in percent change. But since whites bought much more guns to begin with, a 51% increase in white buying is probably much larger in absolute terms than a 58% increase in black buying, so overall I think the ratio of white:black gun owners went up rather than down.
(that is, if 30% of whites and 3% of blacks bought guns the year before, then a 51% increase in whites means ~45%, and a 58% increase in blacks means 4.5%, so an extra 15% of whites and 1.5% of blacks have guns)
Not sure this is exactly the right way to look at things but I think the basic idea is pretty sound and this makes it hard for gun purchases to be the driving factor.
Minor correction, if both increased by the same amount, that would mean the *ratio* of white:black gun owners stayed the same (30%:3% = 45%:4.5% = 10:1). And, though it'd be very slight, if white increased by 51% and black by 58%, that means the ratio did go down.
Edit, hold on, messed it up... You are right, sorry, thought you were doing something else, and trying to multitask meant I failed at two things simultaneously. Carry on :)
So Scott’s wording was “white gun buying increased”. That’s a second derivative, not a first derivative (first derivative would be “white gun ownership increased”), so taking the statements at face value, one would expect that the ratio would increase, not decrease. We would need specific numbers to be sure, but if white people buy a lot more guns than black people to start, Scott’s statement is likely correct.
I'm still pretty sure it's all multiplication, and the ratio won't change. If every 10 white guns bought is 1 black gun bought, then the absolute numbers will change, but at any given time the _ratio of absolute numbers_ is 10:1. If they each increase by 50%, then it's 15 to every 1.5, which is still going to result in a 10:1 (e.g., if we had 100:10, at t=10, then the increase would result in 115:11.5 at t=11, which is still 10:1*). If one increases by 51% and one by 58%, then we get 115.1:11.58 which is very slightly less than 10:1.**
* Yes, you can't buy half a gun, so if it was 115:11, that's more, and if it was 115:12, that's less. I imagine in the real world the numbers are larger, and this is less of an issue.
** All of this is going off his parenthetical. I don't know the actual numbers, but _in that explanation_, the ratio would not actually increase. So, if that's an explanation as to why he thinks the ratio would increase, he should not think the ratio increased. (personally, I would've said "stayed about the same" since it's a minor difference either way, but I pointed it out just because he specified a direction, and I'm pretty sure it's the wrong direction.)
You’re right. I misread Scott’s statement and didn’t carefully read what you were saying.
The *ratio* would go down, as you’ve said, but absolute numbers would still swing in favor of whites buying more guns.
Also, the second derivative bit was nonsense. It probably isn’t worth going into the misreading of this argument that made me think saying that was a good idea.
A lot of black gun ownership is illegal too and hence out of the statistics, so this entire attempt to get an idea of the on-the-ground reality using official numbers is an abortive maneuver
My primary criticism of the claim that rising gun sales explain the increase in homicides differs from Scott's. Specifically, longer-term trends don't indicate an annual rise in U.S. gun sales should be expected to lead to an annual rise in the U.S. homicide rate.
I have not graphed a full comparison versus annual U.S. murder rate, but quick eyeballing doesn't indicate any obvious correlation over time between U.S. gun sales and U.S. murder rate. Specifically, there's a broad upward trend in U.S. gun sales** during the post-1990 period when U.S. murder rates declined by ~50%. U.S gun sales in 1990 totaled ~4.4 million. By 2019, U.S. gun sales had increased ~140% to a total of 10.7 million.
Here's one other reason not to be surprised that annual U.S. gun sales fail to predict year-over-year change in U.S. murder rate. There are an estimated ~390 million firearms in civilian hands in the U.S. With that context, does it sound like a big difference whether 10 million, 15 million, or 20 million are sold in a given year?
Note: I am not making any claim about comparisons between countries of gun sales/availability and a country's murder rate (and/or gun violence rate). I'm speaking with respect to U.S. trend data.
* To be precise, 3 metrics that create a reasonable proxy for gun sales: firearms manufactured in the U.S., firearms exports, and firearms imports. The total excludes firearms produced for the military but includes those purchased by domestic law enforcement agencies.
** I'm using firearms manufactured plus imports less exports as a proxy figure for gun sales
I don't have time to find a link, but first time gun buyers have been an accelerating percent of all purchases, and the second derivative increased after Minneapolis started burning. FWIW, these first time guy buyers are also disproportionalty liberal, young, BIPOC and queer compared to the repeat gun buyers and the population as a whole nationwide.
"Higher gun sales" doesn't explain a murder spike any more than "higher alcohol consumption" explains a drunk-driving spike. Even assuming that in 2020 a bunch of people went out, bought new guns, and promptly murdered other people with those guns, the question is WHY they did so.
The first sentence sufficiently explains the phenomena and the rest is quibbling over statistical margins if not completely irrelevant because it obfuscates the causal chain.
"Although the George Floyd protests in May 2020 were the largest round of Black Lives Matters protests, there had been several previous rounds. Most notable were the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August 2014, and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore in April 2015."
I got curious about the Baltimore/Freddie Gray numbers a while back and did a writeup.
For Baltimore there is NO DOUBT when the spike began. The cause is pretty obvious, too, though statistics can't tell us that.
There’s another possibility for the mechanism that you don’t mention. I know there’s been some academic literature on the idea that the community loses trust in police and places fewer calls to 9-11. I don’t know if this has good evidence for it or not.
Good point, the difference between a homicide and an assault is often the speed and quality of medical treatment. That's a simple variable that could influence this a lot.
And medical facilities were definitely overwhelmed during much of the pandemic.
You can also imagine that at any given time, there's a stable equilibrium in a community between police, non-criminals, and criminals, and that the mass protests shifted the equilibrium in majority-black communities in the direction of criminals--fewer non-criminals willing to talk to the police, criminals walking a bit taller, police walking a bit smaller, etc.
"A priori there’s no reason to expect the pandemic to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group."
Really? There have been tons of articles about how the pandemic disproportionately affected black people. Yes, this comes from a media environment which is biased in many ways as you point out, but this claim seems quite plausible to me given that crises like this tend to have far worse effects on the economically underprivileged (as well as the possibility that there is sufficiently less trust in the medical system among African-Americans to have an effect as well).
Right, there also might be a Vitamin D effect, and/or some genetic difference in race susceptibility to COVID as with other diseases. Black people are generally less healthy than other races of people in the US, lower life expectancy, and so on. And yes, they trust the medical system less. COVID actually reduced economic inequality I think, but it's true that it's better to be rich during COVID than poor during COVID (that's always true).
Scott did say "a priori" though. He maybe should have said "a priori, controlling for race differences in average health and network effects" or something. Anyway, it's clear BLM would have more of a disparate racial impact than COVID, since BLM was explicitly race-focused.
Although the pandemic hit black people hard, I don't think that causes them to commit or be victims of murders more? I think the claim was always that cabin fever from lockdowns was responsible for the murders, and black people were no more locked down than anyone else.
(except insofar as black people got hit harder by the pandemic, maybe black areas would have stricter lockdown rules. But black people had the same number of cases but more deaths because of preexisting health problems. My guess is most lockdown rules were based on case rate. If I'm wrong, I think it's too small of an effect to explain these data. )
Given that black people in the US are quite a bit poorer on average, I bet that they disproportionately worked in service jobs which got disrupted by the pandemic - especially young men, who are presumably most of the murderers and murdered here. And in general economic crises hit people with less money harder.
(More speculatively, maybe poorer people have homes they're less happy staying in, or worse video games, or something.)
That's why I tried to include other points like the timing, the cross-national data, and the data on previous rounds of protests to show that this was more likely a protest effect than a pandemic effect.
As others have pointed out, the timing, although suspicious-looking, is not all that persuasive given that a substantial contributor to there being such huge protests in the first place was people being out of work and cooped up and getting sick of it - it was an obvious powderkeg even at the time.
The others are more persuasive, but I'm always a bit leery of comparing US murder trends to elsewhere given e.g. our enormous amount of guns.
But that would make the pandemic an aggravating factor, not a cause, as the Ferguson and Baltimore examples suggest there would have been large protests and an attendant spike in homicides even in the absence of the pandemic (ignoring, of course, that Floyd and Chauvin may not have encountered each other at all in that timeline).
I agree that the other points you brought up are pretty convincing. This doesn't change the fact that the point about no reasons to expect blacks being hit by cabin fever and lockdowns more is wrong, though.
There is no reason to make the situation appear less nuansed and more one sided than it is.
The evidence that recessions cause homicide increases is quite poor as I understand (e.g. homicide fell from 2007 - 2009). No particular reason to think that the economic aspect of the lockdown would cause increased homicides, especially since unemployment benefits were relatively generous in 2020.
I would also be suspicious about the likelihood that the people committing murders are those with regular jobs they lost instead of those who didn't have regular jobs and worked in the black market to begin with, e.g. males aged 16-24 years old. Murder rates based on age (https://www.statista.com/statistics/251884/murder-offenders-in-the-us-by-age/) suggest murderers skew young.
Those seem like reasonable points, but I understood the claim about the onset of the pandemic causing more crime to be about more than cabin fever: the pandemic (especially in the earlier stages) made people very scared and frustrated and unemployed, and this emotional effect was surely magnified among the less healthy and economically privileged, and those states of mind strike me as more likely to cause breakdowns in relationships and violent behavior. Not to mention that, even assuming that lockdown was imposed on all demographics equally, it had the worst effects on relationships among those who were living with more other people in less space, which again applies to the less privileged.
It surely is not surprising that black communities, where adults have many chronic health problems -- overweight, have diabetes, hypertension, smoke Newports ferchrissake, have patchy health care -- might be hit harder by any ambient illness. (*)
(Or that, per Carlos Mencia, "Hispanics" all basically live in one apartment near Pico-Union, so there's your "community transmission" right there.)
But the new point I want to bring up is this: Many here think of "cabin fever" as they might experience it: Unable to go to your normal job, and obeying the Rules and not going outside, bored with yourself and the few people you are stuck with.
The reality for poor people is different. Nobody has a job, so that has not changed. What changed was that NOBODY was going to their job. That removed the kind of accountability that the one or two people a person knew who visited Reality every day could provide.
But think about the deserted streets, the feeling of pause, the fact that normal employed people were not on the street, at the subway platform, business owner not keeping an eye on the block, etc. I think the cabin fever was more like all the adults had suddenly gone away. That basic check, on bad behavior -- community norms -- were suspended, not in effect, like alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules.
Also, there has been a major increase in drug trafficking. I'll get to that below.
Overall convincing article though I had matching priors previously. One nitpick:
Figure 1, weekly homicides per 100,000 city population appears to show local homicide minimums in March of 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, with local maximums in May of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. Is it possible that there is at the very least a simultaneous seasonal/weather effect? Based on that chart I can't help but think that if George Floyd died on March 1st attributed murders might have been somewhat lower, though there is likely some effect from the protests.
No other graphs in this article showed multi-year monthly murder rates so I have not referenced other data at this level of granularity yet.
I agree with almost everything in this post except for the media criticism parts. The conclusions seem very similar to this January New York Times article, for example:
My sense is that (1) most people believe the spike in murders was related to the Floyd protests, (2) most people believe that because the theory has been widely aired in the media, (3) the people and the media are almost certainly right about this.
What's much harder to say is exactly *how* the protests relate to the murder surge and what could we do about it?
Sorry, the article you link has as its conclusion in that section:
“All three [of the pandemic, more guns, and the BLM protests] played a role,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. “What’s difficult is to assign priority to one compared to the others.”
The thesis of my post here is that this is wrong, and actually the BLM protests were much more important than at least the pandemic (and guns too, although I didn't get into that much because I haven't heard too many people making that case), and that it's quite easy to determine that.
When I said in my San Fransicko review that I thought the BLM protests caused the homicide surge, lots of people said in the comments that they were surprised I believed that because they had heard in the media that it was a collection of factors especially including the pandemic. I think this is the story most ordinary people reading media articles would come away with, and I think it's false. I also linked several articles in this post saying things like that, and why I thought they were wrong.
I agree the media has been willing to say that the protests were one of many potential causes for the surge, but I think they've very much avoided saying they were the main cause, and I think they were the main cause and that this post provides evidence for it.
Scott, I don't think that separating out the contributions of guns is something you've attempted in this post. Obviously the protests were the "cause" of the spike in violence, but it's hard not to think that the abundance of guns (along with the abundance of free time for poor youth) was an inextricable factor feeding into the brutality of the protests, and whether the police are able to de-escalate successfully. I think if we wanted to truly estimate the contribution of guns we would have analyze a lot more data and make a lot more guesses, because I don't know how you could possibly get clear data on this - you would have to find a set of countries with different numbers of guns, but the same racial tensions and a similar trigger event, but I have no idea how you would do that.
Some others here have provided some pretty convincing evidence it might be unrelated. There are already a huge number of guns, so a 3% increase or whatever in the total guns seems like maybe not a big mover. Moreover gun ownership has increased substantially for a generation, yet mostly accompanied a structural decrease in crime. Moreover other local maxima in gun buying did not immediately impact gun crime rates.
I'm not saying that gun ownership was higher during the protests than other times, thus "causing" the violence. I'm saying that the overall high rate might be a precondition for protests leading to riots and looting, and the police not being able to get the situation under control.
It seems to me like all your evidence shows that increases in crime closely followed the death of George Floyd (and Freddie Gray), but not so much that it was because of the BLM protests specifically or that it was because of the factors you mention.
A lot happened in a short time right around Floyd's death, I think it's impossible to separate out. But the obvious explanation to me isn't "BLM protests cause police to do their job less therefore increasing the murder rate, libs owned forever", but more like "high profile examples of police misconduct cause people to trust the police less, call them less often when there is a shooting, feel less of a societal obligation to follow the rules, etc."
In particular I don't think you can so easily separate out these effects:
(1) A high profile police killing, in and of itself
(2) People protesting the killing
(3) Perceived heavy handed police response to the protests
(4) Proliferation of left-wing ideas about police
(5) People not trusting the police so much anymore
(6) Police acting differently as a result of all this
(7) General feeling of a breakdown in order
For your list of proposed mechanisms, recreated below:
> Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
> Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them.
> Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk.
> The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police.
I think the issue is either these didn't happen as much as advertised, or they've also happened at *other* times.
(1) For "less policing" - progressive DAs pulling back on police activiy has happened recently, but I don't think the increase in crime has correlated with when, or even where, they took office.
(2) For police going on an unofficial work slowdown, this has happened before without the dramatic effect, e.g. under de Blasio in New York
(3) It seemed to me like there was plenty of heavy-handed police action immediately following Floyd, including cops getting off. It also doesn't seem like increases in crime follow *convictions* or decrease following exonerations. At least that's not the obvious pattern in the data you show.
(4) Most places didn't "defund the police" as far as I understand (and if it did I'm guessing it wasn't immediate - budget decisions take time), but the increase in the murder rate seems to have happened all over the place.
This one brought back some menories. In mid-2020, a few of my friends seemed to be convinced that civilization was about to collapse. I live in an extremely safe, wealthy area, so I can't imagine what things would have been like for poor areas in the US.
The general feeling of a breakdown in order really does seem to be precipitated by the pandemic. How many of us have experienced utterly antisocial behavior in the past two years compared with before, in settings that have nothing at all to do with law enforcement?
Thanks ... to be clear this is saying something similar to what I said right? Efforts to reform police behavior don't cause an increase in crime unless they happen after a high-profile police killing?
It is about federal investigations and not popular protests, but directionally similar.
Also, I think the post clearly answers that last question, which was "police withdrawal." Of the four hypotheses that were put forth to explain police withdrawal, if you're looking for policy that could counteract them I'd say the following (respectively):
(1) Fund the police;
(2) Bust police unions and burn away the rot. I think this worked in Newark, if I recall right? Then we can start on the other public sector unions.
(3) Develop clear, inflexible, and bright-line standards for the use of police authority and force that don't depend on general reasonable-person standards, abolish qualified immunity, cap tort damages for a lot of violations and make the punishment firing of the responsible officer(s) rather than some tortuous consent decree or massive monetary liability in the department, mandate that departments carry significant malpractice insurance.
On (3) - I don't think this set of standards exists. Or if it does, it's easy to game. For example, once you lay out an exact set of standards for when foot pursuits are allowed, news will get around and criminals will know when they can just walk away.
You can probably make some improvements on the margin with policy, but ultimately, some kind of general reasonable-person standard is inevitable here. This is unfortunate, for all the reasons you'd expect, but I just don't think there's a better way.
Unquestionably, this is the hardest one. That's why I said "develop" those standards. Of course, you need to retain some flexibility. As it happens, one of the existing standards that I think is usually used appropriately and not normally abused is "exigent circumstances," which would cover a foot chase.
I think the desire for bright lines can be a fool's errand, like in sports. You want well trained professionals with some scope to exercise judgement, and a society and media that doesn't cherry pick bad outcomes as emblematic of the whole.
Absolutely have some data and experience driven guidelines, but the desire to expunge judgement from complex processes generally has pretty poor results. A checklist is great for a plane when the costs of failure are high, situations are consistent, and there is not much time pressure.
Policing isn't so much like that, and particularly the confrontations which are very quick, and quite disparate.
IDK I think at its core people just need to be more comfortable with the idea that police are literally there to be society's enforcers. I think there is a lot of collective/self delusion about that point. Absolutely some things that are currently handled by police are better handled by social work. But sometimes in society someone needs to use force to get compliance, and eggs will be broken occasionally.
The rate of police killings in the US compared to Germany almost exactly tracks how often the suspect is armed in the US versus Germany.
> My sense is that (1) most people believe the spike in murders was related to the Floyd protests
But the thesis here isn't that the spike "was related" to the Floyd protests, a vague assertion that virtually anybody could agree with. It's that the one was principally and proximately caused by the other, that the one followed from the other almost as night follows day.
Suppose we harden the claim to the point of saying that had there been only Covid and gun sales, but no anti-police protests and no breakdown of civil order, there would've been no rise in violent crime at all. Do you still agree that that's perfectly consistent with the general media narrative?
Don't declare certain people essential and others inessential. Don't arbitrarily decide which goods or services may be bought or sold, who is permitted to earn a living and who isn't. Don't declare a universal curfew.
Bad news - our legal system has *always* declared some people essential and others inessential, and arbitrarily decided which goods or services may be bought or sold, and who is permitted to earn a living and who isn’t. The pandemic changed those rules, but didn’t change the basic facts that we have zoning and immigration laws and health and safety regulations.
I think you and Moosetopher agree more than you think you do. If not, I'll stand in and say I agree with both of your points. I think you are right about historical injustices, and I think Moosetopher is right that explicitly saying out loud the quiet parts + changing the rules was a big inflection point that made it acute.
People following Covid restrictions is a disruption -- in my view, and perhaps yours, a tragic one -- of ordinary civil society.
But it's not a breakdown of civil order in the sense I meant that, precisely because people are still following the rules, even if the rules are bad and dumb and possibly even illegitimate at a higher constitutional level.
People smashing windows, setting fires, and throwing bricks at police officers is a breakdown of civil order. And while I suspect that wouldn't have happened without Covid, there are definitely alternate scenarios where Covid happens but that doesn't.
I am not really talking about “covid restrictions.” It was my experience that during the early months of the pandemic, even before restrictions were in place and certainly after, people did not feel free to carry on in their normal habits. Being from the New York area, I know a few people who became sick with Covid in March 2020; even without restrictions, no one I knew was keen on getting infected next. So most of us were glad to radically change our habits to avoid this disease in those first few months. I was living with vulnerable people and went without seeing friends for a whole year until I was vaccinated. I am far from the only one who was living in such an isolated way. But with restrictions or without, it was nevertheless a severe disruption to the civic order that engendered a lot of alienation and distrust that I don’t think has really been fixed. The acute cases of violent protest end and order is relatively quickly restored. But the pandemic in the US has been a disaster for trust in society, and trust is not gained back so quickly.
But I'm not sure it fully explains a punctual spike in violent crime that followed directly upon an episode of violent protest that had police pullback as its explicit, unambiguously desired aim.
Perhaps people taking to the streets to demand de-policing was a sort of derangement that could only have happened under the general civic unraveling that was Covid. But -- to be quite blunt about it -- my civic community was massively disrupted by Covid and *I* didn't get the slightest inclination to smash anybody's storefront or burn anybody's car.
This was a choice that certain people made, and they can and should own its predictable consequences.
> (2) most people believe that because the theory has been widely aired in the media, (3) the people and the media are almost certainly right about this.
Serendipitous to see you commenting here, saves me a link. I'll point at a middle position between this and Scott's, that there is an entire genre of articles in the line of "Black Americans' relationship to the police is complicated, and they're less likely than liberal Whites to support Defund efforts", and that "policing reduces crime" is a pretty standard claim to see defended there. You've written a few yourself, and while I think Scott is wrong to say they don't exist in non-right-wing media it's also not correct to say they're "widely aired" and you might be overestimating the reach.
The causal link between reducing policing and increased crime is a tricky one for plenty of reasons (and unwarranted confidence on the details was my issue with Scott's comment on the previous article), but the basic thesis is at least *available* to anyone who pursues the issue on its own terms
> Nearly a century before George Floyd’s fatal encounter with police at a Minneapolis intersection, a federal agency [redlined] the area a few blocks to the west...
The hilarious things about those Heloc maps people so love to cite, is that they were meant to predict how safe those areas were to lend in, and were in actual fact relatively good predictions (there is obviously some risk here of them being self-fulfilling prophesies, but they were also less influential and more transitory than is commonly presented).
Moreover if you actually examine them, there is just as much or more scourge reserved for "laborers", "servants", "poor farmland", "areas near industry/railyards/quarries", "various "white" ethnic groups", and the overall tone for someone who isn't going into them lookin for "black oppression" is of a more or less earnest attempt to map the expected change in real estate values (and thus suitability for lending) of neighborhoods in what was admittedly a racist era.
The maps were not all made by one person, and some of them definitely seem more or less racially focused, but there is this bizarre narrative that seems to develop that the maps were all about "blacks/negros", and that this then explains the totality of the differential change in the circumstances of different ethnic groups post the 60s. Despite the fact that many many different ethnic groups were "redlined", as any even 3 minute examination of these maps will acquaint you with.
1. Violent crimes rise during the summer. Following the lockdown, it's not surprising that crimes rose more.
2. I'd be interested to see deaths by economic status.
3. "but all things are smaller than other, larger things, and that doesn’t prevent them from being real or relevant." But it can mean that they are much, much less important.
4. It seems equally likely that the rises in murders are caused by the underlying factors which led to the protests. I won't insist on it, but it's at least as valid as Scott's "guesses".
I think cabin fever is a lot of what caused the Floyd case to blow up the way that it did. I have a friend who says that the left also made an extra big deal out of it because they wanted to increase turnout and win in 2020. I guess that's also possible. I do think though that "the wokeness era" is insufficient by itself to explain how big the Floyd thing was. Do we not have any other videos of unjustified police killings of black people? But yeah imagine all of the extra people who were unemployed because of the pandemic with nothing to do. Surely that made the riots a bigger deal.
Even though killings of unarmed blacks by police are way less common than they were 20 years ago, now we have wokeness and everyone with a cell phone so we hear about it more. But I think we don't know Patrick Lyoya and we know George Floyd largely because of COVID. I guess Lyoya was technically armed, but so was Philando Castille. I don't know. Minneapolis is a bigger city than Grand Rapids?
Sure but BLM had been around for a while, since the early 2010s. Why in 2020 did this happen?
I am not sure. How would we resolve whether cabin fever led to the Floyd thing blowing up so much? I mean we know that the season probably matters. If this happened in the winter people would not protest as much.
Yeah, my priors on policing may have drifted rightward since 2020 but I remain incredibly saddened by Philando Castile and Breonna Taylor especially, among the litany of common cases cited by left-leaning sources. There are some examples of viral police shootings that turn out to have been justified after an initial period of public outrage (Ma'Khia Bryant, Joseph Rosenbaum) which makes them no less tragic, but the Castile and Taylor cases are just incredibly awful.
>It seems equally likely that the rises in murders are caused by the underlying factors which led to the protests.
If underlying factors X, Y, and Z caused the protests, and the protests caused the murders, then I guess it's trivially true that X, Y, and Z caused the murders, in the same sense that the birth of Derek Chauvin's grandmother caused the murders.
If you mean the underlying factors caused the rise in murders *without* the causal chain running through the protests, that would seem rather strange, unless the underlying factors' existence didn't predate the protests by any span of time. Query if an "underlying" cause that's temporally exactly coincident with its purported effect is ontologically any different from attributing causality to the "effect" itself.
Maybe what you're getting at would make more sense to me if I understood what you took to be the "underlying factors" at hand. Or why they would present a plausible mechanism for the rise in violent crime independently of the protests.
I do think that the chain from lockdown -> cabin fever -> Floyd riots is a lot shorter and more direct than the chain from Chauvin's grandmother to the Floyd riots.
Of course I think vorkosigan is wrong that it's equally likely that the rise in murders was caused by these same vectors, but I don't think it's analogous to Chauvin's grandma.
But if Scott's claim is that the police policing less caused the crime surge, "the police pulled back after there was a big anti-police protest/riot" has a kind of integral causal logic that "the police pulled back after everybody got cabin fever from the lockdowns" doesn't.
I took vorkosigan to be saying that "underlying factors" could better explain the rise in crime if they *weren't* being routed through the causal chain of underlying factors --> protests/riots --> police pullback.
My point with the grandma remark was just that vorkosigan is either saying that, or else he's saying something tautologically true. So I'm going to assume he's saying the thing that actually means something non-tautological, even if that thing strikes me (like you) as quite at odds with the facts.
Right, indeed that's what vorkosigan said in his comment 4, and I agree that its wrong, indeed the whole point of this post is to disprove it.
I don't think it is quite tautological that there is some causal chain from COVID to the Floyd thing. Well, maybe it is, because Floyd was COVID positive which possibly contributed to his death (along with the fentanyl and the stress from Chauvin's knee). But yes, I think people had cabin fever and that helped make the Floyd thing blow up so much. Still it's the Floyd thing that proximally caused the homicide spike and the "cabin fever".
If you take vorkosigan's claim generously, it might be something like "the homicide went up because of cabin fever, and the Floyd incident was an excuse for an outlet, but that summer would have seen more murders anyway" but a bit of a problem with this is other facts Scott discusses in the post, that there were bigger murder increases in places with more BLM stuff and there was not a murder increase in other countries.
Cabin fever did not have the same effect anywher else, it bizarrely had minimal effect on domestic violence murders, and it cannot possibly explain what happened *in Ferguson*.
This government article talks about fewer people being put in prison.
And we know drugs were still being sold. Though the death rate from drug overdose was not as publicized during the pandemic, it was higher than before. Could fights have occurred more from drugs dealing, fights over money? Overcrowding in homes from lost jobs?
On target. Many criminals were released during the early pandemic as well. Add in criminal justice reform at state and federal level and a lot more criminals were on the streets, causing crime, even before George Floyd.
I mentioned it in a comment, but you can also rule recent gun purchases out using trace data, as it takes years on average for a gun to go from purchase to crime.
Kind of feels like Scott came to his conclusion first and then is now reading the data to support that. But the data doesn’t at all look convincing to me. Clearly there was a spike around May, but the data shows it was starting in the middle of May? Floyd died on May 25, and while protests began the next day in Minneapolis, they really didn’t pick up steam across the country until a few days later. But, for example, the NYC chart shows a clear escalation that starts at the beginning of May.
Like Scott says the Minneapolis Aggravated Assault chart shows it’s obvious but all I see is that before Floyd died, cases were rising dramatically, hit their peak shortly after protests started, slightly dropped soon after and stayed at an elevated pre-Floyd rate the rest of the year.
There is constant up and down in rates of various things. There was an small uptick in mid-May, probably caused by a combination of weather and normal randomness, but instead of being followed by a small downtick like every other small uptick, it went much higher and then plateaued long-term.
I think if the pandemic had started in mid-May, it would be fair to attribute to the pandemic, but the uptick clearly doesn't start in March and so you would need another theory to explain why this was happening in May.
But at least in several of the graphs you provide, the early-to-mid May increases weren’t small.
I would have also assumed the causal effects (especially the ones you suggest) would have been more gradual rather than immediate as the charts suggest, and that there would be a closer correlation between height of the crime wave and height of the protests.
If I were to provide a counter-factual, from what I remember, May is when people finally had enough of lockdowns (perhaps that also explains the size of the BLM protests, people used it to blow off steam), and we were certainly seeing lockdown protests by then as well. I’m personally of the belief that the rise in generally bad behavior over the past few years is attributable to some sort of psychological malaise caused by pandemic/lockdown fears leading to less institutional trust, and you see that starting in May as lockdowns ended. This could even explain some of the bad behavior occurring during the BLM protests.
I looked into this further, and several of these graphs are 7 to 14 day rolling averages, meaning that an increase on Day X will start showing up gradually on day X-7 or X-14.
A nice alternative data source that provides really good precision is CDC wonder provisional mortality data. Here, we can look nationally (smoothing over individual city randomness) at homicides by race by *week*. Since most murders are within race, this is a good proxy for murders by race of offender. The biggest spike in 2020 is for black homicides, and it turns out the huge spike for black murder victims is literally the week following Floyd.
To get a bit jargony, if you run a "structural break" test, it detects the week post Floyd as the most plausible week for a structural break for black people. (And in fact, if you run the same test for car crash deaths, it looks like the structural break happens almost immediately thereafter too. Strongly suggests its about depolicing and BLM).
I actually downloaded the data from CDC Wonder myself and did the analysis myself. Happy to email my code and data to you if there is a way to do that?
CDC Wonder allows you to save urls for specific searches, hopefully these still work:
Er, FWIW, that's usually *not* what people mean by N day rolling (or moving) averages. Usually the window is only backward looking not forward looking. So an increase on day X will get picked up by the 7dma between X and X+6. (Of course, it's possible to center the window elsewhere. No comment on what is being done in said graphs).
I also have no idea about the graph's data source, but you are correct. I'm not aware of anyone who does a rolling average of the week AHEAD of a date. Rarely you will see centered, but when that happens the centering should be explicitly mentioned in the methodology so as to avoid confusion.
You've got it backwards. You can check wikipedia or whatever source you like. Moving averages nearly always take the average of the previous N values, or more rarely, the average of N values in both directions. I've never heard of taking N values forward. So, the Minneapolis Figure 5 is even worse for your argument than you thought and suggests that the protests may actually have occurred at the peak of a crime wave which began to subside at their onset. That doesn't mean your overall hypothesis is wrong, or right, of course.
If you can, please add this to the article for the relevant graphs. This is definitely something worth pointing out right next to those graphs.
Another commenter pointed this out, and I think you did yourself in another recent post, and I think it would be something worth pointing out to 'raise awareness' of generally too.
Murders were declining pretty steadily through 2014, but then BLM emerged at Ferguson in August 2014. Murders started going up where BLM triumphed over local police: in St. Louis, then in Baltimore after Freddie Gray, then in Chicago after the release of the LaQuan MacDonald bad shooting videotape on 11/23/2015.
But then various over-enthusiastic BLM supporters assassinated cops in 2014-2016, helping Trump get elected.
Strikingly, traffic fatalities followed the same trajectory. But it all makes sense if you think of it as how scared are potential bad actors of being pulled over by the cops.
BLM sort of vanished after 2016 as intelligent people like George Soros switched to emphasizing more respectable methods of fighting the New Jim Crow like funding candidates in DA races.
Murders stopped going up in 2017 and dropped an encouraging amount in 2018. At some point in 2019, however, things changed for whatever reason and the post-Ferguson decline stopped and started going back up. This was before both George Floyd and before covid.
The increase before the George Floyd era wasn't enormous, so it could be just random noise. On the other hand, it could be that from mid-2019 the criminal element was once again feeling its oats as during the Ferguson era. Or that could just be hindsight is 20-20.
On the other hand, the black traffic fatality surge is hard to see coming until it suddenly happens after George Floyd's demise.
One possibility is that the kind of people likely to carry and shoot illegal hand guns are a much smaller and more hard core population than the kind likely to drive recklessly if the cops are cowed.
Perhaps the gun criminal element was already beginning to sense a change in the winds regarding enforcement of gun and warrant laws well before George Floyd, while the huge number of average people who'd enjoy driving fast if they didn't have to worry so much about getting pulled over by the cops didn't realize we were entering a new historic era until after the beginning of the celebrated "racial reckoning."
Unfortunately, Scott's tone and reponse to you confirms my feeling that he has no interest in being convinced otherwise. I noted in my comment that this article was a defense of his claim and not an exploratory post. I find it biased, erroneous, and lacking greater context. Sorry not sorry Scott.
There are a lot of comments any time Scott does a political post that sound exactly like something I would have written back in 2016, when I was a dyed-in-the-wool Bernie supporter and quick to gaslight analyses that did not support my left-leaning assumptions.
But when Scott persistently puts in the work and develops these longer posts explaining his reasoning, the burden of proof falls on his cynical detractors to prove him wrong. In this case, the statistics are clear enough (particularly internationally) that I am frankly disappointed to see this kind of obstinance. Scott's "tone" here (as in his post about parties moving away from the center) is based on the weight of the statistical evidence he has found. Your tone, by contrast, seems to demonstrate a lack of interest in accepting this evidence, in favor of nitpicking at the kind of technicalities that will always exist when statistical methods are not perfectly homogenous among jurisdictions. I'd invite you (and others with this view) to kindly consider the overall argument holistically from a neutral point of view, rather than blaming Scott for failing to shift your entrenched priors.
What a passive aggressive comment... and then some directly aggressive. Really. I could say more to the pieces of your comment that have objective merit, but the rest of this leaves me unwanting to carry on the conversation. Toodles
It's this kind of specious hypocritical moralizing that I really dislike and that inspired me to comment previously. If you have something to contribute to the discussion, if you identify something with "objective merit", you're free to say so. If you disagree with the tone or substance of something said, please expand on those specific details. If you don't have a rebuttal or if you were in the wrong, no one will judge you for saying so.
Discussion here should be rigorous and topical whilst allowing for changing minds. It's intellectually virtuous to be able to retreat from a previous position in the face of strong, well-founded pushback. Debate is not a war. Posturing in place of concrete engagement brings the level of discourse down to that of a thread on r/all.
I really don't love being aggressive in any way, shape, or form. I don't believe my previous comment to have been particularly aggressive. But it was fairly blunt. I'm sure we agree on plenty of issues, but on comment quality, I don't believe in compromising. The natural tendency of online discussion (in the absence of self-enforcement) trends towards entropic deterioration.
> If you have something to contribute to the discussion, if you identify something with "objective merit", you're free to say so.
- Agreed
> If you disagree with the tone or substance of something said, please expand on those specific details.
- I did my best to construct and express my thoughts thoroughly. I stand by what I said, especially since no one has answered the questions that I was genuinely asking. You are always welcome to engage with curiosity and learn more.
> If you don't have a rebuttal or if you were in the wrong, no one will judge you for saying so.
- Agreed
> Discussion here should be rigorous and topical whilst allowing for changing minds. It's intellectually virtuous to be able to retreat from a previous position in the face of strong, well-founded pushback. Debate is not a war. Posturing in place of concrete engagement brings the level of discourse down to that of a thread on r/all.
- Agreed 100%
>I really don't love being aggressive in any way, shape, or form. I don't believe my previous comment to have been particularly aggressive. But it was fairly blunt.
- Generally speaking words are a clumsy vehicle for the human experience, stepping on toes is easy to do without realizing it and I recognize it happens and try to call it out without holding it against people. I'm having issues with the site so I can't revisit your prior comment. The thing I always try to center on is the behavior or actions and not the person. e.g. saying "specious hypocritical moralizing" rather than calling me a "specious hypocritical moralizer". e.g. saying "that was a dumb comment" instead of "you are dumb".
> I'm sure we agree on plenty of issues, but on comment quality, I don't believe in compromising.
- I'm not sure what minimum bar you are expecting but as far as I know there are no requirements here, only guidelines on civility.
> The natural tendency of online discussion (in the absence of self-enforcement) trends towards entropic deterioration.
- 100% I have left many communities because of this. There is a lot about how this community operates that I appreciate, including the thoughtful and thoroughness of Scott and commenters. That being said, I don't believe in a minimum bar to entry... especially in a case where the other party was amassed a large amount of data.
In this case, I am accepting the data Scott presented and questioning the broader context in which it is presented, as well as what Scott actually accomplished here. I don't see a problem with that kind of meta commentary and I do find it constructive, at least to anyone interested in the scoping, definition and conceptualization of problems. In other words, Scott defined an initial scope and I questioned it. With more time and interest, I could amass more data and present a counterclaim to Scott but I am not trying to do that. I am just trying to ask a rigorous question about his methodology and purpose. Again, nobody seems to have answered these questions for me and that's fine. I remain curious and life moves on.
The discussion of those NYT and Vox articles on the Ferguson Effect reminds me that so much of modern "reporting" and "fact-checking" is about determining who has the right or wrong vibes or context, rather than the facts.
There was a point brought up earlier, regarding causal factors, and it seemed quite persuasive to me as a mechanism: if the black community, due to the protests (and the various grotesque murders that served to catalyze various BLM protest waves), began to perceive the police as less trustworthy, this would increase the homicide rate because homicide is correlated to distrust in institutions. It would also explain why the increase is largely confined to the black community.
The police arbitrate violent disputes. If your friend gets shot, if you're in a community with a functioning relationship with the police, the police investigate, find and arrest the perpetrator and put them in prison. If you don't trust the police and dont rely on them to deal with it, you're more likely to get revenge personally and violently.
This is extremely silly reasoning. You think gangs would prefer to deal with things thru the police by proxy if only they could trust those mean police? fucking hell, cmon.
I think it's plausible that in practice, having the police deal with shootings will lead to less revenge violence. Anything that decreases the extent to which the police can do that - whether it's fewer police officers, less community coperation with the police force, an unwillingness to call 911 etc. - will lead to more revenge violence. I'm not convinced that my comment explains it all, but it fits the time line and could explain some.
I'd think this effect would be less important for homicide than other crimes. I mean, however little you trust or like the police, you're probably going to call them if someone gets murdered or is trying to murder you.
So an increase in murders after the BLM protests is an indication of reduced policing. Because there is NO possible causal path between the BLM protests (or the events that provoked them) and increased murder, except for reduced policing.
And BLM and the pandemic are the only possible causes for an increase in murder in black communities, so if it doesn't look like the pandemic, it must be BLM.
I don't have to name any causal paths; YOU have to exclude the possibility of any other causal path. There are probably thousands of things that COULD have caused it.
This commenter is banned. You will question whether this was really worth a ban, but in fact, you can't prove that it was because of this post. There are thousands of things that could have caused it!
So by this standard, Scott should identify every possible discrete solution to the distribution, with no statistical weight on likelihood, solve chaos theory, and toss out the prevailing ideological dichotomous idea-space status quo in favor of universal epoché before admitting defeat?
Cartesian doubt can be useful, but it doesn't have to be universal and it certainly shouldn't hold as a bulwark against the preponderance of evidence. Scott identified a domain in which there has been some political squabbling over which one of two broadly defined arguments is correct, proved that one (the pandemic explanation) was extremely unlikely, and provided further supporting statistical evidence in favor of the alternative (the BLM/depolicing argument). Sure, you can argue that the interaction of the pandemic and the depolicing movement was far more potent than depolicing by itself, but it is the latter that is inextricable from the causal chain. The pandemic, in isolation, had no significant, widespread effect on murder rates in other areas.
An example: if I were to try and analyze the principal cause of global energy inflation in 2022, I have a couple extant arguments to choose from, preselected in terms of prominence by the idea marketplace; that the principal cause is supply chain constraints, aggravated by the pandemic and corporate greed, or that the principal cause is sanctions on Russia, limiting their ability to sell natural gas and oil into the international market. These arguments are not perfectly bounded -- there is plenty of possible overlap between them -- but they provide a useful initial basis for analysis. Whether there is more evidence for the former explanation or the latter, it would be counterproductive and extraordinarily selective to respond to a long post providing that analysis that the analysis is useless and a third, orthogonal explanation is more likely (and no you will not explain what it is).
Another pathway to more black-on-black murders during the celebrated racial reckoning is the same one that led to more traffic fatalities among blacks during the same period: confidence and exuberance. When the media decides, as it did in the summer 2020, to capitalize "Black" but not "white", that sure says something about who is top dog.
How would we distinguish between "police retreat to the donut shop" and "black exuberance?" Increased crime and car accidents are consistent with both theories. Is there some observation we could make that would be consistent with one and not the other?
Theoretically, blacks might have self-policed themselves more than normal after George Floyd's death so that the retreat to the donut shop wouldn't have mattered, but that clearly didn't happen.
I read scores of op-eds in the national press after May 25, 2020 about how blacks were in mourning for George Floyd and were terrified of the police and so forth, all of which would logically suggest they'd stay home. But then I'd turn on the local if-it-bleeds-it-leads local TV news and watch hours of live footage of ecstatic mobs looting fashionable sneaker stores in West Hollywood. And then I'd read police blotter items about one dead and eight wounded in a mass shooting at a block party in South-Central. And then I'd look up on Gun Violence Archive and see that mass shootings of at least 4 victims struck by bulletts (which are typically at black social events) were up about 50%.
But what was causing the increase in murders? Just the reduction in police presence? I wish we had some data on the situation surrounding the murder. Was it drug gang violence, domestic violence, robbery, etc.
It was widely predicted, not unreasonably, that domestic murders would soar during lockdowns, but that didn't happen. Instead, mass shooting at black social events exploded as did black traffic fatalities.
-The difference between an assault and a homicide is often the speed and quality of medical care provided - anything that reduced 911 efficiency/usage or interfered with ambulances and hospitals will increase the homicide rate.
-These numbers all come from police reports on number of homicides, we have no 'objective' count of homicides. And the numbers just happened to be overwhelmingly flattering to the people producing the numbers.
-A community without police is a community that has to handle criminal justice on it's own. Historically, communities without a strong criminal justice system have had much higher homicide rate as there's no other mechanism to protect yourself from an aggressor or punish a criminal available. It's not clear that you shouldn't *want* the homicide rate to go up if you remove police from a community, assuming some of those victims are people the police would have arrested otherwise and would have been victimizing people if left alone.
Generally if a police report shows x homicides, it's because for each of them there is a body, and the police are looking for a killer. If there isn't a body, it's going to be hard to go to court to prove homicide.
So these will be undercounts, and if the police are doing less then the undercount will be more severe. Balancing that is that if someone actually calls the police for the body, they are going to investigate.
There may be a few poisoning murders in which the murderer flat out gets away with nobody noticing the dead person was murdered. Same for a few other detective novel quality crimes.
But virtually all shootings are going to wind up being counted as homicides and most of them as murders unless the killers make the body completely vanish like Jimmy Hoffa.
The FBI reports murders from law enforcement sources.
The CDC reports homicides from health sources.
The CDC figures are always larger than the FBI figures, but they tend to go up and down quite closely together.
The CDC uses typical modern race-ethnic terminology (Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, etc.) The FBI has a problem with some police departments still classify most Hispanics as white like they did in 1960 when Hispanics wanted to be white. So FBI numbers work best as black or nonblack, but that is pretty useful.
The FBI has data on both victims and on perps charged or accused in cleared cases. The CDC has data on just victims, but it's pretty complete.
I suspect that attempts to claim the spike began in March in order to avoid political blame are specious, but I also have to question your implicit assumption that a spike due to covid would necessarily begin in March. What if it took a couple months for lockdowns to make everyone crazy? That could explain both the severity of the riots AND the murder spike.
As I said, I think BLM riots ARE the primary cause. My point isn't that they aren't ... just that even if the cause WERE covid, it wouldn't necessarily have begun in March just as the lockdowns started.
An analogy: I shoot a target. Why did it get shot? Is it because I pulled the trigger, or because I loaded the gun and took aim at the target?
The pandemic takes aim, and the riots are the trigger, causing sudden action.
I do think the pandemic clearly added to social unrest, and in a counterfactual where there’s no pandemic, the protests would been less widespread and so less influential. They still would have happened though, so I’ll amend my analogy to say that the general undercurrent of societal unrest in America keeps the gun loaded and pointing at the target, while the pandemic nudged it closer to the bulls-eye. The anti-police riots and subsequent fallout are still the trigger.
Minor nitpick on the German murder graph - it looks like this is a graph of "Mord" (murder) as opposed to "Totschlag" (killing), which are separate offences in Germany. Shooting someone because you're angry with them, which is presumably what we're talking about with most of the murder spike here, would be Totschlag. Mord requires the crime to be evil in some sense (eg. treacherous, for the purpose of eating the corpse, committed with poison etc.).
Not really; "Totschlag" incompletely overlaps both "manslaughter" and "murder".
In modern German law, the Mordmerkmale (murder characteristics), any one of which is sufficient to make an (unlawful) intentional killing Mord, are 1. a 'base motive' (bloodlust, regular lust, greed), 2. a reprehensible manner ('insidiousness', particular cruelty, danger to the public), or 3. intent to facilitate or conceal another crime. Any other intentional killing is Totschlag.
Anglophone common-law manslaughter generally comprises involuntary manslaughter (unintentional killing, e.g. by negligence or recklessness or as a result of the commission of certain other crimes) and voluntary manslaughter (intentional killing under 'adequate' provocation). Totschlag requires intent to kill, so it can't be involuntary manslaughter, but it's indifferent to provocation, so it can be either voluntary manslaughter or murder.
Switchnode's comment is exactly right. The better analogy is first degree vs second degree murder in the US, but Mord is still drawn differently (and generally narrower) than most states' first degree murder statutes. Totschlag is treated a bit more like voluntary manslaughter than murder in terms of seriousness/sentencing though (eg. never/rarely life imprisonment).
Unlike most people who are reading this piece and might bring it up, I would like to say that I think the new blue color for the site is nice and feels less generic and more intentional than the previous white background.
Minor gripe: I don't think the phrase "clear evidence" should be used in cases where there's been no attempt to actually isolate a causal effect (e.g. using a convincing differences-in-differences or instrumental variables approach, or an observational approach with a real claim to causality). The methodology this article uses could provide, *at best*, somewhat weak evidence.
Major gripes: making causal claims from time series data is really, really hard, and econometricians put a lot of effort into thinking about how to do it well. This article doesn't do any of that, and the genre "rationalist wades into ongoing academic debate without avoiding any of the pitfalls the field is already aware of" worries me epistemically.
Some specifics: many of your graphs don't show what you say that show, at least not clearly enough to count as evidence. A graph which is increasing before the event isn't evidence that the event had an effect, *even if you have a story to explain why the pretrend exists*. (It isn't evidence that the event had no effect either. It just means you can't make a convincing causal claim from it.) Similarly, the story you give to the Chicago police presence graph doesn't make that graph into evidence either -- you could come up with a similar-sounding story for pretty much any random walk.
To make an "it happened in place X but not Y" claim causal, you need evidence that X and Y would have otherwise responded the same to an outside shock. This doesn't work with America and any other country in crime (so many guns! no reason to assume the pandemic would have the same effect!), and also doesn't work with the black/other races response to the pandemic (black communities were hit much, much harder!).
It's methodologically very, very hard to distinguish "the protests caused this" from "the pandemic caused a huge increase but the first few months also had a large decrease because people were stuck inside" or "the pandemic caused a huge increase but only during the summer because that's when crime usually spikes" or something similar. Doing this right would be dozens of pages of econometrics, not a handful of graphs.
tl;dr there's causal evidence that policing reduces crime, but the spikes in this article would be much larger than any of the well-identified evidence. (I'd expect maybe a 10% increase at most?) I have no idea whether or not that's because they in fact very large, or because they're the results of other causes, but I don't think this article provides strong evidence that they're the result of the protests.
Interesting comment, but you are arguably too purist here. There are three ladders of “causal purism”:
(1) A true purist (i.e. an extreme positivist) would say that all talk of causality is nonsense, since we do not observe causality – we just observe if something follows after something else in time (re: grandfather Hume). “Causality” is an interpretive act, it is not something we can observe (re: Kant and his people). And since causality cannot be observed, talk of causality is an act of metaphysics, not (empirical) science (Wien-style positivists). And since metaphysics = nonsense (according to the same philosophers), all talk of an eventual causal relationship between the Floyd incident and homicide rates is nonsense.
(2) A next-ring-of-the-ladder purists are those saying that only controlled experiments can detect causality (the hard-nosed core of the evidence-based science people).
Unless we had set up an experiment to let the police kill Floyd (or someone similar) while having an exact equal city where we avoided them killing an exact similar guy, plus were able to deal with all the fish hooks in a controlled experiment (double blind etc.), we can never be certain of causality. Since we do not have any such experiments, all talk of “causality” in this case is at best imprecise-ordinary-language-concept use, at worst nonsense (see above).
(Then there are the “natural experiment we are lucky enough to detect is sufficient” – people, but since that appears not to be possible with the data we have on this one, we end with the same conclusion.)
(3) Third ring of the ladder, where you seem to be: bring in the diff-in-diff approach, and/or Pearl/Glymour type causal path analysis, or some other econometric stuff.
My hunch is that these approaches, like (2) are also not possible to use in this case, due to lack of adequate data to do these types of analyses. (Digression: Which we often do not have in the social sciences, and even less if we consider all the innumerable possible causal relationships that ordinary people try to deal with in their everyday lives).
Summa summarum: If you are a purist, you can shoot down everything most people everywhere do when they talk about “causality”.
My defense of Scott-type analyses would be that a) the ideal should not be the enemy of the good; b) we must run with the best observations/data we have got, here in the best of all possible (data) worlds; c) you can do a pretty good “ordinary language use is actually ok” - philosophical defense of the ordinary-language use of the concept “causality”; c) eyeballing, combined with intelligent discussion of possible causes/”mechanisms” behind the eyeballed statistical pattern, is actually a fairly good way to reach “fairly certain” conclusions.
…noticing that we can never be more that “fairly certain” of anything at all, that happens under the sky; including the fallout from Floyd’s murder.
Partly due to (1), but also because all talk of “causality” (including Pearl/Glymour talk & diff-in-diff & econometrics), if the causal mechanism is supposed to run through how people interpret a situation, will always run into the fundamental empirical problem that how people (in this case: the police & other criminals) interpret a situation, is not observable.
We cannot observe interpretations, we can only observe behavior (due to a combo of the “other minds” problem and the hard problem of consciousness). That is also why Scott ends up with four possible “mechanisms” through which the Floyd murder may have influenced police interpretations & subsequent behavior (and there may be more, you can literally never know).
I guess this comment is above-average nerdy (as people say these days), but it is always fun to wade into the philosophical debate of what “causality” means, in particular when humans are
involved, and your comment provided me with an opportunity to do so😊.
There's a lot I agree with here, especially the ability of too much methods purism to shoot down any claim whatsoever.
I think my main disagreement here would be with (c), but in a way I don't know how to communicate to another person -- after some econometrics training and a significant amount of time watching economics seminars and working on my own research, I have seen many, many graphs like this and convincing-sounding discussion of possible mechanisms that completely fell apart when subjected to real statistical scrutiny. So my personal experience is that "how convincing your eyeballs and the causal story sound" is not a good measure of whether the underlying claim is true.
I think maybe what you're missing as a 'rationality outsider' is that Scott is claiming something more like 'this is the best model AFAIK' instead of 'this is as solid and convincing a theory as any other scientific theory' (which itself is silly).
I think "real statistical scrutiny" would be great for this issue tho!
So how would we test the theory? We have two big shocks (covid and the Floyd protests). They both hit at about the same time across the country.
A couple random ideas (but I don't know if this is useful):
a. If this is tied to the size/duration/intensity of local protests (protest -> police pullback -> more crime), then we should see a correlation between how serious the local protests were and how big the impact was on murder rates. But this is going to be confounded with a bunch of other stuff, like prior crime rate and size of your poor black population.
b. If the mechanism of action we propose is that police pull back because they're afraid of getting sent to jail or fired, then could we find places where that was a more vs less plausible threat? I'm not sure how we'd measure that, but if police in one city are more worried about being prosecuted/fired for anything going wrong than police in another city, this would be a useful variable.
c. We could look at different cities that had local protests about police killings of blacks over the years that didn't go national, and see if there's a Ferguson effect overall.
+++ for this comment. It’s shocking and disappointing that someone with a medical degree would publish even a blog post with assertions about causality and “evidence” based on time-series data (and without supporting data for the logical model underlying the claim!). Sad.
I'm surprised you think there's enough evidence here to confidently state that the pandemic had so little effect. Is your view that had the BLM protests occurred without the pandemic then we would have seen a similar homicide spike? Why can't both the protests and the pandemic be important factors? Why can't the pandemic have potentiated the protests and their knock-on effects?
You cite the timing of the homicide spike vs the beginning of the pandemic many times, but that's unconvincing to me. The beginning of the pandemic was characterized by widespread lockdowns and much less activity. It was also still pretty cold in many northern cities. As you said yourself, murder rates often spike with warmer weather--couldn't the pandemic plus warmer weather potentially explain the timing? (And yes ALSO the protests?)
I also don't think it's useful to compare the US with other countries--other countries have very different homicide rates to begin with (and different social safety nets, and had different responses to the pandemic, and different gun laws, etc). To say this proves the pandemic wasn't a factor in the US specifically seems questionable.
In general I think it's harder to disentangle the various factors here than you claim.
Look at the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore, which show a spike in murders starting exactly at the time of the protests then, in the same way there's a spike in murders starting exactly at the time of the George Floyd protests in 2020. If it had just been warming up during the pandemic, the spike would have ramped up gradually throughout April and May, with the temperature. There is a slight pattern showing that effect (though no larger than the April/May temperature increase every other year), but then a separate very large spike in late May/early June, which is the phenomenon we're trying to explain here.
Also, I predict the gradual April/May rise was the same for all racial groups, but again, the main spike seems to have very disproportionately affected blacks.
I hear you, but you're making a stronger claim than I am--that a) the protests caused subsequent de-policing and b) this de-policing was the principal cause of the spike in homicide rates. I'm merely saying that the pandemic and the warm weather AND the protests likely all had an effect (which is what other sources are also saying it sounds like). I don't see strong evidence in this post or this comment that refute the claim that the pandemic/economic and sociological effects likely potentiated the protests/violence/homicides.
To make your case stronger, I'd love to see an analysis of depolicing vs homicide rates pre-pandemic, something that I think is missing from your post here (you explore this a little, but don't conduct the thorough analysis I think such a question deserves). See this article "Did de-policing cause the increase in homicide rates?" which analyzes rates of arrests vs categories of crime and finds "no evidence of an effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense category for any year in this period, including 2015, the year of the spike in homicide levels." (https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12414). Notably, they found that arrest rates had been decreasing for several years prior to Ferguson, and the drop after Ferguson was not out of step with that existing trend. You can sort of see this in the Economist graph you posted as well.
The term "spike" is misleading people. We have instead a "plateau" of higher levels of homicide extending through late 2021, the latest month for which we have CDC homicide data.
Why is the discussion of possible causes restricted to covid vs. BLM?
Why not argue that the fervid election of 2020 contributed?
There was a definite "by any means necessary" attitude among elites in 2020. NYT editor Dean Baquet reassured the NYT staff in 2019 that the failure of the NYT's Plan A to dump Trump, Russiagate, just meant they'd keep rolling out Plan B, Racism.
Much of the media and the Democratic party seemed convinced for much of the summer of 2020 that the "racial reckoning" was going to doom Trump, at least up through the Kenosha riots in later August. What are hundreds of riots and thousands of murder compared to the cost of four more years of Trump? Especially when you control the megaphone and can relabel riots as "mostly peaceful protests." I didn't notice the Democrats and media turning definitely against rioting until late October when the Philadelphia riot almost cost Biden that important state. By late October it was clear the media and the Democrats wanted the rioters to go home, but that sure took a long time ...
As applied to 1970-1994 crime explosion era, I'm not sure ? Many generations were exposed previously, so not totally sold it was THE major causation. I was shocked to just learn Benjamin Franklin (and most) found it dangerous in the 1700's !! We sure took our time banning it. I think that the combination of Baking Soda & Cocaine had a bigger effect on people....and of course the reaction to that was even bigger. Massive Social Upheaval is a common denominator that seems present at the beginnings of the last surge and the current one.
1920's actually. Dupont Corp. Known as "Loony" gas. It was bad. But I was speaking to lead in paint, inside houses. Breathing in and in some cases kids chomping on peeling paint. Can only assume these were the pasta eaters as well 😂
It certainly could be, although it feels crazier today with minimal amounts dispersed that way. I tend to think violence is within us, A remnant of...what we were. It breaks out sometimes, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Europe, here. I think it's within us, and can get unleashed with the right (wrong?) conditions.
In the 1934 novel "Studs Lonigan," the Chicago blue collar main characters debate whether the high wages earned by house painters is worth the getting stupider from the lead paint. So people have been aware of the dangers of lead for a long time.
This is one of the things I always love to point out. you find modern people make these weird points always where say coal miners in the 1890s or early 1900s didn't know being a coal miner was dangerous or was bad for you. "if only we had known then what we know now".
No there was not a medicalized explicit definition of what the exact harm vector was, that isn't the same thing.
The people at the time ABSOLUTELY were generally aware of the risks and making tradeoffs, they might not have had all the information, but people rarely do. You see this with concussions too. In the 1980s people would regularly talk about boxers getting "punch drunk", and how hockey players don't want to get their "bell rung" too often because it will permanently fuck you up and ruin your life.
Then we discover the specific mechanism in the early 2000s and suddenly everyone acts like no one knew it was bad for you. It is literally sort of the Ministry of Truth, people re-writing history to make their currently policy goals more palatable.
It couldn't have been that people in the past were weighing costs and benefits and made different choices than we do now (perhaps due to lower life expectancies and standard of living), nope they just didn't know. Ignorant babies we could have saved with modern knowledge.
In fairness to "everyone" (else), having a nice 'concept handle' (i.e. word/phrase) for something _is_, for them, very much like 'the thing suddenly existing' and then, probably via the 'illusion of transparency', people readily generalize to 'no one knew about this until now'.
Having a word for something definitely helps you think about it. That's why in "1984" the Party is eliminating words. Like Orwell, I'm a soft Whorfian about words. The more the better.
If lead had had such a large effect on crime, it would also have had an effect on IQ over the same period, but actually population IQ increased with increased lead in the environment, then plateaued when lead was banned and has since been decreasing with virtually no lead left. I'm not claiming that lead leads to higher IQ, only that it is unlikely that lead would have an effect on crime and no effect on something we know how to measure well and that should be affected more and more directly.
Also, the cohorts that saw decreased crime starting in 1994 were NOT the 20 year olds but the older cohorts. So not the people who had never been exposed to lead. Likewise, since lead was banned in the early 1970s (?) shouldn't we see a reduction before 1994? Unless any amount of lead while the mother was pregnant has a strongly non-linear effect, but then it is the 20yo cohort that should have been less violent and actually they were in 1993/1994 the most violent cohort in several decades.
Your points and questions are totally valid. As a counter argument I would note many (even most) houses built prior to 1974? are likely to have leaded paint, sometimes several layers beneath the layers put down since the ban. Every time you buy a house you have to sign the document acknowledging it is there.
Like almost all things, Crime likely has 10+ factors. I do feel that Mass Incarceration was extremely effective (and incredibly heavy-handed) in reducing it. It only makes sense that if you lock up massive amounts of 3 Felony people you will be removing people more likely to repeat & escalate. The 1990's version will not likely return, but if current trends continue I can see 2024 as the beginning of a new, possibly more focused version.
Learning about the lead-crime hypothesis for the first time via Kevin Drum was a major update to my entire world view in several ways.
1. Before that I had assumed everything in sociology must be extremely complex and confounded and only explainable by a large number of factors. Now I am much more amenable to relatively monocausal explanations of societal phenomena.
2. I am now much more worried about ultra long term effects of drugs and environment chemicals that are very difficult to detect even with careful studies. The hypothesized lead-effect on crime has a more than 20-years delay (although, to be fair, there was plenty of evidence for other negative effects of lead which should have led to a ban much earlier).
3. I now distrust the disdain social scientists often have for biological and other reductionist explanations. I think the fact that criminologists have for so long all but ignored the lead-crime hypothesis is a symptom of a wider pathology where such explanations are viewed as vulgar and simple-minded at best and reactionary and outright immoral at worst. This probably has do to with a defensiveness (akin to economists' "physics envy") towards a perceived threat of being taken over and rendered obsolete by natural scientists and their methods. The "backlash" (see, I can do that, too!) to such perceived imperialism manifests itself in postmodern theories according to which all those threatening rigorous scientific results are really just social constructs emanating from the power structures of that patriarchal project called "science".
As a result, I would for example not be surprised at all if it was found that some as of yet unidentified chemical(s) were found to be a major contributor to the massive societal shifts we currently see around gender identity. There is a lot of evidence by now that phtalates used to soften plastics affect fertility and possibly sexual differentiation; Ibuprofen is now suspected to negatively affect the fertility of a pregnant's woman's daughter (!).
At the same time I am quite sure that such research would - fallaciously - be discarded or even be regarded as offensive by a significant part of the population.
Another data point: Miami neither had widespread riots or a major defund the police movement. (Or at least if there was one it didn't succeed.) There were peaceful protests but there was minimal rioting. Miami does have a significant Black population too. Violent crime decreased while arrests went up representing (at least according to the local politicians) the police interrupting people trying to commit crimes. This is despite not having as much of a weather change or sticking people indoors as long and having pretty widespread gun ownership and a long history of organized crime. (Seriously, it's Miami. It's still a major drug port.)
Anecdotally I lived near a lot with a lot of high end cars. The police basically had some officers watching it full time and they'd arrest a few attempted car jackers a day during the first few weeks of the protests. After a week or two the thieves (but not the protests) died down. Either due to thieves taking the hint or literally removing them from the streets. If there was a pullback I didn't notice it. If anything it seemed like the police were more active.
HUGE factor. I sure hope we learned that allowing rage past 7-10 days is really just surrendering to the mob. The "new" way of handling riots (namely, allowing them) was a massive failure on par with Defund!! and we should never try that again.
You are assuming that the goal is public safety and not to advance other social and political goals. The most benefit of the doubt I am able to summon is that people that thought the continuing protests would advance their personal socio/political goals ALSO believed that public safety would not suffer due to the insidious effects of motivated reasoning.
While I would agree that it basically started that way it devolved rapidly, and obviously, to anyone familiar with 1968 or 1992.
The biggest blunder was the Covid Flip-Flop. Having gone from being telling everyone that going to the park or paddle-boarding was possibly "Literally Murder™️" , Govt and Media destroyed their belief in Science in plain view, enabling the deteriorating actions in the streets, and sowing the seeds for all that followed these past 2 years.
Perusing, some seem reputable. Some questionable. Wonder how many survive replication attempts or remain compelling under assault. Not clear that the entire set isn't just a mix of cherry picking. Still interesting, thanks for the share.
Some are clearly false. One of the claimed facts is "Two-thirds of men and women who were homosexual change their orientation to heterosexual five years later"
Not quite what you're asking for, but your comment reminds me to share something I thought of when reading Scott's piece itself: overall, NYT reporting isn't thoroughly biased.
I've found a few hot-button examples. Would these have been reported by a thoroughly biased paper?
"Some recent robberies — in which large groups rush into a store, overwhelm employees and flee in cars before the police can respond — recall the looting that occurred across the country amid protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. At that time, people took advantage of police departments stretched by the protests and ransacked hundreds of stores, including the Macy’s in Herald Square and many smaller retailers, causing millions of dollars in damage." (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/business/retailers-robberies-theft.html)
"Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/us/liberals-race.html)
For now, the NYT remains a high-quality general news source. It is best read in conjunction with a variety of other sources with differing editorial lines. (That said, to the extent that I know who is who, I have a vague impression that millennial NYT reporters' reporting is on average worse in every way than boomer reporters'.)
I don't know if that's the case with your examples, but Steve Sailer has pointed out that the NYT often includes inconvenient facts but bury them far down in their articles under mountains of tedium.
As one of the people who questioned your attribution in the previous article, this post causes me to take a significant update in the direction of your thesis. I'm still not totally convinced, primarily because causal inference on observational data is incredibly hard, but the evidence you present here is better than evidence I've seen presented in favor of other points of view.
I also think I was more importantly wrong on a meta point. Part of the reason I questioned your assertion is because I thought something like "this is just the sort of thumb in the eye of sanctimonious establishment media that would be catnip for Scott", so I thought it was likely that you would be biased on the subject and may be making overstated claims on questionable data. While I still think you may have some bias here, I also think your conclusion is honestly arrived at with proper consideration, and I regret any implication of unvirtuousness in my previous comment.
And extra 'yay' for describing your own reasoning. You're a great example of one of the things I love about Scott, his blog, and (some of) the commenters he attracts.
I predict a spike in comments elsewhere in what used to be called the blogosphere to the effect that "once again Scott Alexander has shown his true colors and good people everywhere will denounce him and never read him again."
I appreciate your analysis here, but there were numerous points that left me rather confused. First, "A priori there’s no reason to expect the pandemic to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group" — no? the lowest income groups in the US are blacks, Native Americans, and latinos. All of these had an uptick in the homocide rate during the pandemic (e.g. chart you present midway down). An entirely plausible alternative hypothesis is that lockdowns pushed people in low income groups into more dire economic situations, and this lead to more murders. It seems all non-white/non-asian groups had a rise in homocide rates that you're ignoring here, and class is an obvious potential confounder.
Second, a huge problem in the "Effects of other Protests" section is that protests are perfectly confounded with the underlying event perceived as a huge social injustice worth of mass protest. There are many possible causal hypotheses here, two that come to mind are:
(1) death by police → protest about policing → policy of reduced policing → more homocide/crime
(2) protest about policing ← death by police → less trust in social and government institutions, less prosocial behavior → more homocide/crime
Increase in homocides could be (1) alone, or (2)'s right path alone, or (2)'s left and right paths, or (2)'s left and right paths, with the left path also going along (1)'s entire chain to also lead to more homocide (it's hard to draw DAGs here, so hopefully this makes sense). The point is that death by police and protest are coupled, so it is nearly impossible to disentangle "the effect of protests" from "the effect of less trust in social institutions less prosocial behavior because of police murder". So I think the claim "If Black Lives Matters protests can cause homicide spikes, we would expect to see one around this time also" isn't alone sufficient, because it fails to control for the upstream cause of the protests. In reality, I bet it's both — protests reduce policing, reduced policing changes the economics of crime a bit, and less trust in our social institutions leads to more antisocial behavior. But I wouldn't be so quick to blame protests as much as what caused the protests. Protests could act primarily through an interaction in that they spread awareness of police murder and that reduces social trust much more quickly and widely than without protest.
Regardless, I do agree it is rather unfortunate the media covers these issues with such heavy partisan lenses, and not as a really tricky social problem with unknown causes that we should really work hard to understand, so we can try to have some idea of a sensible intervention.
“The Ferguson effect” is a correlational claim, not a causal claim. Is it awareness of police misconduct that causes crime? Is it protest that causes crime? Is it police dislike of protest that causes crime?
Isn't it called an "effect" precisely because it's a causal claim? The nature of the cause may be argued about, but it's not supposed to just be a correlation.
Hmm, interesting point. It's true that the word "effect" suggests a causal claim. But I've never heard anything in particular attributed as the cause (increased violence, decreased police presence, something else, all of which might be contributing factors). I think it's common to talk about "effect sizes" even for correlations where one suspects they are common effects of some unknown cause.
In any case, correlations usually do indicate *some* causal connection, just not always in the direction that one might initially hypothesize.
Yes, the "no reason to expect the pandemic to hit blacks much harder" line definitely raised an eyebrow for me, since that was one of the big talking points during the point when we were actively doing something about the pandemic. I would expect it to hit blacks harder, just as I would expect it to hit Native Americans harder. And yes, there's an increase in Native American murders, which is dismissed as being random.
The charts you show reinforce my distaste for rolling average plots. They often confuse when the effect actually happens. That's particularly a problem when you're trying to tease out causation, which is often what those plots are used for!
If you think your data has some artificial noise or periodicity, try leaving it in and just labeling it! I think you'll find that most people can figure that out.
A 7 day rolling average causes lag that can be adjusted (after the fact) by moving the graph back 3 days, so each data point is compared to the three days on either side. (You can't do this in real time because you don't have future data yet.) This seems to be rarely done, though.
Also, I haven't seen the proof, but here's a claim in a digital signal processing textbook that moving average is optimal at removing random white noise from a signal: http://www.dspguide.com/ch15/2.htm
It's not optimal for adjusting for non-random noise, though. If you have a model, like weekly effects or weather effects, you can do better.
I think a factor that's been overlooked is fiscal stimulus contributing to gray market demand for firearms. I've been through the legal system twice (once during and once 5 years before pandemic), and this time it def seemed like the judges were having a strong reaction specifically to the prevalence of guns at the time. Imo, everyone having more money at the same time really raises the perceived value of having a gun (either for greed or protection), and this could explain why there aren't similar spikes in countries where guns aren't readily available
Disposable income spiked in April 2020, and in January and March of 2021 (the stimulus checks, and unemployment insurance) and is only just now getting down to the levels of late 2019.
That also could contribute to the rise in traffic fatalities: e.g., lots of people stopped paying rent in 2020, so they had money to get a car. E.g., Los Angeles' Latino community spent an insane amount of money on July 4, 2020 on illegal fireworks.
I'm not following how depolicing leads to an immediate uptick in homicide. Petty crime, sure; robbery maybe; murder seems like a stretch. I agree impunity rates affect criminal behavior *on some time frame* but is the feedback that immediate? An alternative hypothesis is that the depolicing is a response to the uptick in crime caused by calls for black lawlessness combined with demoralization of policing. I would guess that the type of policing that falls the most is the kind of "circling the block in a police car type" of beat, not the difficult detective work and DA buy-in needed to bring someone in for homicide. (I know this firsthand: my brother was murdered in August 2020, and we're still fighting to get his killer arrested nearly two years later.) So I think Scott needs to go into more detail on the mechanism behind depolicing -> more murders. But I enjoyed the piece, and I agree that the NYT sucks on this.
This seems way too surly and uncharitable. I'm pretty sympathetic towards people that 'don't want to believe' something. The truth _can_ hurt!
But the only long-term sustainable and effective way to change people's minds is to calmly and patiently point out where and how their 'models' fail to explain or predict whatever they cover.
And, in this specific case, they're probably just ignorant of important details about how policing works. I was too for a long time!
Matt Yglesias presented some evidence that main pathway for police -> crime is simple police presence; i.e. "police visibly driving around communities makes people more nervous about committing crimes", not something lengthier like "more police work means higher clearance rate means crime pays less." The feedback from a reduction in police presence seems like it could be really fast.
There's a party you want to go to, but there's a warrant out for your arrest on assault. If a cop pulls you over on the way, you'll spend a month in jail. Also, you kind of want to take your gun in case that guy you're beefing with shows up at the party. But if the cops pull you over and search you and find your illegal hand gun, you'll spend a couple of years in prison. So maybe you should stay home and watch the game on TV.
But now you hear that the cops aren't pulling people over much because they are all deployed on the Magnificent Mile to keep looters away. Plus, it's the racial reckoning and they don't want to be the next face of white supremacy.
100% I think cops not being on the street and not responding to crimes gets out among the criminals VERY quickly.
Minneapolis went from normal, to armed bands of dudes showing up and pharmacies miles from any protests at 4PM on a weekday and ransacking them in less than a day. Once the police stopped doing anything other than defending a few key areas, violent crime exploded within hours.
Pinker talks about a police strike in Montreal when he was a kid. It took about 4 hours to progress from motorists changing lanes without putting on their blinkers to armed bank heists.
Concrete example: police pull over a car for, e.g. having a taillight out. The police have some suspicion, or know, that someone in the car is, e.g. a gang member. They search the car, or pat down the driver/occupants, and find a gun. Whomever's gun is taken is now less likely to murder if only because it's a little less convenient.
A big part of policing is basically just 'hassling' the already-known criminals. That almost certainly provides _some_ 'pressure' that reduces all kinds of crimes, including murder.
100%. When I did a week of ride along in a rural area 20 years ago, the cops already knew ~95% of the homes we were called out to. Where/who the crimes were happening was not really a mystery. The mystery was in balancing between discouraging/de-escalating, and trying to nail people and get them in jail so that would stop causing trouble.
This is our fifth ride out to "Bobby-Joe's" trailer this year, maybe we should really try to find an way to lock him up this time.
Great analysis. I think events turned the social tenor toward chaos, and people who are only marginally civil exploited the opportunity. Why are certain races victimized, certain properties targeted? Some blame the pandemic, global warming, colonialism, police abuse and murder of criminal suspects, racism, inflation, white supremacy, etc. If one is determined to act unmoored and/or violent, to dishonor the social contract, any excuse will do. Someone usually benefits from chaos.
The response time of the homicide effect to the protest "intervention" seems awfully fast - faster than I remember the politics moving. When did police departments actually start quitting or pulling back? One could imagine a more immediate effect of "the police are dealing with the protests and not other things", if your theory is that police presence is strongly preventative of crimes. In sports you often double-cover your opponent's star player, so #2 or #3 ends up getting more plays. Maybe it's as simple as the cops having steady-state capacity but not surge capacity.
But at least for homicides the picture still doesn't quite make sense. Even though the timing looks somewhat compelling, the motive is still muddy. Why does inter-racial grievance lead to a spike in intra-racial violence? Does police presence actually work? Are cooler heads who would ordinarily prevent this violence out at the protest? Are people deliberately taking advantage of the lapse in policing to go gunning for someone? Are people of their own race just close at hand when they get back from the protest with their blood still running hot? This seems like a critical part of the story to nail down for it to emerge into that respectable conversation and out of the fringe right.
I've been posting graphs showing what's going on with shootings since the summer of 2020. But I'm some kind of deplorable extremist who you know is a extreme deplorable because he downloads official statistics and makes graphs out of them.
Cute. Why does depolicing instantly - if we believe Scott's charts - turn inter-racial animus into intra-racial violence? That link is not self-evident. Why would you expect that to happen? When wouldn't you expect it to happen? How do you double or halve the effect? Show me the 'physics'.
Let's try again: what assumptions and hypotheses are you holding that explain the phenomenon, precisely? Please share with the class.
And so the prospective criminals, what, keeping a spreadsheet of police car sightings before they shoot someone? Acting promptly, but only when the data is favorable to them? I wish I could hire engineers as rigorous as you think criminals are.
But, please, continue to insist that it's obvious why depolicing black people would have an effect of raising an unrelated crime rate, while not having that effect with white people, while refusing to say why it would be obvious. I'm sure it's a perfectly reasonable reason and not a bias of any sort.
>This seems like a critical part of the story to nail down for it to emerge into that respectable conversation and out of the fringe right.
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with that. The NYT articles show that even when the truth is obvious and right there, liberals willfully ignore it for ideological reasons. There is nothing 'fringe' about this from an epistemological perspective. If the left cared about the truth, this would be a common and accepted fact. And until then, no amount of evidence, no amount of 'nailing down' anything will convince these hyper-partisan ideologues.
Lol, as opposed to who? The right? Who believe that Trump won the 2020 election and that covid wasn’t real and that nothing notable happened on January 6th, 2021?
You reveal yourself to be a hyper-partisan ideologue with your vitriol.
It’s entirely possible to win over enough people that even most fringe lefties will be forced to acknowledge the truth, or at least shift in response to it. We’re discussing this on ACX, a pretty left-leaning space. A space that even has experience with the foibles of the NYT! ;) We’ve also seen arguments that do or don’t persuade, even on partisan issues, and believe they may persuade again.
The reason I had been skeptical of this argument when I’d heard it before is that it seemed on the surface to be Charlottesville and Covid whataboutism, tinged with racist assumptions, about BLM. Scott has produced enough evidence that I’m giving it a second look. The story still has a few big holes in it, though, and I would not feel comfortable trying to defend it beyond “yeah that’s a weird coincidence”. Is it a story widely about policing? Is it a story more narrowly about riots? Is it a story about community support networks?
If we can advance that explanation beyond far-right sneering about black-on-black violence and riot whataboutism, I could feel comfortable discussing it with friends and colleagues.
Yes, you are absolutely correct that the right is fucking crazy and confused and stupid. What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Edit: For what it's worth, Brett's comment definitely seems hostile, but frankly if he had toned it down it would have just felt deceptively neutral instead to me. It's also an important point. If your argument is that the people ignoring the evidence are just a very small fringe, then showing the linked NYT article is very enlightening counterevidence on that very specific issue. It is certainly relevant evidence for the issue being focused on.
For you to then turn about and say "well, the same or even worse is true of Fox news" feels very, very much like a non sequitur. Your comment had the effect of pushing me towards "wow, I guess Brett S is right". Not a whole lot, but a measurable amount. Because you're clearly articulate and intelligent, and instead of coming back with an explanation as to why the NYT writing what it did is *not* indicative of the argument that Brett S makes, you came back with an argument that Fox is even worse when it's pretty clear that nobody disputes that Fox is worse.
And I was inclined to be more charitable to you than Brett at the start!
Yeah the fact that FoxNews is garbage 50% of the time, misleading 40% of the time, and ok 10% of the time, doesn't give the NYT some pass for only hitting 10/45/45 on those marks.
I don't like arbitrary thresholds for accuracy shy of that which is needed to actually get things right, which IME is pretty hard to reliably hit even for determined, talented actors. Convincing someone to ditch the NYT might not be doing them a favor depending on what replaces it.
I think ideally it would be replaced by thinking for yourself? I have no problem with people who use the NYT or FoxNews, if they are approaching them to the requisite amount of skepticism.
John, I guess I found it hard to take Brett's argument of "look at this NYT article, it's proof of liberal bias" seriously in a liberal space with a bone to pick with the NYT. We're having this discussion because Scott - and now a number of us - found the evidence compelling enough to revisit despite our skepticism.
I agree that the NYT not infrequently has an agenda and lets it drive the story, and that's a failing and they should be skewered until their behavior improves. I didn't respond to his charge because I felt the burden was still on him to prove that the failings of the NYT prove some larger story about liberals, against the backdrop of liberals practicing steelmanning. After all, the case was about the evidence being so compelling that even ideologues were forced to admit the truth to their readers.
Personally, I was moved by this article from "yeah, right" to "huh, that's weird". Previously, I had heard people on the right tell a story whose punchline is "and this is why Black people are bad", and I've heard that from them before and learned to tune it out. But in this case, Scott showed that there really was an effect and the timelines line up enough to be worth further study. And I don't believe that Scott has a racial bias, but his story ends with some serious blanks. I personally won't be fully convinced until I can explain the "physics" of the phenomenon. Why did it happen here? Did it also happen after Charlottesville or Occupy Wall Street or other kinds of protests or rallies? Vaguely gesturing at a community and saying "yeah when they're mad at other people and we don't police them they suddenly get violent against each other" seems insufficient. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying it my friends or family or colleagues. Again, I don't believe Scott is biased in that way, I think he just doesn't have the answer, and until he does and I do I won't be fully convinced.
This is a much better response, thank you. I am, myself, convinced; blm -> murder is plausible but unknown and should be investigated
I guess my problem then becomes: is this essay by Scott not the beginning of such an investigation? It feels like Scott started in the position you're in now, where it seemed more plausible than the NYT or the general liberal gestalt was willing to credit, and so he investigated, and a bunch of what he found lined up pretty well, so he publically said that his investigation made him move even closer to tthat position than he started. So far this all seems pretty reasonable. But (some of) the reaction he's getting is less reasonable, even here in these comments there are people saying that the very investigation he's doing is evil. This seems to strongly indicate that "even [if] the truth [were] obvious and right there, liberals [at the NYT at least would] willfully ignore it for ideological reasons"
Although, to me, this feels like moving the goal posts a bit and therefore feels yucky... it's definitely pretty close to the original Brett S claim that I objected to you objecting to
(And pivoting to point out that Fox news is even worse, definitely still feels like a non sequitor to me, I still don't understand why you said that in the first place)
I think in its current state the original essay is hard to swallow precisely because it's unfinished and ends abruptly. It's hard to live with uncomfortable questions - and doubly so while they're open. If there was some more specific claim like - to make up an example - "when both the police and lots of community leaders were at the BLM protests, gangs shot each other up" that was backed up by evidence, I'd personally be more comfortable with it. The longer we have the phenomenon but not the physics, the more we leave the door open for conspiratorial people to drum up cruel and baseless "explanations" based on their assumptions. And I don't think we should blame Scott for it, but I don't think we should be happy about it either.
This whole episode definitely indicates that even liberal spaces can contain people who ignore the truth for ideological reasons. But Brett S went beyond that, generalizing to say:
"The NYT articles show that even when the truth is obvious and right there, liberals willfully ignore it for ideological reasons. There is nothing 'fringe' about this from an epistemological perspective."
With "liberals willfully ignore ... nothing 'fringe' about this", Brett S is not saying some liberals; they're (he's?) saying all liberals. That's the sort of absurd defamation I was tilting at in the first place. If someone's view is that all liberals are hardened ideologues, who do they view as open-minded? I didn't even mention Fox News, their association with ideological radicalization of the right is strong enough that you (not unfairly) assumed that's where I was pointing.
When you say "BLM" are you referring to that ineffable-but-surely-good entity inhabiting the same space as "real communism?" Because I'm allowed to sneer at the actual-concrete-world organization that primarily exists to enrich Patrice Cullors, right?
If you consider "vaguely blaming for a rise in murder rate" to be a kind of sneering then maybe don't? But when you have a specific complaint, sure, go for it.
I think the straightforward explanation is that there was a pretty rapid and immediate adjustment in what police departments were telling their officers at nearly the same time there was more or less a rapid and immediate change in how people viewed police.
So you have more pissed off, less socially invested/trusting people being policed less.
The eroded police presence doesn't cause Sally the Asian non-profit worker to suddenly go commit violent crime, but it does cause Timmy the small time drug dealer to be more comfortable brining a gun to his transaction.
Point-of-use gun control is highly effective. A whole lot of shootings take place because somebody has an illegal handgun close at hand when they are feeling peeved. If you can persuade guys with illegal handguns that they better go hide them up in grandma's attic instead of carrying them around under the seat of the car, you'll get fewer shootings.
My impression as it was happening on May 28, 2020 was the Mayor of Minneapolis ordering the police to evacuate the Third Precinct police station and let the mob burn it down was a historic turning point toward chaos.
This is the big problem with the argument that "COVID was a global event, but the homicide spike only happened in America." The George Floyd/BLM protests were also a global event! There were protests on every continent including Antarctica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_George_Floyd_protests_outside_the_United_States A bunch of protests outside the US got quite rowdy. Just to give one example, on June 6, 2020 the US embassy in Mexico City had to be locked down due to violent anti-police brutality protests in the vicinity that saw cars being set on fire and businesses being vandalized. https://www.newsweek.com/us-embassy-mexico-city-locked-down-due-george-floyd-protests-1509112 Yet I've seen other people cite Mexico's *lack* of a homicide increase in 2020 as evidence for the BLM protests causing the homicide increase.
And as other people have pointed out, several of your graphs show an increase starting before May 25, not after it. Here's another graph that shows the same thing, scraped from the Gun Violence Archive that supposedly covers all of the firearm homicides in the country: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E20sKyAVEAAOAMk?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 It clearly shows an increase above 2019 levels starting in April, not at the end of May. The source is this blog post by none other than Steve Sailer, who claims it was sent in by a reader, so it clearly meets the Criterion of Embarrassment. https://www.takimag.com/article/the-racial-reckonings-new-normal-50-murders-per-day/
You might say that that still doesn't show an increase starting shortly after the pandemic. But we also have to take into account other effects of the pandemic. The most obvious is people spending a lot less time outdoors. Here's a graph of mobility in 2020 compared to 2019: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxre9dVEAQKqP4?format=jpg&name=medium It shows a massive decline starting in March, bottoming out in April, then returning to 2019 levels...in the middle of May. People are obviously less likely to commit murders when they spend less time outside, so this data massively confounds any time series data on homicide.
We would expect that more consumption of alcohol would lead to more alcohol-related murders. We would expect that more consumption of illegal drugs would lead to more drug dealers shooting each other. We would expect decreases in mobility to offset this in the period immediately after the pandemic started. We would expect this to hit black people harder than other races because black people are more likely to deal drugs (and probably even more likely to be involved in urban drug gangs that are more likely to get into violent territorial disputes with each other than IE meth-dealing biker gangs). It isn't that hard to think of reasons why this phenomenon might hit homicide numbers harder in America than in other countries. So it seems extremely plausible that at least some of the increase was due to changes in the consumption patterns of intoxicating substances, and at that point why not apply Occam's Razor?
I admit that one flaw in the alcohol and drugs theory is that Mexico didn't see a homicide increase in 2020, but it's possible that COVID border crossing restrictions made drug smuggling more difficult and that offset some of the impact on the Mexican drug scene.
And here's one thing that I have yet to get a good answer for from "Ferguson Effect" advocates: why wasn't there a homicide increase in Los Angeles following the 1992 riot, which was worse than anything that any single American city has experienced since then? Here's a graph of homicides in major American cities in the 90s: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQxUdYVVUAImPk6?format=png&name=medium Los Angeles doesn't stand out at all.
There was no major defund the police movement in the UK in the way there was in the US. The protests were not a result of a particular death in the UK - they were a copy of the US protests.
There's no reason that BLM should be accepted to have the same impact in the UK as the US. There's no evidence police felt any need to retreat from high % black areas in the UK,
>And here's one thing that I have yet to get a good answer for from "Ferguson Effect" advocates: why wasn't there a homicide increase in Los Angeles following the 1992 riot, which was worse than anything that any single American city has experienced since then?
Because the culture changed and the left have more institutional power and are more anti-police today than 30 years ago?
Read this post again. The 'Ferguson effect' is not that protests -> more crime. It's that the BLM movement resulted in police doing less policing. Unless you have evidence that there was less policing in the UK following these protests, then this isn't evidence against the Ferguson effect.
If the pandemic is the cause (which we should have low priors for because less people outside leads to less crime - see: winter), there was no crime spike in 2008. The idea that recessions lead to more crime is a narrative, nothing more.
And my argument is not that it was caused by economic hardship, my argument is that it was caused by increased drug and alcohol consumption, leading to more alcohol-fueled murders and more drug dealers shooting each other and so on. And we have plenty of data that is consistent with a large increase in drug and alcohol consumption in America during the pandemic. Alcohol purchases: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxq-bgVcAA5jKr?format=jpg&name=medium Drug overdose deaths: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxrSCuUcAADqZc?format=png&name=900x900 Combine that with the mobility data and I think it lines up quite well with the homicide time series graphs.
As Tom Wolfe said about the 1960s, we had a Happiness Explosion after George Floyd's death, which got a lot of people shot at parties and killed in car crashes.
What about the fallout from the Sarah Everard case? The vigil there was the result of a particular death in the UK and the response was a PR nightmare for the police.
I've said for a long time that the Sessions Effect of declining homicides petered out in mid-2019 and started going up again. But the post George Floyd levels of homicides and traffic fatalities are an extraordinarily high plateau.
Heritage has nothing to gain by using a less provokative title. The left have overwhelmingly demonstrated their hyperpartisanship on this issue and categorically are not interested in the truth on this issue. A strong claim, but when you have the peak "respectable" news site in the NYT basically reporting something they don't believe to be true, it shouldn't be a controversial claim.
> Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide.
That specific phrase, "demoralized police" was something that I took issue with, and made a comment on. The specific claim was not that police pulled back, it was that they were demoralized. And now in this article you say:
> I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back.
But in the previous article you directly attributes it to demoralization, which was what I took issue with, and why I left a comment there.
The evidence does seem to support the case that the protests (and related unrest, especially in black neighborhoods) led to an increase in the murder rate. Though from the stats here I'm not convinced that reduced policing is mediating this? If a policing pullback were the cause, I'd expect a murder spike earlier march/april when policing was reduced for the pandemic response. The Freddie Gray graph also shows a more gradual decline in arrests starting well before the protests, whereas the spike in murder rate was relatively abrupt and more tightly coupled to the protests.
I think Scott makes a good case for the pullback in policing that followed the BLM protests contributing to the 2020 homicide spike. But there's another factor that may have played at least as large, and I think even larger role: the social and economic stress caused by Covid.
One good measure of this additional stress is the number of overdose deaths. This from the CDC:
"Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before."
One can reasonably infer from this, and the increase in overall drug use it implies, that the emotional impact of Covid on the residents of low-income, inner-city areas, most of them living in relatively cramped conditions and with very few financial resources, must have been huge. The added stress falling upon a population with very easy access to guns, suffering acute financial distress and unprecedented social pressure, could have led to an increase in homicides that was unrelated to police withdrawal.
The timing of the spike in killings, a few months after the Covid lockdowns began, is at least as consistent with the evidence as the explosion in BLM street activism, which itself might have been, in part anyway, a consequence of the unparalleled intensity of social stressors in 2020-21.
Generally, blacks don't commit suicide all that much. American Indians and whites tend to be the most suicidal. It's one reason why so many whites are killed by cops relative to the threat of homicidal violence that whites pose: a lot of whites commit suicide by cop.
Would benefit from more discussion of 2021 and 2022. Here in New Orleans the murder rate is even higher this year, which it’s hard for me to plausibly attribute to BLM protests in the summer of 2020. Also the “pandemic started months earlier” point is unconvincing, could be that it’s prolonged isolation that causes breakdowns in relations
I live in Columbus Ohio. A city not in these charts. The city population is about 900,000 and the Metro is about 2.1 million. In the city of Columbus, murders did increase dramatically in 2020 and the city set a record with 175 murders. Whether or not it tracked the timing in other areas, I do not know. Whatever the reason, the spike continued and got worse in 2021 when there were 205 murders.
Just when you thought you knew what was going on, and for equally mysterious reasons, there have been only 62 murders as of June 25, 2022, the 176th day of the year. At that rate the number of murders will drop to about 130 a 37% decrease.
There have been no changes in the political leadership of the city since the beginning of 2020.
One off-the-cuff thought I have -- I was born in Columbus -- is that because of Columbus's history of ad hoc annexations of neighboring municipalities, it has unusually ragged and weird city borders, including in some of what I'd expect to be the highest-crime areas. Is it possible, then, that murders could shift back and forth over the line into Whitehall or Reynoldsburg in more or less arbitrary ways, creating more than usual noise in the year-to-year data?
Thanks for the heads up on the number. I fixed it.
As for annexations to the city of Columbus, it developed a policy of active annexation of unincorporated land before extending services in order to avoid being encircled. It began the 1950s at 40 sq mi and doubled in land area in 5 year. It is now 226 sq mi, extending into the next county to the north (Delaware).
However, cities are not able to annex areas that are incorporated cities, as is the case with Whitehall and Reynoldsberg. My guess from looking at the map I linked above is that most homicides have occurred in inner city areas that were part of Columbus before 1960.
One political change recently in Columbus was that that young cop who on April 20, 2021 made that amazing shoot to save the life of the girl in pink from the knife-wielding Ma’Khia Bryant (a police shooting that drove the NYT into a frenzy) was cleared this year:
"The case went to a grand jury and on March 11, 2022, it declined to charge officer Nicholas Reardon because there was not probable cause that he committed a crime."
That's exactly the kind of thing that encourages cops and discourages criminals.
I doubt that it had much political valence. The video's were so clear cut, that the usual suspects could not profitably use the case as a way to attack the police.
Despite the clarity of the video, the New York Times and Washington Post ran numerous articles about how horrible it was that Ma'K the Knife died for weeks after Officer Reardon heroically saved the girl in pink's life.
Police responses are almost certainly one mediating factor, but let's not overlook the simplest possibility: BLM implied that police all across America murder blacks; this made a lot of people really angry; angrier people are more likely to kill people. I suspect the Marxist founders of BLM would consider a spike in homicide a feature, not a bug. It both signifies an increase in revolutionary consciousness, and destabilizes the society to be overthrown.
That might be so if the anger were purely a result of one thing and one thing only, and a person logically deduced that he should express his anger by killing police or whites.
I don't see people as being that logical, particularly when they're killing in anger.
Also, I don't see homicide as a logical response to a particular stimulus. I see it as being more likely when someone is more angry, and I see anger over killings as being just one more thing to be angry about. Likely most of their anger is over something else entirely.
The "racial reckoning" wasn't just about how awful whites are, it was also about how awesome blacks are (e.g., everybody started capitalizing the word "Black" in July 2020 -- that sounds trivial but that episode of Reverential Capitalization was indicative of the National Mood). There is a lot of evidence that blacks got much more exuberant after May 25, 2020, which led to a lot of deaths of exuberance, such as dying in shootings at parties and in car crashes.
This isn't a tight empirical/causal argument so the level of confidence in these statements exceed the available evidence. For example, what if the pandemic caused BLM and both had contributions to homicide. The level of data storytelling presented here could be explained by this same model and we're back at square one.
It's clear that the media has an agenda - and perhaps they left the conclusion to this unusually and purposefully vague. However, I think that vagueness is the right answer to reach, however inconsistent, and "data" presented here is short of being the evidence needed to match the confidence of your claims.
Any amount of causal reasoning, lets say you take this graphical causal model approach, can always be confounded by unmeasured confounders. Unless there's some good exogenous variation in this protest factor, you're not going to recover an estimate of this effect. State the model and run the regression. This back of the envelope causal reasoning is just as flimsy as your usual journalistic storytelling.
- if we want to talk about policing policy in the US we should focus on US as our sample
- if we want to make a more than n = 1 claim about a poilcy - we should breakdown our units of observation within the country of concern (US) into numbers great enough to have statistical inference between a comparable group of units that were more heavily affected and less heavily affected by covid - a statistical t-test can then get us at a reasonably rigorous answer about these effects. not this back of the envelope pointing at time series trends in data.
this is an important point too, how a police force responds to BLM could vary as well and that response could be a) dependent on the environmental factors in the community they serve and b) have implications for what the actual learned policy is (less policing? better policing? police depts fudging the stats we're looking at?)
so i wasn't able to dig up any great evidence on the impacts of policing on societal outcomes but i was able to find one on the enforcement of police arrests on social welfare outcomes through the pre-trial detention channel:
by not detaining arrested folks pre-trial we see statistically significant drops in future arrests/crime (less obvious) as well as welfare benefits for the individual (more obvious). this amounts to $55,143 and $99,124 of social welfare impacts per released defendant depending on how you "value" deterrence of various types of future crime.
this leverages some random variation on how bail judges are assigned so you're not using your usual granger causality type arguments for making these claims. not perfect but a much stronger argument than these interrupted time series methodologies.
here's another finding similar affects on future crime in boston:
happy to discuss more of this if needed. unfortunately the direct effects of policing doesn't have a good empirical paper out here. the best we have is the enforcement of policing at the district attorney level.
These aren't binary cause and effects. Pandemic could've created a set of social circumstances that made protest more likely, how is this n = 1 Ferguson example definitive proof otherwise?
If you're going to be nitpicky about the confidence level of statements it behooves you to not say blatantly untrue things like the pandemic could've caused BLM, which is obviously impossible and only requires an n=1 example to disprove because time is linear.
I think the issue of guns is kind of too easily hand waved here.
The idea that, because most guns in the US are bought by white people they can't have an impact on a subcommunity seems specious.
For example, people buying weaponry to smuggle down into Mexico is not a large proportion of US gun sales. But, if you then said, therefore the availability of guns from the US is not a factor in making the Mexican cartel wars super violent, it would be wrong.
Similar with all those countries that aren't awash in guns that didn't see a spike in the murder rate.
I like the article and I find it mostly convincing as a whole.
If you look at the proportion of households that own guns it's not that different, 26% in Canada compared to 32% in the US in Scott's old article about homicide rates. I'd guess the difference is that the US has a lot more blacks with handguns than those other countries.
One part which I don't understand is the relationship between people choosing to commit more murders and the decline in police presence/action/screening or perhaps it is the anger stirred up by the protests and angry people kill more often, just like hot people do with more summer murders. Are we just x amount of irritation away from attacking each other to death?
I get random stops by police might cause an arrest for illegal firearm possession or something which then prevents a murder by removing the gun and interrupting a crime of passion....but can that really add up to so many more murders?
I get we look at the protests and we look at the police actions...but no one is saying it is the police or protesters themselves going around murdering people. It is random other people killing more.
Do people who want to kill think they are less likely to be caught and decide to kill more often? Are we saying that police presence and actions to arrest for minor crimes are a huge deterrent and/or they interrupt such rare events by harassing the general population? Or a targeted population of young men of a certain race? It just seems like you could stop thousands of people and not interrupt or stop a single murder.
One factor which is hard to pin down is if the desire or circumstances for murder to occur have themselves gone up. Which I don't understand. The police killed a black guy one didn't know, so one is going to go out and also murder some other guy?
I don't get the logic...I saw only 3 police patrols instead of 7 police patrols in my neighbourhood over the past week....time to go kill someone?! I don't get it. Is seeing a few cops and a handful of extra guns or drugs taken off the streets here and there really the reason people choose to kill others or not? It isn't like murder isn't already very very illegal with heavy penalties. Or that a lower police patrol rate means you think the cops are going to work less hard in a murder investigation? Do killers think this?
Is a 10% or 20% less likelihood of feeling like you'll get caught the threshold for people to go out and commit the murders they already wanted to commit? Is that all that separates life from death for so many victims of murder? Are gangs just going nuts because there might be a 30% reduced rate of cops driving around?
I just feel like something is missing here. Do people want to kill more than before? Do they want to kill but feel like they were being held back and those barriers are gone? Is killing like other crime from the 'broken windows' hypothesis and simply needs a context? Killing seems like far less of a crime of opportunity than shoplifting does and context feels very weak as an explanation. But again, summer murders are higher, so maybe context matters far more than I'm thinking?
I suppose people just wanted to murder each other more in 2020. Why do americans like to murder so much more than other nations. Perhaps there are tipping points or thresholds of poverty or population or gun ownership or gang violence or drugs and despair or undemocratic abusive workplaces, but even when you 'control' using statistics for the number of guns or whatever...the US murder rates are higher. And that's not even counting the invasions, wars, or drone strikes of the american empire!
I think the "normies" show up in the big increase in traffic fatalities. The urge to have a few drinks and drive 100 mph doesn't mark you as a member of the hard-core criminal element, it's just a fun thing that younger people do more when they feel less likely to get pulled over by the police. (3 recent NFL first-round draft picks have been in fatal car crashes recently, and one Kentucky basketball player who was headed for the first round of the NBA draft.
Among normie blacks, fear of the police dropped like a rock after George Floyd's death and black traffic fatalities were 55% higher in June 2020 than in June 2019, which is a crazy difference. (Car crash deaths tend to be pretty stable year to year.)
Among the hard-core criminal element (the kind who bring illegal hand guns to parties), I'd say that they were getting more restless and shooty from some point in 2019. Still, the horrific levels monthly homicides have reached and more or less stabilized at since George Floyd's death through 2021 was not predictable from the pre-May 25, 2020 data.
For weird reasons I've read a lot about this issue so here are a few points I want to raise wrt to your argument:
- Using only city data seems like it could be misleading if you're making conclusions about a murder spike that happened nationally. CDC data is probably more useful here if you're interested in figuring out the timing of the spike. The CDC found that murder was already up 20% nationwide in April 2020 and up almost 30% for blacks. Then there was an additional spike in June after the protests started.
- The causality of the protests on the murder spike is kinda dubious even though part of the spike does line up with the protests beginning. I brought this up in a previous post but the 2020 BLM protests saw an outpouring of young people, particularly black and in urban areas, into the streets after months of lockdown. When tons of young people start all coming out into public at once, you're going to get a rise in murders no matter whether police behavior changes or not. For example holiday weekends in the summer (i.e. the 4th of July) are often the deadliest times of the year for murder because people are socializing all over the place and you end up with tons of drive-by shootings and the like. So based on this you could explain the spike by saying that propensity to murder was already up before the protests (which I think is born out in the CDC murder stats) but lockdowns were holding people back a bit from actually carrying out murders - until, that is, the protests hit and the dam of social distancing broke.
- Interestingly murder went way up in 2020 but almost all other crimes didn't. Both police reports and victimization surveys (which don't rely on changes in police reporting) corroborate this. So this begs the question of why, if de-policing caused a murder surge, it didn't cause a surge in other crimes as well. Is murder just unusually sensitive to changes in policing, compared to other crimes? It's possible, but the difference would have to be huge to explain the lack of any changes in, for instance, theft and robbery.
> So this begs the question of why, if de-policing caused a murder surge, it didn't cause a surge in other crimes as well.
Murders are much better reported and harder to ignore than other crime, maybe for other crime increase had also lowering in reporting rate, leading to inconclusive effects?
For example, crime in CHAZ could be mostly not reported - but murders still would be.
This is a good point but the lack of an increase in non-murder crime also shows up in the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks people directly what crimes they've been a victim of in the past year instead of relying on police.
This is me speculating rather than being informed by any kind of knowledge of criminological studies. But I think it does make sense to expect murder to be especially sensitive to changes in policing.
Murder isn't particularly opportunistic with respect to motive. Generally speaking, you kill people to get back at them for something. They stole your drugs, double-crossed you, have dirt on you, killed one of your people, etc. If you kill them 2 or 5 or 10 years later, that still has pretty much the same deterrent effect. You can afford to lie in wait for the right moment.
On the other hand, murder is extremely opportunistic with respect to enforcement. If you get caught doing it, the state will likely either kill you or put you away for a long, long time. It's not like breaking and entering where you can sort of expect to skate. The system either manages to pin the crime on you or it doesn't.
Consequently, it's a big deal whether the police are sort of around in the neighborhood and will hear the gunshots, find the body within 24 hours, be able to locate witnesses and roll up on you while memories are still fresh and some forensic evidence is still findable. The cops declare a de facto holiday on that, and murder is likely to be the crime that most noticeably manifests. There's a backlog of desired murders that every would-be murderer now sees an occasion to clear.
> Murder isn't particularly opportunistic with respect to motive.
I don't think this is necessarily true though. People who kill someone out of a personal grievance are probably not going to feel just as angry about that grievance years later, or even months later to be honest. So I doubt anger strong enough to drive murder is something that usually lingers for long - consider that one of the best individual-level predictors of violent crime is low impulse control. Although to be fair there are situations like organized crime where killers will wait years for just the right moment.
I doubt if there were a huge number of murders at BLM marches proper. Having thousands of witnesses you don't know around, lots of TV cameras, tons of cops, and you aren't on your home turf isn't conducive to the shooting spirit.
Instead, black on black mass shootings (4 or more struck by bullets), which exploded in 2020 tend to take place at black social events in neighborhoods where everybody knows snitches get stitches.
Somehow this reminds me of a tweet thread I saw recently presenting a study that paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN instead. The author made it out to be about the pitfalls of partisan media in general—they just happened to pick fox because it matched the current administration. But pretty clearly the big selling point was that it confirmed liberals’ biases about right wing media without requiring them to face up to any of their own media’s blind spots.
Wonder what a study would look like that paid NYT readers to follow ACX for a while.
Has anyone bothered to see if all-causes deaths went up by the amount indicated by the increase in reported murders? Meaning, did more people die in those communities because there were more murders, or were there the same number of deaths and more were officially classified as murders?
Because, maybe I'm getting a biased view from listening to liberal-minded podcasts and interviews and articles on this subject, but it really feels to me like official crime statistics have more to do with what the police are incentivized to report than with the actual amount of crime happening. And they were certainly incentivized to report an increase in black-on-black crime immediately following the protests.
It look like the spike is something like a 50% increase immediately, dropping back to baseline over a few months. Do I think police have enough wiggle room in how they report things to invent such a spike in their statistics even with zero change in actual rates? I think it's plausible, yes - that seems like an increase of 1 homicide per 100k citizens per month, not a huge number of bodies to reclassify.
Classify some marginal things as homicide instead of manslaughter or accidental death. Does the coroner usually take 2 months to file cause of death paperwork? Get them to dump the backlog this week and speed up the process this month. Do you often ignore people who look like gang members or criminals when they try to report a crime? Take the report this time.
I feel like this wouldn't be hard to do, especially if your previous incentive was to keep the reported numbers as low as possible to look good to your superiors, so you're starting from an artificially depressed baseline.
I'm not claiming to be an expert or know for sure that this is happening or could happen, but from everything I've heard about police departments being driven by arrest metrics and community-safety metrics and how this has affected reporting over the years, I'm surprised this isn't one of the first hypotheses tested for whenever the crime numbers do something odd.
Because of articles like this one saying that BLM caused decreased policing and decreased policing caused more murders. Overwhelmingly powerful narrative in favor of shutting up and being thankful for police and giving them more funding.
As opposed to the 10,000 articles about how overwhelming wonderful BLM is, there's the combined might of Scott, Heather Mac Donald, Charles Fain Lehman, Tucker Carlson, and myself perpetrating a giant hoax by claiming that lots more black people were getting shot when they were really just dying of a special type of covid whose symptoms happen to look like bullet holes in the chest.
If you look at the CDC homicide data, it jumps by 50% soon afterward and was still ~50% elevated a year later. I suspect (without knowing or checking) that the CDC does not separate out homicides from manslaughters (manslaughter seems to be considered a type of homicide).
I'm having trouble tracking down the specifics with Google, so commentary from someone with direct knowledge would be appreciated.
But as far as I can tell from this: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ntmh.pdf, the CDC numbers are coming from the 'cause of death' field of death certificates written by coroners, and state laws require that coroners investigate all deaths ruled a homicide by the police.
Meaning the CDC numbers are in a real sense downstream of the police numbers, and certainly not an independent counting.
Yes, they have overlapping/common sources, so they're not "independent counting". But there are some differences between them that would allow for detecting the most obvious fudging. For example in your OP you say "classify some marginal things as homicide instead of manslaughter". That won't really help in the CDC data, which includes negligent homicides (aka what you are almost certainly thinking of as manslaughter) among the standard homicide count.
(In your link: "Homicides reported through the NVSS are classified according to the ICD system into two general categories: homicide or legal intervention. Both intentional and negligent homicides are defined as “homicides” in the NVSS, which makes no judgment of criminal intent. The legal intervention deaths in NVSS generally align with the FBI definition of “justifiable homicide,” while the single NVSS category of “homicide” includes the SHR’s two categories of intentional and negligent homicide. Unlike the SHR, the NVSS homicide classification includes assault by the crashing of a motor vehicle, but this category generally accounts for less than 100 deaths per year.3")
So fudging categories at the margin won't really help. You either need large scale fraud - e.g. invert the common trope and start calling lots of Covid deaths of Black people homicides, or you need to fake dead bodies from somewhere. The odds you give to either of these should be reallllllllly low.
Yea, the examples you gave don't make any sense....I charitably thought they were off the top of your head as part of a longer comment, and was giving you the chance to elaborate how one can invent murders at scale. I guess that was the best you had?
> Does the coroner usually take 2 months to file cause of death paperwork? Get them to dump the backlog this week and speed up the process this month.
The date the cause of death is filed is not the same as the date of the death....if a person dies in January and the coroner processes it in March, it doesn't show up in the records as a murder occurring in March. Also, we're talking about a sustained increase in murder, not a one-time spike that can be exhausted by spending down a backlog.
> Do you often ignore people who look like gang members or criminals when they try to report a crime? Take the report this time.
What is your impression of what "not taking a report" looks like, in the case of homicide? Leave a bullet-ridden body in the street and hope that nobody notices until the crows pick it over (even after that...skeletons in the street are not normal)? The fundamental point here is that, unlike many other violent crimes (rape, assault), murders have to deal with the physical evidence of a body with violent injuries. Systematically hiding murders at the scale we're talking about is beyond a fake-the-moon-landing level of conspiracy. Like at a basic level, where do the bodies go? How much of society has to be in on this ongoing conspiracy for it not to leak?
> Classify some marginal things as homicide instead of manslaughter or accidental death.
This is the only idea that makes any sense, but I'm skeptical that you can subvert the profession of medical examiner enough to make this happen at scale. Not quite as batshit crazy as your other suggestions, though.
>.if a person dies in January and the coroner processes it in March, it doesn't show up in the records as a murder occurring in March.
Yes, that is how it would work if the system was run by competent scientists concerned with providing accurate data for analysis.
How sure are you that's how it works in reality?
Because during Covid, there were lots of concerns early on about weird cyclical spikes in cases in various areas, which turned out to be based on when cases were reported in batches by various agencies and added to databases al at once.
This type of thing is not uncommon. Creating clean, easily analyzed data is not a naturally intuitive thing that all human beings inherently strive for. You actually have to work really hard to make people do it, and they still don't do it anyway most of the time.
Maybe you're correct and the system is both designed to get that right and never fails even when there is heavy institutional pressure to make it fail for specific political reasons. But it certainly wouldn't be my first guess.
What is your impression of what "not taking a report" looks like, in the case of homicide? Leave a bullet-ridden body in the street and hope that nobody notices until the crows pick it over
>What is your impression of what "not taking a report" looks like, in the case of homicide? Leave a bullet-ridden body in the street and hope that nobody notices until the crows pick it over
I imagine their family would arrange a funeral? Like what normally happens in a normal world?
I'm having a really hard time understanding how you think the world works. Police aren't the only way that bodies can ever be managed, they're in fact not involved in the majority of body collection and funeral situations.
> but I'm skeptical that you can subvert the profession of medical examiner enough to make this happen at scale.
Again, I think you're imagining fantastical things, like a vast conspiracy to make coroners knowingly lie. Instead of normal things, like coroners always making probabilistic best-guesses anyway, and those guesses being heavily influenced by what the police tell them about the surrounding circumstances, and their decision criteria in 51%-likely cases being vulnerable to being shifted 5% by what the police tell them and a general attitude about what people they work with/for will be happier to see on their reports.
To hopefully put this (rather silly/unlikely, imho) doubt to bed, it is not in fact that hard to check the all cause mortality data.
Since looking at all causes adds a tonne of noise, it makes sense to focus on the demographic where Black homicides / Ferguson effects are concentrated, and see if total mortality rises there too. The majority of all Black homicide victims are males aged 15-34, and this other mortality is relatively low for this group (since it is young). Indeed, across recent years, homicide is approx 1/3 deaths for this group. Here's what we see.
It looks pretty clear to me that the same spike we see in overall Black homicide deaths is evident in Black male 15-34 yo homicide deaths. Furthermore, there is a pretty clear concurrent spike in all cause mortality for this latter demographic group that persists as of a year later. Hopefully that puts your question to bed. (P.S. If you respond to this saying "but the jump in all cause mortality occurs in week X rather than week Y" I am not going to dignify it with a response. You ask for a series that has more noise, you get a series that has more noise).
No, these weren't some kind of "marginal homicides" (whatever that would be.) There was an explosion in shootings. In fact, woundings were up more than killings: e.g., people shot in NYC went up 100% but people killed only went up 40%. All evidence (e.g., Shot Spotters in cities with that technology) points toward a lot more shots being fired in anger during the George Floyd era.
And of course the framing of this conclusion as "right wing" is a political construct in itself - assuming that suburban whites won't care why policing declined because they're so fearful and easy to manipulate (having been a suburban white surrounded by suburban whites my whole life, I'm not sure they're wrong).
David Simon, for instance, just did a whole mini-series about how, yes crime has gone up due to police protest, and how that makes police a bunch of cowards who don't deserve the public trust.
You can ideologue with any data, and I won't even be mad. The annoying bit is the strategizing. I don't care what you think, just say that thing and not the thing you think you need to say to make me think what you think.
This made me wonder about homicide rates after the LA riots. This Time Mag article points out that immediately afterwards “In May and June, only four people were killed, down from twenty-two during the same period in 1991. Drive-by shootings fell by nearly 50 percent from 1991 to 1992, and gang-related homicides by 62 percent.” The decrease is primarily attributed to the effects of the formal truce and peace pact agreement between the Crips and the Bloods the day before the riots. So this essentially supports your hypothesis as well.
Why do you say this supports the hypothesis? Crime falling because of non-police reasons doesn’t seem to imply that a modern police pullback caused crime to increase.
It’s not just like crime fell randomly for non-police reasons, crime fell at the very moment that data tells us we should expect it to spike. Why? Because the gangs started to police themselves. If not but for the historic gang truce the LA homicide rate would likely have exploded due to less organized policing in the riot aftermath. If hypothetically there’d been a widely-accepted violence-reducing truce prior to Ferguson, etc. maybe the crime rates would not have spiked as they did. So I do think he’s on to something regarding the trend being related to policing in crime prone areas following these events, as purposeful gang self-policing in this case measurably reduced crime.
I agree that the LA data doesn't prove that policing *doesn't* affect murder, but your conclusion that it shows policing *does* affect murder is entirely based off a hypothetical that just begs the question.
I agree it is not definitive evidence, it just seems to support his hypothesis. What do you think? Do you think the post-event crime spikes are related to a lack of policing?
In “Votes, Drugs and Violence,” Trejo & Ley make the argument that in a society with some corruption (overlap of bandits with govt&police), periods of political upheaval generate ripples through the bandit-establishment interface. This triggers turf wars among bandits, leading to increased killings. It can be as direct as “the leader of the corrupt police was promoted & left the city, so now other corrupt police and their factions in the bandit community are battling for control.) In order to have a society with fewer bandit killings, the corruption has to reach a steady state with leadership hierarchies that are clear to those involved.
Is this the mechanism by which changes in protest behavior cause increased murders? I don’t know how tightly the police-bandit connection is held in these cities.
I do wonder if, rather than A caused B, perhaps both A and B are caused by a different C, not the pandemic. Perhaps whoever organizes protests made friends among the bandits and conducted a two-pronged campaign, political street protests to weaken police plus community violence to weaken the community & establish dominance over underground economies.
I could imagine that happening in, say, Chicago in the 1960s when Senator Percy was playing around with the Blackstone Ranger gang. But the BLM 2 Era shooting rise happened almost everywhere almost all at once. Nobody has that kind of organizational ability. Instead, it was cultural contagion through social and mass media.
The fact that you need this many graphs to demonstrate this to smart readers is the reason I'm giving up on smart people. They are worse than dumb people.
Need pages of sources to tell you that there's a correlation between a spike in the murder rate, and the most expensive riot in US history--which happened at the same time, occurred because of the police, coincided with a widely-broadcasted pullback in policing, and of which oodles of videos of the reality were available. Gunfire going off like popcorn in all directions.
Also need pages and pages of sources to tell you that women are not the same as men.
Need pages of sources to prove anything that an effete intellectual would find unpleasant if it were true.
Videos can be cherry-picked and sensationalized. Media coverage can be biased. Memories of what happened a year or two ago can be foggy. So I'm still going with the statistics. It seems like proving this sort of thing is what statistics is for?
Statistics can be cherry-picked, manipulated and presented in biased ways.
Cherry picking direct experiential evidence is only possible when the evidence would otherwise have existed in the null hypothesis.
If someone posts a study saying that men's and women's brains are the same, you can either jump off an intellectual cliff and cannonball into a sea of blinkered absurdity, or you can hazard a guess that such studies have flaws based on the fact that you live on this planet. And they did.
All information that lands in your brain comes from somewhere. There is a time and a place for learning counter-intuitive truths through rigorous analysis of the data--but there is also time (most of the time) for believing the obvious unless there is a compelling argument to the contrary. Especially in an environment where the truth is increasingly irrelevant, and everyone has a strong motivation to bamboozle you for political reasons.
I put in my time reading tens of thousands of "interesting facts of the day" on RSS feeds, many of them counter-intuitive. But this has led to a world where people will just let you tell them stuff if you dress it up correctly.
Thanks for the laugh: “Based on the fact you live on this planet.” I’d say a lot of research happens to try to prove what it already believed (confirmation bias masquerading as science) rather than a disinterested inquiry by means of falsification.
"If someone posts a study saying that men's and women's brains are the same"
Being old enough to have seen both sides of this debate, I do remember the days when it was "men's brains and women's brains are different, the poor little dears just can't process things like reason and logic" and "men are naturally smarter, they have bigger brains than women" (the Harry Enfield skit is extreme, but only in an exaggerated way of this line of thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w)
So I do understand, and am sympathetic to, the first strain of feminism which fought for "women's and men's brains are functionally identical, women can think logically and do 'male' work like STEM".
Then it went to "there is *no* difference between women and men, and if you say that on average over the global population men tend to be greebs and women tend to be meebs, you are a sexist pig" and I can't agree with that.
But then it kept right on swinging to "of course men's brains and women's brains are different, tee-hee! I have a girly brain, that is why I am a real girly who likes girly things even if the silly old doctors insisted I was a boy when I was born!" and the kind of presentation of a person like this, where if I dare to say "that is *not* a woman, however they want to socially gender present themselves which is a different matter" then yeah, I'm a bigot pig: https://rdrama.net/images/16563440260631292.webp
I find your idea of "obvious" to be rather strange. Little about crime is obvious to me, because it rarely happens in front of me. I'm not a cop and I don't hang out in the streets. I don't work in a store. Honestly, I don't leave the house much since the pandemic. Why should anything be obvious?
Or do you mean it should be obvious from reading the news, or from social media? Why should that be? Should I believe other people's accounts? Which ones?
The big advantage to being smart is being _able_ to change one's mind – in the right/correct/true direction!
Yes, 'smart' people are also better at convincing/deceiving themselves about all kinds of things, but 'dumb' people are still worse at recognizing that, let alone fixing it.
Police do useful work *and* commit atrocities. Probably the same is true of the justice system in general. What policies would help maintain or increase the useful work while making atrocities less likely?
Honestly I think a lot of sentencing reform would help reduce the adversarial relationship police have with these communities, which could help these problems a lot.
Like, the atrocities are eye-catching and become nucleation sites for outrage, but atrocities are not needed for police to be dangerous and harmful presences in poor communities. Just enforcing the laws as written and acting within their SOP is enough to decimate heavily-policed communities, since almost everyone in the country is a criminal (I pirate jaywalk, speed, etc) and since the penalties for everything are extremely heavy (especially if you're poor and can't afford fines).
I’d like to think our society is capable of going down this sensible road. Too often, people will say this is what they want while actually tending to much shorter term selfish goals.
I like what "Graham" has written – he's been commenting here on ACX but also has his own blog on Substack that I've found to the best policing blog since Peter Moskos stopped blogging.
It seems to me like there's a great deal of evidence here that around the time of George Floyd's murder, and a couple other high-profile police killings, there was immediately after a spike in homicides.
But it doesn't seem like any of the above data proves, or even really provides strong evidence for the idea that, it was because of the specific mechanisms you state.
Here is a way to test the theory - do homicides increase after killings *of police*? I would think that actual cops being killed is a bigger cause of cops being afraid to do their job, then BLM protesters.
Deaths of police on the job went way up in 2020, but IIRC the increase was due to cops dying of COVID.
Seems like it could be a bit of both. But Scott cited a police fear of being punished severely for any mistake - why would they be more worried about that than actually being killed? Especially when cops actually being held accountable for excessive force seems to be pretty uncommon.
Just because people know it's a job with a risk of being killed doesn't mean magnitude of risk doesn't matter. If suddenly the rate of car crashes goes up, you might want to drive less or be more careful when you drive, even though you've always known there was a risk.
And the risk of being killed is more stark than the risk of being fired or something, especially how often police are *not* disciplined for these sorts of things. I actually would think that if police are pulling back after efforts to punish them for normal policework like putting your knee on someone's neck for 9 minutes until they're dead, it's probably less about fear and more about resentment/payback.
The assassination during the first BLM Era of two NYPD officers on December 20, 2014 by a BLM supporter led to a soft mutiny by NYPD against Mayor De Blasio, and a rise in killings. Eventually, the mayor backed down in his war with the cops and the cops went back to doing what they do and crime fell.
It also appears there was an NYPD slowdown in 2019 after the cop who killed Eric Garner was fired. Another data point to look at considering that it didn't happen contemporaneously with a high-profile shooting of anyone, it was 5 years after the triggering incident. In any case none of these seem to have had the major impact that happened with Floyd.
There's no shortcut! You have to use your own judgement, or at least pick someone and use their own judgement by proxy.
There's no escape from having to trust _someone_!
But this is a BIG topic that Scott's covered, e.g. 'bounded distrust', and basically all of modern 'rationality'.
But it's certainly easier to 'triangulate' multiple sources than try to 'score' a single source in some kind of absolute sense.
I also appreciate people that even just _share_ their reasoning, even if I disagree with them about specific facts or conclusions derived from them.
Trying to 'reverse' Gell-Mann's Amnesia helps, i.e. go back and 'de-trust' sources for which you know they've overreached/misrepresented something that you, personally, DO know about.
Unrelated to the content of the post, but I much preferred the plain white background to the new pale blue background. Just my two graphic design cents.
I find "plain white" to be a _little_ 'too bright' generally and myself prefer 'muted' colors like the current background. It's _probably_ easier to read as-is.
A couple of reasons for thinking covid played a sizable role in the U.S.:
When I was a kid watching Westerns, the term "masked man" was synonymous with bandit. I suspect that encouraging masked men to roam the streets contributed to the return of car-jacking during the pandemic.
Also, lots of dangerous people were released from lock-ups during the lock-downs due to fears of infections in jails and the like. Of course, this was also something the Establishment had been wanting to do since the war on mass incarceration got going about a decade ago, so it's hard to disentangle covid and wokeness.
Similarly, both covid and wokeness played a role in the war on college admissions testing: in-person testing was called off in 2020, and then many colleges announced they were getting rid of testing, to one extent or another, to fight racism. I call this the Not So Great Reset in which temporary expedients during the worse of the pandemic feed into long-term changes in directions the Woke had been wanting to go.
Portland had 4 homicides in the first 6 months of 2020 and 55 in the last 6 months. The only thing that changed from the first half of the year to the second was that BLM and Antifa became very "active" in the city so I think we can all guess why the homicide spike occurred
I understand THAT this is supposed to be some sort of right-wing point, but I don't understand WHY without some SERIOUSLY uncharitable assumptions about how the right-wingers making the point think about black people. After all, the idea of a police strike, by which police are punishing communities for their insolence by failing to properly protect them from violent crime, would seem to me to be a pretty LEFT-WING point about toxic police culture.
On a tangential note, a few weeks ago my wife called the police because there was an African man sitting in a crosswalk drinking hard liquor at about two in the afternoon. The police arrived, helped him up, and took him aside to politely ask him if he was doing OK, how much he'd had to drink, and whether he needed medical help. The man was obviously somewhat indignant, feeling racially profiled, but my wife was not the first person to call the police, because he was sitting IN A CROSSWALK and was clearly not doing great. At no point was anyone in danger of being arrested, jailed, shot, strangled, or hurt in any way, because this was in Germany, where police are generally well trained and disposed to be helpful and resolve situations as peacefully as possible. This is policing that is actually useful.
Right, but the idea that this is an INHERENTLY right-wing idea seems clearly wrong, unless everyone is going around with beliefs about black communities that are too odious to write.
In 2017, Berlin, Germany had an _order of magnitude_ more police officers per annual homicide (approximately 17,000 officers / 91 homicides = 187 officers per homicide) as 2019* Minneapolis, Minnesota had (approximately 900 officers / 48 homicides = 18.7).
When police officers have an order of magnitude lower rate of having to deal with killers than Minneapolis PD officers (like they do in Berlin or wealthy American suburbs), they quite obviously have _much_ more margin to be helpful and polite (and intervene in cases that aren't obviously crimes) rather than suspicious and wary (and skipping simple welfare checks in favor of dealing with actual crime), even before considering the long-term psychological/social coarsening effects of being in a group that is exposed to so much more violent crime.
"Policing that is actually useful" starts with enough police officers relative to criminals that they can actually be of use. Germany has that, parts of the US have that . . . and cities like Minneapolis don't.
So, of course, the people who want American cops to behave more like Berlin police call for defunding the already vastly-overworked US urban police departments.
*2019 is _before_ both the homicide spike discussed in this article and a recent one-third decline in the number of MPD officers. The situation is now obviously much worse than it was then.
1) Berlin-2017 had twice as many officers per capita as Minneapolis-2019, so Minneapolis-2019 was under-policed by a factor of two relative to Berlin-2017 even before considering homicide rate . . . unless you believe residents of Minneapolis are half as likely to take action that should be met with a police response as the average Berliner.
2) The US non-gun homicide rate equals or exceeds the German total homicide rate, even in the face of the substitution effect where it's much easier to kill with guns and not particularly hard to get one in the US. So if you're not policing Americans under the assumption they're more prone to violence than Germans, you're refusing to deal with reality.
3) The guns are in the US regardless, and accordingly are a facet of reality that American police have to deal with.
So, Minneapolis-2019 was under-policed by somewhere between a factor of two and ten compared to Berlin-2017. You want Minneapolis police to act like German police, the force needs to be massively expanded from 2019 levels, not (as happened) cut by a third.
More police and higher quality police are not opposites. However, America has an unfortunate record of getting extremely poor ROI on investment in public goods, whether it be mass transit or public safety or health care, so no matter how much money is spent, I have to question whether America can ever achieve the quality of life enjoyed by many European countries. Goes to show the limits of GDP in measuring standard of living, I suppose.
>More police and higher quality police are not opposites
Maybe it is, beyond a point. If you hire some number of policemen (say, 100k), you can assume that these 100k are the best you can find (or at least the best at fitting the recruitment process). If you hire another 100k just after, then you can assume this 2nd group are (mostly) those that failed to reach the top the first time.
If the population that wants to be a policeman is limited (and it has to be, it seems to be a shit job, per policemen testimonies), then I wouldn't be surprised if you reached the bottom of the barrel quite quickly.
Lowering the average quality of the police applicant as a consequence of increasing enrolment is only inevitable if the pool of applicants is fixed. I can envisage that changes in the job conditions/oversigbt /public standing/benefits could be made such that some qualified people who nowadays would not touch that job migjt decide to apply. Not easyto do, ofc, like any social change
I see it more as a reflection of the modern extreme left, who like to claim that police are of no benefit to society and should be abolished. (It sounds like a dumb straw man, but it's not, here in the states. Though it is fringe).
Under this view, the fact that less policing leads to more homicide is actually a surprise, because the police weren't stopping homicides; just oppressing people or whatever.
...
I hope there's a conservation law about dumb politics, because I would hate it if I'm living in the only country with discourse this dysfunctional.
Having spent equal parts of my life in the USA and Germany, the police in the USA are of tremendously less benefit and I can understand why Americans might conclude they're a waste of money. As a white guy in a fairly white place, I learned from both explicit instruction and several unpleasant experiences (my own and those of friends) that under no circumstances should you ever call the police, talk to the police, or interact with them if you can possibly avoid it. The police can only hurt you, not help you, I was told by a teacher who was a white, buzzcut-sporting retired 82nd Airborne artilleryman. To this day, every time I see a Crown Vic, my stomach drops.
I guess it's a bit like public transit: American public transit is so horrendous that quite a lot of people ask why it should get any funding at all, and you can kind of see their point.
That could be the universal experience (it's not, as my experience is different. Also white) and it would still appear to be worthwhile, according to the data in the article we're commenting on. Well, depending on how many fewer inconveniences are worth an extra homicide (note: I know that *enough* inconveniences actually can add up to a death in terms of tradeoffs we choose to make in society all the time. From what I observe, it's not enough inconveniences in this case.)
Higher quality policing, including potentially more police officers, is absolutely a necessity. The protests were sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, an obvious outrage that a jury confirmed was, in fact, murder. Yet blaming the protests against a police murder for the rise in homicides, whose proximate cause was not the protests themselves but reduced policing seems to be offering up an insidious choice: the implicit bargain being offered is to look the other way on cops murdering people with impunity or else they won't do their jobs at all. That understandably ruffles feathers.
“the implicit bargain being offered is to look the other way on cops murdering people….”Congratulations for being quite near the first person to write this explicitly. Others have danced around this but not put it into so many words. Presumably because they feel, as you said earlier, it’s too odious to write.
That’s sad. I’ve met both great and awful cops. But not when I was personally involved. I’d certainly exercise extreme caution if I was ever any kind of suspect.
I've only personally known a few dozen cops, though they were in multiple states. Some I consider friends, others I've worked closely with.
All of them, without exception thought lying was a legitimate tool and all of them, without exception were willing to abuse their authority if the target of the abuse deserved it. Anecdote: a gay member of Dallas PD would provoke confrontations with protestors at Dallas' Pride parade so he could arrest/remove them. Yes the charges were dropped, but the process was the punishment.
I think the 'never trust police' rhetoric is _terrible_ and untrue. I find it very sad that that's something like the 'sophisticated' view, e.g. among lawyers.
It seems obviously corrosive, socially, and it doesn't even seem to be true!
And I'm libertarian-ish AND have had a (friend of a) friend die because of police incompetence/neglect/malice _because_ they cooperated with police.
I can observe something terrible, but 'do the math' and _also_ observe that the terrible thing is in fact relatively rare, and then decide that terrible thing isn't in fact representative of whatever it might otherwise represent.
Is there any concrete element of this that you think you're missing that would explain my apparent 'divergence'?
As humans we tend not to evaluate risk rationally, or even understand fully what risks might be involved in any particular action. But it would be totally rational to completely avoid whatever relatively rare risk you're referring to.
I think that most of the people calling for "abolish the police/defund the police" were activists, and that ordinary black people living in those neighbourhoods instead wanted the police presence.
Then the foreseeable consequences of their actions happened, and suddenly it was all "no no by 'defund the police' we never meant *abolish* the police, we just meant hire more social workers!"
This sort of helpful policing does occur in the US as well. But long before Floyd, it looked to me as if, in general, the cops had redefined their job to include judge and executioner. There were a lot of stories about cops going too far and many involved white people.
There are too many innocent people shot by the police without the officer being punished, but the number of people killed by police in the US is tiny compared to the total number of people killed.
> police are punishing communities for their insolence by failing to properly protect them from violent crime, would seem to me to be a pretty LEFT-WING point about toxic police culture.
I don't think it's 'left wing' to think that the police DO protect anyone from violent crime, no?
I'm pretty sure the modal left wing view of policing is that's essentially oppression; definitely not 'protection', or only of 'capitalist property'.
> Here’s number of arrests in Chicago. We can see that it goes way down in March when the pandemic starts and everybody (including police and criminals) are indoors, then starts going up again before the protests. Then after the protests it goes back down and stays down. My interpretation is that people complied with the strict lockdown early in the pandemic, that effect was played out by May, and then separately the protests caused a longer-term decrease in policing.
I found this unconvincing. On all other graphs the effect of the protests was immediate, but here there was seemingly a several week delay? On top of that, the downturn in arrests coincides with a downturn in the average for previous years too, suggesting that this could be a normal thing in June for some reason. (Though usually with a much smaller magnitude.)
The Minneapolis traffic stops graph also shows the downturn clearly starting before the protests, and it doesn't look like data smoothing since there's a small spike shortly before. I found it strange to see this graph presented as though it backed up your conclusion.
Most crime statistics are dubious except for car thefts (for insurance reasons) and homicides. A dead body with a hole in it or a hole with a dead body in it simply demands bureaucratic record-keeping attention.
Homicides have been an obsession of the English system of criminal justice for 800 or 1000 years.
The difference between manslaughter and murder is quite slim sometimes.
Comparing with suicides, accidental deaths and manslaughter can only be enlightening. If they rise too, it could be attributed with COVID and failing mental health. If they don't change, it reinforces the theories above. If they lower, it reinforces mine.
The ratio between homicide and manslaughter should also be compared in older social upheaval events
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests."
I'd argue that causation went like this:
The riots start -->
The Establishment more or less encourages them as "mostly peaceful protests" -->
The police are discouraged and potential bad actors (e.g., shooters and reckless drivers) are encouraged.
Potential bad actors are encouraged in two ways: they fear the cops less so they do things like carry illegal handguns more and speed more. And they feel more exuberant because Society is telling them they are the good guys and the cops are the bad guys.
Case and Deaton coined the term "deaths of despair" for white working class losers killing themselves, dying of opioid addictions, or drinking themselves to death. The high rates of black homicide and traffic fatalities deaths after May 25, 2020 look more like "deaths of exuberance." For example, mass shootings (4 or more killed or wounded) at black social events went way up in the summer of 2020. Traffic accident deaths among blacks were 36% higher in the 7 months after George Floyd's death in 2020 than in the same period in 2019, whereas the other 87% of the population saw traffic deaths go up 9%.
Why "exuberance"? This does not match, at all, what I've seen from interviews. Most of what I've seen is anger, disillusionment, being fed up, etc., which seems, to me, that it would better explain shootings, mass shootings, and reckless driving.
Sure, lots of people after George Floyd's death were asked to tell the viewing public about their anger, disillusionment, being fed up, etc. So they did.
But watch security camera videos of 2020 looters. They didn't make the national news often because they undermined the Narrative, but the looters were having a blast.
Didn't a lot of cops quit as well in relation to the protests? Leading to fewer police and more experienced cops replaced by less experienced cops. I think I have read that a few times.
In 2019, Dean Baquet, chief editor of the New York Times, addressed his staff after Robert Mueller's testimony. He said that while he, too, was sad that the NYT's Plan A to get rid of Trump via RussiaGate had failed, they should not despair because the NYT was rolling out its Plan B to get rid of Trump via playing up racism.
My impression is that, for months, many Democrats saw the "mostly peaceful protests" as a way to get rid of Trump, either in November or possibly earlier in a mostly democratic color revolution. Thus, Joe Biden, who is not by nature a progressive extremist, didn't seem to recognize that the riots were bad for his campaign until the third day of the Kenosha riots in later August 2020, when he finally started calling for calm.
Restated correlation still doesn't imply causation.
In terms of unpicking that, I'd imagine we're still a couple of years or more from having the data on *what sort* of murders spiked (pending convictions), which might shed more light on root cause. And of course 2020 was .... rather an unusual year in many other regards. There could possibly be other confounders?
And "police have murdered plenty of people" is a phrase you'll not heard blithely used about most democracies. *Even if* BLM is shown to have triggered the homicide spike, I think a reasonable supposition that police murdering "plenty of people" might just have triggered BLM.
One thing that went up about 50% were mass shootings (4 or more victims struck). As the NYT reported after looking at all mass shootings in 2015, approaching 75% are black shooters and black victims, typically at black social events:
There were multiple videos of deaths in police custody, including of a white guy killed pretty much just like Floyd, as well as video of a guy on his knees begging for his life. No riots. BLM took an opportunity to inflame sensibilities in a racial manner and ran with it.
That's probably intended as a rhetorical question, but I don't recall that being a big news story over on this (British) side of the pond.
My point isn't so much the video per se, but that the narrative assumes:
Cops kill someone (again) -> people protest -> changes to policing -> murder!
rather than, say,
Cops kill someone (again) -> people get real mad -> murder!
Most murders, IIRC, aren't premeditated, but rather spontaneous crimes of passion. Speaking for myself, no changes to policing are going to incentivise me to murder. Getting real mad .... might.
If I were to go to the trouble of doing a deep dive on this, I'd be interested in looking at the types of murder that have spiked.
Organised crime: would add credence to Scott's narrative.
Murders of police officers and those associated with them: would add credence to my alternative.
Domestic murders: would add credence to the lockdown theory.
Well, the glib answer would be that they've not been afforded the same "opportunities" -unless there are some equivalent cases (including similarly-damning video footage) that you have in mind?
But have white people ever rioted, and for less reason? Have homicides by white people ever increased? The answer to both is trivially yes.
The footage of Daniel Shaver was quite damning. He was at least the person a caller was complaining about, whereas in the case of Justine Diamond she was the one who called the police and was then shot when they arrived (in Minneapolis, of all places).
Apologies. As per my reply below, there's a a sequence of events that may or may not start with "cop kills man" and end with "homicide spike". The article establishes some level of correlation, but assigns causation to "people protest about cops killing man", somewhere in the middle of the putative chain, between initial incident (and the widely-shared video of it) and adjusted policing policies in some jurisdictions.
*If* there's correlation, and I don't see that that's been established, why pick out the protests specifically, in the absence of evidence, over any other link in the chain?
And for the avoidance of doubt: I'm in that crazy "anti-murder" sector of society, and I think identifying factors that cause homicides to rise is a Good Thing. It can drive better policies and lead to fewer murders. I'm a fan of Scott's writing, but I don't this particular piece does that.
The protests are the most visible and salient manifestation of the 'cultural uprising' that's degrading police performance. I think of 'BLM' and 'the protests' as shorthand for that – they're both legible effects of the relevant political culture.
I think there's a larger 'inferential distance' than this post can bridge, even among the readers/commenters of this blog, let alone anyone else.
Some elements you might be missing in a quick sketch of the 'causal pathway':
- Police resentment increased – even just with most recent protests – and is probably increasing _faster_ now too; that's directly impacting cops' willingness to be 'proactive'.
- Lots of police departments, in the wake of the most recent protests, have been officially ordered to NOT engage in lots of otherwise normal (before recently) proactive policing, e.g. traffic stops.
- Criminals absolutely are aware of all of this. If you know any retail workers, I would bet they could corroborate this, and at length.
What I've observed having become MUCH more frequent are statements like "Police are useless."; pretty in-line with "Defund the police." and, e.g. the view that police are racist oppressors serving only the capitalists/white-people. And, in that light, proposals for 'reform' probably really _are_ cover for 'abolishing' the police.
> why pick out the protests specifically, in the absence of evidence, over any other link in the chain?
One, 'the protests' are just 'wrong' – their facts are wrong, their inferences are mistaken, and their (implicit) values are bad. Two, the protests have had a HUGE impact, e.g. hundreds or thousands of extra murders, and most/many of them the very people about which the protests are nominally focused!
The specific 'cop kills man/woman' incidents ARE bad – tragic, if nothing else, even when justified. But a protest movement, nominally protesting police violence, that results in _more_ murders, and probably a LOT more, is just an abject failure. It's not _pushing against_ the new extra murders – it's directly causing them! And it's refusing to even admit that this _might_ be happening!
I'm with you on most of that. And please bear in mind I'm approaching this from across in the UK, so I may miss some general cultural assumptions, but may also be able to bring an outside view.
And from over here, the idea that police are killing 1000+ people per year is *horrific*. It's just unthinkable. If that started happening, no matter who those people were, there'd be uproar. For comparison, Wikipedia lists *seven* people killed by UK police in total for the 2020s to date. Consider that a plausible root cause for anything else.
And consider that maybe the protests aren't "just wrong".
And yeah, I get the inferential distance thing - in fact I was clearly guilty of contributing to it with my initial comment! There's a long causal path being discussed, and each step in that path doesn't just make it more difficult to follow, it makes it more difficult to mis-step. I'd be genuinely interested - in due course, when the cases have gone through the courts - to see the detail of the homicide spike. Who is killing whom? Where? And why? And how? What are the specifics of the spike?
I find it difficult, intuitively, to imagine that someone who otherwise would do no murder changes their mind purely based on policing policies. Or that a committed murderer decides to do a few more. That doesn't match what I understand of most murders (although, admittedly, from a UK perspective).
If, on the other hand, you told me fewer murders where being resolved (especially in African American communities) because of BLM/distrust of the law, then that I'd understand. It'd make intuitive sense.
As things stand though, the conclusions seem firmer than the data provides.
>And from over here, the idea that police are killing 1000+ people per year is *horrific*. It's just unthinkable. If that started happening, no matter who those people were, there'd be uproar.
Suppose it turned out that somewhere in your country a criminal gang sexually abused 1000+ children and the police refused to intervene for years to avoid accusations of racism. Would this be considered unthinkable and cause BLM-style riots?
Well, something similar has certainly fuelled unrest (I think I know what you're getting at - and you should factor in similar revelations of child sexual abuse from white establishment figures revealed around the same time) - but the UK homicide rate has remained stubbornly static. Perhaps hinting that anti-police/establishment protests don't necessarily cause an increase in homicides. See also the poll tax riots of 1990, anti-Iraq war protests of 2003, and anti-lockdown protests of 2020-2021. We've a long history here of protesting about things and then not going home to our communities and killing each other because there are no police around.
Perhaps there's a perceived difference between "taking insufficient measures to prevent/prosecute crime" and "being active perpetrators of crime"? Certainly from here there's an air of disbelief that "you" (the US public) have accepted this level of police violence for years. What may seem unavoidable to some there seems unthinkable to many here.
I've no knowledge of local sex abuse scandals in the US, but I suspect there must have been some.
And the closest we've got here in recent decades to a "storming of the Capitol" moment was in 2005 over a bill about fox hunting, of all things. And that certainly wasn't by the dispossessed.
> And from over here, the idea that police are killing 1000+ people per year is *horrific*.
Sure – it's horrific here too, even if not as surprising. But 'policies' that result in more people being killed, even if it's not by police, seems, to me, to be even _more_ horrifying. It's not even saving any lives on net!
> And consider that maybe the protests aren't "just wrong".
I mean, maybe there's _some_ valid points in all of the many (and extremely varied) ideas of which 'the protests' are 'composed'.
But many of their 'key facts' are plainly incorrect. And 'their policies', as vague and bullshit as they are, when the can even be pinned down at all, are likewise terrible, i.e. counter-productive or outright disastrous.
I certainly sympathize with all of the people that are convinced of the justness of their cause or its expected efficacy. I don't think almost any of them are malicious or insincere. (Some definitely are tho.)
> Who is killing whom? Where? And why? And how? What are the specifics of the spike?
It seems like it's mostly young men in fairly urban cities and in the 'typical' places, for the typical reasons, and via the typical methods, e.g. on contested drug turf or at gatherings of opposing 'crews'/gangs/groups, for standard turf/status beefs, and via generally indiscriminate shooting into crowds, and almost always with handguns or semi-automatic guns. If you listen to a good range of { hip hop / rap }, there's LOTS of songs openly describing exactly how these killings/attacks happen, and why/where/by-whom.
These kinds of murders are happening all of the time but what proactive policing had been doing before was provide 'pressure' on the relevant people's abilities to kill quite as much. A traffic stop that results in a gun being confiscated might not stop a killing; merely delay it. But sometimes they probably did stop killings too, e.g. if an illegal gun charge results in a long prison term.
Given the both voluntary _and_ officially ordered end to a lot of proactive policing, the pressure is basically non-existent now, so there's little 'up front' pressure against these killings happening.
> I find it difficult, intuitively, to imagine that someone who otherwise would do no murder changes their mind purely based on policing policies. Or that a committed murderer decides to do a few more. That doesn't match what I understand of most murders (although, admittedly, from a UK perspective).
Have you never watched The Wire? It's VERY accurate – for 'Hollywood' – and 'okay' even according to people that do know more.
There don't seem to be a lot of 'mobsters' in the UK anymore. I'm sure there are still some, but they might be 'disappearing' people nowadays over there more than just shooting people (and leaving the body).
But there are lots of elements of society here in which threatening to shoot someone is either a 'fact of business' or a 'fact of life'. It's sad for sure.
> If, on the other hand, you told me fewer murders where being resolved (especially in African American communities) because of BLM/distrust of the law, then that I'd understand. It'd make intuitive sense.
I don't remember off-mind whether I've read anything about this _changing_, but AFAIK, it's been VERY bad in this way for a LONG time. "Snitches get stitches!" does NOT have an obvious exception for cooperation with homicide detectives. Again – The Wire is a good illustration of this and it's 20 years old now!
"The 2020 homicide spike primarily targeted blacks"
As an Englishman, it's always a surprise to hear about the depth of the systemic discrimination in America. It's not just people and institutions, you also seem to have racist graphs!
“Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike.”
I’ve read many “news articles” which variously asserted that the spike in violent crime and the decrease in ratings for TV sports were due to the pandemic. If someone writes an alleged news article saying that, you know that he’s a transparent, pathological liar. If someone cites a transparent, pathological liar as an authority, what does that make him? An “expert”? A “tenured professor”? A close relative of mine?
Why do you think it's not just wrong but pathological lying?
I hadn't heard about the decline in ratings for professional sports. It seems odd that they'd decline during the pandemic, since I'd assume that the appetite for at-home distractions would increase. Too expensive? Badly produced (too many ads and fluff)? Some other reason, like competition from other sports?
The decline in TV ratings for professional began before the China Flu. It started when black supremacist nfl players began refusing to stand for our national anthem, and instead took a knee. At the time, people started posting photos of nfl stadia that were 30-50% empty, in spite of having sold out.
The causal nexus was obvious, but msm journalists always deny the obvious. Later, they asserted that covid somehow “caused” TV ratings to drop.
On March 23, 2020, the nyt launched the hoax, whereby President Trump had caused the explosion in “hate crime attacks” against asian-americans. I debunked that hoax eight days later at VDARE.
There was no explosion in anti-asian hate crimes, but what violent crimes were being committed against asians were almost all being committed by blacks.
How did White “racism” cause blacks to die from the China flu? That’s a blood libel the MSM promoted, beginning in spring 2020.
When is the last time you heard of msm journalists reporting on anti-white hate crimes? Blacks commit such crimes constantly, and yet, msm “reporters” never talk about them. And yet, the same “reporters” constantly promote blood libels against Whites.
Thus, msm reporters lie coming and going, in denying constant black-on-White hate crimes, and in promoting blood libels against Whites. Since such dishonesty always goes in one direction, its practitioners are either pathological liars, or they’re telling the truth.
What black supremacists? It seemed to me that they were opposed to police killing black people and did a symbolic gesture which damaged the fun of people who like football. I usually don't weigh in on this because I don't have sympathy for football or patriotic displays and I'm not convinced it was worth Kaepernick losing his career over, but it that affected interest in all sports, it seems like an overreaction.
Evidence about possible hate crimes against Asian-Americans? I've got a Chinese-American friend I'd like to reassure. She's very worried.
I agree that the fact that the attacks are almost all by black people gets obscured in the press. There are people who want to believe that poc have something in common, and it's a false idea.
Blood libel is taking it too far, I think, but I don't think it's wrong to say that prejudice has something to do with black people living in more crowded conditions and having more public facing jobs.
On the other hand, I do think that anti-white prejudice among SJWs is a serious matter, and it doesn't matter that a lot of the people with the prejudice are white.
Reassuring to find an independent voice on a topic that has become (needlessly) controversial. If people are being killed, when it happens is a good start in figuring out why.
I'll put forward another theory to add to the mix. Blacks in the United States are less restrained in their behavior because they feel like they are winning. Winners get to do what they like. Similarly, fans of sports teams tend to riot more after a win than after a loss.
I think it's unfair to lump all black people into one monolithic group like that. The problem seems mainly to be, as the report on the 2021 spike says, "gang-related arguments, drug deals gone awry and disputes among people living on the streets."
The BLM protests probably *encouraged* the trouble-making elements who saw that in many places they were being given what amounted to free rein by city and local governments - remember the "no, you can't go to a religious service in your local church, singing hymns will spread Covid which is the Greatest Threat Imaginable!/of course you can have unmasked protests of multiple people marching and mingling in the streets shouting slogans, Systemic Racism is a bigger threat than Covid" fudging?
And that encouragement means they are emboldened to keep on doing what they were doing, but even more so now. If you aren't going to be arrested for open drug dealing and public nuisances because you are 'unhoused', why stop at shooting your enemies/rivals?
It’s also unfair to define the rioters as black. Lots of skeevy whites, and also a pretty big contingent of the well meaning liberal variety. As a former well meaning liberal myself, I was dismayed to see the whole discussion over policing come down to “those poor blacks.” I’d like to be part of a community that includes all colors and all economic strata. That’s the only way the policing issue moves forward for real. I’m dreaming I guess.
Yeah, I think that a lot of white guys (and gals) leaped at the chance to do some destruction under the guise of 'marching for justice'. Some just wanted to feel like they were part of something Big and Important and sticking it to The Man, some were just criminals/mentally ill who took the chance to be destructive under cover of the legitmate protesters.
People, including a lot of the most shown on media black activists, forget or ignore the black people living in those neighbourhoods which were full of rioting and violence, the small business owners whose premises were smashed up (because we're fighting capitalism, hell yeah!) and those who don't like or trust the cops but also don't want local criminal gangs taking the opportunity to act like warlords ruling their own little fiefdom.
The pattern I saw at times in 2020 was local black kids looting stores for fun on the first night of a riot, and then on the second night, hard core white rioting hobbyists flood into town for some serious action. To keep riots going a long time, like in Portland, you needed white riot enthusiasts who have studied manuals about how to fight the cops without looking bad to the media.
I agree with Deiseach. Maybe you didn't intend any imprecision with your comment but it's not black people at large who are rioting across the board. I'll admit to some personal bias in this belief as I'm married to and related to several black people (quite a few who are generally conservative and even some Trump supporters) and I find myself annoyed at sweeping statements that lump them in with those black people who commit crimes. The black people who are being victimized by said criminals do not feel like they are winning.
It's not a bad theory. 2020's BLM protests were followed by big waves of kids setting off fireworks for weeks in some black communities, it looked almost like an independence celebration.
A large number of 2020's mass shootings were black people shooting up house parties after some grievance. Simply having more exuberance, more drunken house parties, in a community could cause some part of the spike.
But I doubt that's the entire effect, I doubt all shootings were at parties. And even that case might relate to policing -- like, there might have been an increased willingness to carry a handgun without fear of consequences from the police, leading to both more impulsive shootings at parties as well as more murders in other circumstances.
"A large number of 2020's mass shootings were black people shooting up house parties after some grievance. Simply having more exuberance, more drunken house parties, in a community could cause some part of the spike."
Like the case of the British activist who was shot at a house party in 2021. Initially there were suggestions that this was because of her activism in arranging protests (starting off with ones to pull down statues of Cecil Rhodes, do we remember when statue-toppling was The Big Thing?) but then it was alleged it was just random shooting by people with a grievance against somebody living in that house who turned up to shoot the place up:
I imagine part of that is down to the whole "don't talk to the cops, don't be a snitch, the police are not your friends" attitude, but also perhaps in part to "I don't want to come forward as a witness because I don't want these guys or their friends turning up to shoot *my* house up".
Good analogy. Victory riots started to become a thing in the US in the 1980s. There probably would have been one after the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986 if it weren't sub-zero. During the 1992 Michael Jordan Riot in Chicago, the best book store on Michigan Avenue, Stuart Brent's (where I once saw Saul Bellow dressed head to toe in Burberry), was looted by a mob of white yuppies.
Has anyone worked out the total number of above trend deaths for the year? Would help to know how many extra individuals died in absolute terms. Quick estimate looking at the first graph seems to be a 1.4% increase / 100 000 people x 330million citizens = ~4620 individuals, more accurate calculations welcome
I think your 1.4% increase / 100 000 people is somewhat misleading. If the total number of above trend deaths is 4620, that's an increase of 25-30%. The total number of homicides is about 20,000 per year.
It spends a whole lot of words conclusively proving that there is a strong correlation between the BLM protests and an increased homicide rate.
Then it triumphantly declares clear proof of causation.
And, as far as I can tell, there is no actual case for causation. The arrow could go the other way, both could be caused by a third or multiple other effects, or there could be circular causation.
My takeaway is that Scott is fed up with what he perceives as a liberal propensity to refuse to believe inconvenient things, and that led him to beliefs further than the evidence supports.
(2) Big event happened with lots of protests and lots of violence
(3) "Hm, what can possibly have caused this, could it be related to Big Event? No, surely not, it's all down to Orange Man Still Bad"
You had people coming out and setting fire to buildings, smashing things up, setting up their own little Autonomous Zones (and then their 'security forces' shot many more people than the cops had done), for heck's sake are we forgetting the Rittenhouse trial so early? But noooo, it must be something else like Covid that caused people to spontaneously keel over with bullets inside them.
it's not refusing a connection. it's questioning how the causation works. Assuming that having a protest causes people to go out and murder is a pretty wild claim, and shouldn't be made with regard to only one event. There are so many possible interactions, simply saying the BLM protests "caused" homicides is just kinda abusing the sort of inferences we can make from correlations.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough! What I was trying to say is that Scott did a great job of establishing the *correlation* between protests and homicides, and I don’t think there’s any doubt.
But just because two things are correlated (“connected” if you prefer) does not mean one necessarily caused the other. And your point #3 is basically the same hand wave Scott did. You seem unabashedly ideological and abusive, but that’s not usually Scott’s brand. I’d expect more than “of course A and B happening at the same time means A caused B” from Scott.
Since we’re all just asserting our beliefs without evidence, I’ll share mine: I think the world is a complex place, and I think some of Scott’s speculations are likely correct: police backed off, out of a combination of genuine reaction to having overstepped and also some passive aggressive “if anyone criticizes is we’ll stop doing our jobs”.
And I think the really strange social changes of the pandemic and lockdowns created more stress that caused more barely-sane people to act out.
And I think having a president that openly advocated violence against political foes set a dark tone.
And I think we’ll-meaning but misguided progressive ideals excused terrible behaviors and led to poor choices in prosecutions and sentencing.
And I think that COVID was serious enough that concerns about overcrowding in jails furthered under-prosecution of crimes.
And I think police were under all of those same stresses, on top of being called to account for past abuses, and some officers and some departments reacted badly.
And I think the BLM protests were a focal point for a lot of these things.
But I think it’s a mistake to go with the simple “A caused B” view of protests = homicides, and I think that would be a poor basis to make moral judgments or policy decisions.
You know what. If you’re going to wait for conclusive evidence every time some data goes against your priors, you end up just where you started. “Man, that can’t be true!” The spirit of disinterested inquiry instead considers what could be true, without having to reach a definitive conclusion. I’d say you just don’t like the hypothesis and have therefore looked at the data with a jaundiced eye.
My prior is that this is too complex of a topic to be explained as “two things happened at the same time, therefore one caused the other, and it’s obvious which direction causation goes”.
Show me ANY data that contradicts that prior and even suggests this is a two-variable isolated system. I sure didn’t see any, so maybe you’re right and I’m missing it. Where is the evidence of *causation*?
Explanation for the German murder-spike in 2018: The German Police adds murders to the statistic in the year they learn about them, not in the year the murder happened (since otherwise you would have to correct the statistics when it takes them a while to figure out a murder happened). In 2018 there was a trial against a man, Niels Högel, who confessed to around 100 murders he commited by killing patients while working as a nurse. This alone accounts for half the spike you see in the statistic.
While I agree with the research and the numbers, I don't think your conclusion is well formulated. Saying that "the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests" makes it sound like there is a one-step causal connection. As in the act of protesting bad police work will always cause more homicides. This kinda reads like blaming the protesters for the murders, as if protesting somehow leads to murdering someone. This can't possibly be a satisfying conclusion if your goal is to know why more homicides happen directly after BLM protests. Of course this is fantastic if all you care about is finding SOME truth to prove main stream media wrong.
You go on to mention that "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas." just to fully ignore it the conclusion, as if the police simply have no agency in this matter. What you really do here is no better or worse than NYT or Vox since all you end up doing is focusing on an irrelevant truth to strengthen your contrarian position. Anyway, thanks for linking protesters to homicides, surely nobody would use that to justify crushing legitimate important protests.
There's also the option that the police were too busy dealing with the massive protests to do other things. Crowd control takes manpower, and undermanned police departments would naturally have to shift people away from other priorities if they felt the need to manage (or even suppress) large protest marches. We saw plenty of examples of looting that opportunistically used distracted police resources for property crime, and it wouldn't be that odd if murder followed a similar logic.
This would make sense if the murders happened during the protests and in the places where the protests were happening, but the murders were more spread out in time and place.
"Anyway, thanks for linking protesters to homicides, surely nobody would use that to justify crushing legitimate important protests."
This is either terrible reasoning or no reasoning at all. If there is a link between protesting and murders, then it's entirely reasonable to say so. The fact that some people might use this as a reason to be critical of protesting is neither here nor there.
Oh, and in your manipulative rhetoric ('justify crushing legitimate important protests') you forgot to include the obligatory 'Mostly peaceful'.
I don't think BLM protests were all that peaceful compared to regular protests. What I'm saying is that if you wanted to construct a valid but not sound argument for stopping future legitimate protests, this "research" is pure gold.
Now you can go like "Look, anytime there are protests, homicides go up. There clearly is a connection. We cannot tolerate the loss of innocent lives caused by protests. Hence, no more protests. Stand down and obey" Now we can pet ourselves on the shoulder, because science wins. fantastic!
I take your point. However I'm not particularly worried about there being 'no more' protests - I think that would probably take something like a constitutional amendment.
And it is also true that there doesn't seem to have been any major uptick in homicides following other protests, whether they've been about the climate, gay rights, abortions or whatever.
So the next time a group of people start a protest about transgender boxer's rights I doubt there will be a single voice saying "Hang on, this protest should be stopped because the homicide rate is likely to increase as a result"
Another potentially interesting factor to consider:
Most courts closed for the pandemic. Many of them, especially in cities, didn't reopen for several years or reopened with much lower capacity. A lot fewer murder cases were being tried in court because of the pandemic. The justice system either had to detain people without speedy trials, or it had to not prosecute crimes. Neither of which are good options.
If this were the main cause of the increase in murders, I would expect a gradual increase starting in March. Instead, we see a sudden increase starting in May. So I don't think that this is the main contributing factor. But it could contribute to why murders haven't gone back down.
Assuming that this was the largest factor for the increase, I wouldn't expect murders to increase gradually starting in march; I'd expect a phase transition some time later. (I'm not sure how long to expect -- more than 2 weeks but less than 5 months.) The reasoning is this: if people are going to be committing crimes based on the reasoning of "I'm not going to get punished" it's going to be due to an open social understanding (in their social circles) that criminals are not being punished. That kind of open social acknowledgment of hidden statistics takes time to respond to changes and requires a (potentially very rapid) phase transition at the end to turn into open information.
A gradual increase from March seems like it is modeling each criminal-to-be as updating their own individual rationalist probabilities of being caught based off of each new case they hear about. I don't think that model accurately describes the decision making processes of people likely to commit crimes.
Maybe I missed this in the article -- is there evidence that the depolicing caused the increase in murders (rather than just both being responses to the Floyd incident)? Genuine question. In my head, I had assumed that it was something like increased anger/tension/despair in black communities as a response to Floyd's death.
That might be true, but the spike being in murders of blacks only would imply their anger/tension/despair was being taken out solely on other blacks, which would be odd. If murders were up across all races the general anger cause would seem more likely.
Fair point. I think the usual explanation for why most violence is within-race is segregation -- like, black people tend to live near other black people, white people tend to live near other white people, etc. So if you had a general increase in anger/tension/etc within black communities, it still makes sense to me that the resulting violence might be within-race?
A bit perhaps, but given the nature of the incident triggering the anger/tension it would make more sense that it was more outgroup targeting than ingroup I would think. The near total lack of increase among other groups makes it seem oddly inner directed, since even in a fairly segregated city you can't be more than a few miles from people of a different race to vent on. Minneapolis/St Paul are pretty quick and easy to drive across, and not terribly segregated, for instance, but the violence is pretty intra-group there.
One way to test your idea a bit might be to consider how for example the Twin Cities reacted to Ferguson in earlier years. That would be another anger/tension heightening situation but so far as I know there wasn't the national anti-police sentiment resulting in less police activity. Less anger perhaps, but also much less affect on policing, so if murders didn't spike as much (I have no idea if they did) that would suggest that more policing helps prevent anger turning into murder, and the reduction in policing in 2020 allowed more murder from the anger.
Other races don't party much with the type of blacks who bring illegal handguns to parties. There have been some nonblacks killed when blacks start shooting at each other in a downtown entertainment district, such as the white tourist who got murdered on 6th Street in Austin during a gun battle between black youths. But, generally speaking, the arrival of folks who look like they might be packing tends to diminish the party mood among nonblacks.
Homicides in general occur mostly within one's proximate community, and there's no reason to believe that an increase in anger/despair would precipitate increased criminality that is different than whatever crime precipitated by the baseline level of anger/despair.
Anger / despair is just what op-ed writers said about what they call the "racial reckoning." Watch videos of the looters and you'll see triumph / enjoyment. Like somebody said above, this was a huge Victory Riot.
Homicide victimizations were up across all races in 2020 over 2019 other than Asians.
By 2021, blacks were dying 49% more by homicide than in 2018, and Hispanics a little less but still way up. Whites, Asians, and Native Americans were up 9% to 13%.
If I believed the Intercept graph, the safest city in the US was Baltimore and, um, I think the rest of the data quoted contradicts that.
Also, how did Portland have *negative* murder rates? Was there a necromancer passing through who resurrected a lot of the formerly dead? There is definitely something odd going on with that graph, and I think it may have to do with "percentage change in murders" - percent change compared to when? If there were 1,000 murders in March and only 100 in April, that would give a negative percent, but it wouldn't mean that there were no murders going on.
And if I instead believe those lying liars in Oregonian media, Portland had its own little sharp increase in murders over the period 2019-2021:
"City police and officials say last year’s increase — which disproportionally impacted Portland’s Black community — was fueled by gang-related arguments, drug deals gone array and disputes among people living on the streets. In addition, the situation was exacerbated by the pandemic, economic hardships and mental health crises.
In a May statement, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler warned residents that “groups” were traveling to the city from Washington and California to “engage in and advance gun violence.” In addition, Wheeler said “groups involved in this violence have issued an order to shoot someone in the next 30 days or be shot for not showing loyalty.”
Similar to the ’90s, Portland officials have said the city faces a rampant gang problem. Comparatively, police and residents say the boldness of shooters, their young age and the amount of shots fired surpass what they have seen before."
Those are percent changes in murder rate. So Baltimore's murder rate didn't change and Portland's decreased, for those months, according to that graph.
What I want to know is, why aren't black people vocally concerned about the rise in homicide in their communities? Could it just be that the media-favored activists don't care, but the average black person does?
I can certainly see how wanting more police in one's locality could be compatible with the broader BLM goals of demanding higher standards of conduct from police, and more accountability and punishment for police misconduct.
It's much harder for me to envision how a person could want there to be more police in their immediate locality AND that the police be defunded. I'm not saying the latter goal NECESSARILY precludes the former, but it might as well, all things considered.
Ordinary people of whatever hue don’t have the media bullhorn. You do see however, in the “right-wing” press, occasional stories about how ordinary black people don’t like criminals and murderers running wild. Duh
This is not “right wing media,” any mainstream media where ordinary black people are covered will without a doubt have this angle at least occasionally. Despite the frequency with which people will say that media like this doesn’t exist it’s actually pretty common.
You won’t see it on CNN or in the New York Times or the Atlantic. Journalism is agenda driven, including these “ordinary people” stories. I’d say you could easily find people who’d say “racist” and “right-wing” about any story that said ordinary blacks want police to curb the criminals and murderers in their neighborhoods.
They are. This has been extensively covered in the Mpls television and print media. Ilhan Omar is being challenged in the Democratic primary by a black man who lives in predominantly black North Minneapolis. I’m hoping he gets the nod.
There are some black men I follow online-- Glen Loury, John McWhorter, Colman Hughes who are quite concerned about crime in black communities. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, it's just the people I happen to know about.
My impression is that there's a long history of black organizations who have tried to help lower the crime rate. They may have made matters better than they otherwise would have been.
Oh, you asked about *vocally concerned*. I'm inclined to think that the mainstream media isn't amplifying them, and possibly that there are black people who are concerned but don't want to give fuel to racists.
Not just homicides. Motor vehicle accident deaths increased a great deal, especially amongst blacks. I plotted car accident deaths and homicides on a monthly basis from 1999-2021 as standard deviations of each groups' monthly mean to help separate seasonal effects from secular trends. It's pretty compelling. You can see both increased in 2014 and then again a great deal around May 2020.
Hi, just wanted to say thank you for your health analysis! Helped change my mind about not one but two things that I thought I knew reasonably well - health economics and casual inference.
I'd like to add one small factor: Drug trafficking is way up.
When you heard about a 40% increase in overdoses, did you consider the size of the iceberg underneath that? Anybody who ever had a habit started again during the lockdowns. With lots of demand, lots of product and lots of manpower, local dealers have been making $$$. Naturally, there has been some conflict up the chain, and anywhere there is that much $$$, there will be criminal violence.
But that is maybe 15% of the increase in crime. The police pullback is the rest. Based on conversations I have heard *IN JAIL*, amongst criminals and Sherrifs, criminals know the cops' hands are tied, they are in defensive mode. Criminals are far more aggressive from the start when the feeling on the street changes from,
"violence or shootings are certain to bring a big LEO response",
to
"Cops on duty are down 25% already, and some are at mandatory diversity seminars. 95% chance we just get away with this crime right now...." and
"...any fool has a 90% chance of getting away with murder."
This creates some real sympathy for the cops, in a soldier-ly way.
Opioids weren't seen much in the black inner city up until about 2015. According to Sam Quinones, Mexican dealers preferred to stick to white areas like Kentucky where users died quietly, rather than have to deal with black gangs that shoot a lot and attract attention. But fentanyl has been pretty big in the inner city in recent years, as George Floyd's toxicology report would suggest.
Looking at all of this data, the more interesting question to me now is related to the figure of US murder rate by year and asking what caused the murder rate to double in the decade following ~1964?
EDIT: Although, if you look at comments from Scott on this post, I think he personally prefers the lead hypothesis?*
*In case you're not familiar, the hypothesis is:
(1) We know substantial lead exposure in childhood has many developmentally harmful effects.
(2) We know that (because of leaded gasoline) there was a period of time in American history that saw significantly increased childhood exposure to lead.
(3) It's sort of maybe possible to line up the onset + abolition of leaded gasoline with the onset + end of the 1960s-1990s crime wave, although the correlation is loose -- leaded gasoline started to be used in 1924, but it took a while for it to be widespread and car use was much higher in the 1940s than 1920s. On the other end, "A 1994 study had indicated that the concentration of lead in the blood of the U.S. population had dropped 78% from 1976 to 1991."
Notably, there are a few other high-spots of lead contamination for idiosyncratic local reasons (Central America due to leaded glazes being used in local pottery, Afghanistan due to leaded gasoline (?) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6025484/]) that also have elevated rates of violence, but this was an anecdotal correlation I noticed a while ago and not something that I've found a good statistically rigorous study of.*
*Probably because collecting blood lead levels is time consuming and expensive so a global database of different countries's lead levels doesn't exist.
The start in 1964 is a lagged effect of the baby boom, which increased the birth rate 50% about 18 years prior. That larger youthful cohort should lead that 50% more crimes per capita, since most violent crime is committed by the young. The actual rise was more than 50% and the reasons for that aren't as clear.
The causes of the decline seem a bit clearer to me, but even that involved multiple factors. I wrote a bit trying to sort it all out, came to a clearer understanding but still don't think I have the full picture:
View from the inside. I'm two steps removed from several police officers, and the reduction in policing verifiably comes from these factors:
1) Cops willfully and consciously stopped going to black neighborhoods. Literally stopped responding to 911 calls there, because the risk of themselves getting roasted in the media, skewered by a social media mob, fired, and jailed was not worth the risk of going to the black area. They stated this privately, and they acted on this on the ground. A great example was the entirely justifiable Wendy's Atlanta shooting. The police officer was acquitted, but the media mob attacks on him literally caused his familial relatives to be fired from unrelated jobs.
2) Cops quit their jobs. Staffing across the country is down, especially in urban police forces that had to deal with ACAB social pressures. They decided to work lower stress jobs such as private security.
It was less of a "own the libs" thing as it was a "well if this is what they want I guess we'll give it to them" thing and a "they've made the personal risks too high to do my ordinary job" thing.
It seems to me that Americans have a lot of trust in punishment. Not all Americans, of course, but I see this weird hypnosis where the idea of punishing someone leads to believing that the punishment will have exactly the effects one wants. The unwanted behavior will go away, and there will be no blowback or side effects.
This shows up both in long prison sentences and in the left wanting to punish the police. I'm not saying punishment never works, but it's not all that reliable.
Note that more white people numerically (though not proportionally) are shot by police than black. I've been angry that police shootings of white people (some of them sketchy) aren't taken seriously, but maybe the net effect has been better for white people. On the other hand, the justice system shouldn't just be about net effect.
One more angle, the police are trained to be very afraid of the public-- as long as that's in play, it's going to be hard to get them to treat people more carefully.
Yes! I'm working on it. It's surprisingly hard, I don't have much power myself, but lots of other people are doing their part. I'd guess you are too :)
Punishment seems to be a behavior modification across species, so it would seem to work at least somewhat. Or miscreants spontaneously conform to desired behavior standards randomly.
What would probably be even _more_ effective is MORE but _less sever_ punishment, i.e. increasing the rate of which crimes are punished (while not punishing innocents _too_ much more, ideally).
But jailing/imprisoning seems perfectly effective at preventing crimes (outside of jail/prison anyways).
There's no secret American sauce to it. People respond to incentives. Punishment is an incentive, as long as it is applied consistently with high probability.
My point is that punishment has some effect to control behavior, but it can also be incentivizing for the punisher, and the latter seems strong in the US.
It's absout the same once you control for crime rate and rate of vilence against police.
>One more angle, the police are trained to be very afraid of the public-- as long as that's in play, it's going to be hard to get them to treat people more carefully.
People in America have guns, and black Americans are more violent than a majoirity (if not all) major populations in developed countries
> A priori there’s no reason to expect lockdowns and “cabin fever” to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group.
Blacks are more likely to be poor, and so live in tinier and more rundown apartments and in neighbourhoods with fewer parks, and they have more children. Sounds like a recipe for cabin fever to me. That would also explain the uptick in arrests prior to the George Floyd murder.
> No country except the United States had a large homicide spike in 2020, which suggests that the spike was unrelated to the pandemic and more associated with US-specific factors, for which the BLM protests and subsequent pullback of policing in black communities seem to me to be the most obvious suspect.
To play devil's advocate, the US arguably has the strongest culture around freedom to move and associate.
The effect on police is likely much longer term than the protests themselves. And the continuing crime rate invalidates other theories much more than Scott's.
Not to excuse how things played out but the particular circumstances at the time of George Floyd’s death did make things worse than they might have been.
The COVID lockdown did provide a large pool of young people with no work or school to attend. Warm weather had made it’s first appearance at the same moment of the crowd violence too. If things had played out between November and April, Minnesota winter weather would have made for much smaller crowds.
They didn’t have the video of George Floyd dying on camera either. The guy was kind of a fuck up but his death was not necessary. He was cuffed and loosing consciousness and the knee remained on his neck. Watching it play out remains a gut punch. A jury called it murder. Chauvin wanted to plea second degree murder but the DA didn’t let him. He’s appealing on the grounds that public sentiment in the community was biased against him. It probably was.
I only know the situation in the Twin Cities first hand. Mpls police are still understaffed. Enforcement is still lower than pre pandemic lockdown and George Floyd’s death.
My main point above is that there was a confluence of circumstances that contributed in to scale of events in Mpls after the event.
As I said above the violence that followed is not excusable.
1. The pandemic essentially continued in the US until Jan-Feb 2022 when omicrone essentially produced not-quite-but-close-enough-for-gov't-work herd immunity so that most people changed from pandemic behavior to 'new normal' behavior.
2. Other countries had real lockdowns...as in you stay in your house and come out on the street with a permission slip from the gov't to, say, do quick grocery shopping. By April-May the US had moved to a type of de facto lockdown where people were mostly not at work or school but could be outdoors as much as they pleased and many businesses that facilitated that were open (for take out). At that time you also had the breaking of cold winter weather and a growing recognition that Covid did not transmit outdoors very well.
All other countries? Uniformly for the last three years?
The US crime spike was worse in 2021 than 2020 and every indication that I could find is that so far 2022 is worse than 2021. If the country has largely returned to normal then why is the rise in crime still accelerating?
The data is not really in that I can find to show acceleration. You want to drop out 2020 since that's going to be totally abnormal and look instead at how does 2019 compare as a baseline to 2021 and 2022.
If crime is accelerating, though, that really blows a huge hole in the 'BLM protests caused this' thesis. Huge.
The US's response to Covid was exceptionally bad cross the board. That is pretty much undeniable. The US's 'lockdown' looked very different from other nations. You don't have to pretend other nations had a 3 year don't leave your house lockdown to acknowledge that.
1) The homicide rate in the US is the worst it's been in at least 26 years. I think you have to go back to 1996 to find a year with a homicide rate that's comparable. That's almost 30 years of falling crime rates wiped out. Pick any year in the last 26 and the current homicide rate by comparison shows a remarkable increase.
3) When you look at Covid measures you have a tremendous diversity in response across countries. My point is that as far as I can tell there is a single country on the planet that saw historic gains in the homicide rate: the United States. No other country, whether it locked down tight or very loosely, saw an increase in violent crime like the US.
Imagine a world that had protest yet no increase in crime.
A) Before lockdown crime is at some normal level: X.
B) During lockdown fewer people are out. Crime lowers to: X-b.
C) After lockdown crime returns to normal level: X.
If there’s a rapid transition from B->C, then it will look like a “spike” in crime. My point is only that the protest may have triggered a rapid transition (“de facto end of lockdown”).
Obviously crime went up to some level X+c after the protest. The first part of Scott’s argument is titled “timing”. I’m merely pointing out you could have a theoretical situation:
A) X
B) X-b+c
(protest)
C) X+c
Where +c precedes the protest.
*Didn’t happen in other countries—> lockdown didn’t end abruptly.
*Doesn’t explain the Ferguson effect in Ferguson. True.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t think this theoretical world is our own.
Thank you for this. Maybe you are the brave, investigative journalists I've been dreaming of? I have one question, it's a doozy and no one is bothering because the corporate media are stasi hacks. HOW MUCH DID THE "PEACEFUL" PROTESTS OF 2020 REALLY COST? One measly Axios report, estimating the damage between $1 and 2$ billion, covered only two weeks- when we all know it went on much longer. Some of these areas will never recover- and they aren't in the rich parts of town.
What we don't know yet is how big of a transfer of wealth there was from urban property owners to suburban and small town property owners. Land prices are up all over so it's hard to tell, but it looks like Blackstone et al bought in heavily to places where there are unlikely to be riots or black crime. But it's hard to disentangle this from the work-from-home revolution.
The cost in urban land prices from the mid-1960s onward was colossal: e.g., Detroit pre-1967 riot vs. today. In contrast, the appreciation in Brooklyn as crime came down was immense.
I don't think the police decided to relax policing in black neighborhoods as much as they were ordered to do so by people now trying to rewrite history and hide their actions.
Looking at fig. 1 - eyeballing the data, you could just as easily say that there was no spike before july 2020. The peak in may is only very slightly higher than peaks in the previous 3 years. I would have liked to see a statistical analysis of whether this peak sufficiently explained by random noice. Certainly, if you consider the last 20 years to be homogenous (probably not a perfect assumtion, but still, looking at the last 10 years seem just as arbitrary) that spike does not seem that abnormal at all.
I guess I'm arguing that the whole post may be about nothing - sorry....
It's obvious the BLM protests and riots caused the homicide spike, but it is also obvious that the pandemic caused the BLM protests and riots to happen on a scale ten times or more greater than they would have otherwise. Perhaps without the pandemic we don't get widespread BLM riots and an increase in homicide.
What does "the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests." actually mean?
If social issues had been accumulating like tinder, and May 2020 sparked the match, does that make the match the cause? If the match is the cause, then you should be able to decrease murder rates by targeting the cause... but I laugh at the idea that BLM Protests is the social issue to address in order to reduce murder rates. It is the underlying social issues that are driving these murder rates and need to be addressed. This is why I'd like to understand what it means to scott claim BLM as the primary cause. This article lacks a broader context to make the conversation meaningful or practical. The context feels like "here is my defense of my prior claim". Cool?
I see many faults with this analysis. We lack a comprehensive baseline for the seasonality of murder rates year over year. There is no explicit causation, just casual inference. I agree with the inferences but not the conclusion. And the opposing perspecties are dismissed outright.... Scott is explicitly trying to explain his perspective so this post is inherently biased rather than exploratory.
Do I think the civil events of 2020 Summer affected murder rates? Absolutely... and it happened during a pandemic at the end of Trump's presidency. Still, it feels completely irrational to try and focus on a singular primary cause to a complex social issue. Again, if "BLM Protests" were the match, how much tinder was already there and what is the real cause? What is the purpose of writing this? What is the message to be taken from it?
> We lack a comprehensive baseline for the seasonality of murder rates year over year.
If you're demanding something _more_ comprehensive than what's already in the post, then that seems like an 'isolated demand for rigor'.
> There is no explicit causation, just casual inference.
I have, I think, a fairly detailed and concrete 'model' for "explicit causation", but there are levels of what you might mean by "explicit causation" and it _seems_ like maybe nothing could possibly satisfy you in this case – because you don't _want_ to believe Scott's 'inferences'.
> I agree with the inferences but not the conclusion.
What does this mean?
> And the opposing perspecties are dismissed outright.... Scott is explicitly trying to explain his perspective so this post is inherently biased rather than exploratory.
Yes, Scott wrote this at the explicit request of commenters on recent posts and I'm very sure that this is a 'rough sketch' of his, Scott's, model of this topic/subject. That doesn't make it "biased".
But Scott also isn't just 'dismissing outright' other explanations. He mentions several of them and explains why he finds them relatively lacking.
> Still, it feels completely irrational to try and focus on a singular primary cause to a complex social issue.
Why? Is there some reason why complex social issues _can't_ have a singular _primary_ cause?
It sure seems like you just don't want to believe what Scott (and others) believe!
But believing this is true doesn't in fact, e.g. imply that you're racist. It's just a (sad) way the world might be.
I will try to say this again more simply... I believe what the data shows and I don't agree with the narrative derived from it. We interpret data, and in the scope of what Scott did in this post I think his inferences were appropriate. However, I think Scott's scope was too narrow, lacking in root cause analysis, and poorly situated in any broader context (this last bit is particularly understandable as it arose organically from comments in the San Francisco review). As a result, his narrative feels impotent to me.
I'll also say, I find so many people here use data as justification for "belief" and I worry about an under-appreciation for the limitations and caveats to the utility of data. Do you hear yourself when you say "It sure seems like you just don't want to believe what Scott (and others) believe!"? I could say the exact same thing for another thought leader and their community that steeps its belief from another cause... and it would leave us at odds with no remedy because our conflict would stem from the means by which we assemble our beliefs rather than our beliefs themselves. e.g. scientific revolution vs established religion
Perhaps It goes without saying, this is a Rationalist community and I do not believe in Rationalism as it is defined. I am someone who appreciates the utility of rational thinking in conjunction with other modes of evaluating the world around us. I will always find things to be critical of Scott, I have a right to say them so long as Scott welcomes me here, and I am under no obligation to fully agree with what Scott narrates because he provides data that supports it. That's my reality.
My comment was, perhaps, somewhat 'inflammatory', but this _is_ a "Rationalist community" (to a large extent anyways), and my advice is standard for us '(aspiring) rationalists'.
(Minor quibble – our philosophy isn't "Rationalism" – it's more accurately 'modern rationality' (no capitals) and it's less of a _compact_ 'philosophy' than a much more nebulous 'cloud' of ideas/aspects from all kinds of prior/current bodies of knowledge.)
> I will always find things to be critical of Scott, I have a right to say them so long as Scott welcomes me here, and I am under no obligation to fully agree with what Scott narrates because he provides data that supports it. That's my reality.
I don't like that first part – you will _definitely_ "always find things to be critical of Scott"? Even if Scott states "I agree with Jordan."? That just seems _deliberately_ contrarian :)
But, yes, _of course_ you have a "right" to express disagreement (to the standards Scott requires/demands), and, yes, you're not 'under an obligation' to agree with Scott, or anyone else.
But it also seems like a mistake to _believe_ anything because of an 'obligation' – that's not how accurate beliefs are assembled! Truth is neither an obligation nor 'allowed', but info that's accurate independent of our thinking or desires/fears/hopes/'obligations'.
It sure seems like you just want to believe what Scott believes. Research on complex social issues finds, over and over again, that there are not single, primary causes to health or disease, prosperity or poverty, social order or civil enmity. Wanting there to be One Weird Trick is a very human desire, but not rational in the least.
Your "take note everyone" feels fallacious and quite curt. You ignore my query into the root cause of things and fail to answer the question you quoted directly. Can you answer it?
What Scott communicates is a narrative. Having data points to back that doesn't mean it isn't a narrative, and I'm going to save us my diatribe about general concerns of data collection, concept validity, and inferred causation.
The central point I'm making is about the lack of root cause analysis in this piece and it's practical context (e.g. the bit you quoted). Here, I'm not debating the validity of the "Ferguson effect" and other patterns observed in data because I see it. I'm questioning the meaning and practicality of concepts like that. You picking up what I'm putting down?
I was discussing this essay online and my interlocutor pointed out, and I'm copying/pasting this:
"A very simple falsification of his theory would be if the bulk of the increase was in-household homicide."
Do we have numbers for that?
(To be honest, I think that if the bulk of the increase was in-household then that opens up even uglier questions but, hey. The point of science is to go where the data inexorably leads.)
Is "in-household homicide" about the _relationship_ between the perpetrator and victim or _where_ the murder occurred?
I think it'd be difficult to get data on the relationships – a LOT of murders are unsolved, and probably a good portion don't even have a 'official' lead suspect. The kind of people that commit these murders don't generally 'snitch'.
The FBI tracks murders by type. Domestic murders have a high clearance rate -- e.g., the man of the house probably did it. In fact, a lot of domestic murderers clear their crime themselves by then shooting themselves.
But do you know how those 'types' are defined? Is it _where_ the murders take place or _by whom_ they're (suspected to have been) done?
I'd guess in most cases the two are related, e.g. "domestic murders" take place in a domicile.
And maybe that's good enough. If someone is murdered in a private residence, and not from, e.g. a drive-by shooting, it's probably (or almost certainly) a 'domestic' murder. And similarly for, e.g. a murder at a family gathering outside somewhere.
I think your interpretation of the effect of the moving average is backwards.
When using a moving average, the measurement should lag behind drivers, not go ahead of them.
Stylised example: If the murder rate is always 5/day, then on Day N the atmospheric lead concentration goes up and stays up and changes the murder rate to 10/day on all future days, then the 7-day moving average murder rate will start rising slowly on Day N+1, reach 10/day on Day N+7, then stay there.
But you use the fact it's a 7-day moving average in some of the charts to argue for the measurement starting to go up *before* the event, as far as I can see, and that's completely backwards. Moving averages can't give us advanced predictions of the things that will eventually cause them to have risen!
All round, a lot of the very good time-resolution graphs seem to show the effect starting before the protests, and even before the protested murder itself (which was May 25th, I think), more like the beginning of May. That's very confusing to me.
But it's always tough to say when a trend change actually occurs in noisy data. Oftentimes if you just looked up to Day Y, you'd say, well, yes, Day Y is high and it's been trending up since Day X, but it "trends" up and back down again all the time just due to noise, and there's nothing particularly "trendy" about the Day X to Day Y period. But the if you look onwards up to Day Z, you find out that the increase just keeps on going and going until Day Z is clearly way out of noise range and there's definitely been a start of an upward trend at some point, and then the temptation is to go all the way back to that last inflection point on Day X and call that the start of the new upward trend, even though when you'd only seen up to Day Y, Day X didn't look at all special, just one more inflection point in a noisy bounce up and down.
I dunno why but my comment kept cutting off partway through (even though it would all be there when I tried to edit) so I've copied the rest here:
Maybe murder was up throughout May due to noise or some transient effect like easing some lockdowns and everyone having some built up murders to get through quickly or the weather or aliens, but it would have just subsided back to trend without the protest effect. It's really hard to say.
Clearly something has happened (most likely, anyhow, I guess maybe not but it seems probable), and this is as good an explanation as I've heard (pandemic explanations really don't ring true given worldwide data and the racial split), but I'm still allocating quite a lot of my probability mass to "some weird shit nobody's thought of yet" or "just sort of, you know, stuff".
This completely depends on how you apply the 'moving average'. There's a whole subfield of digital signal processing devoted to different filtering techniques. When you're dealing with a data series where you have all of it ahead of time (generally historical data rather than current data) it's common to do a symmetrical filter. The simplest is a centered boxcar filter, where the output is f(x[n]) = (x[n-1] + x[n] + x[n+1])/3. That's still a 3-day moving average, but it keeps spikes and other anomalies centered on their actual time and spreads them out on each side.
Using a filter like that, a sudden discontinuous rise on a particular day will be filtered to a straight line of the width of the filter, with the date of the rise half-way up the line. That's pretty close to what we see in the graph, so I suspect Scott's right about the cause. (The rise looks a bit more like a sigmoid than a straight line, so they might be doing a more 'rounded' symmetrical filter like a Butterworth.)
You can check the website those data are from (citycrimestats.com). They don't provide the raw data but from inspecting plots of "count" vs "count - 7 day moving avg" it's clear that the latter is the average of the count for the previous seven days (e.g., the first "February" day is the average of the last seven "January" days). So Scott is simply wrong here.
Yep, you're right. For anyone else struggling to be sure, take a look at the Incidents in Austin. There's a giant dip in mid Feb 2021, which is clearly delayed by several days in the rolling average plot.
Yeah. @Scott please retract the moving average part of your claim. The moving averages for that source in particular pull events _later_ in time: https://imgur.com/8xSgzYl
However, the point is sort of moot, because if you go to the raw unaveraged data, it looks like the spike in Minneapolis starts on May 26 or 27, which lines up ~perfectly with the start of the protests. So there's really no discrepancy that needs explaining away. I think citycrimestats.com doesn't draw the line in the right place, maybe because the protests started in Minneapolis before spreading elsewhere?
You discount the spike in gun sales too much. Sure the protests led to the increase in gun sales so they are correlated. Homicide rates are still high though and that is because gun sales are still high. Police do tend to pull back when convenient to set a narrative and in some countries you even see that with gang violence.
If gun sales played a major role, states with strong gun control laws on sales should have had lower increases in homicides. Did they? That would be interesting to check.
I don't think that's impossible, but my impression is that the increases were pretty similar across the country.
My guess would be that lax gun control states would average the biggest increases in gun accidents and gun suicided, but that gun homicides trends depend more on NYPD-style point-of-use illegal hand gun control than on point of sale control of scary rifles.
"Guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black"
I think Scott's overall analysis is right, but this particular sentence doesn't ring true, because legally-bought guns have a tendency to make their way into the black market via theft. In 2014 Tennessee allowed residents to keep guns in their vehicles without a permit, and then in 2020 there was a huge spike in gun purchases, related to the general craziness of 2020. Here's a graph of "guns stolen from vehicles" in Memphis, TN, by year.
Right. The mayor of New York was complaining this week, pretty reasonably, that the Supreme Court's concealed carry decision would lead to more thefts of guns from cars -- a law-abiding citizen with a concealed carry permit wants to visit his mother in the hospital where guns aren't allowed, so he stashes his gun under his car seat and his car gets broken into and his gun stolen.
My general bias is that guns for self-defense make sense in Wyoming when the cops are 30 miles and there's no bystanders to accidentally plug in the background, but guns make a lot less sense in NYC where the NYPD is a few minutes away and you might miss the bad guy and shoot a random pedestrian.
I'm really skeptical about one connection here. I don't think the homicide spike could be mediated by cop pullback. The timing doesn't work. Intuitively, there should be some amount of lag behind any of the reasons you proposed for cop pullback. Funding isn't cut instantly. The 'Defund the police' messaging took a little while to dominate. Police didn't instantly grow resentful; most condemned the Floyd killing anyhow, so only became resentful due to the protests. And this fits with the graph of arrests in Chicago; the arrests only started to fall off a week after the protests started.
But the homicide spike happened as soon as the protests happened. It needs to have been mediated by a much faster effect. I'd suggest the mundane 'there were just more people spending more time outside.' We know that murders in cities already go up when the weather is nice and people are outside, and go down in the winter and in rainstorms/blizzards. It makes sense that if some social effect made even more people go outside, there might be even more murders.
But then what exactly happened? If resentful police means less speeding tickets are written. That would not necessarily imply speeding will increase, just that fewer people get tickets. On the other hand if word gets out the police aren't around, then speeding will probably go up (and during lockdown, there were quite a few people who gleefully posted about breaking 100mph on interstate highways that would normally be clogged with commuters).
Besides _increasing_ resentment, and probably at a faster rate too, in the wake of the most recent 'BLM protests', the effect you just described was at play.
But then, beyond that, the police were officially ordered to, in many cities, NOT engage in all kinds of similar proactive policing.
And _of course_ the 'criminals' would know of all of this! It's in their professional interests to know this kind of thing.
Steve Pinker I think had a story (which I suspect he misremembered) about the police going on strike in his city when he was young. The first week there was an absurd number of very serious crimes.
While he concluded from this policing saves the day, I thought it was very obvious if his story was halfway true there was coordination between criminals and police. Probably not formal but all it takes is someone to overhear cops saying something like "well I hope the mayor knows there ain't going to be anyone covering the north side next week, he better be ready with excuses if anything happens!" and word will get out fast.
Tyler Cowen, likewise, likes to cite an ancedote about DC where sometimes random terrorism alerts cause police to increase patrols at odd times. This leads to a decrease in crime. Again the lesson he takes is more police = less crime, but I think it is pretty obvious the criminal ecosystem works around the work habits of police. Shifts in either direction can cause a temporary change in crime but the reversion to the mean asserts itself over time.
Yeah, I'm _very_ sure something like what you describe happens.
Fiction – not _great_ evidence generally! – _does_ describe, in stories about 'criminal' protagonists, pretty detailed knowledge, on the part of criminals, of their 'adversaries', e.g. the police, guards, etc..
I realize a lot of people don't remember the day-by-day change in the media climate over the last week of May 2020 but by the weekend of May 29-31 it was already extraordinarily hostile toward police and white people in general and stayed that way for months as a "racial reckoning" was declared to make up for 401 years of white sins against blacks.
That weekend I watched hours of Los Angeles news helicopter coverage of mobs breaking into and setting fire to luxury sneaker boutiques on Melrose Avenue and smashing up Jewish delis on Fairfax Boulevard in the closest thing I've seen to a pogrom in this century and was amazed the next morning to see the national prestige press egging on the "peaceful protesters." And it went on like that all summer, with the media eventually changing their term to "mostly peaceful protesters."
My impression is the American Establishment thought George Floyd protesters were, at least potentially, a mostly peaceful color revolution that would bring down Donald Trump in a mostly democratic coup after they'd attacked the White House, and the Joint Chiefs denied Trump's request for troops. Bill Barr defused the dangerous situation on the last weekend in May 2020 by pointing out that if the Pentagon refused to defend the President from the mob, the federal government employed huge numbers of armed men, such as the Border Patrol, who would be happy to protect their President.
Eyeballing these graphs and invoking priors about crime does not make a "compelling statistical case". Correlations in timing are weak evidence for claims that one thing was "caused primarily" by another, not "clear evidence". The observations made in "right-wing sources", or at least those you repeat in this post, are also made in the other sources you link. I don't believe it's correct to say a point has "gone unnoticed" when it is taken into account in justifiably more careful causal inference.
You've shown through your use of statistics that BLM protests directly correlate to the rise in homicides in black communities in the cities where the protests took place. Great. Now how did BLM protests influence this rise? Working out this more difficult question that should produce a nuanced answer, but you'd going to need more than stats to make it clear. What you've done at this stage is give fodder to those who care to use it.
After notable incidents of police brutality, calls to 911 drop. Most interestingly, some cities have microphones designed to pickup gun shots and pinpoint them to a block. This provides useful data since the microphones will pick up all gun shots and you can look at call logs to see how often neighbors call the police when guns are fired.
The problem with the claims of the Ferguson effect is quite frankly cops do not prevent many murders. If you want to kill someone, you're not going to do it if you see a cop standing on the street, but that just means you'll do it when your target isn't near a cop. If you kill someone because you are in a fit of rage, again that often happens in places where you normally wouldn't have a cop just standing around anyway.
The Ferguson effect is not that protests cause crime spikes, it's that when trust between police and a community breaks, crime spikes because the community no longer trusts the police and will not engage them, for example, if they hear two people arguing in the street late at night. My father-in-law was Italian and grew up in Newark NJ and his motto from the streets was "you never call the cops unless someone has a knife sticking out of them"
Now I also think 2020 had another impact on crime. The pandemic hurt open air drug sales and as a result dealers tried to move in on each other's territories to maintain themselves in a shrinking market. At least from watching a lot of shooting headlines from NYC in 2020 and early 21, a lot of them seemed very much like hits rather than the peak of a generalized crime wave (i.e. someone zips up on someone in scooter, shoots him, zips away). This can be tested when there's good data on all types of crimes. Usually one would expect homicide to be on the top of a crime pyramid with lesser crimes making up larger numbers underneath. In that model if homicides increase, all other crimes should too. If, however, we find most other crime stays the same but homicides go up much more, that indicates something is going on with the distribution of crime.
I'm a big fan of L.A. Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy's 2015 book "Ghettoside" that portrays a tall, handsome blond surfer dude LAPD detective who winningly talks South-Central witnesses into naming shooters in the war on impunity (although I suspect she wrote it with Brad Pitt in mind to play her hero).
But ... the single most successful war on crime in my lifetime was in NYC in the Giuliani-Bloomberg-Bratton era. Did it consist of winning the trust of the community by Brad Pitt types charming witnesses? Maybe, in part. But mostly it consisted of rounding up guys who were carrying illegal handguns and sending them upstate. After awhile, the guys left on the street were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of each other, so they stashed their pieces in hard to access places and NYC stopped having so many shootings.
>The Ferguson effect is not that protests cause crime spikes, it's that when trust between police and a community breaks, crime spikes because the community no longer trusts the police and will not engage them, for example, if they hear two people arguing in the street late at night. My father-in-law was Italian and grew up in Newark NJ and his motto from the streets was "you never call the cops unless someone has a knife sticking out of them"
But this is precisely what BLM/defund the police want. So they're promoting polcicies that lead to more black people dying.
Actually quite the opposite. The breakdown in trust happens not because there are BLM protests, there are BLM protests because trust has broken down. Defund is not a solution in the sense that having the fire department come and shoot hundreds of gallons of water on your house is not a solution to you doing a sloppy job wiring. Water damage will gut your house but if you've allowed a fire to start it's better than letting it burn but obviously the better solution would be to avoid the fire in the first place.
Anyone who realized how embedded police unions are knew that defund was never going to happen on any scale and it didn't. Find me any major police force with less officers today than it had ten years ago, or twenty years ago? Unless you have a very small area or an area that had a massive population decrease such places will be few and far between.
You can, however, rethink defund in terms of paying police less to harass with quota offenses and overpolicing and more with lighter touch policing and community building.
+1 to that. This article was really disappointing because it completely skipped a step, much as environmentalists skip a step (well, multiple steps) when they say "there is plastic in the ocean, therefore we should ban plastic bags."
Here Scott says "increase in homicides coincide with the protests, therefore the protests caused less policing which *pretty much instantly* increased the national homicide rate". Scott's proposed mechanisms:
> - Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
> - Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them.
> - Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk.
Plus he makes a fourth suggestion about police being "defunded" that doesn't make any sense (any reduction in police funding surely would have occurred after the homicide rate increased).
Somehow Scott fails to notice that he is implying a questionable theory of action for how police prevent homicides. Indeed, I fear that he has completely left the realm of "gears-level models" here. Scott is making a claim about *how* police prevent homicides, but doesn't notice that he is doing so! If I try to come up with a gears-level model of Scott's claim, the model I see is this: right before a homicide, cops often arrive on the scene just in time to prevent it. Therefore, if you reduce policing, homicides go up.
Consider: the size of the spike is about 28%. If we assume cops reduce the amount of policing by half (surely an exaggeration?), then it would seem that Scott's unstated assumption is that in about 36% of all would-be homicides, cops arrive on scene just in time to prevent the homicide before it occurs. Then, because cops are policing only half as much, they only show up on-scene half as much, so they only prevent half as many homicides as before; therefore half of those 36% go unprevented, so what used to be 64% of homicides materializing becomes 82%, which is an increase of 28%.
(Here's the equation I solved for this where b=baseline homocides without cops, p=prevented homicides, assuming policing dropped by half: (b-p/2) / (b-p) = 1.28, implying 0.78p = 0.28b; 1.28 represents the 28% increase in homicides)
Of course, I'm pretty sure it doesn't work this way. I would guess that well over 90% of the time, cops are not around when an attempted homicide is about to occur, and that instead, homicides are primarily prevented by a combination of (1) people not usually wanting to kill other people and (2) people being afraid of the consequences of killing people, plus (3) people killing people accidentally (e.g. during an assault or while driving badly)
In my model, police mainly prevent homicides indirectly via detective work rather than ordinary "policing". Detective work (and other pieces of the system, like courts and prisons) create a deterrent. And there's no way that criminals were thinking to themselves "hmm, George Floyd died, so I bet cops will *investigate murders less* now, so killing is safer now."
Scott doesn't follow the "Rationality A-Z" advice of spending five minutes on hypothesis generation (even though he does take the time to list out four ways that his one and only hypothesis could turn out to be right). So, here are the ideas that came to my mind during *one* minute of hypothesis generation:
1. people didn't stop *wanting* to kill people when the pandemic started, but put off the murders until lockdowns eased, leading to a spike
2. while people were in lockdowns, they got some homicidal thoughts and followed through when lockdowns eased (or otherwise had lower mental health leading to a greater tendency to kill)
3. people got into angrier moods because of the general anxiety after Floyd's death, and became more likely to kill other people as a result
4. more than one of the above
See also: Get Real notes that Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020.
It's also interesting that homicides did *not* decrease during lockdowns as compared to March/April of the previous 3 years according to figure 1 (oops, this is evidence against my hypothesis #1)
Finally, I notice that Scott's first three mechanisms do not involve police being defunded, which implies that they're doing less policing while being paid the same amount. But if cops aren't doing the job they are paid to do, why does Scott label the BLM protestors rather than the cops as "the cause"? As Nobody Special notes:
Step 1 - Police killings that lead to the protests <= not the cause
Step 2 - Protests against the police killings <= THE CAUSE
Step 3 - Police pullback in response to the protests <= not the cause
Step 4 - Increased crime
(edit: okay, I see how they could still "do policing" but leave the black neighborhoods, so they would technically not be skipping work, but I am not seeing how this makes them blameless. But this is a moot point: I bet cops *did not* leave black neighborhoods *nationwide* at the end of May.)
On a 'gear level' model, I could see how police could trigger a crime spike. Cops are mad at the mayor over pay negotiations. They let things 'drop' when arresting people like "Well, I hope the Mayor has something planned for the north side because there's not going to be anyone there next month". When calls come in, maybe they drive 'extra careful' responding. Word gets out if you want to get away with something, do it on the North side. Businesses complain and then the Mayor is coming to neogitations with hat in hand.
But that would probably result in lower level crimes going up first rather than the upside down pyramid where homicides spike but other crimes move slower.
Tyler Cowen made an error looking at this dynamic in DC policing. In DC policing is sometimes ramped up due to things like intelligence on terrorist threats rather than responding to the ebb and flow of crime in the streets. When that happens crime drops, from this Cown concluded more police = less crime. But what I would conclude crime is like a business and like a business that has competition, a dramatic change in tactics may throw it off guard but it will readjust itself. Crime in the streets is aware of things like when cops are nearing the end of their shift and at their lowest energy. You can get a temporary shift by making crazy changes to shifts but the other side will adjust to that eventually.
Scott: When you consider murders exclusively your conclusions make sense, but when you consider the stats for other types of violent crimes, it makes less sense. If policing went down post BLM, how do explain the fact that other types of violent crime didn't rise along with the murder rates? Violent crimes other than murders have only risen slightly (too bad I can't paste graphs into my comments).
Another data point you missed is that gun ownership among blacks went up 58% in 2021, and it had been rising for several years before that.
OTOH gun ownership also went up significantly in Latino and Asian communities (albeit not as fast as in black communities). I'd be interested if we saw any increase in homicides and or crime in either of those communities — which you'd expect to see if police started patrolling less post BLM.
I don't have an alternative theory, but any explanation needs to explain why other other violent crimes haven't risen alongside murders.
Indeed. Homicides generally can be divided into a few buckets:
Pre-meditation: "Hits" so to speak. Cops simply out and about are unlikely to prevent many of these. If you want to kill a gang member and see a cop nearby, you'll just wait until later to kill him.
Fits of emotion: Again these happen generally outside the eyes of cops. A man beating his wife probably does it at home and not in the middle of the street in front of a cop who is walking a beat.
If you want to argue that protests caused cops to pull back OR protests made criminals push forward (perhaps thinking cops are distracted), then the entire crime pyramid would have to increase. If a criminal thinks cops are out of the picture, all types of crime are on the table now and murder is typically the least common crime. If the bulk of crime did not increase dramatically, the protests fail as a causal factor.
Did police not respond to 911 calls for domestic violence because they were mad about protests? If that's the case the data should be easy to come by since 911 calls are logged as are police responses.
This was data from FBI NIBRS that was regurgitated by Kevin Drum. But I'm no longer sure whether he meant that domestic homicides were 45% of the increase in homicides, or whether there was a 45% increase in domestic homicides. I'm suspecting the latter, because I see another chart where domestic homicides are only 20% of the overall 2021 homicides. My bad.
But even so, I agree with you that we should see an increase in all crime, not just murders, if post-BLM reduction in policing is the cause.
I have to say it is hard to get good current data. There are some cities that have portals with good data but a lot of it is articles with things like "X has gone up Y% this June from last year" with no baselines, no previous years, no context nothing.
beowulf888 wrote that domestic murders were 45% of the increase. I'm now not sure what he meant. Did he mean if murders increased by 100 in 2020, 45 of them were domestic (i.e. within family) and 55 outside or did he mean of 100 additional crimes in 2020, 45 were murders?
Are we talking about a crime increase or a homicide increase?
Violent crimes typically refers to murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
It's been a year since I dug through that stats, but my recollection is that aggravated assaults rose along with murders and spiked at exactly the same times, while rape and robbery did not.
Rapes went down in many places, in 2020, and the timing generally coincided with the start of the lockdowns -- more women staying inside and less women dating because of covid -> less rape. There was a slight increase in the summer when some people stopped taking covid seriously, I don't recall if the numbers returned to normal or remained slightly below. I believe that rape still tracks the behavior of women, not just the behavior of criminals. Robbery rates might also depend on the number of targets to rob, for similar reasons.
Notice that grand theft auto did go up, in a number of cities, but robbery didn't. Perhaps because cars didn't stay inside to social distance, but people did?
I broke down some numbers by crime, back in 2020, but I haven't done an extensive follow-up.
NYC has a good UI for graphing crimes, that might be one good place to start, if you want to dig further. Also, this page is a good aggregator of city data:
The data graphs are a lot of information. It would seem to me if you broke rapes between date/family/intimate rapes and stranger rapes, then the thesis of police pull back being the cause would mean that while overall rapes went down, the later would increase or at least the ratio of stranger/non-stranger rapes would go up.
I feel the 'drug market consolidation' thesis needs testing. That namely is street level dealing saw a massive hit in the pandemic. Dealers responded by trying to take over larger territorities causing violence. I recall a lot of the shootings that made the headlines TV news each evening in NYC during late 2020 and 2021 seemed a lot like hits rather than just general crime at all levels going up resulting in a handful of murders at the top of that crime pyramid.
Agree that breaking down rapes by date/stranger would be informative and probably show the patterns you suggest, but I have no idea where to get that data.
Also agree that some of the murders and shootings could have been caused by changes in drug markets. The two worst US murder waves of the past century were caused by fighting over drug turf (prohibition in the 20's and crack cocaine in the 1980's).
It's certainly possible that drug markets were somehow rearranged by the pandemic and lead to more violence as a result -- maybe more drug consumption moved to online purchases, depriving street level dealers of income?
I wouldn't favor the hypothesis, based on the timing and location of the crime increase, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out as a factor.
Well you know all other business got huge government support with things like the Paycheck Protection Act and let's be frank, all the "these closed businesses will doom the economy" have ended up being wrong. Here we are two years later and frankly getting food outside your house has never been booming this much (granted takeout is huge versus sit down).
How exactly could the drug market have *NOT* had major reshuffling during lockdown and after?
I am also surprised that all the restaurants in my town didn't go under. I have also moved from dining out to UberEats. I do find it sad there is no UberDrugs to bring me psychoactive chemicals.
That said... why was there little/no crime spike in other countries? There are no drug markets and associated violence? What explains the racial distribution of the murder spike in the US? Like, why was it so much worse in some cities than others?
Cities with a large black population did poorly:
New Orleans, 62% increase in murders
Atlanta, 58%
Chicago 55%
Los Angeles only saw a 30% increase, I'd imagine there's quite a lot of drug use and trafficking in LA. But the racial demographics are different.
Miami also saw about 30%. Different demographics.
Las Vegas only saw 15%. Surely there's ample drug use in Vegas. But maybe less tourism reduced demand?
Seattle had one of the highest scores, 74% increase, I think that was both because of a low baseline plus big police protests/defunding
And Portland saw a 52% increase (low baseline, mass protest insanity)
Generally the theory holds up that places with defunding of police or big protests or depolicing of black populations did poorly. It being drug related... could be true, I don't know. You're gonna have to work harder to make the case to me.
There wasn't any 'defunding of police'. Not too long ago there was an article about a Washington assistant police chief who liked to decorate his office with nazi symbols. It took over a year and a $1.5M settlement to get rid of him.
When I look at NYC for aggrevated assault, I notice that there was a massive dip in early after March in 2020 (pandemic). And then an increase that that went up quickly in May (consistent with the BLM protest/Floyd thesis). BUT the increase returned to the pre-lockdown baseline only to fall again near the end of June leaving it lower for most of the year. Shooting follows the same pattern.
If one saw a general increase in all types of mayham (with some variation like robberies falling because you can't be sure a home is empty while carjacking goes up) this seems inconsistent.
I think you'd want something like a 6 month total to deal with noise/dips after May. I believe the total number of assaults for the second half of 2020 was higher than 2019, but NYC compstat is a little hard to work, I can only get YoY comparisons of June or of year to date.
It's not so much about trusting statistics versus having them. The statistics get a lot more plentiful if you wait a year or two but real time statistics are pretty sporadic unless you happen to be looking at a city that has exceptionally good reporting (with, perhaps, a helpful web based dashboard).
Carjackings are a violent crime that are almost always reported to the police for insurance reasons. They've soared since George Floyd's death, especially in Minnesota.
"‘Staggering’ surge in violent carjackings continues across Minneapolis
"A triple-digit percentage increase over this time last year has residents in fear.
"By Liz Sawyer Minneapolis Star Tribune DECEMBER 1, 2020 — 7:42PM
As I pointed out, media is not very helpful here. Triple digit increase means what? And what does it mean in relation to all crime versus a specific type of crime or crime in a specific area? I too heard carjackings went up in NYC but bulgaries went down and that seems a logical reaction to the pandemic....you can not longer be so sure people will be away at work during working hours but if you're hanging on the street all day, it's easy to get access to someone driving that is stuck at a red light or stop sign.
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests."
Very sound analysis, but the conclusion seems flawed. The murder spike was likely caused by the police pullback from the streets. While the police may have pulled back in response to the protests, I do not see how we could say that the protests 'caused' the police pullback (and hence the murder spike). If I call Scott a bad logician (which he is not) and he pulls a gun on me, is it right to say that I caused him to shoot me?
Indeed, and it is not like the protests covered every street. In reality protests would be in a few high profile areas but outside of them business went on as normal.
This is kind of an argument for general social fragility increasing a lot in the US after the pandemic. If Scott prepandemic let insults slide more and people insulted less then after the pandemic insults increased and Scott had less patience for insults, then things like shootings will go up. So will things that are not shootings like, say, people flipping out at fast food workers and throwing things at them or making scenes on airplanes.
Huge difference between "contributed to" and "caused". The thing is, "caused" suggests Scott/the police don't have agency. But they do. They make choices. Scott doesn't have to shoot me. The police can keep doing their job, even though they disagree with the protesters.
Scott and right leaning people here like the idea that BLM protests literally cause crime via some type of white fragility? But it's actually an amazing anti-police assertion. Imagine if a town voted down teacher raises in the school budget and the next month every kid was given detention, got D-'s, numerous refferals made to child services for psychological checks, etc. People would go ballistic.
Yet here we casually entertain the idea that police, many earning close or more than six figures, have been purposefully allowing crime to happen for two years plus now as revenge for....being mean to Trump I guess... Not a good thing if this is actually true because if it is the answer is not to stop protests.
I fully agree. I didn't want to get into this bc I'm European and I may not be getting all the nuances right, but I also fail to understand why the Democrats would try to conceal the fact that the crime spike followed the BLM protests and the police pullback from the streets. This is damning for the police, not the protesters.
The Democrats encouraged the BLM protests and then provided the police with the incentive to pull back from the streets. The American people are at least occasionally observant enough to notice that sort of correlation, so the Democrats in general would obviously prefer not to have them thinking in terms of "why was there a big crime wave starting in Summer 2020?"
The demand to defund the police is not very smart. But we all surely agree that a structural way out of the crisis is to end the impunity of the police? This is the way to avoid BLM protests altogether (or at least unite the US society squarely against them) and avoid the spike crime "caused" by them. Right?
No. BLM will protest even when police do perfectly legal things that are necessary to protect innocent life. To avoid BLM protests *altogether*, you'd need to basically either not have police, or order the police to never ever use force against a black person even if the black person is actively trying to kill them or some other innocent person. And no, US society will not "unite squarely against" protesters who protest police using force against black people attempting to commit murder.
Policemen abusing their authority in ways that ought not be allowed, is only a subset of things that cause BLM protests.
Strange, haven't heard about BLM protests for nearly two years from now yet not a few days ago I passed police having pulled someone over. Perhaps the best way to avoid BLM protests is to be for professinal policing rather than openly embracing thuggish policing as certain previous administrations did.
Then try to solve this subset. I bet it'll help, but even it if it won't, you'll have the satisfaction of having been right all along (while also having saved a couple of innocent lives).
"Policemen abusing their authority in ways that ought not be allowed, is only a subset of things that cause BLM protests."
It seems odd that critics of BLM criticize BLM for protesting police too rarely? I mean if you think there should be more protest when targets of police abuse are not Black, then what has been stopping you from protesting those incidents over the last few decades?
You misunderstand John, who is accurately saying that BLM launches protests over perfectly reasonable and just uses of force. For example, Ferguson and Michael Brown.
Not really, considering the number of similar incidents involved both African American and Caucasian suspects that happened without nationwide riots and murders.
TRANSLATION: Because you didn't protest like this when X happened, you're now punished for protesting when Y happens. It's as if whataboutism floating lifeless in a pool has suddenly become sentient and become a new lifeform. Yawn.
Naw, it's because in one case, when someone gets killed, BLM doesn't care unless it's a black person. When it is a black person, BLM cares so much that they burn down the town.
It also kind of takes the police pullback as a given, rather than a choice. It's like the proposed chain of causation here is:
Step 1 - Police killings that lead to the protests
Step 2 - Protests against the police killings
Step 3 - Police pullback in response to the protests
Step 4 - Increased crime
But for some reason, the people in step 2 are deemed to have "caused" the crime spike, rather than the police doing the killings in step 1, the police pulling back in step 3, or the criminals committing more crimes in step 4. Like only the protestors have moral agency, for some reason.
- Firstly, I don't remember "give us more murders" as an endorsed desired outcome of the protestors, and I think it's more than a bit of a stretch to say that's "what they wanted"
- And even if we do apply some sort of "this is what you wanted" framework to the protestors, doesn't it then apply equally to the police in step 3? Aren't the increased crime rates the intended outcome of the police pullback? If you believe that you are the only thing standing between people and high murder rates, and then pull out of communities in order to show your detractors "what a world without cops looks like," it seems to me that "communities I pull out of experience higher crime rates" is part of the outcome you are trying to create by pulling back. Also at Step 4 "more crimes" seems very much like the intended outcome of the criminals who took advantage of police absence to do more crimes.
The protestors' stated goal was less policing. They explicitly said that's what they wanted, over and over again. What did they think would follow from that? I honestly have no idea. But they evidently thought it would be something good. Insofar as they were wrong about that, that's their problem, not mine.
I've never heard police saying what they want is less policing. What they've implicitly said is, "Apparently you guys want less policing, so that's what we'll give you." That's the opposite of actually desiring less policing as a policy outcome. The police hope that by doing less policing in the short run, they'll make people see how much they miss policing, and cause them in the long run to abandon the "less policing" platform.
I suppose in a certain sense criminals are in favor of less policing. But probably not all that much; what criminals mostly want is to free-ride on a system that polices and thereby protects them from other criminals, but just happens not to notice their own crimes specifically.
>>The police hope that by doing less policing in the short run, they'll make people see how much they miss policing, and cause them in the long run to abandon the "less policing" platform.
But that's just my point. The means by which police hope to "make people see how much they miss policing" is the crime spike resulting from the pullback. If the pullback doesn't result in a crime spike, it doesn't "make people see how much they miss policing" and the strategy fails.
So the crime spike is very much the outcome police intend to produce by pulling back. Granted, it's intended as a means to an end, not an end in and of itself, but it's still the effect that they hoped to achieve.
Okay, but the protestors are still the ones who insisted that this was a good idea. Nobody else thought that. But for the protestors, none of this would ever have happened.
Attributing causal responsibility to the people who pioneered the idea, emphatically called for its implementation, and ultimately achieved it -- even if only through the mechanism of other people's cynical acquiescence -- seems like the most natural thing in the world to me.
Oh for crying out loud. If the police pull back and there is no crime spike, then the protestors are correct and the cops are being violent oppressors out to kill young black men, the American justice system is constructed the wrong way, and putting the funding into community measures not more cops is the right way to deal with preventing crime.
The crime spikes happened. That means there were criminals out there just waiting for the chance to take advantage. Blaming the police for the existence of criminals is a new one on me, is this along the lines of "if there were no laws, there would be no guilt"?
It was a rough way to do it, but how else would the police prove their point? If they had continued where they were and no crime spike happened, you'd be here arguing that this proves the police presence is unnecessary because the 'peaceful protests' didn't cause any rise in crime.
Should the cops have pulled back? No. But if the mayor and the chief of police are telling them "don't engage with protestors, don't make arrests, just let them set fires" and protestors are yelling in their faces that they should go away and if they stay protestors deliberately interfere with their attempts to police events, then what do you do?
You do as you're being demanded, and pull back. And then the consequences of that happen. You can't have it both ways - you can't have both 'the police should not be here, the police should not engage suspects' and 'why aren't the cops here to arrest those shooters?'.
"But for some reason, the people in step 2 are deemed to have "caused" the crime spike, rather than the police doing the killings in step 1, the police pulling back in step 3, or the criminals committing more crimes in step 4. Like only the protestors have moral agency, for some reason."
That's because if the protestors march and demand "No more cops! All Cops Are Bastards! No Pigs Here! Cops Are Killers!", then if they get their demand - police pull back out of the neighbourhoods they are being told to leave - then step 4 happens as night follows day. All the proposed alternatives - no cops, just specially trained social workers - are not going to work, and neither will the home-grown 'community policing' we saw with CHAZ and CHOP which very soon degenerated into "goons with guns set themselves up as tinpot militias and shoot people just as much as the cops ever did".
"I want those peanuts!" "But you have a peanut allergy, they will make you very sick and might kill you" "Gimme those peanuts!" *grabs peanuts* *gets very sick* "Who could possibly be to blame here, it must be those dastardly peanut growers!"
In the first place, the protests don’t happen without the police killings they were in response to, and a quick google of names like Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Philando Castile, and George Floyd will tell you that whatever you think of the percentages, at least *some* of those killings were totally unjustified and legitimate to complain about. So there’s a role in police causing the protests that we have to ignore if we want to simplify things down to “the protests caused the crime increase.”
As for the protests themselves, they’re hardly monolithic. For every extreme position shouting “all cops are bastards defund the police,” you can point to somebody clarifying “abolishing the police would be stupid and ‘defund’ is really a buzzword for getting cops out of the social services business and redirecting that money to social services,” or asserting a more moderate position like “I want more community oversight of cops in my community.” We can argue about the mix of percentages, but the argument that the protestors “got what they wanted” when the police stopped showing up relies on outright ignoring that any reasonable voices existed, which is demonstrably untrue. The protests at 12AM were very different from the protests at 4PM, as they always are, but the argument proposed requires the illusion that the 4PM protests simply didn't exist at all.
Then you have the police reaction. Nobody forced them to engage what was essentially a stealth slowdown strike. That was another choice they made, one which was to many degrees informed by a desire to punish people for disrespecting them and a hope that rising crime in their absence would make people regret having demanded weakening their authority. Other factors like fear of liability and public shaming for honest mistakes were certainly part of it as well, but you can't just say "once crime goes up they’ll all be sorry and come crawling back” in one breath and then "I didn't mean for crime to go up" in the other. So again, people trying to simplify things down to “the protests caused the crime increase” have an inconvenient fact to ignore, and end up effectively pretending that police are just machines that automatically stop policing when criticized, instead of being adult human beings who made choices.
So you can get to “the protestors demanded less policing and got what they wanted, which was a crime increase, so the crime increase is all their fault” but only if you cherry pick actors and choices to remove from the narrative until that’s the only explanation left. But I don’t think that honestly represents the police’s role in the history. They aren’t the sole cause, but it’s silly to pretend that they’re somehow totally on the sidelines of it.
For clarity, I'm not arguing the converse - the protesters aren't robots either. Any attempt to write them out of the cause-mix would be asinine, and I'd be writing this same kind of novella if someone was in here arguing "police caused the crime spike."
It's just that it seems like people here are well familiar with the protestors' agency but overlooking that of the police.
It doesn't feel weird to me at all. There have been numerous unjustified killings by police that resulted in no change in the crime rate whatsoever. The difference with this particular killing was that it led to protests on a massive scale. The protests, not the unjustified killing itself, would appear to be the obviously decisive causal variable.
Moreover, the protestors chose to adopt as their most prominent desideratum a demand that the police cease to function, or cease to exist. They could've chosen any number of messages to broadcast in response to an unjustified police killing. It was their unconstrained free choice, not determined by the actions of Derek Chauvin in any way, to settle on the message that would be maximally hostile to law enforcement officials as such, and most likely to demoralize and alienate them if and to the extent that the protests received mainstream support. That was their decision. It's for them to reap the whirlwind.
Okay, but most police killings (even unjustified ones) do not lead to protests, and BLM protests have followed completely justifiable shootings (e.g. Mike Brown).
Also, what does it say for the black community if their response to a black man being killed is to...kill more black men?
Unfortunately, the Republicans seem to have now adopted the tactic as well to some extent. The Jan 6 riot seemed like a "We're copying your playbook, how do you like it?" moment to me, as a foreigner watching from abroad.
We have a right to protest peacefully, which the VAST majority of people there (estimates between 200k-500k) did. Almost zero property damage, a few dustups considered "normal" for protests these days, and nobody killed except an unarmed, non-threatening female veteran murdered point blank by police while she was standing right next to a SWAT officer. And they were fully justified in being angry - it is impossible that the elections in the swing states were legitimate EVEN IF the actual number of legitimate votes for Biden exceeded those for Trump. We can NEVER know the truth of that. Why? Because in breaking their own election integrity laws (refusing to collect, evaluate, and properly store the evidence required by law to prove legitimacy, thus making it IMPOSSIBLE to know for certain if the tallies were legitimate), the act of declaring those elections "certified" was an act of felony fraud.
Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. I find it astonishing that anyone could be gullible enough to believe that 81 million people (16 million more than voted for Hillary) came out to vote for a turnip.
Hahahahaha, yea ok Jan 6 was just a normal protest. Or it was confused tourists who thought the building was open. Or it was ANTIFA secret agents who wanted to scuttle the election because, errrr, everyone would blame it on Trump supporters who were in Church that day? Yawn..
Yes because you've done such a careful job presenting a case with real evidence. People like you cannot be allowed to have power because we all know what you are when the mask drops.
Hilarious - a totalitarian trying to decide for us who is qualified to have power.
The correct answer, as our founders knew well, is, "Nobody." That answer absolutely enrages you.
That is why you will take a shellacking this November, will spend decades out of power, and Trump will serve his second term - because you over-reached, and everyone knows it.
Republicans were in charge in 2020 and of the two major candidates, only one embraced law and order and rejected violence in protests. That's the one that won.
Not in the cities, they weren't. That was all Dems.
You must be very sad this week. Roe shot down. Gun rights affirmed. Next up - SCOTUS is about to revoke all the powers unelected bureaucrats have wielded for 70 years. Your totalitarian dreams are all going into the trash heap.
At least you have a shellacking to look forward to in November, decades out of power, and Trump's second term. Right?
You do realize this statement is no more valid than saying that the solution is to stop electing Republicans because Donald Trump was a leader "practicing lawlessness as an example to the people," and it's therefore all the fault of the Republican party, right?
I mean, it's so on the nose that one almost has to assume you're trolling here, so if you really are serious, I'd reconsider this claim and the thinking that lead you to it.
Lawless leaders encourage lawlessness from citizens. This is a historical fact traceable across millennia of recorded history. Furthermore, President Trump was doing his Constitutional duty to try to avert the consequences of the massive election fraud which we all know happened.
So, it's no surprise that, with no facts to support you, you resort to gaslighting and projection.
"I looked into Central America, and found that Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala also all saw murders decline rather than spike in 2020."
Taking these two factors into account, it isn't hard to see why this might lead to a large increase in homicide specifically in the United States. Demand for drugs increased, but dealers who sourced their products from South of the border were unable to meet that demand. So more money went to dealers who got their drugs from other sources, and some of them used their increased resources to expand into territories of the dealers who got their product from down South. When people started to go outside again in Summer 2020, some of those new territorial disputes turned violent.
It makes perfect sense why we would see this more in the US than in other countries. Compared to other developed countries, an unusually large portion of American illegal drugs come across one particular land border, the American drug trade is unusually violent, the easy availability of guns might have something to do with it, etc. That's without even getting to the question of whether cultural or other idiosyncratic factors might have led to a greater increase in drugs and alcohol consumption in America during the pandemic than in other countries (for the record, the first Google hit for drug overdose deaths in the UK in 2020 shows a pretty small increase of just 3.8% https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsrelatedtodrugpoisoninginenglandandwales/2020 ). And it makes perfect sense why the homicide increase would be greater in demographics that are more likely to be members of drug gangs in high population density areas where we would expect territorial disputes to be more frequent.
It all seems very consistent with the available data.
A theory I heard tossed around in 2020 was that the pandemic hit drug markets very hard. As a result actors in the market may have tried to take over more territory in order to offset the shrinking market. Since those in other territories are facing the same problem, you have an incentive for using force to 'downsize' the industry.
This would make a lot of sense if the crime spike hit Latin America as well. The BLM protests then are more likely a correlation than a causation despite appearences.
Looks like I misread this comment as an increase rather than decline in crime in 2020 in those countries. I wonder, how good are our data? Even US data always seems to be a year old.
But in all seriousness, I think that the refusal of so-called "expert sources" and media outlets to self-correct when they get something wrong (like their explanation for this big crime spike) is a huge problem. It seems to me like it's mostly based on ego. People in power don't have the humility to admit when they're wrong and because they hold power, they typically don't have to.
That's why you should vote for me when I eventually run as president. I promise that if any media source or person of influence makes a mistake and doesn't own up to it when new information comes out, I will punish them in a terrifying way. Egotistical narcissism is a hard personality trait to eliminate but when it is put in direct opposition to the self-preservation instinct, anything is possible.
The left doesn't look good here and they haven't for a long time. Dating back to The New Jim Crowe (2011?) I've seen a lot of slight of hand from the left, and then when someone raises an inconvenient fact, there is more smoke, mirrors, and ad hominem arguments.
The causal chain between BLM riots and the rise in violent crime seems crystal clear to anyone without an agenda. Considering the progressive effort that goes into convincing us that black white disparities are the mostly the result of a history of institutional racism (a claim that is highly disputed even among many black intellectuals), this link looks much more direct and well supported by evidence. If we can't agree on something so seemingly obvious as criminals do more crime when they know they won't be punished for it, how can we solve any meaningful problem? Isn't this a "hard conversation?"
This highlights an area that cause a lot of compassionate but logical people to question whether the left cares more about their own sacred ideas rather than the underlying problem.
"The causal chain between BLM riots and the rise in violent crime seems crystal clear to anyone without an agenda. "
Why of course, because the right will literally blame everything on BLM protests. I've seen conservatives trying to blame the bad police response in the Texas shooting on BLM protests (sure it's literally years out and I don't think rural Texas was a hotbed of BLM protests even then but why not?)
But this creates an interesting dynamic. If the theory is that police pull back because of BLM protests and the responsibility for crime falls on the protests because that caused a pull back....then that really means all responsibility is pushed out. In other words, the criminal blames the cops not being there, the cops not being there blame the protests (even if they only saw them on TV 2 years ago), but hey the protests get to blame who? Yea, keep playing with this double edged sword my friend.
I'm not making any sort of connection between protests and all crime. I'm talking about poor young black men killing other young poor black men--which is what Scott is talking about. This crime is disproportionately concentrated within certain communities that is also the focus of BLM protests.
In 2014, 2015 and again in 2020 we convinced the whole country that the bad element to focus on was actually law enforcement and not the underlying crime that law enforcement was responding to (and admittedly doing horrible things in some circumstances). We DEFINITELY didn't care about the 99% of these communities that is trying to live around this despair. Either way, once the cops saw that there was zero upside in preventing or responding to violent crime, they decreased activities, and crime exploded relative to when police were incentivized to work.
I have never "stretched" this to a mass shooting or other non-related violent crime and I don't see the connection there. Again, it's amazing how hard people work to explain away what seems clear as day from a "common sense" perspective, but which is also supported by evidence as the article shows.
"I'm not making any sort of connection between protests and all crime. I'm talking about poor young black men killing other young poor black men--which is what Scott is talking about. This crime is disproportionately concentrated within certain communities that is also the focus of BLM protests."
You have the following problems:
1. What communities had high Black populations but no BLM protests? If you don't have this, you can't really test the question can you? You might as well say lots of people watching Tiger King on Netflix caused a surge in homicides in 2020.
2. We are treating BLM protests as if they just happen for no particular reason. They happen after a breakdown in trust between police and the community. You can say the inspiration for that distrust is an unfair focus on individual incidents that are unfair from some hypothetical 'objective' mind. But that's kind of stupid. In the 90's, Bill Clinton getting a haircut on Air Force One became highly important cause. A odd 'yeaaa' captured on a mic at a rally sank Howard Dean's presidential aspirations. A few high placed people in the UK attending parties during official lockdown almost sank Johnson's government. Telling people something that has caught their attention is something they shouldn't pay attention too is, well elitist and stupid.
3. So then what is the impact of the pandemic? Are we really going to be told that the pandemic was nothing? If not for BLM protests, crime or poor black on black crime, would be the ONLY thing in all of American society that would have remained unchanged by such an unprecedented global event? That seems quite a remarkable assertion which would require some really hard evidence for such remarkable stability in the face of such dramatic social change (and why would crime be so amazingly stable in the face of a pandemic, but mostly peaceful BLM protests are too much for that one metric to remain stable?)
4. The global surges in homicides in Latin America do hint that you can't pin this on BLM protests unless you're going to get really voodoo with it and claim even just seeing it on Youtube or foreign news somehow caused people around the world to start killing each other.
1. (a) The test wouldn't need to have any BLM protests in them. The protests and the underlying message of the protests went into just about every home in the country. The most lily white elite privileged adolescent goofballs were going around ripping blue lives matter stickers off of police cars in white suburbs and holdings protests at their cute little private schools. A physical BLM presence was not required within a community for the community to adopt the idea that we should devalue law enforcement. (b) It wouldn't be just black populations, it would high crime black populations that had relatively high crime before the protests. The crime would be relative to other areas and you would ask whether the crime increased after the protests (which it did based on the article) Although I do think it's interesting that even wealthy areas of these affected cities are experiencing much more crime as well. (c) the idea that I would have to "test my questions" is hilarious. Is there anything that can be surmised from living in the world? Talking to the people living through the problem? Looking at all the statistics? I love how people can now declare that water isn't wet unless we can prove it with a peer reviewed study.
2. I'm saying the reason they happen completely misses the point and ends up hurting way more poor black people than it helps. There are corrupt awful cops that should be in jail and there always will be. But to say aggressive policing isn't a net benefit to reducing crime in these communities is ignorant. This would be like blaming not only a terrible trauma surgeon in a high crime district for negligently letting a patient die or reckless manslaughter if they were REALLY bad, it would be like denouncing the entire surgical profession as evil and racist across the whole country and then asking "why is it so hard to get surgery? Probably just the pandemic". These functions are downstream and responding to a much bigger problem that we tried to solve for a while and now, well, we're just kind of saying oh well let's just let crime be not that big of a deal and, well, yeah you read the article. We've allowed the roving gangs to continue terrorizing the townsfolk while we demand more accountability the poor bastards that are tasked with having to try and make a difference. The underlying crime is the problem and it's getting worse, thanks to our helpful progressive "activists".
3. I don't know what the effect of the pandemic was on the most violent areas of our country. Seems pretty clear from the article above the rise in murders didn't really start until the protests started and we told everyone in America that it was ok to burn police stations. Did the pandemic have an effect? If I was running an attribution analysis maybe it would be 5%? It doesn't seem at all to be the proximate cause, and all communities experienced change--it was youth black on black homicide exploded after we allowed "activists" to burn their own communities for a month. "Mostly peaceful". This again is why we'll never solve this problem. We are so desperate to avoid the truth and hold the narrative. I can tell you some things that the pandemic DID cause--(1) a rise in bike sales (2) a rise in rural and vacation real estate (3) a revolution in telecommuting for knowledge workers (4) all sorts of horrific monetary and spending policies. A spike in murders in Baltimore? I don't think so. That was from the lack of police, and we have BLM to thank.
4. A global surge in Latin America I honestly don't know. Sure...maybe that's good evidence that the rise in US cities wasn't all because we told police to stop policing. I don't really know anything about Latin America and why crime there is similar to or different than kids shooting each other in Chicago.
Why is the vested interest in a certain narrative on the left so strong on anything to do with helping black people? I truly can't think of a situation that is more of "no brainer" than this one and it's still pulling teeth. BLM is a nightmare for black communities.
"In the second graph, you can see a more traditional presentation of homicide rates, which shows them *shooting up* after Gray’s death to a level higher than they had been in the previous twenty years."
There's an alternative explanation that fits the evidence here: the killing of Floyd itself caused the crime increase by damaging trust in the police, which led to an increase in retaliatory violence.
I posted some of this as a reply but it occurred to me that it might be worth elaborating on as a main comment. The police arbitrate violent disputes. If your friend is shot and the police to deal with it, there's probably no further violence: the perpetrator is arrested and sent to prison, end of story. But if you don't trust the police to deal with it - because there has been an extremely prominent example of them being untrustworthy - you might decide to take matters into your own hands and seek violent revenge.
This is just as compatible with the timing of the evidence you've described, including the pre-pandemic stuff in Baltimore and Ferguson.
This argument could be strengthened or weakened by research on how trust in the police changed among young black men, especially those adjacent to or involved in gangs.
I did see another comment mentioning that reported trust of the police among white people was affected more but at the risk of speculating a bit, even if a white American reported trusting the police less post-Floyd, I'm not sure they would turn to revenge violence in the event that they were the victim of a crime. Given that retaliatory violence is already common in gang disputes, I think it makes sense that it would go up there and not suddenly appear in other parts of society.
This completely undermines the BLM narrative that police do not stop/reduce crime. Police being less effective at policing is *exactly what BLM supporters want*, so they are promoting policies (defund the police) which will lead to more black people dying.
Yeah - I'm not a "defund the police" person, I do think they reduce crime. To be more charitable to defund the police people, they generally argue for shifting the funding to other social and first response services that they believe will reduce crime (I'm not saying this is a position I hold).
This old Tabarrok papers cleanly explains a mechanism through which we should expect riots to lead to permanently higher crime rates. Having read it long time ago, when I saw these riots I was pretty confident that they would lead to permanent increase in crime. As a bonus its explanation is less morally charged than your proposed mechanisms.
The thing is, given constant police resources the equilibrium crime rate is not self correcting. Exogenous temporary shocks to total crime will lead to a permanent change in total crime.
This happens because the decision to commit crime depends on the share of crime that is caught, but with constant police resources the share of crime that is caught depends on total crime.
So what happens is a temporary exogenous rise in total crime leads to share of crime caught falling, this makes people more prone to commit crimes, and that makes crime rise even more. When the exogenous shock is gone, there are still more crimes than before, so the share of crime caught is still lower, perpetuating the new higher crime equilibrium.
(Incidentally that is a minor plot point in True Dectective's second season, where a group of mostly law enforcement officers take advantage of the LA riots, and the consequent straining of police resources to make a hit on a jewelry store)
An interesting question would be how the homicide rate moved in cities that previously experienced the Ferguson effect compared to large cities in general.
Baltimore, for example, saw a spike in homicides after the Freddy Gray riots in 2015, which has remained until now. Notably, unlike the rest of the country, it did not have a homicide spike in 2020. Total homicides in Baltimore actually dropped in 2020.
This fits nicely with the thesis of this article. Baltimore has experienced the effects of the effects of the hypothesized depolicing, the George Floyd riots thus had little additional impact.
Edits: 1 ) removed grammar mistake, 2) clarified in the first sentence that I'm objecting mostly vehemently to Scott's characterization of the criminological literature regarding the OG Ferguson effect (see his section titled "Effects Of Previous Protests") which serves as kind of a robustness check to his claim that protests -> homicides.
Scott, you are wrong (about the original Ferguson effect, which serves as a robustness check of your more general claim of protests -> homicides)! And I can show you why. Why should you read this random comment among a sea of meshugas? Argument from authority: I'm a PhD candidate in one of the top criminology programs. In other words, I'm intimately familiar with both the content area and the issues of time-series analyses. I'm happy to privately verify this and/or share full text articles I source below if they are paywalled. Key points:
0) Begging the question and also not citing relevant literature that tests+disproves your claims
Throughout this letter (which should be revised to become a mea culpa), you conflate two separate hypotheses:
a) There is a POSITIVE ferguson effect (aka protest effect) on DEPOLICING (aka less 'active' or 'proactive' policing)
b) There is a POSITIVE ferguson/protest effect on violent crime, PARTICULARLY HOMICIDE
Hypothesis A appears true: police do pull back from policing when facing public scrutiny. The extent of this pullback is debated. For more info, see MacDonald 2019; Marier and Fridell 2020; Mourtgos, Adams, and Nix 2022; Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. However, you beg the question by showing hypothesis A is true, and claiming hypothesis B is also true!
Hypothesis B is plausible and worth exploring! This is because at the extremes both 1) more and/or well targeted police(ing) reduces crime (Evans and Owens 2007; Sherman 2022) and 2) poorly targeted and/or no police(ing) increases crime (Loeffler and Braga 2022; Piza and Conneally 2022). Deterrence - particularly versus nothing - does exist (Nagin 2013)!
However, the problem is that we have actually tested hypothesis B and found it lacking! See the Criminology and Public Policy Volume 18 Issue 1 (2019), particularly Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. The issue is that there's an assumption that arrests (and other CJS interventions) have a UNIFORM marginal effect, but this may not be the case. Instead, imagine that the marginal effects of incrementing/decrementing a(n) arrest/imprisonment/search/stop etc. is conditional on the cumulative exposure, much like a laffer curve! In this case, it is not so clear that reducing police interventions would result in increased crime, as long as the reduction isn't 'too large'. See Owens 2019 for a very good short summary on this economic perspective on CJS interventions.
So, TL;DR hypothesis A doesn't mean hypothesis B, and in fact we (criminologists) have already done this work and found hypothesis B lacking.
1) Causal and validity problems - aka time series analysis is hard
You've done some work, but it isn't even close to enough. To help get there, read the very approachable McCleary, McDowall, and Bartos 2017, with particular attention to the chapter on construct validity.
2) too high an expectation of there to be a parsimonious explanation - aka homicide is a highly contingent social event
It shouldn't be surprising that a reasonable desire for a parsimonious explanation - like protests -> homicide - falls apart. Why? Because homicide is actually the culmination of highly complex social phenomena. You have to have 2+ people, a place, a social context, a particular reason, and (usually in the US) a gun! Parsimonious explanations seldom provide enough of those elements.
3) Why does it matter if you are wrong?
Well, because being wrong about attributing the rise in homicide constitutes perpetuates a historic trend of perversely individualizes general social problems, creating variations of the following viewpoint (not to mention Sailer in the comments of course): 'The reason black people suffer in the US is that the poor and/or black community is composed of individuals who have low self-control, make poor decisions, have broken families, bad cultures, excessive disobedience, immoral norms, and self-perpetuating poverty. Therefore poor and/or black people profligately inflict crime (particularly bad ones) both within their community and across the US.'
Basically, this view of the world is like watching a cut of The Wire that only features drug busts and scenes of violence (aka the media up until 5-10 years ago). This means that structural conditions are ignored, or perversely endorsed in a 'race realism' mode to morally justify inequity. This is a lazy interpretation and it's uninspiring you stan for it when, in other arenas, you seek novel explanations. Like, instead of this hogwash you could write about when regulations and higher education intersect with negative externalities (e.g. Lovenheim and Owens 2014).
Bibliography:
Evans, William N., and Emily G. Owens. 2007. “COPS and Crime.” Journal of Public Economics 91(1):181–201. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2006.05.014.
Loeffler, Charles E., and Anthony A. Braga. 2022. “Estimating the Effects of Shrinking the Criminal Justice System on Criminal Recidivism.” Criminology & Public Policy (online first). doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12588.
MacDonald, John M. 2019. “De-Policing as a Consequence of the so-Called ‘Ferguson Effect.’” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1):47–49. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12430.
Marier, Christopher J., and Lorie A. Fridell. 2020. “Demonstrations, Demoralization, and de-Policing.” Criminology & Public Policy 19(3):693–719. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12492.
McCleary, Richard, David McDowall, and Bradley Bartos. 2017. Design and Analysis of Time Series Experiments. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mourtgos, Scott M., Ian T. Adams, and Justin Nix. 2022. “Elevated Police Turnover Following the Summer of George Floyd Protests: A Synthetic Control Study.” Criminology & Public Policy 21(1):9–33. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12556.
Nagin, Daniel S. 2013. “Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists.” Annual Review of Economics 5(1):83–105. doi: 10.1146/annurev-economics-072412-131310.
Ouss, Aurélie. 2020. “Misaligned Incentives and the Scale of Incarceration in the United States.” Journal of Public Economics 191:104285. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104285.
Piza, Eric L., and Nathan T. Connealy. 2022. “The Effect of the Seattle Police-Free CHOP Zone on Crime: A Microsynthetic Control Evaluation.” Criminology & Public Policy 21(1):35–58. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12570.
Rosenfeld, Richard, and Joel Wallman. 2019. “Did De-Policing Cause the Increase in Homicide Rates?” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1):51–75. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12414.
Sherman, Lawrence W. 2022. “Goldilocks and the Three ‘Ts’: Targeting, Testing, and Tracking for ‘Just Right’ Democratic Policing.” Criminology & Public Policy 21(1):175–96. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12578.
OP called for exploring complex causes for racial differences in crime("regulations and higher education intersect with negative externalities"). I was curious if he had disproven the explanation that Occam's razor would suggest: the IQ differences that explain most racial differences in socioeconomic outcomes also explain most of the crime differences.
I'm not sure I really follow what you're saying. Is your argument that the apparent uptick in certain categories of violent crime starting in May 2020 is a statistical artifact or otherwise illusory? Or are you arguing that the uptick did happen and happened at that time, but de-policing can be ruled out as a cause? If it's the latter, is there some hypothesis you're proposing as an alternative?
> "It shouldn't be surprising that a reasonable desire for a parsimonious explanation - like protests -> homicide - falls apart. Why? Because homicide is actually the culmination of highly complex social phenomena. You have to have 2+ people, a place, a social context, a particular reason, and (usually in the US) a gun!"
I am particularly baffled by this claim. Homicide, as you describe it, is the culmination of highly complex social phenomena in more or less the same sense that buying a DVD player is the culmination of highly complex social phenomena. You have to have 2+ people, a place, a social context, a particular reason, and (usually in the US) a credit card! If purchases of DVD players have been dropping since the advent of streaming services, a parsimonious explanation like "the advent of streaming services" doesn't strike me as being defeasible simply by pointing to the inherent complexity of the consumption of leisure goods in a capitalist society.
The paper's I referenced deal with the existence of the 'ferguson' effect on depolicing (what I call hypothesis a), and then that effect's causal relationship to crime (hypothesis b). The reason for that is simple - Ferguson (and similar) was not commingled with an economic crisis / lockdown / unprecedented pandemic. Therefore, it's a far cleaner test of Scott's hypothesis that protests -> homicides.
I don't put forth an explanation of why crime increased in 2020, because that's unsettled ground. There isn't some grand conspiracy to conceal the truth - it's an area of active research and debate! That shouldn't be surprising because it takes forever to get good data, analyze them, and publish articles. The best analyses I can find that have been published are:
Kim, Dae-Young. 2022. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Gun Violence Across Census Tracts in NYC.” Homicide Studies 10887679221077036. doi: 10.1177/10887679221077036.
Schleimer, Julia P., Veronica A. Pear, Christopher D. McCort, Aaron B. Shev, Alaina De Biasi, Elizabeth Tomsich, Shani Buggs, Hannah S. Laqueur, and Garen J. Wintemute. 2022. “Unemployment and Crime in US Cities During the Coronavirus Pandemic.” Journal of Urban Health 99(1):82–91. doi: 10.1007/s11524-021-00605-3.
(particularly table 4, a segmented poisson regression that finding a significant increase in shootings, but not of homicides, in the post-protest time segmentation)
All together, these studies suggest again that hypothesis b is PLAUSIBLE but do not substantiate it, if that makes sense. Perhaps another study will, given enough time (it took ~4 years for good Ferguson research to be published). Together, these articles seem to show that 2020 protests are associated with a subset of crimes (not necessarily homicide), but the story is unclear: is depolicing, driven by protests, enabling more crime? Is it a crisis of police legitimacy (aka views of the police rather than police actions)? Are protests merely accelerating a latent pandemic effect as compliance with Stay-At-Home orders was falling anyway? Did the cumulative socioeconomic precarity of the pandemic predispose BOTH protests and crime?
All in all, the mechanism that protests -> homicide is plausible in a context-free sense. But the evidence did not support it in the past, and does not support it yet, particularly in light of more complex alternative models. And, yes, that should not be surprising.
So, that seems to conflict a bit with the findings of the other studies, and suggest that hypothesis B is more plausible. My interpretation is that homicide is complicated, and Philly may honestly be different than Boston, NYC, New Orleans, Chicago, etc - so the quest for a general protests -> homicide causal story might be to simplistic.
"These studies suggest again that hypothesis b is PLAUSIBLE but do not substantiate it" strikes me as a very different preliminary conclusion from "Scott you are wrong!" and "we have actually tested hypothesis B and found it lacking!" And not just because of the shift from exclamation points to all caps as a means of emphasis.
I guess I'll lay my cards on the table and say that I sense in your posts a certain between-the-lines implication that the protests --> homicide hypothesis might well be somewhat true, but it's embarrassingly low-status within the field of criminology. Because it's sort of obvious and unsophisticated and lay-coded as well as right-coded, and what's high-status is fun counterintuitive stuff like Lovenheim and Owens (2014) on higher ed and regulations and whatever.
Maybe protests --> homicide eventually turns out to be empirically sort of right, but nobody's making tenure for substantiating that. Okay, fine. But your summaries of the criminology literature aren't really giving me a reason why I as an outsider should care.
Scott stated there was a clear and obvious effect Ferguson effect on homicide, and cited 2016 era criminology literature about the original (2014-15) Ferguson. The section in which he did was is titled "Effects Of Previous Protests".
Positive causal claims rightfully demand more rigor than a null hypothesis! So, that's where I started - with the Ferguson effect Scott claimed. And Scott was wrong about the original Ferguson on homicide, because we criminologists have found it lacking (Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019).
The 2014/2015 era is easier to analyze because it's clearer - more time has passed, and it's not commingled (with pandemic). Therefore my first pass was to regurgitate scholarship clearly demonstrated this lack of a significant ferguson effect on homicide. Which was my first post, along with other stuff. Perhaps I should edit my first post to explain this, I agree it's less clear. If you'd like I can edit my original post.
In your response, you questioned me about the 2020 protest era. Good point! Moving the question to 2020 is more difficult, and the range of plausible answers expands. You note that my answers are different. That's because the questions are different, and it's a good thing to answer different questions differently.
My conclusion to the question of 'do protests cause homicide' is that the best research says no for the Ferguson era, which is the cleanest test. My conclusion to the specific question of 'did the 2020 BLM protests cause homicide?' is 'I don't know yet', or as I said "these studies suggest again that hypothesis b is PLAUSIBLE but do not substantiate it"
I lay out my cards on the table about why I don't like it when Scott does amateur hour social science in point three of my original post.
To your characterization: What I think is actually embarrassingly low status in social sciences is 1) not testing the robustness of effects to different specifications and 2) not exploring the the mechanism of that effect. Claiming that there is a Ferguson effect that doesn't exist for Ferguson, but only for other time-space locales (e.g. Philly but not NYC) is rather silly. Better to place preregistration or bet given data, or if there's adequate data create a true model to account for concerns of validity. Which are really damn important given the simultaneous nature of the pandemic + its highly differentiated (rather than nicely homogeneous) local impacts on communities and economies.
If you don't care about the data, debates, methods, and findings of criminology, more power to you! But I'm not sure why I should care that you don't care.
> Claiming that there is a Ferguson effect that doesn't exist for Ferguson, but only for other time-space locales (e.g. Philly but not NYC) is rather silly.
That certainly does sound silly! Except that Scott isn't claiming anything like that. That's what Scott's claims sound like, apparently, once they've passed through your idiosyncratic methodological filter.
You're about to say, "Idiosyncratic?? What do you mean? I represent the consensus of an entire academic field!" And what I say is that if academic criminology takes so many words to say so little about such a basic question as "does less policing mean more crime?", it's either useless or obfuscatory.
Concisely, yes policing's relationship to crime is negative! In that more police generally means less crime. But the devil is in the details of that (e.g. order maintenance policing actually 'creates' crime by pre-empting complaints to issue loitering, marijuana possession, etc. misdemeanor citations). For a really superb and concise look at that question, see Emily Owen's 4 pager: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12413 (happy to share a link if you can't access)
To your more general point:
Scott uses the Ferguson effect as an important section of his piece. That section is titled "Effects Of Previous Protests". It serves as a robustness check of his claim that protests -> pandemic. I show that good research finds no such OG Ferguson effect. You don't actually debate me on merits (or literature), and instead verbally sparring with an imaginary version of me. So I'll repeat myself to you:
"To your characterization: What I think is actually embarrassingly low status in social sciences is 1) not testing the robustness of effects to different specifications and 2) not exploring the the mechanism of that effect. Claiming that there is a Ferguson effect that doesn't exist for Ferguson, but only for other time-space locales (e.g. Philly but not NYC) is rather silly. Better to place preregistration or bet given data, or if there's adequate data create a true model to account for concerns of validity. Which are really damn important given the simultaneous nature of the pandemic + its highly differentiated (rather than nicely homogeneous) local impacts on communities and economies."
If you don't care about the data, debates, methods, and findings of criminology, more power to you! But I'm not sure why I should care that you don't care."
I appreciate your attempt to pummel me into submission with papers, but the ones I checked are a bit off from the actual thing under debate - for example, Rosenfeld only shows that it isn't mediated by arrest rates.
You say that "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas". To support the existence of depolicing (I agree, btw, see my Hypothesis A), you use two variables as measures of this depolicing: Chicago arrests and Minneapolis vehicle stops.
Is your argument that Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 are wrong - that arrests don't move in concert with depolicing? The Cassell 2020 paper you reference actually likes the Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 paper, and instead says that the 'treatment' - protests - was instead probably too weak in the original Ferguson era to find statistical significance (pages 55-56). I'm not sure I believe that, but I prefer that argument to the argument you make here Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 aren't discussing what you're discussing. For that to be true, you'd have to claim that depolicing's relationship to arrests is weak at the same time you use a decline in arrests as evidence of depolicing. Pick one!
The claim "a police pullback motivated by the protests caused the murder spike" is weaker/broader than the claim "there is a certain statistical relationship between arrest rates and homicides in 2015".
I'm not able to fully follow the exact specifications of Rosenfeld's model. I see that when they just correlate arrest rate change and homicide change the way I would have done, they find a significant relationship. They note that you can make that relationship go below the threshold of significance by removing Baltimore (or two other cities with strong relationships), but you could also *not* remove the data points where you would expect this effect to be clearest, and even when you do, all it shows is that this real effect goes below an arbitrary significance threshold once you remove the places where it's most visible.
This is the alternative version of what I mentioned in the post in the part about the Ferguson studies - they generally have trouble finding significance at the nationwide level (especially when they remove inconvenient outliers), but do find significance in subsets of the places you would most expect to find the effect.
I think investigating questions like these is less about "can I find one paper where the effect didn't reach significance, then I win!" and more trying to holistically look at what things the data do and don't show. To me, the data show murders reversing a 10-15 year secular decline in 2014-2015, just after these protests, concentrated in the cities where the protests were worst. The Baltimore data show that the breakpoint was exactly at the time of the protests in Baltimore, to within a week or two of resolution. We also know there was a 30% decline in policing in Baltimore - and that, when we repeated this experiment in 2020, we got the same result. To me, the clearest explanation for all of this is that the protests caused a limited decline in policing, and subsequent limited rise in homicides, concentrated in the cities where they happened, breaking a statistical significance boundary by some specifications but not others. I don't really see an alternative explanation here for what seems to me to be very holistically-compelling data.
It also seems possible to me, as Rosenfeld mentions, that the protests exerted their effect through some means that didn't affect (or appear to affect) overall arrests, but this seems less plausible to me since I can't imagine what it would be. Given that Baltimore did fewer arrests after Gray, and Minneapolis after Floyd, and that Rosenfeld fails to find a general trend in arrest rates nationally after Ferguson/Gray, it seems to me that it still makes sense to explain Baltimore through arrest rates, and (assuming that better studies replicate the anecdotal evidence that arrest rates have fallen after Floyd) to explain the more recent spike that way also.
Damn my whole big comment was lost to the ether and I'm not going to rewrite the entirety atm. TL;DR:
1) You need a model rather than a correlation b/c shit's simultaneous: "sanctions, such as arrests, may be both a cause and a consequence of crime. If sanctions are dependent on crime, estimates of the effect of sanction levels on crime rates in which this endogeneity is ignored are likely to be biased (Fisher & Nagin, 1978; Greenberg et al., 1979). To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of arrest rates on crime rates, therefore, empirical methods should be used in which analysts control for the simultaneity of arrests and crime" (page 57 of Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019).
SEM (structural, meaning multilevel, equation modeling) lets you have the opportunity to disentangle such simultaneous relationships. I did NOT choose this article because it was the one article that showed what I wanted - I chose it because it was the most recent full evaluation of the question across all localities, has an appropriate method, and because the journal is well-regarded for its review process weeding out methodological problems. Note how often economists contribute stuff.
2) More generally, I agree with you about how important it is to "holistically look at what things the data do and don't show". It's just that visual inspection is notoriously bad as a method for time series analysis when you are doing causal, rather than descriptive, analyses. McCleary et al's book on time series analysis (2017) discuss how modeling is really necessary (see pages 17-18) especially when the underlying phenomena has complex factors and/or the intervention (here protests) is dynamic rather than fixed (not a singular policy shift, but a cumulative phenomena). Therefore what I need is:
3) a solid modeling approach. This is going to happen, it's just still pretty damn early in academic time frames. Which also calls into question the role of protests... for example, if police policy shifts in response to protests, at what point would a police policy shift have its own distinct agency apart from its origin story? What I'd like is to delve into mechanism and test counterfactuals. Some other commenter (who seemed to be getting frustrated with me) complained that I was obfuscating or some such. I'm not - it's just seems very clear to me that protest have little unmediated ability to influence homicide rates months after the protest itself happened. So... the interesting story is in the meat!
4) Otherwise it would be like saying "Economic activity causes climate change" and complaining that the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge this fact because it's too pro having things to consume. That's a far more causally supported relationship than the one we're discussing here, yet it's also kinda equally unhelpful in that it's overbroad - the interesting story is in the meat and the tradeoffs (again, love Emily Owen's 2019 piece accompanying Rosenfeld and Wallman - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12413 - happy to share if you don't have access).
Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld was the most prominently quoted critic of the "Ferguson Effect" theory in 2015, but in 2016 he changed his mind and said there was a Ferguson Effect.
Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. I should have learned from South Park (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J7AmojLGrs). Nevertheless, I will engage because, at the very least, readers should know the truth.
Parker, Trey, and Matt Stone. 2006. “Hell on Earth 2006.” South Park.
1) Scott explicitly described the effect as protests -> depolicing -> homicides. In 2016, Rosenfeld actually said that there was not yet good data / analysis to test this depolicing hypothesis. So, your 'sources' (self-citing much) are not only unhinged and wrong - they don't refer to the actual National Institute of Justice report that Rosenfeld wrote about this:
"What has become known as the “Ferguson effect” on the homicide increase, as noted, is subject to considerable controversy and evidence-free rhetoric. The term is also unfortunate, because it does not only apply to the police killing in Ferguson and because its precise meaning is unclear. The dominant de-policing interpretation is that highly publicized incidents of police use of deadly force against minority citizens, including but not limited to the Ferguson incident, caused police officers to disengage from their duties, particularly proactive tactics that prevent crime. Interestingly, however, that is not the interpretation of the individual who evidently coined the term. Sam Dotson, Chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, used the term in an interview with a reporter in November of 2014, three months after Michael Brown was killed. “It’s the Ferguson effect,” Dotson said. “I see it not only on the law enforcement side, but the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment” (Byers 2014). [page 18]
[several paragraphs later, when Rosenfeld returns to the question of the de-policing hypothesis...]
If de-policing was the operative mechanism, we should observe larger drops in arrests and other self-initiated police activities in cities that experienced the greatest homicide increases. The arrest data are readily available from the UCR, or will be when the 2015 UCR data are released in the fall of 2016. Data on pedestrian and traffic stops, building checks, and other self-initiated police activity will have to be obtained from local police departments. It should be noted, however, that the de-policing hypothesis presupposes a very large effect of policing on crime, large enough to explain homicide increases from de-policing of 50 percent or more in some cities. Effect sizes of that magnitude far surpass those revealed in research on the most effective policing strategies to prevent crime (Braga, Papachristos, and Hureau 2014). [page 21]"
2) I had thought that most readers could infer that the 2019 Rosenfeld and Wallman paper came at a later point in time that 2016. In your case at least, that assumption was clearly wrong.
Rosenfeld's 2016 complaint was that there was not good data + analysis on the de-policing hypothesis. His 2019 article took that question on directly, and was titled "Did De-Policing Cause the Increase in Homicide Rates?" Rosenfeld and Wallman (2019) lived up to this title, and their analysis found the depolicing-hypothesis lacking: "De-policing, at least as measured by declining arrest rates, did not have a significant effect on city homicide rates in recent years, but arrests will play an important supportive role in this multipronged effort to stem future crime rate increases associated with controversial police violence." (page 70)
Rosenfeld, Richard, and Joel Wallman. 2019. “Did De-Policing Cause the Increase in Homicide Rates?” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1):51–75. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12414.
3) Lastly, why not straight from the horses mouth about the 2020 homicide rise's relationship to the Ferguson effect vs other possibilities? Rosenfeld presented on this in November 2021 for over an hour. See his powerpoint (https://nationalpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/PRESENTATIONS_TUESDAY_Rosenfeld.pptx). Most recently, Rosenfeld and Lopez (2022) released an update to for the non-partisan Council on Criminal Justice that also explores this (https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-yearend-2021-update/). Their conclusion is similar to Rosenfeld's 2016 report (and similar to mine in other posts): protest -> depolicing -> homicide seems unlikely to be a sufficient cause, but we need better data and analysis to test this.
This entire thread is the perfect example of what happens when you release the "experts" into an area where it's difficult to conduct empirical science, but those eager to conduct the science report and act on their findings as if they've just engaged in physics or math. The attempt at being so empirical in areas of human behavior is a relatively novel concept and seems have serious limits. I don't know that it should be valued over the consistent and persistent testimony of those that have lived and worked in the communities that are at issue here. I have a hard time trusting the eager beaver Ph.D student outsider vs. the thirty year police vet or 70 year old resident of Baltimore as to "what happened here?" Cops and citizens all over the country are coming up with the same explanation based on experience. Thomas Sowell's famous book Knowledge and Decisions is something that comes to mind here. As does Shop Class for Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford when he discusses how a twenty year motorcycle mechanic could diagnose a problem much quicker than a newly trained mechanic with a manual. Often times the manual would send the young mechanic down multiple dead ends, where the experienced mechanic could articulate exactly the issue and found the manual to be useless. I realize this is a tangent and abstract, and there is a huge need for empirical data, but in so many areas of human behavior (crime, wealth, child rearing, education) I think we are hitting the limits of empiricism and should go back to valuing localized knowledges (cops, teachers, parents, business owners) rather than the "experts" that many times haven't lived a day in the shoes of those that they regulate or control.
I really like your comment, because I share much of your opinion that the "attempt at being so empirical in areas of human behavior is a relatively novel concept and seems have serious limits. I don't know that it should be valued over the consistent and persistent testimony of those that have lived and worked in the communities that are at issue here. I have a hard time trusting the eager beaver Ph.D student outsider..." 100% agree, localized knowledge is frequently both 1) more valuable and 2) more accurate than outsider/academic perspectives.
That being said, I don't agree with your conclusion - that because of the limits of empiricism we should "go back to valuing localized knowledges... rather than the 'experts' that many times haven't lived a day in the shoes of that they regulate or control":
1) If you think that, you should first object to Scott. The way that Scott argues and draws upon evidence is in very the same 'science report and act on their findings as if they've just engaged in physics or math' mode that you critique. You know, Scott's causal claims, evaluation of counterfactuals, discussion of academic findings, time-series analyses, (ad hoc) robustness checks, etc. Where are the on-the-ground interviews with the police vets or 70 year old residents of Baltimore? Given that Scott adopted that mode, I don't think it's quite fare to lay the burden on me. Or maybe you're not - it's a bit unclear. Is it me you're identifying as among the problematic 'experts', or both Scott and me? Genuinely unsure upon a re-reading.
2) Local knowledge compliments empirical evaluations rather than precluding it! Saying we need to return to localized knowledge implies that you can't empirically evaluate localized knowledge. I don't think that's true - claims about the world are frequently testable! And we shouldn't be afraid of testing them. Theory and hypotheses - derived from lived experience - are critical to my work. Furthermore I've done, and do, observations, interviews, and participant observations. That doesn't mean I have local knowledge, but it does mean that I don't just do statistical work.
For example, folk theories of the 'Karen' can be narrowed down to testable hypotheses about theorized relationship between demographics (e.g. middle-aged white female) and behavior (e.g. entitled behavior and racial stereotyping). Or, at the meta-level, you can explore about the emergence of the folk theory of the 'Karen'.
Objecting to the external validity, fishing expeditions, construct validity, data, sampling, and analytic method are great ways to find flaws social science literature. And you will find those flaws... because honestly a LOT of social science literature is shitty in one or more of those ways. But I think it would odd to be relegated to a pre-scientific understanding of knowledge that insists that local knowledge is superior to scientific knowledge... and further that the supremacy of local knowledge is untestable.
I feel like we are mostly in agreement here. On your first point, I find that Scott's analysis was an historical lookback of "what happened" based on crime data to validate some easily identifiable questions of when/where did the murder rate actually spike and run THAT against the more anecdotal accounts of what police and residents THOUGHT was happening. If the actual data did not support the claim that the violence rose around the time of the protest and affected the types of communities that the protests sought to protect, I would have happily declared victory based on the crime data. I think crime data is basically pretty straightforward and tells a clear story. This is not true for a lot of empirical data and studies that I see, particularly around the area of social mobility and wealth inequality.
So I have two issues with empirical data vs. anecdotal accounts - (1) the quality of the data (empirical or anecdotal) available given the question (2) the burden for some group accepting a conclusion on the data. If a substantial amount in various geographic locations of people are testifying to the same phenomenon that's carries quite a bit of weight. If there is straight forward data to corroborate these accounts (which I think there is here), I'm good.
I think that some groups will then weaponize (2) and demand MORE EMPIRICAL DATA almost to no end, and there really can't be enough to ever satisfy them because they have a vested interest in the well supported story to be false. It's like a defense lawyer always finding some angle on "reasonable doubt" but the burden of proof in social science is not the same in a murder trial. It also could be called what Scott refers to as "isolated demands for rigor". Our incredibly bright, well-resourced, and heavily agenda'd (not a word) academic sector is wildly effective at this type of weaponization of "studies" to use as a blunt object and over the years I've been sort of amazed at what I've seen in terms of (1) denying reality and (2) putting forth some academic argument with a causal chain a mile long made up of wet paper towels that concludes something that goes against the advice of, say, a teacher, cop, parent, etc.
I know I'm being very abstract and I'm just a guy that works for a living with three kids so not on your level of training, but to summarize I take academic research within social science more and more grains of salt with each passing year. I feel that as a society we overvalue Ph.D's and peer reviewed studies in this area, an we would all be better off deferring to practitioners.
I don't think you're wrong that there are isolated demands for rigor. But I'm not sure there's a solution. Our experience as people / researchers gives us opinions and heuristics that necessarily operate before we can empirically evaluate claims. Noting this - that we have, and will always have, biases - doesn't 1) excise our bias or 2) result in a superior way to adjudicate debates about either the world or about results. Using rationalism to LARP that we have no bias and are more 'reasonable' is unconvincing to me. I mean, look at the comment section as a whole - it's largely people saying "Yup this confirms my preexisting POV" or "Nope you're wrong".
Instead, I like the old-fashioned war of ideas vision of academia - a meta-solution of science as a process. I'm a curmudgeon in that I don't believe in post-structural or relativist epistemologies - like Popper, I believe in testing and falsifying hypotheses. So, the threat I see to science is not that people have biases, it's that the research they do is poor and/or the publication process is not doing a good job interrogating research. And that occurs distressingly often in criminology - among other social science disciplines: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428743882511159297.html
The truth is that there is good research, and that research contributes to knowledge. But, perversely, you need to be inside the discipline to actually figure out which research is good, because there is reason to be suspicious of a paper without knowing more about it.
2021 did show an increase in violent deaths (38% increase over the low point of 2020), but it exactly mirrored the the 38% increase in traffic-related deaths, so it's not clear how much the risk of death was driven by changes in police behavior / exposure. And, again, COVID-19 was the most massive contributor: https://nleomf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021-EOY-Fatality-Report-Final-web.pdf
The flaws on both sides are clear. On the "common sense" side you have the careful practitioner of 50 years or the person that had one traumatic experience and they have the same opinion on the issue. One of those opinions is much more valuable than the other because of the way they got there.
On the other side we have an academic that has been carefully studying a topic for forty years and has, many times, discovered something that changed their mind and/or presented an inconvenient truth to the status quo. We also have glorified propagandists wielding their politically motivated and bias-funded "studies" around that end up as headlines on the NYT, which most of the managerial class then takes as "fact".
My biggest issue with the research has been that (1) there are areas where research is limited in ability to solve a problem (maybe you don't agree here but I do); and (2) when the research says something inconvenient to a narrative, the research and the researcher are immediately pressured into changing their conclusion, and again (3) where bad research is used as a bludgeon.
To your three points: (1) Of course people are often wrong and perception is warped. To that crime study I could say the same exact thing about racism. This is a reflection of a political strategy to scare people into voting a certain way. And also it's great to have clear crime data at our fingertips to verify something.
(2) This is exactly the thing I'm talking about that Ph.D's and stats people need to stop doing. Scott talked about this a while ago when he showed that more people die from furniture dropping on their heads than from terrorist attacks in the US. The question isn't being a police officer vs. all deaths, it's being a police officer now vs. last year or five years, ten years, etc. Do you feel less safe? Yes, and you should. Here's an example of what I'm saying. White sharks are now pretty prevalent off of cape cod--something that just wasn't happening in 2010. If in 2020 I took you out on a boat 400 yards off shore with seals swimming everywhere and said "It's ok. Hardly anyone dies from shark attacks, and actually the biggest cause of death is COVID. So you're probably fine." 2020 marked a shift that was palpable for police in their subjective perception of safety as the country did nothing to support them.
As to the stat about traffic--this is along the same lines. We are finding some other area that caused human death that is outside the one most tragic type of death that is senselessly and intentionally cased by other humans (homicide). Traffic deaths aren't intentional crimes. 99% of traffic deaths are, by nature, accidents. With 330 million people buzzing around in metal death traps looking at their phones there is some level of "accidents" that we should expect. Why did they increase? I don't know but there is no necessary baseline in homicides in the world. It's plausible that we could reduce homicides by 90%--traffic or disease is really not the same thing. Lastly--where does COVID come in as a proximate cause in traffic deaths or homicides? The link between BLM --> riots --> homicides passes every smell and data test. I still wonder why so many people just stretch to anything to say "well look at this totally other separate thing, so yeah, we don't really know what caused the spike in homicide". We will never solve this problem with that approach.
Having now looked at a few of these articles, I'm a bit confused by your characterization of how they relate to what you're calling Hypotheses A and B. MacDonald explicitly presents Rosenfeld & Wallman as undermining Hypothesis A. They don't address Hypothesis B because their claim is that de-policing didn't happen in the first place. MacDonald even seems to say that we should still expect Hypothesis B to hold true, under alternate circumstances in which Hypothesis A is correct.
As I read them, Marier & Fridell are making a claim that's even farther back in the causal chain: they think the police weren't even demoralized to begin with. They acknowledge that studies asking police about whether they're demoralized and whether it's affecting their behavior have generally concluded that this did in fact happen to some significant extent. But Marier & Fridell point out that if you look at cops' survey responses to generic questions about e.g. job satisfaction, the results before and after Ferguson look essentially the same. That does arguably complicate the picture, and should maybe make one update one's priors slightly against a major demoralization effect. But it strikes me as very far from a conclusive or universally accepted refutation of the conventional narrative on this point.
That's an interesting point. I read the literature as more supportive of hypothesis a (decline in policing caused by protests) than you did. I agree that hypothesis A isn't clad in iron - there was a secular trend of decreasing arrests pre-Ferguson, so it's not totally clear that the further decline in arrests at a national level is in turn a clear consequence of the Ferguson-related protests. This doesn't mean you can't also test whether further arrest declines (or local increases) increase (decrease) homicides across the localities -- as long as there is some variance (not every city has the same decline), that test is fine. Hypothesis B (in my words: "There is a POSITIVE ferguson/protest effect on violent crime, PARTICULARLY HOMICIDE") can be tested even if Hypothesis A (in my words: "There is a POSITIVE ferguson effect (aka protest effect) on DEPOLICING (aka less 'active' or 'proactive' policing)") is not true.
However, as I said I think that there was some effect of declining policing: Macdonald says "Although it is evident from the data Rosenfeld and Wallman (2019) show that arrest rates have been declining nationally (see Figure 2 in their article), there is little evidence that city-level changes in arrest patterns explain the 2015 uptick in the homicide rate." Rosenfeld and Wallman directly say that their lack of a clear NATIONAL Ferguson-spurred decrease in arrest rates "could mask sharper arrest rate declines in cities with larger homicide rate increases and obscure possible effects of arrest rates on homicide levels" - which is why they go to the trouble of building their SEM model to test the effect of arrests on homicide in the Ferguson context. They don't find it. Which I would say offers some support for hypothesis A and no support for B.
The Ferguson Effect was highly localized: e.g., on 11/23/2015 Chicago finally released the video of a cop shooting Laquan MacDonald in the back and immediately the Obama Administration and the ACLU descended upon the CPD with all sorts of restrictions. By January 2016 murders were higher and the full year of 2016 wound up extremely lethal in Chicago.
The Floyd Effect was much faster and more national.
Gell-Mann Amnesia runs both ways. I've found claims about what "The Media" says to nearly always be false or cherrypicked when I bother to check them. (Also, is The Economist not part of "The Media"? If it is, then citing their graphs here is a self-defeating argument.)
I point to four articles that make the mistake I'm accusing of in this post. You can follow the links to them and see whether they say what I'm arguing they're saying. Have you done this, or are you just accusing me of something you could easily confirm I'm not doing?
The NYT is paywalled, so I checked the WP and Atlantic. I think it's fair to criticize the WP article, but the Atlantic article spends a lot of time saying basically the same things that you did. It even *explicitly* mentions that previous anti-police protests were followed by crime waves and that the current rise in crime is concentrated in black neighborhoods.
> A second major potential factor is the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in May 2020, a few months into the pandemic. Floyd’s death—along with several other high-profile killings of Black people by police—set off some of the largest protests in American history, and police came under scrutiny around the country. Although murders were rising before those protests, the largest spike occurred after them (though murders do typically rise in the summer). Murder rates have spiked after previous major protests against police too.
> But unlike the crime wave of the 1980s and ’90s, which affected many Americans of all walks of life, the current spike appears to be heavily concentrated. Many homicide victims are Black men, living in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
There's also the question of how representative those articles are. There are lots of journalistic outfits, even excluding right wing ones, and they're constantly publishing tons of articles and opinion pieces, so it is easy to cherry pick to support any narrative you want. The fact that you used graphs from The Economist to demonstrate "what the media doesn't want you to know" is pretty ironic.
> (Also, is The Economist not part of "The Media"? If it is, then citing their graphs here is a self-defeating argument.)
Graphs are (mostly) just direct depictions of data. They are sometimes misleading, but these ones ostensibly aren't so it makes sense to use them. Most of the misleading is done in the writing - the pushing of narratives. Like how the NYT tacitly admit the Ferguson effect is real, but the headline point of the article is that you're bad if you think its true.
To throw in another theory for the general situation, maybe double time for overtime is a bad incentive. Perhaps the police are too sleep-deprived to be thinking well. I've never seen discussion of when dubious behavior happens compared to number of hours worked.
I'm with you on sleep-deprivation being a (potentially) terrible component! But that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that could be address by anything in The Overton Window currently.
People wanting to party after bars closed, restaurants. No fun. A riot was a big party where anything goes. For that crowd, police officers would be in danger. Gangs could kill them. All the prisoners being released would likely go find those who got them incarcerated. Deadly game for officers, families, informants. All people who needed to make a living suddenly hitting the streets. Many may have died from drug overdoses.
I'm inclined to think the decrease in policing was a large factor---and indeed there's a large literature showing that increasing policing decreases crime---but it does seem like there are some bugs in the argument here.
It seems implausible that BLM protests would cause a rise in people to get into fights on airplanes. Given that we know anti-social behaviour generally went way up, the simplest explanation for the murder rise is that it's the right-tail of the general phenomena. The concentration of rise in murders in black communities could be explained by a model that just says everyone now commits crimes 1 degree more severe than they were pre-covid.
That leaves the questions of why the murder phenomena is America specific, and why the violence spike started in May. One possible answer: CARES act stimulus checks were sent out in April. This large cash infusion may have enabled many relatively poor people to buy (additional) guns.
My point here is not that this is a better theory for the murder spike, but just that it fits with the main points of your argument and is additionally consistent with the general rise in (non-murder) anti-social behavior.
This is the point that I'm making. The BLM thing explains a rise in murders via underpolicing, but doesn't explain, e.g., a rise in scuffles on airplanes or traffic accidents. Given that we know that bad behaviour in general went up, it seems that we should be suspicious of murder-specific explanations.
I think of 'BLM' as a shorthand for a wider/more-general breakdown in trust and various 'social norm enforcement mechanisms', of which 'policing' is just one.
And I think under-policing _can_ explain, e.g. a rise in scuffles on airplanes or traffic accidents. Those kinds of things absolutely DO sometimes, or _did_ more often, result in police being involved. I think a LOT of people are, now and recently, explicitly considering 'Should I call the police?'. If you sincerely believe the police are oppressive and that their involvement in a situation is _likely_ to lead to someone's death, it'd be (more than) _reasonable_ to NOT involve the police.
But what's the alternative to, e.g. breaking-up a scuffle on an airplane, if no one wants to call the police? It sure seems to me like _someone_ has to, if only effectively, be 'the cop'.
Homicides and traffic fatalities are what we have good data on. But, yeah, there's a lot of anecdata that the "racial reckoning" saw more, say, weave-yanking brawls at Spirit Airline boarding gates and the like.
They let offenders out of jail and prison that normally would have been in cages. Most offenders are black. They went home and killed people. Very simple.
Increases in police retirements and difficulties in recruiting tends to support the points made regarding police reactions to Ferguson, Grey and Floyd effects. What is worth recking you retirement, your life, your assets or even criminal prosecution? At some point you have to be practical.
First, what is this "elite establishment" that you refer to? The WSJ, the NYT, or USA Today, or all three or are you referring to news networks like Fox or Yahoo News?
Your calling a "protest" a "riot" already highlights a bias. Protests can become violent, but riots start out that way--I should know, I worked in a prison and went through several riots and I can testify that I would never call them protests, but you seem to have no problem calling a protest against police violence on black people a riot. Is it because that's all black people can do? And was it "your city" being looted? That sounds like something a white person would say while people of color facepalm in the background--I saw the same thing with Occupy where suburban white kinds would march in some inner city neighborhood they didn't know jack about while shouting "Whose streets? Our streets!"
Sorry, I'm not intentionally trying to be confrontational, but I thought that this site was more about using rational means to address problems.
A lot of different things happened in May-June 2020. There were some protests that had absolutely no riot-like features. There were also some events that would count as riots under any conceivable definition, even if they also had some protest-like elements.
I have no idea why you'd think that observation is some sort of a priori deduction from somebody's idea of what "black people can do." It's just an empirical description of a thing that happened.
When people riot, there's no agenda beyond destroying property. When people protest there is an agenda in place. A word like "riot" has a bias already built into it as does "protest." If I want to make the grievances of the people who are protesting invisible, or if I want to undercut their grievances I call their gathering a riot regardless of whether or not the level of property destruction is in keeping with the use of the term. In the prison system, we were told to avoid the use of the word "riot" because it left the correctional system looking impotent and so we were told to use words like "melee" or "disturbance," but not "riot."
Riot is a word situated within a hierarchy of words. To pick "riot" over other more suitable terms says more about the writer/speaker than about the event itself.
I guess my sense of the linguistic valence is just different. I've been calling, and hearing people call, the 1992 civil turmoil in Los Angeles the "Rodney King riots" for 30 years, without any sense of tension with the understanding that it sprung from the acquittal of some LA cops who beat the living hell out of Rodney King.
Or, to take a fictional document from the same era, suppose you're summarizing the plot of the film Do the Right Thing for somebody who hasn't seen it. At the film's climax, a cop kills Radio Raheem, Mookie picks up a trashcan and throws it through a window, and it sparks -- a protest? A melee? A disturbance? Nah, I think what Spike Lee was going for, and what you'd say if you were trying to most helpfully describe what happens in the film, is a riot. Which is true even though, in context, the reality of the grievance couldn't be more explicit.
So no, I think sometimes "riot" is absolutely the most suitable term, irrespective of what you or I might think about the legitimacy of the associated grievance.
Their grievances are BS. Black people are no more likely to be the recipients of force from police once you control for crime rate and violence against police. Which means either that BLM are profoundly ignorant, or that this is really just tribalism and BLM only care about police violence when it affects their tribe (or both).
“ Riot is a word situated within a hierarchy of words. To pick "riot" over other more suitable terms says more about the writer/speaker than about the event itself.”
You just need to look up the definition of a riot. Most of the riots were largely white people so I don't think it has anything to do with race. White leftists are by far the most race-obsessed.
The argument here is that BLM protests caused changes in police behaviour which in turn led to the homicide spike, while covid and restrictions did not in turn lead to the same.
BLM caused the spike, covid not. Timelines don't match up otherwise. So far pretty convincing!
At the same time, though, we can see that covid restrictions did lead to less policing, just like BLM, without being correlated with any homicide spike. Wouldn't this imply that BLM caused the spike by some other mechanism, or at least that there is some meaningful additional variable making a difference in how police withdrawal affected homicide rates between the spring and summer?
It's not totally off tye wall to use the weather to explain the increased severity of the protests/riots. The February Revolution happened because St Petersburg had a "warm" spell in the middle of a general workers' strike, and at the same time as International Women's Day. If the weather had stayed cold in February 1917, the protests would likely have been less severe and the Tsar may have held on a few months longer. If Floyd had died in February or March 2020, maybe the protests are less intense.
But the weather itself can't explain the sustained levels of violence. 2020 didn't see a spike on Memorial Day followed by a decline to pre-2020 levels. Murder rates went up and stayed there. And murder rates have retained their seasonal pattern (higher in summer than winter), which is almost-but-not-quite counter-cyclical to covid and covid restrictions. If the spike in violence was simply an outburst of suppressed energy from lockdowns, then lockdowns would decrease the murder rates and ending the lockdowns would cause a temporary uptick. That isn't really seen in any of these cities.
On the comparison to other countries - I can attest to the strictness and insanity of Covid rules in Germany, as I spent the entirety of the pandemic there with occasional trips back to the USA. Lockdowns in Germany were far stricter and longer lasting, and letting up lockdowns didn't lead to mass numbers of shootings or stabbings. It did lead to a lot of outdoor celebrations with masked people dancing 2 meters apart from each other, but that was about it.
"Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied."
Coming from a family of New York City policemen, this reason caused great laughter around the table. The police do not comply with the demands of protesters but The second choice also seems wrong
"Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them."
Yes to 'angry and disrespected', but the decision by the police was to punish, to avenge, and in doing so to violate their oaths.
I did a search on the murder spike in this period in the NYT:
“ Changes in policing. The fallout from the 2020 racial justice protests and riots could have contributed to the murder spike. Police officers, scared of being caught in the next viral video, may have pulled back on proactive anti-violence practices. More of the public lost confidence in the police, possibly reducing the kind of cooperation needed to prevent murders. In extreme circumstances, the lack of confidence in the police could have led some people to take the law into their own hands — in acts of street or vigilante violence.
The timing supports this theory, with homicides rising unusually quickly shortly after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests. Killings also spiked in 2015 and 2016, after protests over policing during those years.”
“ The protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were also an important factor, in 2020, although experts differ about why. Some argue that the police, under intense scrutiny and demoralized, pulled back from some aspects of crime prevention. Others put the emphasis on the public, suggesting that diminished respect for the police prompted more people to try to take the law into their own hands.
“The distrust of police, the low morale among police, the fact that the police are being less proactive because they are legitimately worried about being backed up by their superiors” were all contributing factors, Mr. Winograd said.”
Something I've always wondered about is why there isn't a massive push to hire a ton of black cops. That should help a lot right? After BLM there are extremely aggressive pushes for affirmative action in academia, the media, and so on but not in the one place where it's really needed. Electing Eric Adams mayor of NYC was a good start. But society actually has a compelling interest in the demographics of the cops matching the demographics of the population in a way that it really doesn't with the demographics of say, scientists. I'm generally not a fan of affirmative action but I would probably support black quotas in police departments at this point.
There is a massive push to hire a ton of black cops. There has been one for a half century. America has a fairly high percentage of its cops who are black. Unfortunately, it has a much higher percentage of its criminals who are black.
There just aren't that many blacks who don't have criminal records and can pass drug and cognitive tests who don't have some even better opportunity.
What proportion of blacks fail criminal records / drug / cognitive tests? I would imagine the cognitive tests are the biggest obstacle, my guess is you need an IQ of like 100 to be a cop, and most 100+ IQ blacks are fine on the other stuff.
Scott, you said this "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of:
...
Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk" <-- I would add a related option... Police worried they would be punished so severely for any action, even if legal, they were less willing to take the risk.
Even shooting someone grabbing your gun gets your picture in the paper, a long suspension, protestors outside your house, and the mayor condemning the white supremacy of your profession. Who wants to stop a minority and frisk him, even if you can see what looks like a gun? People are going to start filming and chanting as you do it.
Depends on what you mean by "respectable"; as per this excerpt from Chesterton's autobiography:
"I was born of respectable but honest parents; that is, in a world where the word "respectability" was not yet exclusively a term of abuse, but retained some dim philological connection with the idea of being respected. It is true that even in my own youth the sense of the word was changing; as I remember in a conversation between my parents, in which it was used with both implications. My father, who was serene, humorous and full of hobbies, remarked casually that he had been asked to go on what was then called The Vestry. At this my mother, who was more swift, restless and generally Radical in her instincts, uttered something like a cry of pain; she said, "Oh, Edward, don't! You will be so respectable! We never have been respectable yet; don't let's begin now." And I remember my father mildly replying, "My dear, you present a rather alarming picture of our lives, if you say that we have never for one single instant been respectable." Readers of Pride and Prejudice will perceive that there was something of Mr. Bennet about my father; though there was certainly nothing of Mrs. Bennet about my mother."
And because I can never only quote *some* Chesterton:
"Anyhow, what I mean here is that my people belonged to that rather old-fashioned English middle class; in which a business man was still permitted to mind his own business. They had been granted no glimpse of our later and loftier vision, of that more advanced and adventurous conception of commerce, in which a business man is supposed to rival, ruin, destroy, absorb and swallow up everybody else's business. My father was a Liberal of the school that existed before the rise of Socialism; he took it for granted that all sane people believed in private property; but he did not trouble to translate it into private enterprise. His people were of the sort that were always sufficiently successful; but hardly, in the modern sense, enterprising. My father was the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors, which had already been established for some three generations in Kensington; and I remember that there was a sort of local patriotism about it and a little reluctance in the elder members, when the younger first proposed that it should have branches outside Kensington. This particular sort of unobtrusive pride was very characteristic of this sort of older business men. I remember that it once created a comedy of cross-purposes, which could hardly have occurred unless there had been some such secret self-congratulation upon any accretion of local status. The incident is in more ways than one a glimpse of the tone and talk of those distant days.
My grandfather, my father's father, was a fine-looking old man with white hair and beard and manners that had something of that rounded solemnity that went with the old-fashioned customs of proposing toasts and sentiments. He kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table, and it did not seem incongruous when he sang "The Fine Old English Gentleman" as well as more pompous songs of the period of Waterloo and Trafalgar. And I may remark in passing that, having lived to see Mafeking Night and the later Jingo lyrics, I have retained a considerable respect for those old and pompous patriotic songs. I rather fancy it was better for the tradition of the English tongue to hear such rhetorical lines as these, about Wellington at the deathbed of William the Fourth,
For he came on the Angel of Victory's wing
But the Angel of Death was awaiting the King,
than to be entirely satisfied with howling the following lines, heard in all music-halls some twenty years afterwards:
And when we say we've always won
And when they ask us how it's done
We proudly point to every one
Of England's soldiers of the Queen.
I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather's time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.
"You are a Monument," said the strange gentleman, "Sir, you are a Landmark."
My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.
"You are an Historical Character," said the admiring stranger. "You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State."
My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of "Westerton versus Liddell" in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.
"And I only hope," went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, "that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve."
My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn't care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase "I don't care how they are conducted," the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion ot the hand) "provided it is with reverence and sincerity." But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought."
“ This study investigated whether homicides increased after protested police-involved deaths, focusing on the period after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson in August 2014. It also tests for effects of legal cynicism by comparing effects in homicide and aggravated assault on the assumption that reporting of the latter is discretionary and police abuses may make communities reluctant to notify police. Using FBI data from 44 U.S. cities, homicide and assault rates from 2011 to 2019 were analyzed using an interrupted time series design and combined in a meta-analysis to calculate pooled effects. A meta-regression tested effect moderators including external investigations and city/county sociodemographic characteristics. With a conservative threshold of p ≤ .01, 21 of the 44 cities experienced a significant increase and one had a significant decrease. The pooled effect was a 26.1% increase in the homicide (99% CI: 15.3% to 36.8%). Aggravated assaults increased above baseline, though the effect was 15.2 percentage points smaller (99% CI: –26.7 to –3.6) than the effect in homicides. When outcomes were measured as percent change, there were no significant effect moderators, but when measured as absolute change, homicides increased to a greater extent when the death was subject to external investigation and in cities with higher Black populations, poverty rates, and baseline homicide rates. The findings suggest that protested police-involved deaths led to an increase in homicides and other violence due to the distrust fomented within the very communities whom police are meant to protect.”
If policy Q leads to significantly more black people murdered compared to policy P, then my respect for the substance rather than the rhetoric of anti-racism seems to leave "more P" as the only morally viable choice to support.
Can both protests and homicide spike amoung blacks be caused by the same event? Obvious hypothesis is that the outrageous murder made lots of people very angry, some people ventilated this anger through protests others in a different way, including other murders. The distinction here is pretty important because in one case we would like to have as less protests as possible even when outrageous things happen, while in the other we would have the opposite incentive.
There's been outrageous murders of white and hispanic people by police and this has never resulted in nationwide homicide spikes.
And before you say it - no, black people are not idsporportionately the victims of police violence when you control for crime rates and violence gainst police, so its not part of a broader trend.
Probably has something to do with public trust deplition which makes even totally reasonable amount of outrageous murders by police resulting in lots of outrage.
I don't think there's any better way to convince or persuade (those that can be) than to calmly, and repeatedly, 'look at the facts', "insist on thinking on a completely literal level", and walk thru careful reasoning about what's most likely true.
Have not been here in some time. Began reading the post and immediately felt a cringe. Seems all too common these days is to present various data to support various conclusions that are left hanging without context. And thus, we've generally become mistrusting of any presented data, assuming (often too quickly) a cynical attitude about where the presenter intends to lead us. Maybe that’s the point?
I'm not sure what conclusions we are intended to draw from this presentation, but I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes... in this case regarding race. Can this post lead to a more insightful and nuanced discussion about why murder rates rose in these areas, in these communities, that includes a comprehensive and objective accounting of this nation's history toward black communities? Might also be worthy of discussion to understand how a generalized fear pushes white folks to embrace these stereotypes so readily.
"but I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes"
And while that is a legitimate fear, that is also contributing to the problem of investigating "what is happening, why is it happening, and what can be done about it?" be that the spikes in violence here or the homelessness question in another post.
I'm Irish. I think it's fair to say, in the words of a comedy sketch from my own country, that we have the reputation of being a nation of pissheads. Is this a negative stereotype? Yes. Do Irish people suffer real reputational and other harms when they are confronted with this belief when they go abroad? Also yes.
Do we have a god damn national alcohol abuse probem? Hell, yes!
So - would tip-toeing around going "Oh no, you must not draw any conclusions from this study which might help reinforce the very negative stereotypes" is not going to help when you need to tackle the reality that although the legal age of drinking in Ireland is 18, most people have had their first drink around age 15 and are indeed regularly drinking and getting drunk by 17.
"n 2019, on average every person in Ireland aged 15 and over drank 10.8 litres of pure alcohol a year – the equivalent of either 40 bottles of vodka, 113 bottles of wine or 436 pints of beer. Given one in four people in Ireland don’t drink at all, actual consumption rates among those who do drink would be much higher than this. "
"Please don't draw the conclusion from this study that the Irish are a nation of drunks" may be well-intentioned, but if the facts are that we are indeed a nation of drunks, you are not helping to find a solution, you are helping those who don't want to change their ways by attacking the people pointing out the truth.
> Might also be worthy of discussion to understand how a generalized fear pushes white folks to embrace these stereotypes so readily.
Denial that any negative stereotypes may be in some way true is a great way to cause overcorrection and end with people believing the most extreme versions unrelated to reality. And vote for incompetent useless rapey ineffective buffon, just because he is willing to say loud some things (that are often detached from reality, just in opposed direction from official version).
> I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes...
If you try to suppress things based on "I dislike potential conclusion" then sooner or later people will notice it.
> If you try to suppress things based on "I dislike potential conclusion" then sooner or later people will notice it.
I do not think I was in fact promoting suppressing things… in this case, discussion. What I was trying to point out is that there is far more to these discussions that we seem to be choosing not to consider. Or... that we are becoming lazy in our conferences and then drawing far too generalized conclusions. We are getting good about sorting humanity into bigger and bigger boxes... for example, the Irish "are indeed a nation of drunks."
What I hear you saying is that the stereotypes people may infer from a discussion, whether true or not, are worthy of discussion. That without further discussion and understanding… exploration… will invariably lead us to make uninformed decisions that could then lead to potentially disastrous decision making. I am not pushing against this idea.
My fear is that the discussion could reinforce generalized stereotypes that, without further context, will invariably lead us to make uninformed decisions that could then lead to potentially disastrous decision making. My fear is that discussion points, left hanging without context, will lead to willfully uninformed decision making. Are we in agreement here?
I'm for greater understanding... not less. And I apologize if I've misunderstood your comment.
> I do not think I was in fact promoting suppressing things…
maybe I am misinterpreting what you want, but for me
> I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes...
implies "and we should get rid of it no matter the cost", as it was used in this way many times in many context. Sorry if you are actually interested in actual discussion as this was basically poisoned by people using it as pretext to ban things they wanted to ban anyway.
No, you saw something that contradicted your ideology so you desperately began looking for ways to dismiss it. The data are clear, the data were clear after Ferguson too.
>I'm not sure what conclusions we are intended to draw from this presentation, but I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes... in this case regarding race.
See? Exactly waht I said, You don't like what it says so you don't want it to be true.
>Can this post lead to a more insightful and nuanced discussion about why murder rates rose in these areas, in these communities, that includes a comprehensive and objective accounting of this nation's history toward black communities?
You talk about data, and yet you base your views entirely upon NARRATIVES.
Black homicide rates were lower during segregation, so the data shows that your narratives are plainly untrue.
>Might also be worthy of discussion to understand how a generalized fear pushes white folks to embrace these stereotypes so readily.
It's not sterotypes. Its an absolute, empirical fact that black americans have a vastly higher homicide rate than white americans, and this is true even after controlling for education, income and employment rates.
You're mad that reality doesn't conform to your ideology, which simply means that you don't belong here. Go back to whatever dataphobic echo-chamber you normally inhabit.
Why bring in the RK riots --which actually were riots!--when the BLM protests had a grievance and an organization behind them?
RK riots were confined to one location. The BLM movement had 7305 events in various cities across the country, the vast majority of which were peaceful.
Do the Right Thing was a movie, not RL. Spike Lee's character thinks hard for a moment before launching that trash can through Danny Aiello's store front window. We could debate what Lee is asking his audience to consider about the urban black's situation and race relations during this period when he performs this act, but that's as far as I'd go. You seem to be suggesting that art is imitating life and so we can use this film to what? Draw an analogy not to the motives behind BLM, but to justify using the word "riot"?
I'd argue that Spike Lee's character is provoking a riot out of frustration. This was the 80s. Today, there's enough statistical evidence and terms (i.e., structural racism) to create an agenda, demands, and a call to action.
Employing a word like "riot" when referring to a complex situation that has a history of grievances attached to it seems to me to be a way of dismissing that history and those grievances--we were listening until they rioted, now we know that we don't need to listen. Riot puts all of the weight on the black people attempting to address an existential problem that they now have the tools to articulate, but when you employ this word you are relegating them to all action and no thought.
Were there pockets of violence during these protests? Yeah, sometimes, but the larger movement eschewed that violence.
I'm not clear on how you are exercising "linguistic valence" here when you are using the very word that conservative news organizations picked to describe the BLM protests.
Regarding "linguistic valence," I'd say I'm operating in that field by addressing the RK riots as riots while seeing the BLM events as something more complex and thoughtful. You just keep using the same word.
The peaceful metric was the entire event being peaceful and it was over 90%. That meant if you had an event that had 10,000 people marching and one guy got into a fist fight with a Proud Boy, it wouldn't make the cut.
"Really? Did the larger movement refuse to allow antifa and other agitators to march with them? Did they turn rioters in to the police?"
Tell me you never left your basement for the last two years and attended any large outdoor event in person without telling me you never left your basement for the last two years and attended any large outdoor event in person.
"And over 90% of Trump rally attendees on J6 did not storm the Capitol, so J6 was peaceful too, right? You can't wiggle out of this."
Nope, the 90% figure is for the entire event. As I said if you had an event with 10,000 people and 1 person did something violent, actually even if 1 person from outside the group started something, then the entire event is excluded. Jan 6 in DC then would fail that test even if individuals who were there were peaceful.
"I note that you declined to answer the questions, which speaks volumes."
The video caused a ruckus because Paul, purporting to be a journalist, appeared to be participating in the looting of an Arizona mall. Some interesting things:
1. Seems like a bunch of kids.
2. Most seem to be just wondering around aimlessly watching other people do stuff.
3. No one seems to be wearing any nametags that say "Hi, I'm Bill, I'm from ANTIFA. Ask me about membership benefits!"
QUESTION: If I attended an event at the local park on the same day 900+ miles away, where was I supposed to log my, errr, 'denouncement' of this event? Why does this event magically become connected to me?
"If you attended a completely peaceful event hundreds of miles away, you have no responsibility... except that if the topic comes up in a discussion and somebody challenges you,"
And no such person did challenge me. Nor did I see anyone in body armor, nor did I hear anyone yelling anything like "let's hear it for our boys in AZ giving it to that mall!" So ends the entire case against BLM protests. Really the entire case. If you want to talk about Portland feel free.
"As we all know, people younger than 18 years of age have never done anything bad."
Hard to tell but it does seem rather unorganized to me.
"As we all know, if they haven't filed a 501 (c) (3) a group simply doesn't exist and any windows they may have broken are merely a figment of your imagination. That's how it works."
Well you did seem to imply I have/had some special durty to eject such people. Leave aside the fact that mass protests are often not centrally organized, this is not really impossible since the only way to assert authority is to assert force to begin with. It does create a rather tricky set of 'duties' you'd impose since even things like wearing body armor or protection does make sense if you have a bunch of Proud Boys happily shooting paintball and gas at people.
I think this indicates the right's inability to really process this intelligently. You would try to analyze a figure like crime rates as if they were dependent variables (i.e. insert policing and add whether or not protests happen = crime rate) but protests has some type of indepen. variable....as if somewhere deep in BLM headquartes there's a dial and someone said in May "let's set it to 30M people protesting!" This produces some deep incoherence.
For example. Here's Bill. A week after a big BLM protest Bill has an argument with his gf's brother and he shoots and kills him.
If you ask a child what caused this, they would probably say Bill caused it.
But if you ask the amateur sociologist amonst the rational community, no no. It was caused by, errr, a week before Tina a 17 yr old high school student marched in a BLM protest 20 blocks away from where Bill shot his victim. Or it is because Officer Dan did not make it to the scene in less than 15 minutes from when the 911 call came in....because he was mad at Tina so it's Tina's fault. Hmmm
And before you dismiss this, when you're talking about 'murder spikes' that consist of a number going from 50 to 75 or something like that, you're literally talking about Bills. You can literally list each one with a sentence or two description in a comment on this blog.
So whereever you want to go with this, if you think it's that anyone in the Tina group owes an apology, you've gone down the wrong path.
AFAIK there was never an “autonomous zone” in Mpls. Never saw a specimen of antifa produced either.
I did see a guy in a guy fawkes mask breaking store front windows that turned out to be a redneck biker from Stillwater MN with a history of run ins with the law for harassing blacks at open air restaurants in his hometown.
The very worst I saw was the burning of the 3rd precinct police building and that was pretty flipping scary. That was pure anarchy.
Probably the second most frightening moment was when a tanker truck accidentally got past barricades and turned a curve into a crowd of protesters blocking the freeway. Miraculously the driver managed to make a jack knifed stop without hitting anyone. The driver was initially roughed up by assholes in the crowd but they were pulled off by a larger group. The driver was not seriously injured and AFAICR he was cited for some traffic violation but didn’t receive any other criminal charges.
That was a long night of intense real time coverage. When daylight came people came into their front yards and shared stories of how they got through the night. But at a distance. COVID was still perceived as a serious threat.
Was that also near the mysterious 'man in black with an umbrella' who seems to have set off the looting by smashing the windows of an Autozone? Still at large despite ample Internet speculation on his identity.
I’m not sure if was the man in black. I saw a white guy with a guy fawkes mask breaking windows with a 4 pound hammer somewhere on Lake Street in Mpls. I thought local new identified that guy as a Stillwater resident that was arrested. Or at least had a warrant out.
Indeed. Let's not forget we had right wing groups like the Proud Boys openly starting violence at various events as well (there's plenty of videos of PB roaming around places like Portland shooting people with paintball guns).
You can't have a major football game without someone doing something stupid like throwing a drink at someone, the fact is tens of millions of people protested without incident and rational people cannot use as an argument against that the same stupid meme with the CNN reporter in front of a burning building.
Actually I recall watching a bunch of videos from some real estate guy who did tours of that autonomous zone or whatever. It was basically 90% obvious tourists passing through it day in day out, didn't see anyone armed or even anyone who was 'in charge' in any real way. Much like militias, a lot of cosplaying going on here.
The reality is any public event with lots of people carries a risk of danger. If you ever been to an NFL game, you may catch a glimpse at the massive security that operates mostly invisible because given the huge money to be made, stadiums absolutely cannot allow a natural mass gathering of people (think European soccar hooligans in the 80's who regularly riped seats out and stormed the field).
I thought it was esp. unhelpful to have a President at the time who took great delight in stoking the flames and encouraging street battles between different factions and then escalated it even more by having law enforcement without bades, in plain clothes even in plain vehicles. Thankfully the election was won by the only candidate who actually rejected violence.
My? I don't seem to remember owning a droid or a bunch of cosplayers, tourists, protesters, Proud Boys, street people and so on. And not even a day passed before you admitted that no, there is no guilt trip merited here for much of anyone unless you're actually talking to specific people who did things or people who plausibly could have done something to stop people from doing things.
"Nothing Trump did made your goons take over those streets and murder those streets. "
Nor did BLM or anti-Trump protests. Sorry your double standard game doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Hmmm, there must be more to this but rather amazingly the effectiveness of police to solve murders has been droping. It took a hit in 2020 but more amazing to me is that it's been declining since the 1960's and 70's. In particular, we saw police buildup in the 90's while at the same time tools to solve murders have gotten better and more available. A lot of stuff we take for granted today like cameras almost everywhere, people's cell phones producing logs of their geographical locations over time, DNA testing, a lot of forensics, this all should have made it a lot easier to solve murders. Yet police effectiveness here seems to be falling. Are murderers getting more cunning, super-villian types that only a Bruce Wayne or Sherlock Holmes can figure out? I doubt it.
If police effectiveness is going down, then any theory that BLM protests increases crime by causing police to pull back is flawed. If police are less effective, then it matters less and less that they pull back.
I suspect what you're seeing is a gradual decline in social trust, in particular between communities with high crime and police. The reality is probably half of murders are brain dead easy to solve, the police literally roll up on the killer covered in blood holding the murder weapon. Beyond that social trust does a huge amount of work AND things like CSI science can only substitute for that at the margins. Incidents like Floyd and the pandemic accelerated and confirmed that trust was lacking.
Less that BLM protests magically cause crime, more like they are both symptoms of the same underlying dynamic.
True but I can't believe fingerprint tech is *worse* in the 2000's than it was in the 1970's!
One explanation is the innocence project implies a lot of convictions were either frame ups or relying on bad science hence the solve rate in the 70's and 80's was overstated and the rise of better science like DNA is not lowering the solve rate but actually revealing just how low the correct solve rate was all along.
That would require believing before, say, 2000 a massive amount of murder convictions were pinning it on the wrong person. Do you think if you visited a prison in 1979 up to 4% of the convicted murderers were actually innocent people?
I'm not sure. There are a lot of bad procedures leading to false convictions, and the Innocence Project specializes is cases where there's a lot of countervailing evidence. For all I know, 10% is too low.
It could indeed be the case that before the 90's a lot of wrong people were getting locked up and crime was much higher because while police locked up people, they were bad at locking up the right people. Yet the solve rate keeps marching down and down despite more and more data and science coming along.
It feels like every week I see at least one case where some total stranger does something violent and is caught within days because camera footage is able to follow him as he leaves the scene all the way home. Or because a single image is broadcast and social media figures out who he is. Look at all the Jan 6 people arrested because a single image caught their face.
I could see the rise of the Innocence Project, DNA etc. leading to a decline in murder solve cases initially but then that should have started to rise as we've added more and more pretty objective tools.
My alternative hypothesis is that the technology is just the cherry on top. Most of the solve rate is driven by social trust. People go to the cops with information or try to help the cops with what they know. If social trust starts to go down, that invaluable help starts to get retracted and things like cell phone data is not enough to make up for it.
From what I understand: forensics are not magic, TV crime dramas have led people to have unrealistic expectations, and oftentimes the way samples are taken, stored and treated is a steaming mess, never mind the backlog of testing in the labs. And that's before ever you get to the point of bringing a case to court.
Def. agreed. But still you have to admit we are able to do things today that would have blown the mind of law enforcement in 1980. We have people who committed murder 45 years ago getting caught because their third nephew, who they never meet, sent his spit off to an Ancestry site. We have massive depositories of DNA from convicted criminals that can be used to screen against DNA collected from crime scenes.
The solve rate must be going down because while science is helping some hard cases get unlocked, many cases that should be easier with old fashioned community based policing are not getting done.
Whether decreased policing leads to increased crime, and if so the effect size and exact type of policing that reduces crime, is a pretty open empirical question. That said, regardless of the causal mechanism, it sure seems like the crime increase of the BLM protests outweighs the minor police reform that followed (though perhaps it sets the stage for more police reform down the road... long-term consequences are always intractable). This is not to mention the political consequences of Democrats losing votes due to Defund and thus an increased chance of our democracy collapsing, less climate change action, etc.
This was not obvious at the time though. There was a brief period where it looked like we might be getting actual police reform: Minneapolis looked like it was going to remake their police force, a bunch of red states passed (very) minor police reform legislation, etc. Support for BLM and racial justice went significantly up for a brief period, figures which had been stable for a long time.
What does this means for future BLM protests? It is clear that if you are going to have them at all, make them super policy-focused, to actually get something for our troubles. But at this point it's probably not worth having them at all in the foreseeable future, as all they do is polarize the debate around left-wing Defund.
It was pretty clearly the pandemic lockdowns. It makes sense that crime didn't spike immediately but instead took a couple months before people really got cabin fever.
No, it wasn't. There was no pandemic lockdown when the BLM riots first broke out in Ferguson and we saw the exact same thing. You're literally just creating an ad hoc explanation that suits your ideology with nothing to support it.
If you had bothered to read the post, you would have also seen that there wasn't an increase in crime in most of the rest of teh world which had equally or more strict lockdowns than America, so 'cabin fever' cannot possibly explain it.
AFAICR this was the first time that a jury decided that a Mpls police killing was murder.
A couple years later, Derek Chauvin was the second.
Really, the thrust of this post seem to imply that the BLM movement is some sort of first cause. There was a long history of fear and anger about unequal treatment of non whites by Mpls police.
It became common in the Twin Cities to hear of a police shooting and respond with the question “Driving while black?”
Again I’ll say the violence that followed Floyd’s death was not justified. A lot of the people taking part didn’t give a damn about Floyd. There were many people - mostly white - taking advantage of the opportunity to indulge any malicious impulse that occurred to them. The police were in a crouch, all bets were off. What better time to plunder the OxyContin shelf at the local pharmacy? To pin all of that behavior on the BLM movement is just wrong. One of the felony conviction from the early period was against a masked white biker knucklehead smashing storefront windows with a 4 pound hammer, just out for a little recreational mayhem. Another was a white kid who was so dim that he brought police tactical gear that he looted from a police station to work to show off as souvenirs.
Hell, the only houses in my rather sedate St Paul neighborhood without a “Black Lives Matter” sign on their lawn are mine and the black couple across the street.
Murder increased because the police pulled back after the George Floyd riot? Yes, I already knew that and fully expected it.
AFAICR this was the first time that a jury decided that a Mpls police killing was murder.
This did not result in massive protests and riots. It didn't cause police to broadly condemned. It didn't set off 'defund the police' movements. Because the victim was white, Democratic politicians didn't care, and if anything the left were angry about this (there were literally BLM protestors at the trial SUPPORTING Noor).
>There were many people - mostly white - taking advantage of the opportunity to indulge any malicious impulse that occurred to the
Where's your source for this claim? Every single video I can find of rioting and looting shows black people in a clear majority. Don't make these claims if you're not going to substantiate them.
>It became common in the Twin Cities to hear of a police shooting and respond with the question “Driving while black?”
Your ancedotes are worthless. BLM seem to imagine black people are killed at a higher rate than white people by police, but after controlling for crime rate and violence against police, blacks are no more likely to be the victmi of police force than whites. This conclusively shows peoples perceptions are based on ignorance and so cannot be trusted.
> but after controlling for crime rate and violence against police, blacks are no more likely to be the victmi of police force than whites. This conclusively shows peoples perceptions are based on ignorance and so cannot be trusted.
The data for your conclusive proof?
>Because the victim was white, Democratic politicians didn't care, and if anything the left were angry about this
You are telepathic so you know what Democratic politicians care about, or are you simply making a tribal assumption and assigning a terrible trait to people you disagree with?
Cost-benefit calculations should not look at only the costs and not the benefits. If your proposed mechanism of action is that the protest caused reduced policing which created a cost in the form of a spike in murders, then I think it would've been cooler if your analysis also included the benefits of reduced policing. What are the costs of policing?
For instance, if you're using reduced arrests as your proxy variable, we should ask how many arrests are we willing to pay in order to prevent one murder? In 2019 USA there were 10,085,207 arrests and 16,669 murders. In 2020 USA there 7,632,573 arrests and 21,570 murders. The ratio of the differences come out to 500 arrests per murder.
Is that worth it? Maybe! Depends on how bad arrests are compared to murders, and what other metrics are at play. I'm not claiming to know the answer, I'm just saying that I wish that this analysis had touched on relevant questions like this. (I get that you're responding in the context of countering the media and all that, but still ... I really feel that considering costs and benefits together and not separately is a good principle to stick to.)
This is just a back of the envelope calculation of course - a real analysis might look at stuff such as prison-life-years welfare metrics, economic losses, etc. And of course, none of this is really establishing causality super well. I'm just making a more general point that even if we grant your model of this mechanism, in order to draw useful conclusions from this analysis about whether the protests are good or bad, the costs of the intervention (here, the protests) must be considered in conjunction with the benefits.
So if the stated aim of the protests was to end police killings, they didn't succeed. They instead cost more lives, with an increase in 5,000 murders.
But you point out that arrests went down massively as well. Suppose the average person murdered loses 50 years of their life, and the average person arrested spends 1 year in jail (just taking a complete guess here).
If it's 500 arrests to stop 1 murder, you've wasted 500 years of people's lives to prevent 50 years lost.
Why are you only looking at murders? There's all kinds of other categories of crime to include.
You're also ignoring the fact that reducing arrests would most likely increase murders (because murderers spend more time not in jail), so the ratios you mentioned would no longer apply.
I think it's really, *really* irresponsible to express "homicides spiked after the BLM protests" as "BLM protests *caused* the homicide spike." For one thing, there is no way to demonstrate that homicidal-ness somehow increased due to BLM (I seriously doubt that it did), which is what that assertion implies. Moreover, you say yourself that a police pullback led to the increase. So what gives? You already identified the real answer: police stopped doing their jobs. How is that BLM's fault? Cops were never seriously threatened during the protests. As someone who was at them, it was very much the other way around. You've laid out a story where cops were fleeing well-deserved scrutiny, and the result was less deterrence of crime. But this isn't BLM's fault, this is the cops' fault for being bad at doing their jobs under scrutiny. Phrasing the headline as if it was the fault of innocent protesters that crimes *unrelated to the protests* went up is incredibly irresponsible and a massive show of disrespect to people like me who want to see the policing problems raised by BLM taken seriously.
An officer at the scene of burned police station described thinking he was going to save his last bullet for himself. They were seriously threatened on that occasion at least.
There was a lot crime unrelated to the protest though. The police were in a defensive crouch so any bit of maliciousness conceived at that time could be acted on.
Great - this completely contradicts the hegemonic left wing narrative of 'police don't stop crime' and completely undermines the defund the police movement. Glad we're on the same page here.
>How is that BLM's fault?
he obvious explanation is that the police didn't want to risk being in a position where they felt they had to use lethal force, because even if it was completely justified, it could very probably ruin their career/life.
>But this isn't BLM's fault, this is the cops' fault for being bad at doing their jobs under scrutiny.
Is anybody good at doing their job under scrutiny? Why should police risk their careers to police people who don't want to be policed? THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BLM WANT, so it's absolutely ABSURD to blame police for this. They're literally giving these people what they want and this is the product of it.
> Phrasing the headline as if it was the fault of innocent protesters that crimes *unrelated to the protests* went up is incredibly irresponsible and a massive show of disrespect to people like me who want to see the policing problems raised by BLM taken seriously.
There are no legitimate policing problems raided by BLM. BLM claim that blacks are under attack from police despite teh evidence overwhelmingly showing that after you control for crime rate and violence against police, black people are no more likely to the victims of police force than white people. They're completely ignorant, black nationalist ideologues.
I have a friend who claims that one of the reasons that the BLM thing blew up so much, at least in the sense that left-leaning institutions like academia and the media talked about it, is that the Democrats wanted to use it to increase black turnout and oust Trump. How plausible is this hypothesis and how would we test it?
Calling the BLM protests "the cause" feels like a bit of a stretch - yes, the data shows good support for "contributed". But either one plays the cause game all the way back (police brutality leads to protests etc.), or one acknowledge that the police making agentic choices is closer in the causal chain to the measured outcome.
When you have a causal chain, what about the BLM protests specifically makes it the thing to single out in the chain? My guess is that there is some empathy and less agency attributed with the stance "of course the cops reduced their policing"; but "of course they protested" has less support. Why?
> The protesters demanded that the cops reduce their policing. They did
The protesters wanted many things across varying degrees; and what they likely shared was wanting less use of violence in policing, and more accountability.
Yet even if we assume you're right, is that how it's supposed to work? Can neighbourhoods just tell the police "hey, we're opting out of law enforcement", and the police will comply?
Instead, I'd say the police had a choice; and they had a job; and a responsibility. And they made their choice. Ignoring that in whatever blame/cause/responsibility assignment one is doing seems oddly biased and selective to me.
Again - is that how it works? And how it's supposed to work? Can I say abolish the government and declare independance for my neighbourhood? Or does the govt. or police have a choice to ignore my demands and continue doing what they're supposed to do and paid to do?
That is what happened, because the govt. police complied. My point is that govts and police departments that complied made a mistake, and where I would assign at least some blame. And that would explain a rise in crime in those areas.
Further, that a nationwide police pullpack was a reasonable response to what happened in a few areas, and represents some justifiable risk perceived by police everywhere, deserves a little more skepticism and debate than was offered in the post.
It's worse - it's not even just a 'causal chain' so much as a 'causal web'. There's so many potential interrelated 'causes' at play that the idea that one could look at the data from a mile-high viewpoint like this post does and point at a specific thing and say that caused the spike is really, really questionable.
I've read SSC and ACX for years now and I feel nearly certain that I've seen Scott be doubtful of less strained causal chains than this one. I feel surprised at how lax he is with his willingness to declare a particular cause in this case.
It's extremely easy to construct an equally plausible causal chain motivated by a very different set of prior beliefs than the ones you have. That should give you pause when considering the plausibility of your own preferred causal chain. For instance:
"An authority figure murdered a member of a historically oppressed minority group in an extremely public and well publicized manner" -> "members of that minority group become more stressed and feel more unsafe in their environment" -> "stressed people who feel unsafe are more likely to use violence" -> "more violent crime"
There's a reason why causal inference in *incredibly* hard. You simply believing really really hard in your own set of priors doesn't actually make them anymore plausible.
The same data Scott used above could very easily support a different causal chain whereby the widely publicized murder of a black man by an authority figure directly caused an increase in murder. The only reason you're not arguing for *that* causal chain is the beliefs you came into this post with.
I am suprised by the laxness too. It really doesn't require deep analysis to see that in addition to the protestors, choices made by other groups played a significant role. Those other choices being declared logical and neccessary makes little sense to me, and would require a lot more support.
[EDIT] Example: "The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police."
Scott would have to show that "literal" funding dropped, or cops were fired in these areas to support him claim that BLM protests => increased murders. Everything else in his list involves the police making choices, and therefore being a more direct cause of the spike.
A simpler explanation is that police did not want to risk having their lives ruined if they found it necessary to use lethal force in an encounter with a black suspect (no, obviously this doesn't describe Chauvin, but it doesn't take that to become public enemy no 1).
And thus, sympathy for "of course the cops reduced their policing" needs a lot more support IMO. It might seem obvious to you, it doesn't to me - a police force that stops doing it's job because some small subset of the population doesn't give them the respect they think they deserve is problematic to me, and would require more justification. i.e. is the perceived "risk having their lives ruined", overblown?
Showing that many police officers have had their lives ruined uneccessarily to warrant that sort of response would help. One could then debate how high this number needs to be in order for a nationwide police pullback to be reasonable. And the same of course holds true of many claims made by activists.
My primary point is that these debates needs to happen, rather than simply accepting the argument that the police pullback was a necessary outcome. Or accept the claim that all police departments are inherently rascist.
>It's worse - it's not even just a 'causal chain' so much as a 'causal web'. There's so many potential interrelated 'causes' at play that the idea that one could look at the data from a mile-high viewpoint like this post does and point at a specific thing and say that caused the spike is really, really questionable.
Unless you say the same thing when the left confidently declare that ""racism"" is the ""cause"" of whatever racial inequality is being discussed, then this is special pleading from you.
I mean yes, declaring racism as the single cause for everything has the same issues. Something about your comment feels like you're holding your own beliefs hostage: "I'll believe in this tenuous monocausal link as long as the other side believes in this other tenuous monocausal link".
Nothing in what I or @CCubed have said suggests support for one side and political movement over another. It's a comment on motivated reasoning in general.
"police brutality" cannot possibly be the cause, because white people being murdered by the police never results in nationwide rioting and homicide spikes.
Seems like police behavior in response to the protests as a plausible theory of the cause in the spike of inter-personal violence should be addressed in a lot more detail within this essay that concludes it probably was the protests themselves. That, after all, is what the Ferguson effect is supposed to refer to: People protest the police, and in response, the police refuse to do their jobs. This reduces the deterrent effect of proactive policing, which leads to more crime.
The lesson of such a theory isn't necessarily to stop protesting police misconduct or problems with criminal justice. You could instead try to break the chain of police engaging in traditional striking behavior in response.
Of all the foreign countries mentioned Honduras is the most instructive. Honduras has the highest highest documented murder rate in the world. Other places are probably more violent but they are so chaotic reliable data are hard to come by. In response Honduras banned the private ownership of any firearms. The murder rate continued to climb. This debunked 2 libtard fantasies. That gun control works & that government can make something disappear by banning it. The government tried to ban alcohol. That worked out great didn’t it. The government banned heroin well over a century ago. You can’t find that stuff anywhere can you. Ok it’s been largely replaced by fentanyl an even more dangerous drug but the point remains.
I see you trying to make some legitimate points here, but undermining your own credibility by using the term "libtard." One of the nice things about this site - as opposed to most of the internet - is that the majority of commenters are reasonably intelligent people who are willing to engage in relatively polite conversations about all manner of potentially controversial topics. People will take your opinions and arguments more seriously if you refrain from reflexively insulting anyone who's not on your side.
I am wondering about the use of the word "caused" (rather than, for example, "triggered") by the protests. The post unpacks a potential complex of interrelated phenomenon under the heading of the Ferguson Effect that would explain how anti-police protests set off a set of actions that result in less policing (and possibly less cooperation between communities and police) and other effects. So the pattern would be expected. But to say "caused" carries the sense of a more direct outcome rather than a distal outcome. The difference is significant if one is thinking about how to intervene in a social pattern or whether intervention is possible.
Boy, some of these comments, complete with CapsLock shouting, because everyone knows a yelled point is truthier. I paid 100 bucks for a year of Facebook level trolling. Not even a tote bag or coffee cup to show for it.
One of the many difficulties with crime data and making inferences on it is the chain of causal effects that occurs before data is collected. For any given effect seen in the data, you generally have to ask: is X going up because more people are doing X, or is X going up because police are paying more attention to X? Murder is actually just about the only crime we can undeniably say is happening more or happening less at any given time, simply because it comes with a body and we're generally pretty good at reporting on bodies. We can say, undeniably, there was a spike in murders after the George Floyd protests - you can literally just look at the data and know for a fact that yes, that happened.
It's everything *else* that you can be much less sure of. Sure, the spike happened *after* the George Floyd protests... but was it *because* of them? That is a much, much harder question and I don't think you've at all answered it here.
There's a few questionable assumptions and assertions being made about the data here. But ignoring all of those and taking absolutely everything said here to be true, are you sure you've drawn an exclusive causal chain? Because I think I could lift most of this evidence as written and instead make the opposing claim: the stress of seeing a black man brutally murdered, in public, by an authority figure drove an increase in homicide nationwide, predominantly centered in black communities where that stress was felt the most. We need not invoke protests or a hypothetical 'police pullback' at all.
I guess what I'm saying is: did you find the data because you had a viewpoint you wanted to prove, or did you let the data lead you to the viewpoint you're expressing here?
The fact that empirical researchers are hesitant to draw a causal conclusion on what caused the spike is specifically because that's the *right* way to interpret data that is literally inundated with idiosyncracies during a year that was itself literally inundated with novel events.
>Because I think I could lift most of this evidence as written and instead make the opposing claim: the stress of seeing a black man brutally murdered, in public, by an authority figure drove an increase in homicide nationwide, predominantly centered in black communities where that stress was felt the most.
How come its not stressful for black people to witness THOUSANDS of black men being murdered each year by other black people? Why isn't it "stressful" for white people when white people are killed by police? Why isn't it "stressful" for white people when ~500 white people are murdered by black people each year (which is about ten times more per capita than the reverse)?
If this is the route you're going down, then it has extraordinarily negative implications for black people and the way they (selectively) react to things they don't like.
And think about what you're saying - they're angry a black man got killed.....so they went out and killed hundreds of other...black men? There's something profoundly wrong about the culture of these people if that's what you're saying.
People are killed by the police on a daily basis. Nationwide riots and homicide spikes rarely follow.
>The fact that empirical researchers are hesitant to draw a causal conclusion on what caused the spike is specifically because that's the *right* way to interpret data that is literally inundated with idiosyncracies during a year that was itself literally inundated with novel events.
This is incredibly silly. These "researchers" have absolutely ZERO issue whatsoever declaring that "racism" (whatever that even means) is the "cause" of racial inequality. They have no problem declaring that higher per capita rates of black people being killed by police is "caused" by police discrimination (despite evidence conclusively showing this not to be the case). Unless you consistently speak out against this, then this is nothing more than special pleading from you.
>I guess what I'm saying is: did you find the data because you had a viewpoint you wanted to prove, or did you let the data lead you to the viewpoint you're expressing here?
Ironic, considering the fact that VOX, the NYT and dozens of commenters here are tying themselves in knots trying to find a way to deny this obvious trend.
I don't understand why you're so focused on policing changes as causal. If you're right that the increase is predominantly black-on-black in significantly black areas, it seems like level 1 analysis should start with.. black people, not cops. And if black people were more pissed off and angry- not because of the protests, (largely) not because of BLM, but BECAUSE OF WHAT INCITED THE PROTESTS TO BEGIN WITH- then you'd expect more violence ceteris paribus.
What incited the protest? One person dying? At most less than two dozen unarmed black people killed by police per year?
This is simple tribalism. Police killing unarmed black people is a trivially small issue compared to black people killing other people and black people killing white people. Do white people get to be violently angry about black people murdering ~500 white people per year?
The evidence is clear - once you control for the black crime rate and black violence towards police (which can be used as a proxy for black people violently resisting arrest), black people are no more likely to be the victims of police force than white people (and this doesn't even account for the fact that its entirely possible that police killings of black people could be more justified than for white people - you cannot infer this from broad data like this).
Do white people get to riot about police violence against whties? If they did, people like you would be screeching about white people being racist because they only care about police violence when whites are the victim.
You are in so many threads here, Brett S, and you sound really angry about the idea that no one cares about white people killed by the police, or that somehow white people aren’t allowed to be angry about police brutality against white people. If you are genuinely concerned about this issue, you can join the legions of white people who fight to end police brutality, regardless of the race of the victim. Defund and abolition movements aren’t the only option - there are also movements like Campaign Zero are focused on making focused improvements to existing law enforcement systems. I highly recommend checking them out - there’s a lot that citizens can do: https://campaignzero.org/problem
"Cities where large numbers of protesters turned out, relative to their populations, decreased police expenditures by an average of $12 per city resident. Los Angeles’s relatively high protest rate translated into a $2.50 per-capita cut in police spending. Minneapolis had an even higher protest rate of 77 participants per 1,000 residents, which coincided with a $32.50 per-capita chop to police spending. (For reference, cities spent an average of $422 per resident on law enforcement in 2021.)"
There are a number of possible mechanisms for decreased policing, and top-down decreased budgets is merely the least plausible of them.
Police not feeling valued, being worried about punishment, etc. are much more likely. Also, retired police still draw a pension so even a mass resignation wouldn't necessary reduce budgets much.
People keep saying things like “oh, I liked when he made an compelling statistical case showing that the media was completely wrong on this one thing they sounded very confident in, but then he started saying the media is often wrong and biased, and that sounded cliched and conspiracy-ish and right-wing, so I lost interest”.
People keep saying a lot of things that are wrong, so don't worry about it. If you sound conspiracy-ish and are correct, so be it. In other words, I think it's best to optimize for accuracy rather than for telling people things that won't put them off. We get too much of the latter already and not enough of the former.
What this doesn't really address is the surge in violent crime in rural areas:
-----
Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government.
The rise came close to the 30% spike in homicide rates in metropolitan areas in 2020.
The CDC hasn’t analyzed 2021 homicide data yet. In some rural counties, murder rates remained high last year, while in others they have begun to recede along with Covid, data from local law-enforcement agencies shows.
...
In cities, law enforcement and civic leaders have blamed the increase in violent crime on factors such as police pulling back after racial-justice protests, the proliferation of guns, initiatives to release more criminal suspects without bail and a pandemic pause in gang-violence prevention programs.
In rural counties, where ties between police and locals are often less fraught, officials say the reasons for the rising violence are hard to pinpoint. They speculate that the breakdown of deeply rooted social connections that bind together many small communities, coupled with the stress of the pandemic, played a role.
Pastors point to the suspension of rituals such as in-person church services, town gatherings and everyday exchanges between neighbors. Such interactions can serve as guardrails, helping to prevent conflicts from turning violent. The psychological and financial stress due to isolation and job loss were especially pronounced in remote areas, where social services were limited even before Covid-19 struck, local leaders say.
As the pandemic took hold in the spring of 2020, fights between family members, acquaintances and even strangers escalated more frequently into deadly confrontations, authorities in some rural counties said.
-----
Obviously, causes could be different in different areas, but they could also be similar or the same in rural as well as urban areas.
But this seems to lend far more credibility to the idea that these trends have many different causes and that they don't fit nearly into any one box.
Sorry, I know that’s a cliché, but it became a cliché for a reason, and it definitely applies here. You literally have nothing but a correlation in time (and an appeal to your personal priors) and you’re using it to dismiss people who say the factors are complex. (And those people are not media editorial boards, as your phrasing implies. They’re named experts quoted in news reports.)
If we’re going to play the game of pointing at graphs and using our common sense to make something up, I think I can do better: The BLM protests and the murder spike shared a common cause – the widespread conviction that police didn’t care about the murder of black people and even did it themselves at the slightest provocation. After all, which would do more to make you feel you could get away with murder? Learning that police don’t care or learning that they won’t be driving around in their cars for a few months?
My raw speculation attributes the spike to a combination of high unemployment and stimulus cash at the time. Lack of a job gives plus a handful of cash led many people to venture into the business of buying and selling illicit drugs. But since there is no court to resolve disputes in that business, these new players found themselves on the wrong side of a gun.
There was a Tom Wolfe-like Happiness Explosion in mid-2020 due to stimmy checks, eviction moratoriums, and the like. Mass shootings at block parties, car crash deaths by ejection, and the like all exploded.
Now the next subject of research should be whether the police in Uvalde were reluctant to act because of the BLM marches in their community in the previous year -- and they did take place -- and whether this isn't the question to ask if Latino police failed to act to suppress a Latino shooter. Still, it's important to research this issue as a school shooting is the most dramatic form of murder short of war and if there were any campaigns or policy changes or funding issues that could contribute to that phenomenon, we need to know it. No good saying that there were school shootings before the pandemic or BLM. THIS school shooting in Uvalde distinctly involved police unwilling to act forcefully, and blaming this on faulty comms or garbled reports when 45 minutes go by doesn't cut it.
I'm very confused by the emphasis of this essay. The narrative it presents is: police kill black people at a disproportionate rate; people protest against that; in response, police shirk their duty and oaths to keep people safe. If that's true, isn't that a *horrible indictment* of the police? In which case, why is it "politically inconvenient" for liberal media? And why would you say that the *protests* caused the homicide spike, rather than the police refusing to do their jobs?
Yeah, actually Scott didn't make the empirical claim about police killings, so drop that part of it if you like. (I think you're wrong on the empirical question, but since it's not relevant to my point I won't argue it.)
As for the protests, I disagree with you on two points. First, despite some fringe police abolitionists, the protests generally did not demand "stop preventing and investigating crimes"; their demand was "stop killing black people." At the level of "government endorsement" (?) there were certainly almost no significant voices calling for police to stop their crime prevention efforts. The "defund the police" slogan was prominent, and I think it was unfortunate, but what it meant was that funds should be invested in social services rather than policing, with the ultimate goal of reducing both police violence and crime.
Second, and more importantly, the public making demands of the police doesn't deprive the police of agency. Their job is, among other things, to prevent homicides. That is what they are hired to do; that is what almost all public officials expect of them; that is what the general public expects of them. It is literally their job. If their attitude is "fine, you want to criticize us, then we won't do the job we're oath-bound to perform" that is on them. It is just not a morally mature attitude. And I don't know about you, but "if people criticize me then I will stop doing my job" is certainly not an attitude I could get away with in my own line of work. Nor should I be able to.
The simplest analysis would just go something like, "black people commit violent crimes at 6-10X the rate white people do, police shoot black people at 2.5X the rate white people do, so it's likely that the increased rate of police shooting black people is driven by crime rates and not by racism"
A more sophisticated analysis would look at something like the rate at which suspects were shooting at the police, as compared to the rates at which police were shooting back, to determine whether officers were actually reacting to a threat.
Scott wrote an old post looking for racism in the justice system. He found data on suspects shooting at police and found they were disproportionately black (at least for one city). He found evidence of racial bias in things like sentencing, but did not find a racial bias in police shootings:
Should a mixture of two ingredients cause an explosion, the explosion will follow the addition of the second ingredient, but that doesn't exonerate the first ingredient from causal role.
> and in the end focuses on rising gun sales (but guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black).
Unless more guns in the hands of black is influenced by guns passing down from white legal purchasers to blacks getting guns through illegal trade. I'm not saying that's the explanation, just that it should be accounted for in your explanation of causality.
> I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests.
Again, "caused" is problematic. You, yourself suggested the "cause" is cops doing less enforcement. Perhaps less enforcement is "caused" by the protests, or maybe it's "caused" by the murder of George Floyd? Or maybe it's "caused" myriad factors that contribute to hundreds of years of discrimination that led to Floyd's death?
How, along the causal mechanism, do you point to a singular "cause?"
>Unless more guns in the hands of black is influenced by guns passing down from white legal purchasers to blacks getting guns through illegal trade. I'm not saying that's the explanation, just that it should be accounted for in your explanation of causality.
The normal timeline from first legal retail sale of a firearm, to that firearm's being used in a homicide, *in the unlikely event that ever happens at all*, is about eight years. Either the weapon is purchased by a law-abiding citizen who at some later date decides to become a killer, or the weapon is purchased by a law-abiding citizen from whom it is eventually stolen, or it is purchased on behalf of a criminal who mostly plans to use it to intimidate people. Buying a gun with the intent or expectation of shooting someone any time soon, is *extremely rare*.
Also, a 50% increase in gun sales in one year, only means a ~2% increase in the total number of firearms in circulation in the US.
So, something really weird would have to be going on for an increase in legal gun sales (to anyone) turning into an increased homicide rate, *that fast*. You'd basically need a large fraction of homicides to suddenly be a new or previously rare *type* of crime, that favors use of a recently purchased gun, and I'm pretty sure that would have been noticed and commented on if that were the case. Yes, headline-style "mass shooting" would qualify, but they're headline-worthy because they're still rare and all of them together would be a barely noticeable blip in the national homicide total.
Thanks for the response. I'll still say there's a problem with Scott's logic although your explanation (I'll assume your timeline is well-informed) would likely apply here. If Scott had laid that out I wouldn't question the logic.
Although, your explanation doesn't address the issue with guns purchased by (white) straw buyers. Again, I'm not saying that's the explanation here - but should be addressed.
<i>In 2019, the average time from when a gun was first purchased to when it was traced by ATF — a metric the bureau calls “time to crime” — was 8.29 years. But that metric comes with a big caveat. Since ATF traces only to the first retail sale, it can’t see if someone bought a preowned gun at a pawnshop and then used it in a crime the next day, for example. The same goes for private sales and trafficked weapons. Any tracing beyond the first sale is up to local law enforcement. In other words, the time-to-crime metric is limited in what it says about where crime guns originate from</i>
> (Minor quibble – our philosophy isn't "Rationalism" – it's more accurately 'modern rationality' (no capitals) and it's less of a _compact_ 'philosophy' than a much more nebulous 'cloud' of ideas/aspects from all kinds of prior/current bodies of knowledge.)
- I appreciate you nuancing, though I can't say I understand the definition you are trying to express
> "I don't like that first part – you will _definitely_ "always find things to be critical of Scott"? Even if Scott states "I agree with Jordan."? That just seems _deliberately_ contrarian :)"
- I don't like it either because that's not what I intended to express lol. I meant it in the sense that people are different people, I know of no two people fully agreeing on every topic. I was ascertaining my right to disagreement, not my right to being a deliberate contrarian. As an aside, I do like stepping in other shoes for the sake of debate and taking on a contrarian position. The farther from my own beliefs, the more entertaining and thought provoking I find it.
1. I think not enough consideration has been put into the details of the mechanism by which police pullback supposedly caused more murders. It's possible, but how - exactly - did police work stoppages lead to more murders? I think that aspect of the hypothesis matters.
2. There's very clearly an uptick in Native American murders. Handwaving that away as statistical noise undermines the credibility of your argument, I think - it comes across as sweeping data that contradicts your hypothesis under the rug.
So, your analysis is that…. cops stop doing their jobs when publicly criticized? And *specifically* abandon their duty to serve and protect Black communities because they’re mad about and afraid of being critiqued?
I was inspired reading Scott Alexander's piece "What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?" So much so that I included it with 7 other primary resources proving there was a Ferguson Effect, where attacks on police and protest led to further bloodshed.
It's a long piece written the past 24 hours, but I excerpted the section where I focus on the Astral Codex Ten article from a couple weeks ago. Let me know what you think.
If you think murders increased from the “pandemic,” another hypothesis thrown in here, then you’re also off. Murders fell or remained static across Europe, Central America, and South America, and I’ve yet to find a single country that had a 2020 murder spike except the country (USA! USA!) that had thousands of “mostly peaceful” anti-police protests after George Floyd’s death, 7% of which turned violent. (Again, a situation where all the Minneapolis police involved were immediately arrested. So much for “no justice, no peace.”)
But critics say “more research is needed.” Which I’m all for, but somehow they missed the multitude of studies indicating a “Ferguson Effect” can be shown statistically and with strong methodologies. I don’t think that’s an accident that they ignore brave academics like Wilfred Reilly, Justin Nix, and Roland Fryer.
Is It Weeks of Months of Anti-Police Protest, Civic Disruption, and Attacks on Policing? (Bingo.)
Here’s a vastly more intelligent and thoughtful analysis by famous rationalist and blogger Scott Alexander. He also had a brouhaha with The New York Times, where he has legitimate beefs with them trying to out him publicly and tarnish his reputation, but I won’t get into it.
Simply, the creator of Astral Codex Ten is not beholden to media or academic pressures, where merely suggesting the “Ferguson Effect” means you’re not an “ally” and possibly “racist.” Alexander puts the near 5,000 single year increase in murders squarely on the BLM protests. Is there any incentive for career-minded academics or media journalists to promote this theory, even if painfully obvious? Of course not.
I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests, most notably in the cities where those protests happened but to a lesser degree around the country. And the spike seems limited to the US, while other countries had basically stable murder rates over the same period.
I understand this is the opposite of what lots of other people are saying, but I think they are wrong.
Scott Alexander is brave, but he’s not alone. If more people stand up against the ideological grain, I honestly believe lives can be saved.
The timing made it pretty clear in most cases. I was looking through the data for Oakland, CA, and the spike was very large and happened almost overnight the week after the Floyd death. No other explanation could lead to such a quick shift like that. Pandemic, gun sales, poverty, change in the weather.....all other explanations would surely have more gradual increases and at different points in the year.
Ha
Define "most" other countries? Do you have some data on unemployment trends at an international level compared with homicide rates?
I assume you mean zoomers, but why would that all happen in one year?
I take your point, but generalising from a 3 month period to a homicide spike that's been ongoing for several years at this point seems shaky to me.
Are murderers especially likely to be unemployed? I honestly don't know.
Or could be stress from the fear of unemployment and/or jobs becoming worse?
I don't mean to be unfairly dismissive, but I've become highly skeptical of straightforward economic explanations for crime over time. I'd suggest checking out some of Devin Helton's essays on urban decay for a run-down on crime and homicides starting in the 1960s. Cross-ethnic comparisons also tend to be illuminating.
The early 1990s murder boom was due to crack. In places where crack arrived earliest -- NYC, DC, LA -- murders shot up in the very prosperous late 1980s.
No, it wasn't unemployment. The 2008 recession saw massive unemployment with a DECREASE in crime. The Ferguson effect IN FERGUSON was not preceded by a spike in unemployment.
You're just desperately clinging onto an explanation that doesn't contradict your ideology and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
"Peaks of unemployment correlate with peaks of homicide."
Nah, homicides fell pretty consistently during the Great Recession, as did traffic fatalities. Murders in modern America don't happen due to desperate Jean Valjean's holding up a bakery to feed their families but instead more because one or more jerks are feeling their oats.
Now, one thing that was weird about 2020 was how many people didn't have to get up in the morning to work but had a wallet full of cash from stimmy checks and not paying their rent.
There's nothing wrong with this comment.
This cannot possibly explain the actual *Ferguson* Ferguson effect.
This article has been cross-posted to Reddit at r/InsaneProtestors
That's an interesting subreddit!
Just looking at the best videos for the last *month*... https://old.reddit.com/r/InsaneProtestors/top/?sort=top&t=month ...wow.
Compare to previous years. Crime always rises a bit in April because it's warmer and more people are outside. This happens in every year, and then the very high rise in June doesn't happen until 2020.
(there's a separate effect where 7-day rolling averages make the June spike start a little earlier than it should)
I might have added in the caption later, I've been editing pretty heavily based on what people express concern about in the comments.
I think 7-day rolling averages should have the opposite effect - they would make it take longer for the spike to really show up.
It depends, but it seems like something that would be important enough to want to confirm the methodology before just taking it for granted.
The NYC shootings new normal didn't really get going until mid-June.
In NYC, like in many cities, shootings were up way more than murders. People shot were up 100% in 2020 in NY while people killed were up only 40%. This goes along with the idea of Deaths of Exuberance. Black shooters traditionally have the lowest killed to wounded ratio, so a very large fraction of the incremental shooting incidents in NYC were likely black.
First generation BLM Ferguson effects were sharply restricted in time and space to BLM triumphs in St. Louis area, Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee etc...
2nd generation BLM Floyd effects were near instantaneous and national.
One thing to keep in mind is that white murderers tend to be pretty old. I don't have statistics at hand, but white murderers who are career criminals tend to bring the term "hardened criminal" to mind: e.g., they worked their way up the scale of criminality until finally killing somebody at age 39 or whatever.
Lol this is retarded. It’s obviously racial. Your intuition of the causal chain is precisely backwards. The black crime spike (primarily by young blacks, I.e. 15-35) drives the youthfulness number of crime. Not vice versa
"For someone with the username "HL Mencken," you should really come up with more clever insults."
I don't know about that, the original Mencken was excessively fond of a fixed set of terms of contempt for the American tardoisie. Not the same one, but hey, you have to go with the times. "Booby" just doesn't sound right anymore.
I'm not saying it's not *good*, I'm just saying that e.g. "ignoramus" and "clod" are standing entries in Real Mencken's insult book. In the instance you've cited here he chose to expand on the subject; on other occasions, like False Mencken above, he was briefer.
Adjusting for age makes a modest difference, but race is the Big Factor: blacks die by homicide about an order of magnitude more than non-Hispanic whites. For young males, the difference is about 20 to 1.
Most educated Americans are not aware of the immense size of the racial gaps in likelihood of shooting and being shot. Or they are aware of them when thinking about their own real estate but they don't factor them in when thinking about public policy.
Part of the lower median age of black Americans is driven by the higher fertility of black immigrants though right? Nigerian-Americans and Jamaican-Americans have lower median age but also don't have anywhere near the ADOS crime rate. BirthGauge says that ADOS TFR = White TFR but higher black TFR is driven by immigrant populations. In general immigrant populations tend to be younger even controlling for TFR because the old people stay behind.
Or everybody forgot how to drive because of the pandemic.
I remember Sailer had a chart showing that black traffic fatalities were a bit higher than white ones before Floyd, but after Floyd there was a massive divergence and a wave of black motor accidents because the police stopped their aggressive racial profiling.
Out of the frying pain and into the fire, I suppose. Hopefully self-driving cars will enable us to avoid the trade-off between racial profiling and motor vehicle accidents.
Fair enough, and that's what we should do in the short term. I'm for racial profiling if it saves lives. But I'd rather do less racial profiling if possible.
Decreased policing plus legalized marijuana.
These Sailer charts showed a big spike in mid-2020 affecting black people but not white people, that's not when marijuana was legalized.
Right, but usage went up on lockdowns.
The police are complaining that one argument for legalizing marijuana was that there would be fewer car crashes because high drivers aren't as terrible drivers as drunk drivers, but now it appears that more bad drivers lately are both drunk and high.
<i>Out of the frying pain and into the fire, I suppose. Hopefully self-driving cars will enable us to avoid the trade-off between racial profiling and motor vehicle accidents.</i>
Or you could just put up speed cameras.
How long until the NYT found the cameras racist?
I think the NYT will say that the law enforcement is systematically racist, not the camera itself, and will just say more black people are profiled, this is unfair. At worse they might say that cameras are part of a system designed to surveil and control black bodies or whatever, the same way they complain whenever the law is enforced.
It's true that NYT already thinks that standardized tests are racist, even though Jews and Asians outscore Whites on them, that they think that Stuyvesant being 80% Asian is because of racism and "white supremacy", and they think that hate crimes against Asians and Jews in NYC are also caused by "white supremacy". Still we can point to actual school segregation in the past and actual hate crimes in the past for which white people can be blamed.
There is not a history of black people having cameras focused on them in the same way. If you install more of these cameras in black areas (which would make sense as that's where more crime is), the NYT will say it's monitoring black bodies or whatever and repeat their usual tripe about the criminal justice system.
Well if you really want to minimize driving deaths, speed cameras alone are probably insufficient as there are traffic issues other than speeding, and it makes sense to pull over random black people and figure out if they are suspicious. It's also good as a deterrent effect, as someone driving aberrantly or drunk is more likely to be scared of being pulled over, they might not be speeding. Obviously profiling like that has second-order effects.
Self driving cars are just another tech-sensationalism phantasy. Even if they do get introduced at some point, they’ll be a luxury item for upper middle class lib types to masturbate to about being “early adopters” of some “hip, cool” (read: ghey) new thing. They won’t be widely adopted by reckless driving blacks. So keep dreaming about getting “problematic” black stats down.
One thing that I've always wondered about is the following. So people don't like racial profiling and they also don't like road deaths. People don't like police killings and they don't like murder. People don't like super harsh drug laws and they don't like drug gangs around their community. Obviously I don't like any of those things either. Unfortunately in life, there are trade offs.
What is the correct tradeoff for these things? Is the right way to approach this from a preference utilitarian point of view? The median person (say, general American, black American, whatever) would probably not want to live in a world where there is no murder because the government is stalking you constantly, and also probably would not want to live in a police-free world. What's the right function to optimize here?
If we want to know how much racial profiling to do on the road, my first instinct would be whatever maximizes the utility function of the median Black American. How much do they value not getting pulled over vs being safe. I think though that this kind of preference utilitarian thing is hard because most people have inconsistent preferences. People say they want capitalism but don't like economic inequality, people say they want meritocracy but they don't like radically disparate outcomes (my friend describes this last one as "most people have no idea what normal distributions look like"; they'll say to a pollster universities should admit students on merit, but if a top school was 60% Asian and 1% Black they wouldn't be happy).
What ends up happening in the real world of course, is much messier. Among Black Americans community leaders pushed for harsh drug laws and now BLM pushes for defunding the police and removing those harsh drug laws.
You can see the same thing in other countries. In Israel, there was a big movement among Israeli Arabs about police brutality after 12 Arab-Israelis were killed during the October 2000 riots, but nowadays the Israeli Arabs (the leadership, and the street) is pushing "Arab Lives Matter" to get the cops to do more about their unacceptably high murder rate ... which was about 1/4 the murder rate of Black Americans at the peak (it's lower now, the Israelis succeeded in fixing it).
Curious if there is a way to operationalize this though. I mean, if you surveyed 100 random Black Americans and estimated their feelings on road accidents versus traffic stops, and adjusted policy accordingly, what would happen?
My feeling is that the result you would come up with is that the policy we had before George Floyd is much better, and maybe didn't go far enough. Same thing with the cops, you would probably find that we need a ton more cops. Anyway, I would like to know the X for which the average Black American values 1 police killing at X murders, and calibrate our race-police policies accordingly. It might be that they care much less when the cop is black, and then I'd want to hire a ton of black cops.
I think that a preference utilitarian approach for the population in question is generally the right answer. Not listening to the most well-organized voices.
The first step toward operationalizing this is to encourage open discussion of the numbers.
Instead, it's considered unmentionable to be explicit about the racial gaps.
The problem becomes that what goes unsaid for reasons of politeness and political correctness quickly becomes unthinkable.
Yeah exactly. This gets to the root of so much confusion. People complain about black incarceration rates not realizing this yields an enormous cut down in crime affecting mostly other blacks. The black community leaders were correct in calling for more policing. That is ultimately the best thing. But I think you’re just always gonna have problems w black America no matter which way you slice it unfortunately. And we are going backwards not forwards. The whole “March of progress” framing of the racial reckoning is a gigantic disgusting fucking lie.
I don't disagree, I think those community leaders were generally correct about increasing policing, though maybe they erred in calling for harsh punishments for consuming drugs rather than selling them. Indeed most American cities are under-policed. There is a police brutality problem but there is an even bigger crime problem. BLM has generally been a bad thing, though of course there are well-intentioned people who support it. I think it's not exactly a "gigantic disgusting fucking lie" in that to lie you have to actually know what the truth is, and the average woke actually thinks American cops kill hundreds of blacks every year for explicitly racial motivations (Zach Goldberg has done good work on this).
I think there also might be creative solutions, i.e. less incarceration, but more forced labor (or we can use the euphemism "community service") and even Singapore-style caning or other corporal punishment.
My view is that the first priority should be to encourage open discussion of data. Instead, our culture tries to cover up the facts.
For example, I discovered the strong evidence for BLM leading to increased black traffic fatalities on June 8, 2021. It's important for two reasons: because traffic deaths are bad and because it sheds light on the causes of the similar increase in homicides.
But in the year since, so far the furthest that important social science finding has penetrated into the mass media was that Tucker Carlson mentioned it a couple of months ago, which mad a bunch of people mad but didn't lead to further discussion.
And that's it.
I agree with that. Open discussion of the data is good.
People are used to driving in traffic, where a mistake means a scratch. But driving on uncongested streets during what used to be rush hour now means that a mistake leads to a dead pedestrian.
I don't see that that necessarily follows. Is it harder to avoid pedestrians if there are also fewer cars on the road? I could see an argument that people were driving faster and more recklessly on the emptier streets, but that argument assumes the increase in danger from recklessness is greater than the increase in safety from having fewer things on the road. Not to mention fewer pedestrians.
Further, wouldn't your theory suggest that most fatal accidents occur when people used to driving in traffic get into a quiet, less congested suburb? We should see that during normal times, as people used to driving in traffic are going to drive through a variety of lower congestion areas.
My claim isn't that recklessness increased - it's that with fixed recklessness, and higher speeds, you get more fatalities, even with fewer cars. Cars moving under 20 mph kill fewer than 10% of the people that they hit, while cars moving over 40 mph kill about 90% of the people that they hit. People inside a car usually don't die unless the vehicle is moving even faster.
I don't believe there were fewer pedestrians during early covid - I definitely saw a lot more people walking and biking during March/April/May 2020 than I did before or after.
I remembered seeing a map where someone had laid out ever traffic fatality in the US from 2004-2013, but it doesn't appear to be working now. Here's a post that had some discussion of it: http://metrocosm.com/map-every-fatal-traffic-accident-in-the-u-s-2004-2013/
Still, that doesn't explain why people would be driving so much faster if there was increased chances of going off the road or hitting pedestrians crossing the road. I am assuming "recklessness" is a measure of "the probability something bad happens I am willing to accept". If recklessness is fixed and speed increases, that implies that drivers are indifferent to the probability that they will hit more people, or that those hit will be more seriously injured.
It also still does not address that we would then expect more people getting hit and/or killed in low traffic areas than high traffic. Suburbs should be seeing people killed left and right, or hell, even just the regular areas as they change from high traffic to low traffic based on time of day (beyond the usual night time being more dangerous and drunker.)
Traffic tickets issued typically went down in 2020, but at least in the state of Utah, the number issued to people driving over 100 mph went way up.
As traffic lightened in March 2020, speeding increased with some people driving like bats out of hell. 2020 saw a 20% increase in the most spectacular way for motorists to die: by ejection.
But total traffic fatalities stayed pretty flat or declined until after George Floyd's death, when they exploded among blacks especially.
I'm pretty sure they were being sarcastic :)
Not that everyone forgot how to drive, but that they forgot what driving is normally like. In my particular case, I felt like I got used to driving on mostly deserted roads during the lockdowns, then when those eased up after 2-3 months, it took me a while to get used to dealing with traffic again and not being able to cruise along at whatever speed I liked, and I think I got irritated by that and drove more aggressively, at least for a time.
According to CDC cause-of-death tracking, blacks have gotten 49% more likely to die by homicide from Jan-Nov 2018 to Jan-Nov 2021 (Dec 2021 won't be ready until July), and they’ve gotten 38% more likely to die in motor vehicle accidents.
Hispanics are up 40% in homicides and 30% in car crashes.
Whites are up 12% in homicide deaths and 10% in car crash deaths.
Asians are up 13% in homicide deaths and 4% in traffic fatalities.
Yeah, exactly. If your entire repertoire of responses to crimes is stuff that you think might get you prosecuted if the legal system finally stopped giving you essentially complete free rein, there is something seriously wrong with you and your training, because cops in many other countries manage to detain and arrest people with far fewer gunshots and choke holds.
A police officer's number one priority is to go home safely at the end of their shift.
They can most easily accomplish that by not leaving home at the start of their shift, so there's more to it than that.
What that is might be worth talking about, but not with someone who falsely insists that the "number one priority is to go home safely at the end of their shift".
I respect you immensely as a poster, but I'm extraordinarily confused as to what you mean by this.
Anyone who works a dangerous job could, I suppose, not do that job. But insofar as they do carry on doing the job, how does the possibility of refusal negate the assumption that their first priority is to get through the day alive?
I don't know if you're a badgelicker or just pretending to not understand the difference between a general and an absolute statement. I base my claim that "officer safety is paramount" on both the sworn testimony in numerous officer related shootings and multiple police officer self-defense/UoF trainings.
But hey, if you want to just randomly pop in and accuse people of bad faith, you do you.
I think it's very unrealistic to expect policemen not to have as two of their very top priorities:
a. Don't get murdered
b. Don't get sent to prison
We can reasonably expect them to take some risks of each, but we shouldn't be surprised when they act to decrease the risk of those very bad (and very salient) outcomes at the cost of less effective policing or more danger for civilians relative to them.
And people are *terrible* at risk calculations for rare events, so it's quite likely that most policemen are way overestimating their risk of being murdered or sent to jail.
Every use of force - whatsoever - counts as "stuff that might get you prosecuted". So, can police respond to crime exclusively without using force? I think not; and I don't think that's something "seriously wrong with [them] and [their] training". If they see reasonable uses of force getting prosecuted, they are justified in getting worried. (And to anticipate one response - when I say "reasonable uses of force getting prosecuted, I'm very much not talking about George Floyd. Rayshard Brooks is the key example.)
Finally, I'd be shocked if the "other countries" you're alluding to have violent crime rates anywhere near Minneapolis' (even before the protests). There's a tendency to hold up wealthy European countries as model solutions, but they don't even confront the same problems.
As always, this is complicated. The police in those other countries are also shot AT far less frequently.
I always bring this up, but the rates police kill the people they are stopping in the US and Western Europe almost exactly tracks how often those people have a gun. In Germany "criminals" are killed ~100X less often, they also have guns ~100X less often. The relationship more or less holds up across several countries, though isn't perfect.
which isn't very surprising (more guns=greater risk to police)
Nobody wants to get to the root of this disparity, but plainly stated, it’s the amount of criminally inclined blacks with guns america has that causes these numbers. And to a lesser extent Hispanics. Cut those out and the US stats normalize to only slightly above other first world numbers.
There’s far fewer feral blacks willing to resist arrest and fight with/shoot at police in other countries. Do you think police like having to deal with ghetto criminality? No, it’s dangerous, stressful (more than usual police work), and they’d prefer to just avoid the black ghetto altogether.
Not that police officers don't routinely do illegal things as you mentioned, but from my perspective, I think they had reason to worry, given that there seemed to be a kind of moral panic happening at the time. People began to advocate not just defunding the police, but abolishing the police entirely, and extreme rhetoric that invoked terms like "genocide," ACAB, etc.
Here's a nice example from the Gaurdian:
"The systematic killing and maiming of unarmed African Americans by police amount to crimes against humanity that should be investigated and prosecuted under international law, an inquiry into US police brutality by leading human rights lawyers from around the globe has found. "
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/26/us-police-killings-black-americans-crimes-against-humanity
It's also important to point out that public opinion/perception was becoming more and more detached from reality around this time. According to this survey, over 30% people who described themselves as liberal or very liberal believed that cops kill about 10,000 or more than 10,000 unarmed black people year:
https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf
The real number was fewer than 100.
BLM talking point, circa 2015: Every black family knows about having "the talk" with their sons, explaining that it's irrelevant whether they're actually doing something illegal or not, that given stereotypes and bias they need to be cognizant of avoiding situations where they might even risk the perception of illegality.
BLM talking point, circa 2022: Anyone worried about being perceived as doing something illegal due to stereotypes and bias, despite being perfectly innocent, is obviously just resentful over the curtailing of their prerogative to do illegal stuff.
I'm not a fan of BLM by any means but I don't know if this juxtaposition is being fair to them. Peoples' preferences change over time and it might not be the same people saying these things 7 years apart. The first thing (which is reasonable) sounds like something an average black family would say, and the second thing (which is unreasonable) sounds like something one of these BLM activists would say.
I think the 2015-era comment is extraordinarily and poignantly true. I think it was true then, and it's true now, and in my social circle I'm close to cops and prosecutors who as a practical matter devote their lives to making it true.
None of that means that the 2022-era comment is honest or just or correct.
Ooof – I'd ban you if this were my blog for this comment alone.
Indeed. There was less of a defunding and more of a police strike/retirement, to my understanding. This is likely a selection effect, but I've also heard a lot more stories about police just refusing to do anything about obvious crimes in the last two years, particularly property crime but not solely property crime. Whether that is a reasonable reaction to e.g. DA behaviour on their part or a mean-spirited form of protest I'm not qualified to say.
We know police want respect. Could this mass retirement have been intentional so that new recruits and technology could be brought in? Drug addicts may have used violence to rob victims while they were stuck at home. Overcrowding after evictions and lost jobs could have affected tempers. Boredom, bars closed affect violence levels? Cops might fear losing their jobs or lives with restrictions on their crime fighting techniques?
That might be the first time I have heard someone suggest that closing bars increases violence in an area.
Might be true, but also might be unique?
:)
Thanks for self-promoting. Good writing. I'm now a subscriber.
Oh God, I've tried a dozen times to re-find this article since I first read it. Thank you!
Do all cops really agree Chauvin was guilty? Greg Cochran isn't a cop and says you can't asphyxiate someone by kneeling on their neck. There were other cops around Chauvin and I don't think any tried to stop him.
Are you talking about the US legal system? If so, that is definitely not the case - since Floyd had a fatal level of fentanyl in his blood, "hastening" his death is in no way grounds for a murder charge. If anything, involuntary manslaughter would be the appropriate charge.
The relevant question is whether kneeling on the back of someone else in the same manner who was not overdosing would have killed them, i.e. whether Chauvin took action that was the primary cause of Floyd's death, and whether he knew that it would cause his death.
For example, if I tase someone who has a rare heart condition I don't know about and they die, I definitely did not murder them, since I did not take an action that I could have reasonably known would kill them.
From there, the question would be whether or not I was justified in tasing them in the first place, which would then delineate between no charges at all or an involuntary manslaughter charge being justified.
This goes against my understanding of the “eggshell skull “rule. Is this state by state? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
That principle indicates that "the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them," but in the case of murder vs manslaughter, neither charge is contesting the seriousness of the injury caused (death). The factors that delineate between the two are the intentions and actions of the defendant, but not the seriousness of the injury.
There is no _one_ "US legal system" – states vary _wildly_ on even basic stuff like what exactly constitutes 'murder'.
Lol that still doesn’t constitute murder. Negligent homicide maybe. But how could chauvin have known when to lay off? Floyd’s tone was increasingly desperate and I can’t imagine staying on him that long myself. But he was saying “I can’t breathe” many times before being subdued. And street riff raff say shit all the time to get the cops to lay off. So what are we really talking about here as police error? To me it seems an enormous stretch to call that murder. Chauvin should’ve been released of charges but fired for questionable conduct with large consequences.
Because the video isn’t the only key piece of evidence. The toxicology report is crucial, as is Floyd’s behavior and words preceding the incident on the ground. Much of what you see the cops doing is plausibly justified or only marginally outside of protocol if you watch the full video (from when the police first arrive on the scene).
I'm not a cop, but my impression is that this is manslaughter, and that DC holding GF down like that certainly was not good for his heart and contributed to his death, though of course the fentanyl had something to do with it as well. The mainstream narrative that DC just murdered GF is wrong, and it's not true that GF asphyxiated. The second-degree murder seems like the wrong charge, it should be third-degree murder (and manslaughter if it was a different state). Holding down an unresponsive person for 7 minutes is really NOT OK.
Is my impression correct?
How does this (Banned) thing work? HL Mencken is posting. Or was he banned somewhere else?
Chauvin wasn't on Floyd's neck, he was on his upper back. It actually would have been preferable for him to have been on the neck, since the risk of positional asphyxia of the protected trachea would be much lower. The officers "around" DC were two brand new rookies days off of FTO who DID try to convince DC to change course, and DC's car partner who was watching the crowd and not the in custody. This is one of the (many) problems with the self appointed reform movement, is that the level of understanding of basic facts is very very low. "Solutions" are proposed to fix fictional versions of events.
There are 800k sworn in the US roughly, I'm sure you can find a handful that find nothing objectionable in DC's choices, but the general LE consensus is that he screwed the pooch.
https://www.forcescience.com/2017/03/what-does-it-really-take-to-kill-someone-with-compression-asphyxia/
Yeah that is an obviously false statement. That isn't even getting into how unreliable people's reports about their beliefs are on such a high stakes question.
Chauvin did show negligence but his actions were actually a pretty minor deviation from standard police protocol. You have a 6’3, 240 lb man on drugs who has resisted arrest, it’s totally normal to physically hold him down with bodyweight once he’s under control and while waiting for the ambulance. Chauvin only screws up minorly by being too callous to Floyd’s increasingly desperate tone. Floyd was saying “I can’t breathe” many times *before* ever being subdued on the ground. So what’s chauvin supposed to think?
With a toxicology report like Floyd’s, you never get a conviction of guilt for murder on any other case like this if it didn’t have the nuclear cultural ramifications. Chauvin was a mediocre cop who made a rather minor error of judgment but who found himself the wrong guy at the wrong place at the wrong time, where that had enormous consequences.
For seven minutes?!?! And after he was unresponsive?
Because of the way MN defines murder I think third-degree murder is fair, I agree second-degree murder was the wrong verdict and it would be manslaughter in most other states, and also that it was impossible for Chauvin to get a fair trial. There are other places I'd spend my political capital though than justice for this asshole police officer though.
Great blog! I subscribed.
Just out of curiosity, has it ever occurred to you that maybe the reason our elite oligarchs want to defund the police is because they are trying to make society transition from public policing to private policing? This way, when law and order in society collapses from waves of mass migration refugees, the only people with any level of protection will be the rich. They can isolate themselves in their bunkers while the rest of society kills itself off until hitting optimal depopulation levels. And the rest of us will accept it as normal because after a single generation, nobody will remember a time when you didn't have to pay private police dues to the homeowners association if you expected police to help you. So when somebody points out that maybe it's wrong that the increase in violence caused by open borders is predominantly impacting the poor, they can just shrug and say "Don't blame US because YOU weren't smart enough to buy police security!"
This is too conspiratorial. It’s not that well planned out. It’s more of a social hysteria driving this shit. Stop thinking every step of our societal decay is some masterminded chess move. The reality of the world is there’s more often nobody at the wheel than a malicious actor steering us.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, and never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by Moloch.
Should we even care if private policing works in a way that public policing isn't?
Regardless, this just seems silly. This is a 'mistake' ('mistake theory' versus 'conflict theory') disagreement – "our elite oligarchs" really just do 'believe' (at least rhetorically and politically) that less policing would be strictly better overall.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but if we take this and Scott’s article as true, what’s the actual mechanism by which more murders occur? I know there are sometimes cases where officers get involved to stop a crime that is happening or about to happen (there was a case in my city a couple weeks ago). But surely most police action is after the fact? So how does reduced policing actually lead immediately to a large increase in murders?
I can imagine a case where potential murderers see that other murderers got off Scott free since no police followed up and so the potential murderers decide to commit. But wouldn’t that take months or years to happen? I think the proximal cause is not so much police not (being able to) doing their job but of a psychological change in the community - a feeling of recklessness or chaos perhaps?
But I also don’t know basically anything about police so maybe there is an actual mechanism?
"But surely most police action is after the fact?"
No police pro-actively patrol and deter crimes. As Alex Tabarrok notes, every step in the causal chain leading to Scott's conclusion has been verified through studies:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/06/what-caused-the-2020-spike-in-murders.html
So I read the Tabarrok paper and it says:
> Violent crimes show no response to increased police presence on high‐alert days. Among nonviolent crimes, auto theft and theft from autos show very large effects, a decline during high‐alert days of 43 percent. ... The large declines in crime involving automobile thefts and thefts from automobiles support the idea that increased police presence is the driving force in reducing crime during high‐alert periods because these are “street” crimes. Temporary increases in street police and closed‐circuit cameras are unlikely to deter crimes such as homicide, which often occur in homes among people who know one another, but are much more likely to deter street crimes.
Obviously they're not going to have data for murder specifically since that'll be too rare to pick up. But violent crime is obviously the closer category to what we're interested in so this seems pretty bad for the argument that police force reductions *quickly* increase murder rate, doesn't it? I still agree that the overall reduction in policing could plausibly have long-term effects of murder rates.
Honestly, this seems like a pretty dishonest mistake for Tabarrok to make.
Domestic homicides tend to occur at home, but the big increase in homicide in 2020 was not (in contrast to predictions about lockdowns) in domestic homicides (or even indoor mass-murders, though they get a lot of press) but instead "street" crimes.
That paper is still (modest) direct evidence against police affecting street violence (violent crime was not separated out by street versus indoor but did not decline). At the very least it is not evidence in favor of that assertion, in contrast to how Marginal Revolution is citing it. That link may still be true, of course, but we shouldn’t overstate the evidence for it.
Though I should add that the claim that street violence specifically is affected by cop activity is a priori sufficiently more likely so your comment has helped me understand this position better even if I think the claim is not yet “verified”.
More concretely than the other commenter mentioned, a lot of the 'low-level' mundane 'patrol activities' essentially involve 'hassling' the people likely to murder others, e.g. over gang turf or in retaliation for some ongoing gang feud.
If a cop makes a 'routine' traffic stop, and then suspects that the person or people they stopped has a gun, they can search for it, find it, and then make subsequent murders a little less likely if only because they're now less convenient for the potential murderers.
There's probably _also_ an effect whereby less police activity directly emboldens criminals, including murderers.
If people are crowded in the streets watching a couple of drivers do donuts in an intersection, and the police _don't_ break that up, that sure seems like the kind of environment in which murder is more likely! (There are several videos of 'pedestrians' being struck or run over by these drivers.)
Also, if it's risky to be walking around armed because the cops often stop and frisk people who look like you, and you'll be arrested if they find a gun on you, then you will probably leave the gun home unless you're on your way to carry out a planned crime right now. Which means that you won't have the gun with you when you get into a fistfight with some dude over looking at his girlfriend in a too-friendly way, and so you won't end up shooting him.
Yup!
Thanks!
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests...I understand this is the opposite of what everyone else says, but I think they are wrong."
You must not be reading many conservatives. Pretty much a standard gripe of theirs is that of course it was all BLM, and the media lies about it and obfuscates what's going just like they do with everything that they find ideologically inconvenient.
An entire section of this article (“A Moment Of Griping”) is dedicated to this.
Skimmed the article and missed that part, my fault. But conservatives count as part of "everybody"!
Best not to "skim" Scott's pieces. They're generally meaty enough to deserve the few extra minutes it takes to read them fully.
no we aren't
Deplorables aren't considered fully human by People Who Matter.
Scott might be surprised to learn how many right-wingers only *became* right-wingers *after* examining sensitive issues and realizing that the respectable media & academia does nothing but lie and obfuscate, *then* concluding that these people can't be trusted on anything that threatens their dogma.
The reddening tint of the grey tribe in the 2010s and 2020s does seem to be evidence-driven, yes.
The reddening of the grey tribe (or at least, this blog's comment section) is a big part of why I don't visit this blog as much. I can't comment on the "evidence based" part, but right now it's reddening because many non-right-wing readers don't want to participate in a right-wing community.
I think the issue is not with the facts but with the tone and with the lack of hyperbole, and with not sounding like an alt-right frog Nazi. Better to avoid vulgar references to blacks as a group, there is plenty of variation on any trait we care about within each racial group, even if the distributions are not identical. If I were to say "many people on the left and in the NYT explicitly or implicitly attribute all discrepancies to discrimination, and this is a false and destructive belief, and discrepancies in average IQ and crime rate cannot be pinned only on racism", this comes off as a lot better than "the problem in the US is stupid blacks and black crime, and the anti-white racist NYT doesn't want you to know the truth and instead blood libels white people".
Good point. ACX is more rightwing than I like, but within my range of toleration. There's an ill-defined limit-- I'm fine with the lead article, but a lot of commenters seem to start with the idea that there's something wrong with black people in general.
Honestly it's not really that tolerable anymore. The comment section has been politically slanted for a long time, but the actual posts used to be interesting. Increasingly I feel lately Scott's MO for a quick high-engagement post is to go out and find controversial political issues; take a strong (contrarian and coincidentally [?] right-wing) position on them; then head out to the Internet to cherry-pick some evidence to support his strong initial belief. When his quick Google search turns up conflicting evidence he devotes paragraphs to tearing it apart. Meanwhile evidence that does support his hypothesis receives virtually zero skepticism. A good example is the "Which Party Has Gotten More Extreme Faster?" post, which is an absolute mess.
This is fine, I guess. But it's a failure mode I've seen on a lot of blogs and sites. First your comments get captured by people with a strong political bias, then 50% of the smart commenters exit the space, and then the main authors begin catering to their new audience. (This gets worse when the audience is paying for the site.)
The comments in this article are full of people aggressively defending Chauvin and Kyle Rittenhouse with little or qualified pushback. It's pretty far gone.
TL;DR Scott's schtick used to be "I am a liberal/libertarian in a sea of liberals, and I need to be contrarian to balance the issues for my overwhelmingly liberal audience." But his audience isn't liberal anymore.
I'm having trouble finding what comments you're referring to. The thread is now so long that I might be missing something. If there's a lot, would you mind linking a couple?
It’s rather mean and strange that to say that there is “something wrong with black people in general”. Obviously black people are human beings worthy of respect and of course I want them to have great lives. And obviously historically Black Americans have faced lots of discrimination.
Still the conclusion most consistent with an objective look at the available evidence is that black people in the US, *on average*, have persistently lower average educational attainment, lower income, and higher crime than other groups for reasons that are not entirely environmental, and generally not “racism” as traditionally understood insofar as they are environmental.
As a society we rightly accept Jews (and Asians) have higher EA and income and lower crime and opioid abuse than white Christian Americans, and we know this is not because of the Sacklers. Why can’t we accept Black-White disparities the same way? Granted the Sacklers did not enslave millions of White Christians and treat them awfully, and the situation is far from analogous, but my basic point still stands.
Care to justify that?
Or is it based on the standard “I don’t like what you say therefore you are a racist” syllogism of our times?
It tells you something that the community that’s loudest about supposed media bubbles on social media finds intolerable the existence of a site that tries to investigate issues in a evidence based, rather than a tribal shibboleth based way.
Glad you are tolerating outside your window! Cool!
People who follow data are not any "wing." To characterize resultant conclusions as "rightwing" or "leftwing" misses a really important point. I hope you will consider this.
Comments are always a mixed bag! I learn from many, and appreciate the opportunity to engage with people outside my immediate circle.
I have not read all these comments, to be honest, though the article was outstanding. Gosh, I would be surprised, though, if commenters here think "there is something wrong with black people...".
Are you sure you are interpreting their comments literally? Literal is a good way to go. Drawing inferences can lead one astray if one uses "people who state A automatically also believe B."
Comments like this are part of why people are becoming right-wing. You see evidence presented that leads to conclusions you don't like, and instead of coming up with a persuasive counterargument, you threaten to leave and reduce Scott's audience. Fine, go. If this is the quality of your contribution, I don't think it's any great loss.
Honestly this type of discussion is a good example of why people are leaving the Left. "Feelings over facts" is no way to live.
What's the alternative? Are there any non-right-wing communities left that aren't even more of an echo chamber?
Seems still pretty lefty to me.
A right-wing community?
Or a truth-based (at least as far as possible) community?
Are we certain it's actually getting redder, or is it does it just appear red-shifted to the blue tribe, due to their rapid movement leftward away from the grey tribe?
...sorry.
Yarvin often says that the left defines anything that is not left as right. It may not even be that actual positions are shifting drastically in either direction, but that with the cultural dominance of the left comes a much stronger focus on purity. You could agree with the left on every issue except for one, but that would still make you right-wing, in the same way that you can be a very devout Christian, but if you deny transubstantiation, you get burned at the stake. So even if grey tribe beliefs haven't changed at all, the tribe is essentially being redefined as red simply because it's not blue.
> ...Christian, but if you deny transubstantiation, you get burned at the stake.
I think they've stopped doing that now
Seems there's a long history of the "trans-" prefix causing purity cultures to turn on themselves.
It's always been like that. The left is a coherent movement based first and foremost on human equality and egalitarianism as the ultimate virtue, and the right is a jumbled coalition of everyone who opposes that for various reasons. Free market enthusiasts, religious conservatives, racial conservatives, and so on (these groups have some overlap of course).
Probably some of both. It's hard to disentangle them. Probably more of the ACX community became less libertarian on crime. Was this just because the woke left went off the deep end so the ACX community seems more right-wing, or because many in the ACX community like dionysus saw firsthand the destructive effects of a lack of policing? Probably a combination.
I think a strong case can be made that "the left" in the US has become less willing to ally itself with people who have slightly different views.
Check out these two articles, and specifically the section "varieties of slicing" in part 2:
https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/
https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/25/the-tilted-political-compass-part-2-up-and-down/
Back in the day, when the red tribe had a lot of power, and the blue tribe was concerned with things like lessening the influence of christian dogma on policy, the blue tribe was happy to ally itself with grey types such as Dawkins. The "left/right" dividing line used to go through somewhere on the right end of the grey tribe. Now a days, the blue tribe has enough power that it doesn't need the grey tribe's help to stand up to the reds, and consequently the dividing line has been shifting ever leftward through the grey territory. Gradually more and more grey people have been told they're not welcome in blue company.
The grey people ousted from alliance with the blues, are then forced to choose between trying to carve out a distinct grey identity, or allying with the reds. The second option being the more likely outcome, I suspect.
Interestingly, this new left/right division that has emerged makes American politics more closely resemble politics in some other countries.
For instance, in Norway (to the extent that it maps onto the American situation), the grey tribe has historically tended to ally itself with the red tribe, since the blue tribe has been the stronger of the two for a long time.
In other words, I think what grey tribe members are experiencing is the blue tribe increasing its social/political power and thus being able to enforce greater ideological purity among its members/allies.
I certainly agree that it is evidence driven. Might be some selection effects. Normal lefties would read SSC but after the Great Awokening they stopped because HBD racism blah blah. And going on Substack likely attracts right-wingers who read other Substack.
I’d be really interested in an SSC survey where Scott figures out how much the community has moved right, and whether it’s individual people or election effects driving the change. It’s almost surely a combination of both.
I was on the right until I wasn't any longer and part of the shift for me was continental theory. I don't know that it's conducive to further conversation to say that all "respectable (whatever that is) media and academia" lies.
Bingo. The rest of us are those who figured it out as kids and wanted nothing to do with them.
I'm one of those people. It was the BLM riots and the elite establishment's lying about them (e.g. "fiery but mostly peaceful protests", from CNN), all while I saw my city being looted on live CCTV footage, that turned me from center left to hardcore conservative.
You should’ve been redpilled earlier by the gigantic russiagate fraud
Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Give credit where credit is due.
Yeah I know. I’m just salty over how terminally lib-brained this country is. Glad you’re here.
CCTV didn't have live footage of Trump *not* being a Russian agent.
And it never will....
There’s this funny thing with a lot of these Weinstein-tier thoughtful moderate/liberal/centrist types who last few years are dissenting from their libtard peers and think they’re hot shit. You’re like two fucking decades late to the party of what most Midwestern conservative grandmas have been saying a long long time ago. Great job being so “freethinking”.
One of the important rationalist policies is to praise people when their views are made more accurate, not to insult them.
Better late than never - welcome aboard the good ship Sanity!
Yeah, the whole BLM thing and the woke purges are a large part of what turned me from center-left to center-right, though I've always been more libertarian than anything else. I voted for Biden in 2020 but I will not vote Democrat again unless something big changes. I'll likely vote DeSantis in 2024. I'll write him in if Trump wins the nomination (I think Trump is an incompetent moron and I'd never vote for him either). I have my disagreements with the Republican party (e.g. on abortion) but the Democrats' views on race, gender, trans stuff in K-12 are too much for me. I'm out.
Oh, but Xiden is NOT "making mistakes." It is mathematically impossible for the results we see to arise out of innocent incompetence. Only years of careful malicious planning could bring the entire world down this quickly.
Yeah, I suspect in Trump's second term he will approach things far differently.
What I find most interesting is that this "new right" Republicanism is really just Classical Liberalism re-booted. People are finally re-discovering Individual Rights and the rule of law - shocking!
Classical liberalism is great, and I have pretty much always believed in it as an ideal, and I've always liked individual rights and the rule of law. I do think though that power matters sometimes and you have to do some illiberal things to fight the "woke left." You can only go so far when your opponents don't play by the same rules.
I like freedom of the press, but it's hard for me to have sympathy for Gawker. Not a big fan of public sector unions, but in this political climate I think police unions do more good than harm. I'm not a big fan of anti-discrimination laws, but I'm rooting for SFFA.
I am not happy about some of the wording in Florida's "don't say gay" bill and I don't want a lesbian teacher to be punished for casually mentioning she went on vacation with her wife. But given the choice between that and prescribing puberty blockers to teenagers, I think it's clear what the lesser evil is.
I should probably say "gender ideology" instead of "trans stuff", obviously there are plenty of trans people (e.g. Caitlyn Jenner, or many of our autistic lesbian transwomen friends in the ACX community) who are not on board with the insanity of gender ideology. Bill Maher's quip about peg leg surgery is priceless.
I'll drink to that!
Yes. I used to vote D but I do research news articles, and read both left and right. This started when I read that Senator Hillary Clinton sponsored legislation to criminalize flag-burning and I did not believe it. It was true.
To my surprise, in spite of the unappealing tone, Fox News is consistently correct fact-wise. (It is likely that there are exceptions.) The NYT is worst, biased and clearly intentionally misleading, by omitting known and crucial facts to give a slanted view.
My favorite was the NYT article about the supposed female athlete being challenged on high testosterone levels. In principle I would not consider natural but exceptional testosterone levels disqualifying. Yet nowhere in the article did it mention that the person was a biological male, a suspicion that I confirmed elsewhere. I looked up testosterone levels and they were perfectly normal - for a male. This completely altered my perception of the reported debate and fairness of the respective positions. My spouse did not believe the NYT would omit this info and I had to show it to him.
Interesting footnote, he remembers the article as it was reported, and I have to continually remind him that I debunked it with facts.
As I said at the beginning, I know lots of right-wingers are saying this, it just hasn't made it into the mainstream. I'll correct that sentence to "lots of other people"
It's conventional in the prestige press to say that murders went up during the "pandemic rather than during the "racial reckoning," although the latter is more precisely accurate.
Considering the "racial reckoning" happened inside the pandemic, it's kind of a pretty big overlap. (BTW, exactly how do you date 'racial reckoning'? Floyd's murder? The date of protests? Which protests? Where? Were all 2020 protests BLM ones? Where did ANTIFA ever go?)
And this also opens up a rather odd question. If BLM protests caused a rise in crime, well what did the pandemic do? Like are we really going to assert that crime was totally unchanged by the pandemic? If that was the case, that would be a pretty shocking sociological event? I mean it's the only thing in 2020 totally where the pandemic had no impact?
Floyd's murder was the end of May 2020. After the first lockdowns and great fears about the virus, at the point when winter weather had broken and it was becoming clear outdoors was safer than indoors but both school and workplaces remained closed in many areas.
"If the crime increase was caused by the pandemic, then now that the pandemic is basically over why hasn't crime gone back down?"
Pandemic isn't over but when was the last time there was a BLM protest?
Did the pandemic cause crime to increase in other countries?
Hard to tell. I looked at this (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01139-z) which seems to show the harder the lockdown order, more crime went down after. But then the US didn't really have the same type of lockdown. People didn't go to work or school but police weren't telling people to stay off the streets or go out in public.
https://insightcrime.org/news/insight-crimes-2021-homicide-round-up/ says Latin America saw violent crime dramatically increase after decreasing in 2020. South America's winter is North America's summer so while US Americans we leaving their homes (but not going to work/school) in late May, the opposite may have been happening in Latin America leaving their increase to come in 2021.
Sounds like the answer is basically no, then.
Scott tried to address your odd question by looking at other countries. Limited data but that suggests pandemic experience didn't cause rise in crime there. More data would be good. In particular there are 2 lines of questioning that Scott didn't address which are 1) could pandemic have caused more crime only among poor populations - in which case DE/UK/DK may not be best bellweathers (although there is a lot of poverty in some parts of UK too that is very comparable to US poverty, maybe with less drugs/guns) and 2) could pandemic have caused a rise in crime but with a delay effect (not obvious to me that the very month something huge shifts criminals immediately adjust behavior). Occam's razor says 2) is not that likely, plus there are other similar episodes pre-2020 to fall back on, but still can't be excluded.
As I said a problem with comparing lockdowns is that many countries locked you in your house doing things like giving you digital or paper permission slips to leave to buy groceries. Many in the US stayed home early on but it was never like that anywhere. By May, it was clear many people were avoiding indoor places like school/work but they were not afraid to be on the street outdoors.
We are also confronted with the fact that the US did not respond to the pandemic as other nations did. In fact, we responded much worse. Our death rate was higher than others despite the fact that we have more hospitals, more resources and even had vaccines before anyone else (not counting Russia and China whose vaccines appear to not be very good).
In other words, it is pretty clear the pandemic was especially toxic socially to the US.
Occam's razor slices BLM protests just as hard. The pandemic can't have a delayed effect but BLM protests can? Crime happening two years after the last BLM protest in a city is, errr, because of BLM but not because of the pandemic or the general social distrust the pandemic both uncovered and increased?
AND the BLM protests were not exogeneous events. Conspiracy theories aside, there was no grand ANTIFA/BLM/Secret plan to do a bunch of protests in 2020. In other words, you can imagine a 2020 without a pandemic you can't imagine it without protests unless you're trying to imagine a different society. But if you're imagining a different society you can just as easily imagine one with protests but no crime increases.
I think the pandemic contributed to the rise in crime and traffic accidents in a few ways:
- Cops started social distancing in March -- i.e., were less proactive about getting in the faces of bad drivers and suspect characters.
- Lots of criminals and crazy people were released during lockdowns for fears of the pandemic sweeping through lockups
- Masking makes it easier for street criminals not to be identified by witnesses and by rapidly improving facial recognition software.
There are probably others.
But, still, the Racial Reckoning was a huge deal. As Scott says, the same increase in shootings ensued after Ferguson, just more localized to where BLM triumphed over local police forces. And, I'd add, the two BLM eras not only saw homicides increase, they also saw traffic fatalities go up.
The solve rate for murders has gone from nearly 80% in the 60's to early 80's down to the 50's for the last 20 years. This is despite all sorts of tools like DNA, cell phones pining geo-locations, using social media to circulate pictures of suspects caught on cameras.
Facial recognition? You're missing the plot. That sort of thing is the cherry on top of the sundae.
I can see social distancing creating a hands off approach to policing. Then again people really were scared and the streets were empty around the world. When I look at states for all types of crimes what I see in many places is a decrease from Jan-March 2020 to rock bottom levels (the immediate lockdown) and then a bounce up in May which would align with BLM protests near the end but also the facts that winter was breaking, people were generally not in work or school (but unlike other countries, business was open, I ate quite a bit of fast food all through the 'lockdown'). Most interesting, though, a lot of the crime seems to have bounced back to Q1 levels. It's a rapid and sudden increase but then the collapse was also sudden and dramatic.
https://citycrimestats.com/covid/
https://twitter.com/chrishnews/status/1542173173008957441
Homicides reached a New Normal in June 2020 and have been high and relatively stable at the "racial reckoning" level at least through the end of 2021.
My fav is how you can pinpoint the spike (or really new plateau) in crime/homicide to the precise fucking week when the riots broke out and you still have NPR types scratching their heads about it.
Wish I could be around to see what Han Chinese historians of the future will be writing about this period of Baizuo America.
Of the four possible causes of police pullback that Scott suggested (or others he may have missed), do you know of evidence favoring any of them in particular?
We have the audio tape of Mayor Lori Lightfoot and leading alderman discussing during the first weekend of the "raciaL reckoning" in Chicago in 2020 and they were terrified. As it turned out the political class was not massacred but 25 local citizens were murdered, Chicago's all time record.
If the 'massacre' was 25 incidents that's a pretty small number. You can actually examine the details of each of those cases and ask what they were about. Were they arguments that escalated? Were they 'hits'? Were they random murders by a serial killer? Did they happen on streets were protests were happening or somewhere else?
25 murders in one weekend in Chicago is a pretty big number by the standards of Chicago, which has a history of violence. E.g., the St. Valentine Day's Massacre of 1929, the most legendary crime of Al Capone, would have been only 28% of the first weekend of the racial reckoning's toll. The highest shooting (killed plus wounded) weekend toll in Chicago's history happened three weeks later on the Father's Day 2020 weekend with 113 shot.
You can look up on Gun Violence Archive or Hey Jackass the details of the killings. Much as Rick in "Casablanca" described Captain Renault as a man like any other man, only more so, the racial reckoning shootings in Chicago tended to be weekends like any other weekends in Chicago, only more so.
For a particular case, see https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-fall-of-seattle/?=refinnar
This article is about Seattle not Chicago. Don't lose the plot.
...Dude, the second is definitely true too. Probably not everywhere, but I've talked to officers who have flat out SAID such things (in Canada, but I'm going to guess that American ones can be more sensitive to stuff happening in America than Canadian ones).
And the fourth definitely isn't the cause, because nobody cut their police budgets that significantly that quickly.
"Blue flu" (that is the word, right?) has been way exaggerated. I don't think very much of the pullback was "to show everybody how much they needed them" (as the second bullet puts it), rather than just garden-variety demoralization. So it seems to me the second cause was way less powerful than the first and third. However, the same media that ignore the protests as a cause of the violence play up "blue flu" as a cause instead, since it lets them blame police, which is politically convenient.
With that said, I think you're moving the goalposts by saying you'll only accept a strike as evidence. Even without an Atlanta-style mass calling out, angry officers can decide to police less, thinking it will lead to medium-term political support once the consequences of depolicing are clear. Again, I don't think this was the biggest cause of police pullback - that's a narrative pushed for political reasons, rather than factual reasons. But I do believe there was *some* amount of it, even if it didn't take the form of a coordinated strike, specifically.
Let's just back up a moment, please. I'm far from naturally pro-cop, but I read Graham's linked piece and the explanations he gives there appear to be sufficient to cause the changes we see in the statistics. I'm sure there are other factors as well, but do please look at those.
In Minnesota my read (without much actual evidence other than being a bit tied into local government and also knowing a few officers), was less a strike, and more a "whatever you do, no citizens must be shot despite the rampant increase in disorder" as an instruction.
Now that instruction isn't specifically "police less", but you would have to be an idiot to not take that as your action when those are the orders and armed gangs with ACAB flags are openly running around the place.
If you tell cops "I don't care what you do, but make sure no black person dies", cops are just going to change the situations they get involved with, because in the real actual world policing (particularly in a place with so many guns), occasionally involves people dying.
Lol yes they fucking did make some serious budget cuts in a few cities, Minneapolis being one.
I think you are the person I should ask the question I was intending to ask Scott to address. (I've subscribed and skimmed the above article and will get back to your stuff more fully later).
My point is that even if we grant the idea that the televised protests about police violence cause increase murder, how do we then measure, much less draw conclusions about, the role of police pullback?
If there was a police pullback then it seems like we should see fewer arrests / officer after the protests than before.
Practically? You probably can't. Bar what None of the Above suggests.
Though, of course, if officers were being overly heavy-handed before the protests, them policing correctly will look like a pullback, because it'll be one.
Sadly, I genuinely think a lot of this stuff is more art than science.
Is there much effect from those communities becoming more hostile to police and hence harder to police? I can imagine a situation where otherwise law-abiding community members harass police (legally), so that police have to pay attention to them and get less done because of that. Otherwise, community members may be more reticent towards police, so that investigations are harder, or they might even act legally but suspiciously as a form of protest, so that police have to waste effort on them. But I can also imagine the total time cost of those options being small compared to the other factors.
I don’t think there’s much evidence for 4, there was an article somewhere that showed that police budgets didn’t move much. Policy change doesn’t happen that quickly. Other three seem very plausible.
I read #4, including "political capital" to imply top-down political pressure for less policing. This is opposed to #1-3 where the motivation is bottom-up from the police themselves rather than their supervisory political authorities.
Recently I had a few conversations on ACX about gun policy, and a couple of conservatives were arguing that homicide rates in general, and specifically gun crime, was not particularly high, or at least not high enough to be worried about. Do you think this might be an issue where politically-engaged people, maybe of multiple persuasions, may be experiencing cognitive dissonance?
It's not inconsistent to simultaneously think that the homicide rate is low and the homicide rate has gone up.
It's also not inconsistent to think that the homicide rate is on the average low enough not to worry about, but it's high enough to worry about if you're in a subgroup, such as living in a black inner city. I doubt that many of those conservatives live in such a place, after all.
I think it would be said in better faith if conservatives made it clear that: “where I live” homicide rates are low therefore my gun usage should not be restricted. Rather than saying broadly: homicide rates are low no changes are needed.
The second statement would preclude the creation of city-state-like laws that control arms in the mentioned areas. See Scott’s recent ZEDE post.
Thank you for putting this this way--I don't know that I've ever seen or heard anyone use this construction.
Most people simply conflate empirical evidence ("I can't see much if any gun crime" or "there were five murders where the murderer used a gun on the news last night") with statistical evidence (gun crime has historically declined quite a lot since the 1960s! gun sales are way up!) and not noticed that the reason these statements don't always align is the lack of context in the empirical evidence--both of those sample empirical statements are missing the word "locally," and both statistics don't mention that those are true if you look at the ENTIRE United States.
This makes it really hard to communicate, especially when one half of a conversation wants to use empirical evidence and the other statistical.
I don't know that most people would notice this linguistic quirk without some explicit mention of it.
There may also be a concept of thresholds; gun violence overall is low, is rising, and is more of a problem BUT has no reached a place where (whatever action or policy or law you are proposing or supporting) is justified.
For example - "gun violence is bad, gun violence is increasing, but the violence has not reached a point where deploying the military, declaring the constitution is no longer applicable, and putting machine gun guards on every street corner in America is justified."
I exaggerate that example, but I suspect some pro-gun folks see any infringement as equivalent to what I just wrote, so the threshold argument still applies. I can agree a thing is terrible and is a problem as completely disagree that <action A> is appropriate in any way.
I did not see your conversations but I do also know that conservatives argue that the gun policies often proposed affects a particular type of gun crime that is not high enough (i.e., school or mass shootings) to justify these policies.
This is also often used to signal that the only way you could really lower total gun deaths would be to ban something like handguns (I think this is responsible for 60+% of gun homicides) which would violate the 2nd amendment. Therefore, illustrating that in the end "liberal" or Democrat gun policies would ultimately have to go for their 2nd amendment rights to have any real impact on gun homicides.
Conservatives more forcefully point out that, whatever event any gun law is SUPPOSED to prevent, criminals will ignore the law.
Which seems disingenuous because all school shootings were legally acquired guns IIRC. If such restrictions force these killers to go to the black market, it seems implausible to say all of them will easily be able to do so, which means we can save plenty of lives at the cost of only a minor inconvenience for legal gun owners.
If a simple design or installation rule that incurs little to no inconvenience could prevent all or most vending machines from falling on customers, you're suggesting that we should not implement said rule because the outcome would be statistically insignificant? That seems pretty ridiculous.
Correct. There’s a few loopholes or marginal law adjustments that could shave off a bit of gun crime. But liberals vastly overestimate how much of the gun crime could be solved without blatant infringements on 2nd amendment.
Liberals also misunderstand the true causes of most gun crime, which is black and (to a lesser extent) Latino gun irresponsibility. The NRA types libs love to demonize have extremely low gun crime and a culture of gun responsibility and safety. This causes libs to profoundly misunderstand how to tackle the issue. Blacks get let off on illegal gun possession all the time cuz that would lead to more black incarceration. And this is in the most hysterical lib cities where calls for gun laws to tighten are highest. Bottom line: the liberal mind is way to infected with nonsense pseudo-reality to discern good policy from terrible.
One issue here is that legally owned guns are primarily owned by whites, and not in cities. See the Pew poll from 2017 https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-demographics-of-gun-ownership/
Now, obviously if you own a gun illegally you are not going to tell the nice person from Pew who called you up about it, so there is probably more gun ownership in cities (where it is hard to own a gun legally) by everyone than reported, particularly minorities. Still, only 24% of black people reporting owning a gun, and 19% of city dwellers over all, combined with almost all the murders happening in cities between black people, suggest that legal gun ownership is not the issue.
In other words, murder rates are highest where gun policy is most restrictive and the fewest people own guns and among the people who report owning guns at a comparatively low rate. Gun control policy isn't going to fix that; one needs to fix the dysfunctions within the cities that cause the violence.
Are cities still higher murder rate than rural areas? I haven’t been able to find data less than 20 years old.
Note the first graph in Scott's post. Cities over 250,000 have a massively higher murder rate than the nation as a whole. I don't know where the break even point is where cities of a certain size start looking like suburban or rural areas, but at least the top 90 cities (how many US cities have >=250k) have a much higher rate.
Ah good, thanks. It looks like in recent years, the rate is double the national average, before the 1960s it was less than double, but during the late 20th century homicide surge it was more than double.
I don't know how that's affected by the increasing fraction of the country that lives in cities of 250,000 and above.
The fraction of people in cities over 250,000 shouldn't affect it as it is a rate, so an increasing number of people in cities just means murders in rural areas drive up those rates more; the higher fraction of the nation that lives in 250k+ cities, the more the national rate will approach the city rate.
What might be more misleading is how cities are divided up. The coast of CA is effectively one big city, likewise the DC or Philly metro area, but there are many smaller divisions for clerical purposes, many with <250k people. Should those little cities be rolled into one larger metro area? The boundaries of cities always make statistical questions about them awkward.
Lol how is this a question? Have you been living under a fucking rock for the last 30 years of rap music? They’ve been telling it to your face what’s “normal” gun culture in urban black areas.
Yes, urban murder rates are far higher than rural.
Yes, but there has been a fair amount of convergence in recent years, particularly in the black community. The homicide rate in 2020 in these more peripheral areas is pretty close to where large metros were before 2014. Quite the change IMO!
(All groups)
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D297F380
(Blacks)
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D297F381
(Whites)
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D297F384
(Latinos)
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D297F385
The huge gap in homicide rates is racial, so it overwhelms everything else. Blacks are known murder offenders at about 8 times the per capita rate of the nonblack rest of the U.S. population.
You can look up homicide victimizations by race by population of the town in the CDC's WONDER database. Urban whites don't get murdered very much.
During the peak of the Law & Order franchise on TV, somebody calculated that there were more white murderers each year in NYC in fictional Law & Order shows than in real life.
Yes, this ratio has increased to 9.6 in 2020 for both sexes in age-adjusted terms (more for males, less for females).
https://twitter.com/RCAFDM/status/1536697372994068484
I also agree these B-W ratios have historically been substantially larger in large cities than small towns and rural areas. The point I'm making here is that while violence increased pretty much everywhere (especially for blacks), it's been increasing at a faster rate in more peripheral areas, i.e., places outside large cities and their surrounding suburbs, since around 2014. Large cities are still worse, overall and for blacks, but there's clearly been significant convergence in homicide rates so that homicide is significantly less concentrated in large cities than it was earlier. This seems an important trend that few (none?) have commented on.
https://twitter.com/RCAFDM/status/1528072704133320706
I suspect gentrification of a large fraction of many large cities has been a substantial driver of this trend. That is, blacks and other less prosperous groups have been migrating towards lower cost housing in peripheral areas (small towns, rural areas), sometimes quite distant from the large cities they were raised in, so that their populations are becoming gradually less urban, and so that they are becoming an increasingly large percentage of these populations. Besides the other implications of this migration ceteris paribus, these groups are likely negatively selected on income, education, family structure, and, for the purposes of violent crime in the here and now, nativity.
The higher density of those more susceptible to violence in these peripheral regions on both margins can likely partially explain the increasing homicide rates in the periphery (even when restricted to just blacks!). The racial reckoning has likely only amplified these trends. Indeed, it’s possible the challenges resulting from this migration trend amplified the racial reckoning itself by stirring up resentment and creating more incidents that lead to outrage (I suspect the police departments and parties in many of these receiving areas are less accustomed to dealing with trouble and less staffed for it).
The thing about lying about if you have a gun is, we know how to design surveys so that people can answer truthfully without having to potentially confess to a crime. The trick is to have the respondent flip a coin: if it comes up heads, then answer truthfully, but if it comes up tails, just say "yes".
Let G be the event "posseses a gun", H is the coin flip coming up heads, and Y is a "yes" response. Then, P(Y) = P(Y|GH)P(GH) + P(Y|G~H)P(G~H) + P(Y|~GH)P(~GH) + P(Y|~G~H)P(~G~H) by the law of total probability. Owning a gun won't affect a coin flip [citation needed], so we can assume G and H are independent, giving us:
P(Y) = P(Y|GH)P(G)P(H) + P(Y|G~H)P(G)P(~H) + P(Y|~GH)P(~G)P(H) + P(Y|~G~H)P(~G)P(~H).
Now, by the design of the survey, P(Y|~H) = 1, and assuming they all use unbiased coins, P(H) = P(~H) = 1/2. This reduces our equation to:
P(Y) = P(Y|GH)P(G)(1/2) + (1)P(G)(1/2) + P(Y|~GH)P(~G)(1/2) + (1)P(~G)(1/2).
Okay looking good! So bringing in an axiom of probability, P(G) + P(~G) = 1, and even though we know Lizardman's constant is a thing, for simplicity we'll assume P(Y|~GH) = 0. So simplifying a bit, we now have:
P(Y) = P(Y|GH)P(G)(1/2) + 1/2.
Here's where we bring in a lesser known extension of Bayes' Rule. Specifically, how to use it on compound conditional probabilities:
P(A|BC) = P(B|AC)P(A|C)/P(B|C). This let's us convert our equation into:
P(Y) = (1/2)P(G|YH)P(Y|H)P(G)/P(G|H) + 1/2.
Using our assumption of independence, P(G|H) = P(G). Furthermore, by the design of the survey and the previous statement, P(Y|H) = P(G) and P(G|YH) =1! This allows us to reduce our equation down to:
P(Y) = (1/2)P(G) + 1/2 !
From here, we can easily solve for the proportion of people who own a gun:
P(G) = 2*P(Y) - 1. In other words, with our given survey design, we need only count the number of "yes" responses, double the count, divide that result by the total number of responses, and then subtract 1, in order to get a good estimate for the actual proportion of our sample that possesses a gun! And the beauty of it is that the survey design also makes gun ownership completely anonymous since any individual "yes" respondent can just claim their coin landed on tails!
The point is we have ways of ensuring the trustworthiness of our surveys when it comes to questions about potentially incriminating topics. Assuming "shadow ownership" just lets you ignore the facts.
Also, without actual base rates relative to population sizes, saying "almost all murders" is meaningless.
Someday we might advance to that, but today we still struggle to get survey writers to even word the question properly. The methodology you describe is far and away not at all how surveys are done. I was actually unsure if you were performing elaborate satire until the end there.
Plus I don't know if you could get the respondents to understand and trust the coin flip methodology correctly. You are still going to have social desirability bias and just straight up "don't ever admit to doing illegal things" bias.
Most clear thinking people already knew that the murder rates are driven by the minority community.
I was writing about this a year ago! https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/the-minneapolis-effect
Scott amended his statement to include more rightward voices, but it seems to me that this entire post is directed at folks who aren't likely to click a link to the washington examiner. Despite the obvious quality of your writing, there's no way you can reach people in a silo built specifically to exclude you. Scott can, and it's worth him doing the work himself and showing it in public.
Nah, that was just the pretext. It's Democrat leadership practicing lawlessness as an example to the people.
You make a good case, but I am left with the nagging feeling that you are affected by retrospective bias. It's not like in mid-March people said, "Pandemic! Argh! Kill! Kill!" At the time we all kind of thought we were talking about two weeks to flatten the curve. As weeks turned into months with no end in sight, lots more marginal behavior started, including the BLM riots themselves.
At least, I'd *like* to believe the BLM riots and both the overreaction and the underreaction to them were all ultimately caused by cabin fever, despair, and hopelessness, mixed with a certain amount of opportunism from some quarters.
I'm arguing from a sociohistorical point of view. I'm not going to say that evildoers get a pass because they were puppeted by the pandemic.
I don't think things were so different from the Ferguson and Baltimore events five years earlier that they need a separate explanation. The protests were bigger and more nationwide, but the Floyd killing had been caught on pretty graphic video, plus the US was five years further into the wokeness era. I won't deny that pandemic cabin fever might have been a contributor, but I'm not sure it was more of a contributor than those other factors.
I'm not clear if your causal theory is that the protests/outrage provide an environment more conducive to murder, or the impact of reduced policing?
The second one. Probably there were some murders during the protests themselves (eg Kyle Rittenhouse), but that wouldn't explain why the rates stay elevated so long.
Exactly. KR killed thugs but didn't murder them.
This comment is such an anti-contribution. You've brought nothing on the topic of was-it-murder save for a naked agreement, but you *have* added an irrelevant attack on the people he killed by labelling them thugs. It's an injection of no substance and all spin, and it does nothing but lower the quality of discourse.
And to be clear, I am also of the belief that KR acted in self-defense. I just think your comment really sucks.
Come on folks. The Rittenhouse incident on its own wouldn't create a statistically noticeable blip at all.
What Scott's obviously gesturing at by shorthand is the idea that the breakdown of civil order created by the protests themselves could have conceivably created a very short-term spike in Rittenhouse-type situations where the very atmosphere of disintegration led to violence of some kind.
But that wouldn't explain a sustained spike that persisted beyond the point where people like Rittenhouse felt like they needed to step into the breach. AFAICT, that's all Scott was saying.
Right. There clearly was a spike of vandalism, robbery, arson, and assault during several days of riots, but after the riot was over, the murder rate seems to have remained a lot higher.
This feels obtuse to me; "murder" is both a legal term with a particular meaning and a common-use term with a much looser one. Referring to homicide that would not legally be murder as "murder" is common as dirt, and to me it seems pretty clear that whether or not these instances of homicide were legally murder is not pertinent to what Scott is conveying, so this is clearly the latter usage.
This may be because I am not a native english speaker, but I discover now that murder and homicide are different things
A lot of native speakers don't know the difference, either. This is because the overwhelming majority of homicide cases are murder.
Accidental killings by a human, justified killings, and suicide are all homicide.
Kyle Rittenhouse would have been murdered had things gone differently.
If you believe that Rittenhouse acted in legitimate self defense, then you believe he was in very real danger of being murdered, which makes his situation an example of the kind of thing that if common would lead to an increase in the murder rate.
He might just be pointing out he would be covered in arrest statistics
Are you calling KR a murderer?
Frankly I would be shocked if Scott doesn't mean "homicide" here and inadvertently said "murder".
I'm someone who has had a very low estimation of the MSM for most of my life, but I still found myself genuinely surprised by how unashamedly mendacious the MSM's reporting around Rittenhouse was. To me, it really felt like a new low for them. So it's easy for me to see how people who maintained a low level of engagement with the case and who are *somewhat* skeptical of the MSM were still insufficiently skeptical.
Kyle Rittenhouse's case doesn't count as murder, or as much of anything criminal at all. Slip of tongue, or hadn't looked into the matter?
Rosenbaum definitely engaged in criminal acts.
Criminals can be murdered, and murderers can be murdered. So, irrelevant.
The Rittenhouse case furthermore involved no blacks.
True, and yet many, many people on the Left believed that he had killed two black people. And were actually shocked to find out that was not true, and that they, and everybody in their ingroup, were *certain* of basic facts that were completely wrong.
One of my blackpill moments was reading the New York Times comment section for an article on the Rittenhouse situation. Top to bottom these NYT reader fools were completely brainwashed about it. Made me realize there is no communicating with these idiots.
Not just that, Rosenbaum's last words were "shoot me n*gga".
I am also curious as to whether you are calling KR a murderer.
Right. The Establishment demanded that cops hassle blacks less, so cops hassled blacks less.
Therefore, more characters (often with warrants out for their arrest) felt comfortable going out carrying their illegal handguns in their cars or waistbands, so more shootings ensued when they got angry at somebody.
The same thing happened in the 1960s and in the first Black Lives Matter era after Ferguson. It shouldn't have been a surprise when it happened a third time.
What prevented it from happening before the 1960s?
Modern racial progressivism didn't have much influence before the 1960s?
Yeah black people don't like to be hassled by cops (of course), and don't like to be shot (of course). Neither does anyone else. There are trade offs in life.
It would be interesting to compare this with an update on the discussion you had last year on suicide and overdose rates.
One major difference is that it happened in Minneapolis. Winters are bad here, and *every* May there’s a sort of collective city-wide release of pent up energy and rush back to large social events, which is usually channeled into festivals, concerts, patios, etc. Not to downplay George Floyd’s horrific murder, but I strongly suspect that Minneapolitans would riot any year where they’re told not to leave their house when the weather gets nice. Note how things didn’t flare up again (much) after Daunte Wright.
For what it’s worth, there are two other reasons the city is probably relevant here:
1. An existing, strong, well organized Black Liberation and anti-policing movement (see: Black Visions Collective, Reclaim the Block, MPD150).
2. The MPD is particularly not well liked. 80% of officers do not live in the city they police, they have a long history of being an outlier in excessive force and brutality, and at the time their self-elected union president was openly a white nationalist. A large number of residents here (of all races) see them as an occupying force, not as allies for community safety.
The point here is that I wouldn’t expect to see a pandemic-related uptick in murders until mid-may (as Scott pointed out, never a lot of winter murders in MN), and since the MPD was already seen as an organization that had contempt for the city it policed, the pull-back in policing was mostly interpreted as a “well, see how you like your city without us” statement.
Which mostly worked, by the way. (Anti-policing mostly lost in the 2021 city elections.) But while I agree that there is a correlation between police pull-back and elevated murder rates, the pandemic, at least in MPLS, seems like SUCH a confounder that I think it’s far from certain to infer causation.
(Edited to add last two paragraphs.)
That's not in contradiction with them being mostly caused by the BLM riots. Causes are not zero sum. If A causes B causes C, then I think it's fine to say both that A is the main cause of C and that B is the main cause of C.
Personally I think that the link is from {cabin fever/despair/hopelessness/whatever} => {increased protest severity}, which means the protests can still be the proximal cause of the homicide spike
1. This was seen nowhere else in the world
2. General homicide increase was 6 times higher than domestic homicide increase
3. This cannot explain the original Ferguson effect
4. Crime fell during the 2008 great recession
1. what's "this"?
2. what do you mean by "general" and "domestic" homicide? what does that have to do with my comment?
3. I'm not sure what you mean. I'm saying that the BLM protests were bigger and more severe, which lead to increased effects. Unless you are claiming that the effects of Ferguson were smaller than the effects of the 2020 protests I don't really understand what you're saying
4. ...okay? what?
Scott's data on other countries are evidence that Covid was not the cause, since they had Covid too.
I’m thinking of the question, “if Covid hadn’t happened, would any of the rest of it?” I think the answer is no, but other countries’ stories don’t resolve that one way or the other.
>As weeks turned into months with no end in sight, lots more marginal behavior started, including the BLM riots themselves.
This theory sounds plausible, but if this was the mechanism behind the murder spike, you would expect to observe similar effects in other countries whose lockdowns dragged on and on after an initial two-week implementation. As Scott points out, the US's murder spike is a statistical outlier: there was no murder spike observed in any other country at the same time, even though many of those countries also went through long lockdowns which were repeatedly extended past their original sunset date.
The US had the special circumstances of
-- A large internal demographic group with already high levels of violence,
-- Whose communities' already low employment and economic activity were crushed and unlikely to recover/survive
-- A very clear and video-simple incident to incite national protests right when NOBODY HAD ANYTHING ELSE TO DO
But most important: Clear statements by politicians all over the country (mostly local City mayors/boards) that
-- violent protests were understandable and would not be stopped.
-- the special victim status of these groups meant that even emergency laws that shut down the country didn't apply to them, and
-- Since the politicians declared that the local police could not be trusted, law enforcement was essentially suspended in cities with large black populations.
This cannot possibly explain the original ferguson effect in ferguson
>cabin fever
1. This was seen nowhere else in the world
2. General homicide increase was 6 times higher than domestic homicide increase
3. This cannot explain the original Ferguson effect
4. Crime fell during the 2008 great recession
I’m confused. Doesn’t
1. The NYC shootings graph show that shootings were steadily going up during the month of May? I see the spike you mention in the caption but it seems to have actually started in mid-May rather than May 25.
2. The Minneapolis aggravated assaults graph counter your thesis? Assaults were rapidly increasing even before the protests started; they just continued their upward trend afterwards before coming down to current levels.
Re: New York, if you look at previous years, you'll see there was always a small increase in May, probably due to warming weather. I think the increase was on par with previous years until the protests started in late May.
Re: Minneapolis, I agree this is confusing. It could be something similar to NY but moreso (the pre-protests spike doesn't seem much larger than other random spikes like March 2020 or August 2015-2019), or it could be that the "start of protests" line is too late (maybe because there were smaller protests before the main protests started? it looks a bit late to be May 26). Otherwise I'm not sure why aggravated assaults would start going up in mid-May of all times.
If the temperature effect is real, then you may want to consider the average temperatures in April and May in Minneapolis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis#Climate
It's not a temperature effect, it is a seasonal effect. If you look at annual homicides in Chicago, which are public record, there's a clearly strong seasonal effect.
Presumably C_B was referring to the fact that spring comes later in Minneapolis than much of the US, including Chicago, because it's colder in April/May.
Couldn't the influence of the pandemic be muted in the winter months when there are fewer murders and only appreciable when the hot weather makes people start muttering kill kill kill? A pandemic psychological pressure x climate interaction is consistent with these observations. It was, incidentally, unseasonably hot in Minneapolis that week and I've always attributed the protests themselves in no small part to the pandemic and the miserable weather.
The homicide increase since Floyd has carried on in the winter months since then.
Lockdowns ended some time ago, too, and yet murder rates remain elevated.
Related question: The Chicago arrests graph doesn't show arrests going down until a little after the protests started, whereas the murder graphs generally show a spike immediately after (or even before, but we can assume that's an artifact of weekly rolling averages or whatever). How does that square if declining arrests are the cause of the murders?
Even more so than the aforementioned two charts, the Chicago aggravated assault graph is evidence against the thesis that it's simply about the protests. The rate didn't rise at all after the protests - it *stopped* its previous rise, and then fell after a few weeks!
I don't think you can handwave this data point away so easily. Maybe there was something different about Chicago's policing response or about their reporting, but if so it deserves a discussion.
Also since this is in the context of San Fransicko, the Intercept asserts there wasn't a BLM Protest effect here, and I'm curious to see whether that was the case or not. (Also because that *would* perhaps shed light on the effect of Chesa - maybe SF's underpolicing just began in January and stayed on course after the protests.)
I want to know how those rolling averages are calculated - if they're centered rather than trailing averages, it can make the graph look like effects start gradually one (window radius) before the cause. If they are proper training averages, though, then yes, that's pretty weird and is evidence against the conclusion.
Great point!
Scott pointed this same thing out in another recent post and now that you've reminded me of it, it's definitely something I think is worth looking out for when interpreting these kinds of graphs.
It’s not that complicated dude. There’s always a seasonal uptick in summer. Does not explain the persistent 30% higher new plateau of crime and homicide that has persisted ever since.
Didn't realize that was the time of the regularly scheduled uptick, that explains it too. Thanks! Does make it harder to pin the start time of whatever the effect is to a specific time, if it starts close to a big natural move.
No it doesn’t make it hard. Compare to other years. The uptick in may in other years is predictably uniform. The uptick in may 2020 goes up way further. This isn’t difficult. Don’t be dense.
Can you be a little bit less insulting, thanks.
Is the spike timed according to the calendar, or the weather, or the school schedule? Is it always the same size and duration? These questions make it harder to judge than if the situation was "it's always flat except for this one effect." Not impossible. I agree there is an effect. I'm just *less* certain we have the exact timing and cause than if the baseline was flat and we got a jump.
Overall I don't believe "people just took a little bit to start murdering because of COVID", but "people started murdering because of COVID gradually around the same time as the usual May spike, and the riots were a coincidence" is *more* plausible than "people started murdering because of COVID exactly on the day of the riots, and the riots were a coincidence"
Go look at the data. Since late May 2020, the homicide and crime rates have followed the shape of seasonal fluctuations of previous years, but at appx 30% higher, at any given time during the year of what the typical rate would have been at that seasonal time in previous years. It has virtually nothing to do with Covid and everything to do with black crime and the lid that was previously being kept on it by policing, which was lifted partially due to BLM phony rhetoric.
I have never stated disagreement with you on that point
This is common knowledge in the Twin Cities.
I don’t consume a lot of right wing News but I do read the local newspaper. Mpls police were taking early retirement, going on disability or simply quitting in large numbers. Everyone in this area knows that the TC police are short staffed and trying to actively recruit. Those still on duty do feel unloved. It’s not just known by right wing media consumers but by everyone paying attention. Those people also know that the spike in murders is largely black on black violence.
It’s more complicated than what you are presenting here though. The scale of the riots was probably increased by the COVID lockdown. A lot of the young people that participated were available because things were locked down. The young were told they ran a less serious risk if they contracted Covid and they made up the majority of the civil unrest.
Then there was the timing of George Floyd’s death, right around Memorial Day. Weather is generally good at that time of year. If the death had occurred in February the reaction would have been less severe.
For a conspiracy theory view: Trump supported both the Minneapolis city newspaper and also one in Seattle that were losing money. What if it was time to have a protest because people wanted a reason to party? And everyone needed black people to stand up for themselves and say, hire me. Increase online shopping by getting rid of local stores, releasing owners from failing businesses and getting insurance money. I notice a lack of movie stars and more normal black people in advertising and in movies. Minneapolis was the perfect place to shed light on this issue because it's doesn't have a reputation for black criminals. If this had happened in the south, we might attribute it to a "southern" problem.
Older people are leaving their jobs, replaced by young people willing to use technology. I wonder how many policemen retired from lack of respect. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming in fast.
It’s not crazy to think that powerful people use the masses to advance their agenda. Once you accept that, it’s easy to fall into scapegoat mode. Those damn libs! Those idiot right wingers! If you want to know what’s really going on have to get past that. It’s not easy for anyone - I’d posit as we are often unaware of the bedrock assumptions that influence our perceptions.
Ditto for Baltimore.
After the BLM protests, Baltimore residents suddenly found that their city had become the murder capital of the world, and I never really heard anyone there question the connection.
The last ~750,000 residents of St. Louis know that the Lou is the most violent place in the US now. It just doen't get counted because its population has dropped down around #35-40 largest metropolitan areas.
Why does an observation have to be right wing? Maybe all those mealy mouthed “it’s complicated” articles prove that the so called mainstream is in fact afraid to deal in reality. So much of reality seems to increasingly be relegated, by our self-appointed explainers, to this fantasy right-wing land. Meanwhile those supposedly in the mainstream know don’t seem to understand the depth of the groupthink they’re swimming in.
Agreed, especially given the wide range of interpretations for the knock-on effects of the protests. It'd be perfectly easy for a liberal to recognize the stats and attribute it to Scott's second suggestion, that cops just got hurt feelings and didn't like being protested so they counter-protested by not doing their jobs.
I personally protested in 2020 with accountability and racial targeting in mind, knowing full well that to some extent policing does reduce crime. I was appalled at how many police showed up at the peaceful protests instead of doing their normal jobs, and figured crime might increase in the neighborhoods they were being called away from as a result. The idea going around then was that the police were purposely escalating, in terms of tactics and numbers, in order to provoke riots and make the protests look violent. No comment on whether that's true or makes any sense, just saying there are plenty of ways to spin the May crime spike instead of just pretending the numbers don't exist.
It was not my interpretation that jake was, himself, claiming this. More so saying that left-oriented news could recognize ground reality (post BLM murders spiking) but still keep their politicized position by unfalsifiably attributing it to bad cops rather than the predictable consequence of 'reform' demands.
What is done instead - sticking their heads firming in the sand - just makes them appear foolish.
Bob Kroll, the long standing head of the police union in the twin cities, said as much. He recently retired, but was a magnet for controvery and egging the local cops on to unprofesional and illegal conduct (e.g., coordinating bounties for particularly disfavored activities which is illegal in his jurisdiction, approriating police funds (not union funds) to extend Killology training after the mayor issued an executive order to end that training, the list goes on).
Remember, a work slowdown is just as much of a labor action as a strike.
Okay, and defund the police *NECESSARILY* wanted less policing, and they got it. You cannot complain about the consequences of something that you were advocating for.
> cops just got hurt feelings and didn't like being protested so they counter-protested by not doing their jobs
Even supposing this was exactly what happened, so what?
Suppose Darrell Issa or somebody organizes the Defund the Fruit Pickers protest. The whole thing is massive groups of people marching to complain about fruit pickers' rampant immigration violations, plus statistically trivial incidents of individual fruit pickers who turn out to be actually guilty of heinous crimes.
As a result, all the fruit pickers in California say, fuck this noise. I guess they don't want us to work anymore, fine. Let's see them put there mouth where their money is -- how are they gonna like it when the price of fruit triples?
Would you regard that reaction as damning of the fruit pickers? And if not, why so with regard to the cops?
Fruit pickers aren't entrusted and given special deference in their use of violence and don't have specific carveouts in their ability to be held accountable.
So slightly different.
It's the spiderman argument. Police have greater power so they have greater responsibility.
I'm not sure I quite understand.
People go into the streets carrying signs saying, "Stop what you're doing. Just don't do it. Let's defund you to make sure you can't even try to do what you're nominally supposed to."
Maybe the thing you were doing is trivial and silly. Maybe it was profound and serious. What difference does that make?
We have structured society around the fiction that police are doing a particuarly deadly job and doing it well enough to enjoy specific legal immunities and generalized social deference (including being told what good boys and girls they are on a regular basis). They, like lawyers, soldiers, and doctors are supposed to be mature enough to operate under heady, complex philosophical frameworks like "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones But Words Will Never Hurt Me".
Turns out, we've inadvertantly set up a system that attracts people who want to have legal immunity for kicking low-class folks in the teeth, and people who can't function like an adult if they don't get repeated, universal fawning.
If you're a lawyer, clients come to you asking to deal with whatever. They may have very unrealistic expectations of what you'll be able to do, and yell at you a lot for failing to do it. This indeed comes with the territory and you need to be able to stand there and take it. But if they tell you to get lost because they don't want to litigate the issue anymore, then you can 100% get lost and stop working for them.
If you're a cop, it's often the case that none of the people you're interacting with has specifically asked you to intervene in their affairs, and often they're positively aiming to thwart your involvement. The equivalent of the client's asking you to work for them is a general background sense that the community as a whole wants you to prevent/solve crimes. If as a cop you get the sense that a particular community is telling you to get lost, we don't want this service from you anymore, why is it irrational to take them at their word?
If you expect cops to conduct their affairs with the same level of professionalism as doctors and lawyers you are going to need a totally different compensation structure and training structure where you replace most of the current cops with people who are from the upper echelons of their cohort instead of middle echelons.
Cops absolutely do have some special permissions and responsibilities, but we need to accept and understand a lot of slop in how that gets executed given how we staff that role.
Only take people from the top 20% of their classes to be cops and you would certainly get better policing. It would also cost twice as much or more.
There are deadlier jobs than policing, but it's not a myth that it's a dangerous job. Take a look at data from BLS: https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_rates_2020hb.xlsx
This shows a fatal injury rate of 13.4 per 100,000. National average is 3.4. There are deadlier occupations, logging tops the list at 132.1.
But probably none of those logging deaths are from homicide, and can't be prevented by fighting off an attacker.
Also keep in mind that fatal shootings are a subset of all shootings. If channels like Active Self Protection are even somewhat representative, then a small amount of gunfights with police end with police fatalities. Even with the little training police typically get, they're still far better in gunfights than the people that try to kill them.
I can't find national stats that include non-fatal shootings. GBI maintains a database of all officer involved shootings, fatal or not, here's 2021: https://gbi.georgia.gov/news/2022-05-20/2021-officer-involved-shootings
100 incidents total.
I found a database of officer deaths here: https://www.odmp.org/search?state=Georgia&from=2021&to=2021&filter=nok9&o= . It shows 7 homicides: 5 shootings, 1 stabbing, 1 vehicular assault.
so you disagree with the claim that police not doing their job lead to the homicide spike?
Because if your response to having hurt feelings is not doing your job, you're a fucking child not to be trusted with a firearm and a badge?
If by "having hurt feelings" you mean "dozens of police being killed due to Democrat rhetoric" then it seems to be a pretty reasonable response.
Also, wasn't the whole point of the rioting to stop the police from doing their jobs? "Don't do your jobs, you pigs! You should be abolished!" .... "but actually you should keep doing your job so this doesn't become Mad Max, I just want to whine and complain and riot for a while." You seem more like the child here, biting the hand that feeds you and then coming back and begging for daddy to come back and save you.
Right. It seems to me the protestors' whole theory was, let's create an extremity of hurt feelings -- perhaps "crushing shame" would be closer to it -- as our desired vector for producing less doing of policemen's jobs.
They can't now be heard to complain if it turns out their theory worked.
I admittedly have never understood the mindset of the protestor, but I am pretty sure their goal was not "let's make the police feel bad." Among other things, if killing people doesn't make the police feel bad, you being demonstrably mad about it certainly won't.
Sigh. 19 people total appear to have been killed during BLM protests. You're telling me all of them were police? And even then that wouldn't be dozens.
The point of rioting and protests generally seems to be letting everyone get their feelings out. I don't think much of that, personally. That said, I think the protests were far more on the "stop killing people" side of things than on the "stop policing" side of things.
I in fact don't live in the US, and work in the criminal justice system. I deal with police far more regularly than you do.
There is an overwhelming tone amongst many police officers of sulking that people don't tell them how wonderful they are for saving society from the barbarians. Leaving aside the questionableness of whether they do save society from the barbarians, wanting people to worship you for doing your job is...not the sign of someone mentally well. You see it a lot with nurses, too, oddly. Not sure why.
Great – who _else_ is going to do the job then?
I'm pretty sure the evidence is, basically, no one wants to do it.
I am 100% prepared to believe that no one sane would want to do policing as it is currently practiced in society. It's lots of getting second guessed outdoors in bad weather with frustrating people and often doesn't pay that well.
Yup!
The benefits are (or were or can be) very good tho.
Incentives matter, even when we wish they didn't.
Remember Scott's writeup long ago where he pointed out that after Medicare stopped paying hospitals for treating old people who were injured falling out of bed, hospitals quickly started taking precautions to stop old people from falling out of bed? Doctors and hospitals are also given a high-status place in our society, entrusted with vital things, and yet, incentives mattered for them. Similarly, consider defensive medicine--doctors absolutely do change their behavior to avoid lawsuits, even when it harms their patients.
This is what we should expect everywhere--if the incentives facing you are that you can either do a good job and get screwed over, or a lousy job and get rewarded, most people are going to do a lousy job. The solution to this is rarely to demand that everyone stop responding to incentives and instead be a selfless martyr. Instead, it's to change the damned incentives.
There is a difference between following incentives and being petulant because your feelings have been hurt. The analogy here seems much closer to the doctors deciding to no longer admit old people, rather than to stopping them from falling out of bed. While making public statements about how people need to appreciate all they do for elder care.
I would concur that changing the incentives would help. At the same time, I think a core problem is that a lot of police officers are, bluntly, bad people. Because jobs where you get to exercise power attract people who want to do that. There is a serious problem in modern policing, where it IS viewed as "thin blue line against the barbarians" and "enforcement of the rules of society against those who would tear it down" and I don't think it's a healthy attitude.
BUT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BLM WANTED
They wanted less police in black neighborhoods, they got it, and the result was thousands of black people dying.
You cannot want to defund the police and then cry that less police leads to mroe crime.
I mean, you can if only because the police have not been defunded. They are, instead, still getting paid.
I am 100% fine if officers want to quit and explain why they did so. I am not fine if officers want to keep drawing a salary but not do their jobs because their feelings are hurt.
>I personally protested in 2020 with accountability and racial targeting in mind,
There's little evidence of racial targetting once you control for crime rates, and no evidence of disproportionately being victims of police force. Blacks make up a smaller % of people killed by police than people who kill police (a good proxy for violence against police generally and resistance to arrest).
>It'd be perfectly easy for a liberal to recognize the stats and attribute it to Scott's second suggestion
No, it contradicts a central liberal narrative - police don't reduce crime. Even if its the police throwing a tantrum, their absence shouldn't be reducing crime.
>I was appalled at how many police showed up at the peaceful protests instead of doing their normal jobs
Are police to know in advance which peaceful protests turn violent?
I think its more appalling to attend these protests knowing the tremendous harm they have been doing in other cases. None of BLM's gripes are worth the death and destruction the protests caued.
There is a LOT of evidence that not many people actually care about police murdering black people, and the sentence "None of BLM's gripes are worth the death and destruction the protests caused" could arguably be added to the pile.
There's just as much "evidence" that you don't care about the police murdering wypipo.
Likewise, your comment can and should be added to the pile of "not many people actually care about black people murdering black people."
It seems like you only believe black lives matter when it's the police killing them. If you were to think black lives matter in both cases, then you'd recognize that the section you quoted isn't just true, but obviously true.
I'm curious how you justify that. Over 25 murders by rioters alone, plus thousands more dead from the still-elevated murder rate, vs. one black guy allegedly killed by the police.
Do you just weigh Floyd's life 25x more than other people's lives? How many people should we be willing to kill to have saved his life? 50? 500? Really, I'd like to know the number.
I'm curious why the protesters against police murder are responsible for that, rather than the murderer himself.
Because we attribute responsibility to people for the things they willingly do. This is known to be metaphysically dubious but is quite central to how we construct the concept of agency
Again, many of the murders were directly committed by those protesting police violence.
And the reason the general increase in murder rate is relevant is because when something like this inevitably happens again in the future, we will once again face similar options: 1. go riot, loot, kill people, and advocate for abolishing the police, knowing full well that this will cause many more deaths than it will save, or 2. not do those things, and instead take some other action to solve this problem that doesn't cause hundreds/thousands more to die.
What is the evidence police specially murder black people? Police certainly do kill some people, and the people killed are disproportionately black compared to everyone. But violent criminals are also disproportionately black compared to everyone. Such that the police rate of violence against blacks is almost identical to what you would expect if no one knew what anyone's races were.
I cannot remember the exact figures, but when I did a big analysis of stop rates during summer 2020 with no really prior expectation about how much racism to expect in police violence, I think I found that police in Minneapolis and Chicago were actually every so slightly MORE likely to kill white people during stops ~3%.
People love to throw around "police murder blacks all the time", even in reference specifically to the Minneapolis PD. In a situation where the MPD was killing ~1 person a year, only a small portion of those killings were found to be murders, and most of the victims of police killings were non-black in a city where the crime and especially violent crime is hugely black.
>There is a LOT of evidence that not many people actually care about police murdering black people
It's an extremely rare thing - much MUCH rarer than white people being murdered by black people. And people care about that much much less than they do black people being murdered by the police.
I guess I'll reply here instead of writing a similar OP comment. Scott writes well on many topics, but CW-type stuff is a particular guilty pleasure of mine, for this reason. It's just fun to watch him scrap-by-proxy with The Establishment and demonstrate at least some plausible level of Obvious Nonsense going on. Sometimes it's even convincing enough to reverse my priors, since I keep finding a lot of my old lefty beliefs were built on shaky assumptions rather than explicit reasoning; even half-assed analysis collapses the house of implication cards.
But ultimately it's sorta extra sad too, cause personal edification comes at the cost of increased social friction with my friends, family, coworkers, etc. Nearly all of them are MSM-pilled, or much further left than that. No matter how carefully I try to make an empirical case for something Politically or Ideologically Inconvenient, it will almost always get dismissed as "right-wing propaganda" or "conservative talking points". If one is determined to believe in social reality, what does it matter ceding actual reality to the Reality-Based Community? They already claimed that ground anyway! So in that regard, this is definitely a "right wing" observation, and Scott would be a dead letter reference if I cared enough to try linking him.
Which is ironic, cause I first got exposed to SSC via being linked to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by same friendgroup. "This proves progressivism is factually correct!", was the vibe back then. Those innocent days when facts didn't care about your feelings.
The trick is to present them with an unassailable syllogism, a piece of logic so simple that no human being could possibly misunderstand it. If they hear this syllogism and understand the premises and structure of the argument and still don't change their mind, then you have the right to treat them like an animal, because by forsaking their rationality they have abandoned the right to be treated like a human.
I'm not sure unassailable syllogisms would be effective on people whose idea of infallible logic is, say, "[culture war] women are women!", "Love is love!", "My body, my choice!", and...so on. Nevermind all the logic-based arguments for socialism which I won't even try to simplify into slogans. Trying to poke holes in their own claims gets met with the same sort of hostility, the accusations of Intentionally Not Getting It or Being A Shill, as advancing any of my own. I guess that's what motte-and-Bailey's Irish Cream (my favourite rational cocktail) feels like in real life.
Could be less charitable and say that step 2 of "understanding the premises and structure of the argument" isn't possible, since all such discussion gets headed off at the pass in step 1, which is You're Not Allowed To Discuss My Sacred Cows (Speech Is Violence). This is based on the principle of solidarity, as far as I can tell; the siege-bunker mentality of those who sincerely believe civilization always hangs by a thread of Damocles and it's always those perfidious right-wing nutjobs filing away at the string. So dissent in the ranks is not to be tolerated by the tolerant.
...which I guess is also my response to your latter assertion, I feel it'd be uncharitable. Like, yes, maybe my friends etc. are all p(rogressive)-zombies. But they're also my friends, and to the extent that's a valuable non-fungible social resource due to living in Bluetopia, I prefer to just not have those sorts of arguments as much as possible. If we *waves at Scott's readership* claim to believe in evaluating others' actions based on steelmanning their sincerely held beliefs about the world, which are very different from our own, then I think it'd be really disingenuous to not try and live up to that nobly charitable ideal in everyday life.
Actually the trick is to not engage w these people at all and realize we have an uncloseable societal rift.
That's where "treating them like animals" comes into play.
I'll proffer the opinion that planning to treat anyone like an animal is counterproductive to one's own happiness in the long run. I have no unassailable logic to support my opinion, but 50 years of life experience leads me to that conclusion.
No – they haven't abandoned any 'rights'. You should/probably-need to _workaround_ their 'sacred beliefs', and that's sad and sucks, but it's not even effective, so even _less_ moral than _were_ it effective, to treat people "like an animal".
Yes, this is all extra Sad :(
It is a particularly cruel curse to see how one's "social reality" is deceiving itself, or just refusing to know something.
I feel like 'it's complicated' is almost always the start of the correct answer for questions of this type, and answers that take the form of single sentences pointing at singular causes are almost always appealing but wrong.
Of course. But. It’s also a way to obfuscate when the most likely conclusion isn’t to your liking.
Sure, but the answer that might be correct still has an advantage over the answer that's almost certainly wrong, in my book.
More to the point: I think it's better to cultivate a point of view that acknowledges complexity and tries to grapple with it, over a point of view that latches onto intuitively-appealing singular causes and ignores everything else. Even if you don't come to the perfectly correct balance of different causal factors in the former case, you are more likely to at least discover, acknowledge, talk about and come to understand the *actual* causal factor at play, than if you just latch onto the one thing that sounds good and laugh off everything else.
Because "reality" is just a giant assortment of events, whereas an observation is somebody's interpretation of some subset of those events, i.e. a narrative. I guess it's possible in principle to construct narratives that fall exactly in between of the left-right spectrum, but that is highly unlikely to happen by chance, and few people strive to do so purposefully (Wikipedia may have had once attempted something like it, but has long since abandoned those ambitions).
I think they were more _lamenting_ that ideas are 'labeled' as "right wing" instead of just being 'true' or 'false' (or some kind of complicated, and hopefully more accurate, somewhat-true and somewhat-false).
But surely after all this time people here should understand that such notions are naive? It's like, on one hand, conflict vs mistake and high vs low decoupling have been done to death, but on the other, still acting as if all those blinkered fanatics will finally see the light after being show one more spike on one more graph? Or maybe, some minuscule fraction of fanatic-adjacents is good enough? Or the level of cynicism that comes with truly accepting the black pill is too unbearable?
I've learned that a LOT (maybe all) of people _need_ to 'vent'.
Yes, it's naive. But also, yes, it does suck; is very sad.
I remember, at the beginning of the pandemic, a kind of camaraderie among everyone suffering under the lockdowns. And I dreaded what eventually happened – everything becoming politically partisan, i.e. the opening of _yet another_ fucking front in the damned interminable Culture War.
But it really does seem like the only effective option for engaging with one's political enemies, short of mass murder/torture/imprisonment, is slowly, patiently changing their minds.
But people shouldn't be "truly accepting the black pill" _because_ it's 'maximally cynical'. We should aim to be _accurately_ cynical! :)
I remember that as well. The attitudes started changing once the "world changers" decided to forcibly impose their will on the rest of us.
(see https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more/comments#comment-4713099)
Not only was it odious on its own, it wasn't even effective!
I agree that the BLM protests and follow-on effects are the most parsimonious explanation. That said:
> rising gun sales (but guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black)
There were many articles indicating that gun sales spiked particularly for blacks. I have not done a deep dive, but just to suggest I'm not talking out of my ass:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/23/us/black-gun-owners-sales-rising/index.html
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/23/guns-firearms-people-of-color
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/05/us-gun-ownership-black-americans-surge
From axios:
Retailer surveys conducted by NSSF showed that between 2019 and 2020, there was a...
58% increase in African Americans buying guns.
49% increase in Hispanic Americans buying guns.
43% increase in Asian Americans buying firearms.
Yep. Guns for private citizens are sort of like nukes for sovereign states, in the sense that you buy them mostly in the sincere hope that you'll never need to use them. Therefore the buying patterns are largely unrelated to the emergence of a new use case, and very much related to anticipated changes in the regulatory scheme.
Very accurate, I've got a number of guns bought on semi impulse for exactly that reason, a new Dem in office bumps the perceived need to prioritize the purchase.
In addition to these factors, I'll hypothesize that gun sales likely benefited from the same factors that helped sales of some other categories of goods during 2020.
Specifically, a combination of stimulus checks and people redirecting some of the disposable income that they would have otherwise spent on travel and in-person services.
Annother voice that says this is 100% in line with my experience as a "gun person" with a large number of armed liberal friends who do the exact same thing. "I voted for Biden, but I purchased my new Deserttech before I did," was a joke one made to me, because he correctly identified that this rifle would go from "Expensive precision tool" price to "unavailable at any price."
Again though, you can easily look at the numbers, guns used in crime are typically not bought legally, and it takes many years for guns to filter down to the black market.
Do you have any reason other than your own prejudice that "increased desire to do crimes" was a larger contributor than increased interest in shooting sports (of which sharpshooting is a minor contribution)? Maybe watch/read some David Yamane.
Time to crime on the average gun recovered from a crime scene is something like 7-9 years, as most crime guns aren't legally purchased.
>Time to crime on the average gun recovered from a crime scene is something like 7-9 years, as most crime guns aren't legally purchased.
To be pedantic, this is the time to the last-use-in-a-crime, before Police recover the weapon and try to trace its history.
The reports are published annually, I think by the FBI. And most years, the reports say that most guns recovered by Police and traced were purchased in the same State, with an average time-of-purchase between 7 and 9 years prior to the Police trying to trace the purchase.
There are other reasons to deduce that gun sales don't directly affect the rates of guns used in crimes like homicide: generally, homicide numbers in the United States have gone down, then up, with no correlation to annual rates of guns manufactured and purchased.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/4/black-gun-ownership-fuels-record-number-firearms-p/ says that white gun buying increased 51% over the same period, so there's not a lot of difference in percent change. But since whites bought much more guns to begin with, a 51% increase in white buying is probably much larger in absolute terms than a 58% increase in black buying, so overall I think the ratio of white:black gun owners went up rather than down.
(that is, if 30% of whites and 3% of blacks bought guns the year before, then a 51% increase in whites means ~45%, and a 58% increase in blacks means 4.5%, so an extra 15% of whites and 1.5% of blacks have guns)
Not sure this is exactly the right way to look at things but I think the basic idea is pretty sound and this makes it hard for gun purchases to be the driving factor.
Minor correction, if both increased by the same amount, that would mean the *ratio* of white:black gun owners stayed the same (30%:3% = 45%:4.5% = 10:1). And, though it'd be very slight, if white increased by 51% and black by 58%, that means the ratio did go down.
Edit, hold on, messed it up... You are right, sorry, thought you were doing something else, and trying to multitask meant I failed at two things simultaneously. Carry on :)
So Scott’s wording was “white gun buying increased”. That’s a second derivative, not a first derivative (first derivative would be “white gun ownership increased”), so taking the statements at face value, one would expect that the ratio would increase, not decrease. We would need specific numbers to be sure, but if white people buy a lot more guns than black people to start, Scott’s statement is likely correct.
I'm still pretty sure it's all multiplication, and the ratio won't change. If every 10 white guns bought is 1 black gun bought, then the absolute numbers will change, but at any given time the _ratio of absolute numbers_ is 10:1. If they each increase by 50%, then it's 15 to every 1.5, which is still going to result in a 10:1 (e.g., if we had 100:10, at t=10, then the increase would result in 115:11.5 at t=11, which is still 10:1*). If one increases by 51% and one by 58%, then we get 115.1:11.58 which is very slightly less than 10:1.**
* Yes, you can't buy half a gun, so if it was 115:11, that's more, and if it was 115:12, that's less. I imagine in the real world the numbers are larger, and this is less of an issue.
** All of this is going off his parenthetical. I don't know the actual numbers, but _in that explanation_, the ratio would not actually increase. So, if that's an explanation as to why he thinks the ratio would increase, he should not think the ratio increased. (personally, I would've said "stayed about the same" since it's a minor difference either way, but I pointed it out just because he specified a direction, and I'm pretty sure it's the wrong direction.)
You’re right. I misread Scott’s statement and didn’t carefully read what you were saying.
The *ratio* would go down, as you’ve said, but absolute numbers would still swing in favor of whites buying more guns.
Also, the second derivative bit was nonsense. It probably isn’t worth going into the misreading of this argument that made me think saying that was a good idea.
A lot of black gun ownership is illegal too and hence out of the statistics, so this entire attempt to get an idea of the on-the-ground reality using official numbers is an abortive maneuver
My primary criticism of the claim that rising gun sales explain the increase in homicides differs from Scott's. Specifically, longer-term trends don't indicate an annual rise in U.S. gun sales should be expected to lead to an annual rise in the U.S. homicide rate.
An annual report from ATF shows annual U.S. totals for gun sales*. The latest report shows figures through 2019 - https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/2021-firearms-commerce-report/download
I have not graphed a full comparison versus annual U.S. murder rate, but quick eyeballing doesn't indicate any obvious correlation over time between U.S. gun sales and U.S. murder rate. Specifically, there's a broad upward trend in U.S. gun sales** during the post-1990 period when U.S. murder rates declined by ~50%. U.S gun sales in 1990 totaled ~4.4 million. By 2019, U.S. gun sales had increased ~140% to a total of 10.7 million.
Here's one other reason not to be surprised that annual U.S. gun sales fail to predict year-over-year change in U.S. murder rate. There are an estimated ~390 million firearms in civilian hands in the U.S. With that context, does it sound like a big difference whether 10 million, 15 million, or 20 million are sold in a given year?
Note: I am not making any claim about comparisons between countries of gun sales/availability and a country's murder rate (and/or gun violence rate). I'm speaking with respect to U.S. trend data.
* To be precise, 3 metrics that create a reasonable proxy for gun sales: firearms manufactured in the U.S., firearms exports, and firearms imports. The total excludes firearms produced for the military but includes those purchased by domestic law enforcement agencies.
** I'm using firearms manufactured plus imports less exports as a proxy figure for gun sales
Do you know to what extent people who already had guns were buying more guns as compared to people buying their first guns?
I don't have time to find a link, but first time gun buyers have been an accelerating percent of all purchases, and the second derivative increased after Minneapolis started burning. FWIW, these first time guy buyers are also disproportionalty liberal, young, BIPOC and queer compared to the repeat gun buyers and the population as a whole nationwide.
National Shooting Sports Foundation (firearms industry trade group) estimates 5.4 million in 2021 (30% of total purchases) and 8.4 million in 2020 (40% of total purchases). https://www.nssf.org/articles/nssf-retailer-surveys-indicate-5-4-million-first-time-gun-buyers-in-2021/
I could not readily locate figures for prior years to get an idea of how those numbers compare to prior years.
"Higher gun sales" doesn't explain a murder spike any more than "higher alcohol consumption" explains a drunk-driving spike. Even assuming that in 2020 a bunch of people went out, bought new guns, and promptly murdered other people with those guns, the question is WHY they did so.
You could’ve just written your first sentence and left it at that. The rest of your comment is obfuscation.
How so? What's your issue with it?
The first sentence sufficiently explains the phenomena and the rest is quibbling over statistical margins if not completely irrelevant because it obfuscates the causal chain.
"Although the George Floyd protests in May 2020 were the largest round of Black Lives Matters protests, there had been several previous rounds. Most notable were the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August 2014, and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore in April 2015."
I got curious about the Baltimore/Freddie Gray numbers a while back and did a writeup.
For Baltimore there is NO DOUBT when the spike began. The cause is pretty obvious, too, though statistics can't tell us that.
http://mistybeach.com/mark/BaltimoreHomicides.html
There’s another possibility for the mechanism that you don’t mention. I know there’s been some academic literature on the idea that the community loses trust in police and places fewer calls to 9-11. I don’t know if this has good evidence for it or not.
Interesting discussion of whether 911 calls in response to shootings dropped post-George Floyd. Study says yes, Charles Lehman says no:
https://www.city-journal.org/did-george-floyd-death-weaken-trust-in-cops
Good point, the difference between a homicide and an assault is often the speed and quality of medical treatment. That's a simple variable that could influence this a lot.
And medical facilities were definitely overwhelmed during much of the pandemic.
Why are murder rates still so high now, then?
You can also imagine that at any given time, there's a stable equilibrium in a community between police, non-criminals, and criminals, and that the mass protests shifted the equilibrium in majority-black communities in the direction of criminals--fewer non-criminals willing to talk to the police, criminals walking a bit taller, police walking a bit smaller, etc.
Okay - and this is precisely what BLM wanted
"A priori there’s no reason to expect the pandemic to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group."
Really? There have been tons of articles about how the pandemic disproportionately affected black people. Yes, this comes from a media environment which is biased in many ways as you point out, but this claim seems quite plausible to me given that crises like this tend to have far worse effects on the economically underprivileged (as well as the possibility that there is sufficiently less trust in the medical system among African-Americans to have an effect as well).
Right, there also might be a Vitamin D effect, and/or some genetic difference in race susceptibility to COVID as with other diseases. Black people are generally less healthy than other races of people in the US, lower life expectancy, and so on. And yes, they trust the medical system less. COVID actually reduced economic inequality I think, but it's true that it's better to be rich during COVID than poor during COVID (that's always true).
Scott did say "a priori" though. He maybe should have said "a priori, controlling for race differences in average health and network effects" or something. Anyway, it's clear BLM would have more of a disparate racial impact than COVID, since BLM was explicitly race-focused.
Although the pandemic hit black people hard, I don't think that causes them to commit or be victims of murders more? I think the claim was always that cabin fever from lockdowns was responsible for the murders, and black people were no more locked down than anyone else.
(except insofar as black people got hit harder by the pandemic, maybe black areas would have stricter lockdown rules. But black people had the same number of cases but more deaths because of preexisting health problems. My guess is most lockdown rules were based on case rate. If I'm wrong, I think it's too small of an effect to explain these data. )
Given that black people in the US are quite a bit poorer on average, I bet that they disproportionately worked in service jobs which got disrupted by the pandemic - especially young men, who are presumably most of the murderers and murdered here. And in general economic crises hit people with less money harder.
(More speculatively, maybe poorer people have homes they're less happy staying in, or worse video games, or something.)
That's why I tried to include other points like the timing, the cross-national data, and the data on previous rounds of protests to show that this was more likely a protest effect than a pandemic effect.
As others have pointed out, the timing, although suspicious-looking, is not all that persuasive given that a substantial contributor to there being such huge protests in the first place was people being out of work and cooped up and getting sick of it - it was an obvious powderkeg even at the time.
The others are more persuasive, but I'm always a bit leery of comparing US murder trends to elsewhere given e.g. our enormous amount of guns.
But that would make the pandemic an aggravating factor, not a cause, as the Ferguson and Baltimore examples suggest there would have been large protests and an attendant spike in homicides even in the absence of the pandemic (ignoring, of course, that Floyd and Chauvin may not have encountered each other at all in that timeline).
1. This was seen nowhere else in the world
2. General homicide increase was 6 times higher than domestic homicide increase
3. This cannot explain the original Ferguson effect
4. Crime fell during the 2008 great recession
I agree that the other points you brought up are pretty convincing. This doesn't change the fact that the point about no reasons to expect blacks being hit by cabin fever and lockdowns more is wrong, though.
There is no reason to make the situation appear less nuansed and more one sided than it is.
The evidence that recessions cause homicide increases is quite poor as I understand (e.g. homicide fell from 2007 - 2009). No particular reason to think that the economic aspect of the lockdown would cause increased homicides, especially since unemployment benefits were relatively generous in 2020.
I would also be suspicious about the likelihood that the people committing murders are those with regular jobs they lost instead of those who didn't have regular jobs and worked in the black market to begin with, e.g. males aged 16-24 years old. Murder rates based on age (https://www.statista.com/statistics/251884/murder-offenders-in-the-us-by-age/) suggest murderers skew young.
Smaller homes, worse climate control.
1.This cannot explain the original Ferguson effect
2. Crime fell during the 2008 great recession
Those seem like reasonable points, but I understood the claim about the onset of the pandemic causing more crime to be about more than cabin fever: the pandemic (especially in the earlier stages) made people very scared and frustrated and unemployed, and this emotional effect was surely magnified among the less healthy and economically privileged, and those states of mind strike me as more likely to cause breakdowns in relationships and violent behavior. Not to mention that, even assuming that lockdown was imposed on all demographics equally, it had the worst effects on relationships among those who were living with more other people in less space, which again applies to the less privileged.
1. This was seen nowhere else in the world
2. General homicide increase was 6 times higher than domestic homicide increase
3. This cannot explain the original Ferguson effect
4. Crime fell during the 2008 great recession
It surely is not surprising that black communities, where adults have many chronic health problems -- overweight, have diabetes, hypertension, smoke Newports ferchrissake, have patchy health care -- might be hit harder by any ambient illness. (*)
(Or that, per Carlos Mencia, "Hispanics" all basically live in one apartment near Pico-Union, so there's your "community transmission" right there.)
But the new point I want to bring up is this: Many here think of "cabin fever" as they might experience it: Unable to go to your normal job, and obeying the Rules and not going outside, bored with yourself and the few people you are stuck with.
The reality for poor people is different. Nobody has a job, so that has not changed. What changed was that NOBODY was going to their job. That removed the kind of accountability that the one or two people a person knew who visited Reality every day could provide.
But think about the deserted streets, the feeling of pause, the fact that normal employed people were not on the street, at the subway platform, business owner not keeping an eye on the block, etc. I think the cabin fever was more like all the adults had suddenly gone away. That basic check, on bad behavior -- community norms -- were suspended, not in effect, like alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules.
Also, there has been a major increase in drug trafficking. I'll get to that below.
Overall convincing article though I had matching priors previously. One nitpick:
Figure 1, weekly homicides per 100,000 city population appears to show local homicide minimums in March of 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, with local maximums in May of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. Is it possible that there is at the very least a simultaneous seasonal/weather effect? Based on that chart I can't help but think that if George Floyd died on March 1st attributed murders might have been somewhat lower, though there is likely some effect from the protests.
No other graphs in this article showed multi-year monthly murder rates so I have not referenced other data at this level of granularity yet.
I agree with almost everything in this post except for the media criticism parts. The conclusions seem very similar to this January New York Times article, for example:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/briefing/crime-surge-homicides-us.html
My sense is that (1) most people believe the spike in murders was related to the Floyd protests, (2) most people believe that because the theory has been widely aired in the media, (3) the people and the media are almost certainly right about this.
What's much harder to say is exactly *how* the protests relate to the murder surge and what could we do about it?
Sorry, the article you link has as its conclusion in that section:
“All three [of the pandemic, more guns, and the BLM protests] played a role,” Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told me. “What’s difficult is to assign priority to one compared to the others.”
The thesis of my post here is that this is wrong, and actually the BLM protests were much more important than at least the pandemic (and guns too, although I didn't get into that much because I haven't heard too many people making that case), and that it's quite easy to determine that.
When I said in my San Fransicko review that I thought the BLM protests caused the homicide surge, lots of people said in the comments that they were surprised I believed that because they had heard in the media that it was a collection of factors especially including the pandemic. I think this is the story most ordinary people reading media articles would come away with, and I think it's false. I also linked several articles in this post saying things like that, and why I thought they were wrong.
I agree the media has been willing to say that the protests were one of many potential causes for the surge, but I think they've very much avoided saying they were the main cause, and I think they were the main cause and that this post provides evidence for it.
Scott, I don't think that separating out the contributions of guns is something you've attempted in this post. Obviously the protests were the "cause" of the spike in violence, but it's hard not to think that the abundance of guns (along with the abundance of free time for poor youth) was an inextricable factor feeding into the brutality of the protests, and whether the police are able to de-escalate successfully. I think if we wanted to truly estimate the contribution of guns we would have analyze a lot more data and make a lot more guesses, because I don't know how you could possibly get clear data on this - you would have to find a set of countries with different numbers of guns, but the same racial tensions and a similar trigger event, but I have no idea how you would do that.
Some others here have provided some pretty convincing evidence it might be unrelated. There are already a huge number of guns, so a 3% increase or whatever in the total guns seems like maybe not a big mover. Moreover gun ownership has increased substantially for a generation, yet mostly accompanied a structural decrease in crime. Moreover other local maxima in gun buying did not immediately impact gun crime rates.
I'm not saying that gun ownership was higher during the protests than other times, thus "causing" the violence. I'm saying that the overall high rate might be a precondition for protests leading to riots and looting, and the police not being able to get the situation under control.
Oh for sure the overall high ownership rate greater increases the violence involved in general policing, and makes dealing with disorder a lot harder.
It seems to me like all your evidence shows that increases in crime closely followed the death of George Floyd (and Freddie Gray), but not so much that it was because of the BLM protests specifically or that it was because of the factors you mention.
A lot happened in a short time right around Floyd's death, I think it's impossible to separate out. But the obvious explanation to me isn't "BLM protests cause police to do their job less therefore increasing the murder rate, libs owned forever", but more like "high profile examples of police misconduct cause people to trust the police less, call them less often when there is a shooting, feel less of a societal obligation to follow the rules, etc."
In particular I don't think you can so easily separate out these effects:
(1) A high profile police killing, in and of itself
(2) People protesting the killing
(3) Perceived heavy handed police response to the protests
(4) Proliferation of left-wing ideas about police
(5) People not trusting the police so much anymore
(6) Police acting differently as a result of all this
(7) General feeling of a breakdown in order
For your list of proposed mechanisms, recreated below:
> Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
> Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them.
> Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk.
> The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police.
I think the issue is either these didn't happen as much as advertised, or they've also happened at *other* times.
(1) For "less policing" - progressive DAs pulling back on police activiy has happened recently, but I don't think the increase in crime has correlated with when, or even where, they took office.
(2) For police going on an unofficial work slowdown, this has happened before without the dramatic effect, e.g. under de Blasio in New York
(3) It seemed to me like there was plenty of heavy-handed police action immediately following Floyd, including cops getting off. It also doesn't seem like increases in crime follow *convictions* or decrease following exonerations. At least that's not the obvious pattern in the data you show.
(4) Most places didn't "defund the police" as far as I understand (and if it did I'm guessing it wasn't immediate - budget decisions take time), but the increase in the murder rate seems to have happened all over the place.
> (7) General feeling of a breakdown in order
This one brought back some menories. In mid-2020, a few of my friends seemed to be convinced that civilization was about to collapse. I live in an extremely safe, wealthy area, so I can't imagine what things would have been like for poor areas in the US.
The general feeling of a breakdown in order really does seem to be precipitated by the pandemic. How many of us have experienced utterly antisocial behavior in the past two years compared with before, in settings that have nothing at all to do with law enforcement?
“Air rage” was an example that was heavily discussed.
Roland Fryer had already investigated the topic of "viral" police incidents and their effect on crime:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html
Thanks ... to be clear this is saying something similar to what I said right? Efforts to reform police behavior don't cause an increase in crime unless they happen after a high-profile police killing?
It is about federal investigations and not popular protests, but directionally similar.
Yeah the “collection of factors” canard is just obfuscation to preserve pious libtard narrative control. It’s obviously 90+% BLM-caused.
Also, I think the post clearly answers that last question, which was "police withdrawal." Of the four hypotheses that were put forth to explain police withdrawal, if you're looking for policy that could counteract them I'd say the following (respectively):
(1) Fund the police;
(2) Bust police unions and burn away the rot. I think this worked in Newark, if I recall right? Then we can start on the other public sector unions.
(3) Develop clear, inflexible, and bright-line standards for the use of police authority and force that don't depend on general reasonable-person standards, abolish qualified immunity, cap tort damages for a lot of violations and make the punishment firing of the responsible officer(s) rather than some tortuous consent decree or massive monetary liability in the department, mandate that departments carry significant malpractice insurance.
(4) Fund the police.
>I think this worked in Newark, if I recall right?
Camden.
On (3) - I don't think this set of standards exists. Or if it does, it's easy to game. For example, once you lay out an exact set of standards for when foot pursuits are allowed, news will get around and criminals will know when they can just walk away.
You can probably make some improvements on the margin with policy, but ultimately, some kind of general reasonable-person standard is inevitable here. This is unfortunate, for all the reasons you'd expect, but I just don't think there's a better way.
Unquestionably, this is the hardest one. That's why I said "develop" those standards. Of course, you need to retain some flexibility. As it happens, one of the existing standards that I think is usually used appropriately and not normally abused is "exigent circumstances," which would cover a foot chase.
I think the desire for bright lines can be a fool's errand, like in sports. You want well trained professionals with some scope to exercise judgement, and a society and media that doesn't cherry pick bad outcomes as emblematic of the whole.
Absolutely have some data and experience driven guidelines, but the desire to expunge judgement from complex processes generally has pretty poor results. A checklist is great for a plane when the costs of failure are high, situations are consistent, and there is not much time pressure.
Policing isn't so much like that, and particularly the confrontations which are very quick, and quite disparate.
IDK I think at its core people just need to be more comfortable with the idea that police are literally there to be society's enforcers. I think there is a lot of collective/self delusion about that point. Absolutely some things that are currently handled by police are better handled by social work. But sometimes in society someone needs to use force to get compliance, and eggs will be broken occasionally.
The rate of police killings in the US compared to Germany almost exactly tracks how often the suspect is armed in the US versus Germany.
> My sense is that (1) most people believe the spike in murders was related to the Floyd protests
But the thesis here isn't that the spike "was related" to the Floyd protests, a vague assertion that virtually anybody could agree with. It's that the one was principally and proximately caused by the other, that the one followed from the other almost as night follows day.
Suppose we harden the claim to the point of saying that had there been only Covid and gun sales, but no anti-police protests and no breakdown of civil order, there would've been no rise in violent crime at all. Do you still agree that that's perfectly consistent with the general media narrative?
How do you have Covid without breakdown of civil order? In this country at least, they have been one and the same.
Don't declare certain people essential and others inessential. Don't arbitrarily decide which goods or services may be bought or sold, who is permitted to earn a living and who isn't. Don't declare a universal curfew.
Bad news - our legal system has *always* declared some people essential and others inessential, and arbitrarily decided which goods or services may be bought or sold, and who is permitted to earn a living and who isn’t. The pandemic changed those rules, but didn’t change the basic facts that we have zoning and immigration laws and health and safety regulations.
I think you and Moosetopher agree more than you think you do. If not, I'll stand in and say I agree with both of your points. I think you are right about historical injustices, and I think Moosetopher is right that explicitly saying out loud the quiet parts + changing the rules was a big inflection point that made it acute.
These were all done in countries that don't have the same problems that we've been having.
People following Covid restrictions is a disruption -- in my view, and perhaps yours, a tragic one -- of ordinary civil society.
But it's not a breakdown of civil order in the sense I meant that, precisely because people are still following the rules, even if the rules are bad and dumb and possibly even illegitimate at a higher constitutional level.
People smashing windows, setting fires, and throwing bricks at police officers is a breakdown of civil order. And while I suspect that wouldn't have happened without Covid, there are definitely alternate scenarios where Covid happens but that doesn't.
I am not really talking about “covid restrictions.” It was my experience that during the early months of the pandemic, even before restrictions were in place and certainly after, people did not feel free to carry on in their normal habits. Being from the New York area, I know a few people who became sick with Covid in March 2020; even without restrictions, no one I knew was keen on getting infected next. So most of us were glad to radically change our habits to avoid this disease in those first few months. I was living with vulnerable people and went without seeing friends for a whole year until I was vaccinated. I am far from the only one who was living in such an isolated way. But with restrictions or without, it was nevertheless a severe disruption to the civic order that engendered a lot of alienation and distrust that I don’t think has really been fixed. The acute cases of violent protest end and order is relatively quickly restored. But the pandemic in the US has been a disaster for trust in society, and trust is not gained back so quickly.
That's eloquently said and very true.
But I'm not sure it fully explains a punctual spike in violent crime that followed directly upon an episode of violent protest that had police pullback as its explicit, unambiguously desired aim.
Perhaps people taking to the streets to demand de-policing was a sort of derangement that could only have happened under the general civic unraveling that was Covid. But -- to be quite blunt about it -- my civic community was massively disrupted by Covid and *I* didn't get the slightest inclination to smash anybody's storefront or burn anybody's car.
This was a choice that certain people made, and they can and should own its predictable consequences.
> (2) most people believe that because the theory has been widely aired in the media, (3) the people and the media are almost certainly right about this.
Serendipitous to see you commenting here, saves me a link. I'll point at a middle position between this and Scott's, that there is an entire genre of articles in the line of "Black Americans' relationship to the police is complicated, and they're less likely than liberal Whites to support Defund efforts", and that "policing reduces crime" is a pretty standard claim to see defended there. You've written a few yourself, and while I think Scott is wrong to say they don't exist in non-right-wing media it's also not correct to say they're "widely aired" and you might be overestimating the reach.
The causal link between reducing policing and increased crime is a tricky one for plenty of reasons (and unwarranted confidence on the details was my issue with Scott's comment on the previous article), but the basic thesis is at least *available* to anyone who pursues the issue on its own terms
Murder spikes the week after George Floyd dies
NYT: It's complicated
Anything happens 60 years after redlining ended
NYT: Redlining strikes again
You can even remove the middle two lines. From the World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/how-redlining-remains-a-source-of-racial-injustice/
> Nearly a century before George Floyd’s fatal encounter with police at a Minneapolis intersection, a federal agency [redlined] the area a few blocks to the west...
Scooby-Doo but every monster turns out to be a redlined neighborhood.
LOL
The hilarious things about those Heloc maps people so love to cite, is that they were meant to predict how safe those areas were to lend in, and were in actual fact relatively good predictions (there is obviously some risk here of them being self-fulfilling prophesies, but they were also less influential and more transitory than is commonly presented).
Moreover if you actually examine them, there is just as much or more scourge reserved for "laborers", "servants", "poor farmland", "areas near industry/railyards/quarries", "various "white" ethnic groups", and the overall tone for someone who isn't going into them lookin for "black oppression" is of a more or less earnest attempt to map the expected change in real estate values (and thus suitability for lending) of neighborhoods in what was admittedly a racist era.
The maps were not all made by one person, and some of them definitely seem more or less racially focused, but there is this bizarre narrative that seems to develop that the maps were all about "blacks/negros", and that this then explains the totality of the differential change in the circumstances of different ethnic groups post the 60s. Despite the fact that many many different ethnic groups were "redlined", as any even 3 minute examination of these maps will acquaint you with.
You should write your own version of this post! Common knowledge for the win!
1. Violent crimes rise during the summer. Following the lockdown, it's not surprising that crimes rose more.
2. I'd be interested to see deaths by economic status.
3. "but all things are smaller than other, larger things, and that doesn’t prevent them from being real or relevant." But it can mean that they are much, much less important.
4. It seems equally likely that the rises in murders are caused by the underlying factors which led to the protests. I won't insist on it, but it's at least as valid as Scott's "guesses".
I think cabin fever is a lot of what caused the Floyd case to blow up the way that it did. I have a friend who says that the left also made an extra big deal out of it because they wanted to increase turnout and win in 2020. I guess that's also possible. I do think though that "the wokeness era" is insufficient by itself to explain how big the Floyd thing was. Do we not have any other videos of unjustified police killings of black people? But yeah imagine all of the extra people who were unemployed because of the pandemic with nothing to do. Surely that made the riots a bigger deal.
I think it's worth a post by itself, why did the Floyd thing blow up so much compared to everything else, compared to say this: https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220414-michigan-police-shot-dead-black-driver-after-traffic-stop-videos-show .
Even though killings of unarmed blacks by police are way less common than they were 20 years ago, now we have wokeness and everyone with a cell phone so we hear about it more. But I think we don't know Patrick Lyoya and we know George Floyd largely because of COVID. I guess Lyoya was technically armed, but so was Philando Castille. I don't know. Minneapolis is a bigger city than Grand Rapids?
Sure but BLM had been around for a while, since the early 2010s. Why in 2020 did this happen?
I am not sure. How would we resolve whether cabin fever led to the Floyd thing blowing up so much? I mean we know that the season probably matters. If this happened in the winter people would not protest as much.
Castile was one of the least justifiable & well-publicized police killings I recall. The jury got that one dead wrong.
Yeah, my priors on policing may have drifted rightward since 2020 but I remain incredibly saddened by Philando Castile and Breonna Taylor especially, among the litany of common cases cited by left-leaning sources. There are some examples of viral police shootings that turn out to have been justified after an initial period of public outrage (Ma'Khia Bryant, Joseph Rosenbaum) which makes them no less tragic, but the Castile and Taylor cases are just incredibly awful.
>It seems equally likely that the rises in murders are caused by the underlying factors which led to the protests.
If underlying factors X, Y, and Z caused the protests, and the protests caused the murders, then I guess it's trivially true that X, Y, and Z caused the murders, in the same sense that the birth of Derek Chauvin's grandmother caused the murders.
If you mean the underlying factors caused the rise in murders *without* the causal chain running through the protests, that would seem rather strange, unless the underlying factors' existence didn't predate the protests by any span of time. Query if an "underlying" cause that's temporally exactly coincident with its purported effect is ontologically any different from attributing causality to the "effect" itself.
Maybe what you're getting at would make more sense to me if I understood what you took to be the "underlying factors" at hand. Or why they would present a plausible mechanism for the rise in violent crime independently of the protests.
I do think that the chain from lockdown -> cabin fever -> Floyd riots is a lot shorter and more direct than the chain from Chauvin's grandmother to the Floyd riots.
Of course I think vorkosigan is wrong that it's equally likely that the rise in murders was caused by these same vectors, but I don't think it's analogous to Chauvin's grandma.
But if Scott's claim is that the police policing less caused the crime surge, "the police pulled back after there was a big anti-police protest/riot" has a kind of integral causal logic that "the police pulled back after everybody got cabin fever from the lockdowns" doesn't.
I took vorkosigan to be saying that "underlying factors" could better explain the rise in crime if they *weren't* being routed through the causal chain of underlying factors --> protests/riots --> police pullback.
My point with the grandma remark was just that vorkosigan is either saying that, or else he's saying something tautologically true. So I'm going to assume he's saying the thing that actually means something non-tautological, even if that thing strikes me (like you) as quite at odds with the facts.
Right, indeed that's what vorkosigan said in his comment 4, and I agree that its wrong, indeed the whole point of this post is to disprove it.
I don't think it is quite tautological that there is some causal chain from COVID to the Floyd thing. Well, maybe it is, because Floyd was COVID positive which possibly contributed to his death (along with the fentanyl and the stress from Chauvin's knee). But yes, I think people had cabin fever and that helped make the Floyd thing blow up so much. Still it's the Floyd thing that proximally caused the homicide spike and the "cabin fever".
If you take vorkosigan's claim generously, it might be something like "the homicide went up because of cabin fever, and the Floyd incident was an excuse for an outlet, but that summer would have seen more murders anyway" but a bit of a problem with this is other facts Scott discusses in the post, that there were bigger murder increases in places with more BLM stuff and there was not a murder increase in other countries.
Cabin fever did not have the same effect anywher else, it bizarrely had minimal effect on domestic violence murders, and it cannot possibly explain what happened *in Ferguson*.
The only thing wrong with this excellent article is the ninth word from the end, unless you were being ironic.
The last sentence has been edited since first writing, can you be specific what the word is?
“everyone”
It was originally "I understand this is the opposite of what everyone else says, but I think they are wrong" so the ninth word was everyone.
This government article talks about fewer people being put in prison.
And we know drugs were still being sold. Though the death rate from drug overdose was not as publicized during the pandemic, it was higher than before. Could fights have occurred more from drugs dealing, fights over money? Overcrowding in homes from lost jobs?
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf
On target. Many criminals were released during the early pandemic as well. Add in criminal justice reform at state and federal level and a lot more criminals were on the streets, causing crime, even before George Floyd.
I mentioned it in a comment, but you can also rule recent gun purchases out using trace data, as it takes years on average for a gun to go from purchase to crime.
Has anybody seen a study of usage of legal vs illegal guns in murders?
My guess would be that legal guns are used in quite a few domestic murders, but not in most others types.
You mean like indiscriminate shoot-ups of BBQs and block parties?
Kind of feels like Scott came to his conclusion first and then is now reading the data to support that. But the data doesn’t at all look convincing to me. Clearly there was a spike around May, but the data shows it was starting in the middle of May? Floyd died on May 25, and while protests began the next day in Minneapolis, they really didn’t pick up steam across the country until a few days later. But, for example, the NYC chart shows a clear escalation that starts at the beginning of May.
Like Scott says the Minneapolis Aggravated Assault chart shows it’s obvious but all I see is that before Floyd died, cases were rising dramatically, hit their peak shortly after protests started, slightly dropped soon after and stayed at an elevated pre-Floyd rate the rest of the year.
There is constant up and down in rates of various things. There was an small uptick in mid-May, probably caused by a combination of weather and normal randomness, but instead of being followed by a small downtick like every other small uptick, it went much higher and then plateaued long-term.
I think if the pandemic had started in mid-May, it would be fair to attribute to the pandemic, but the uptick clearly doesn't start in March and so you would need another theory to explain why this was happening in May.
But at least in several of the graphs you provide, the early-to-mid May increases weren’t small.
I would have also assumed the causal effects (especially the ones you suggest) would have been more gradual rather than immediate as the charts suggest, and that there would be a closer correlation between height of the crime wave and height of the protests.
If I were to provide a counter-factual, from what I remember, May is when people finally had enough of lockdowns (perhaps that also explains the size of the BLM protests, people used it to blow off steam), and we were certainly seeing lockdown protests by then as well. I’m personally of the belief that the rise in generally bad behavior over the past few years is attributable to some sort of psychological malaise caused by pandemic/lockdown fears leading to less institutional trust, and you see that starting in May as lockdowns ended. This could even explain some of the bad behavior occurring during the BLM protests.
I looked into this further, and several of these graphs are 7 to 14 day rolling averages, meaning that an increase on Day X will start showing up gradually on day X-7 or X-14.
A nice alternative data source that provides really good precision is CDC wonder provisional mortality data. Here, we can look nationally (smoothing over individual city randomness) at homicides by race by *week*. Since most murders are within race, this is a good proxy for murders by race of offender. The biggest spike in 2020 is for black homicides, and it turns out the huge spike for black murder victims is literally the week following Floyd.
To get a bit jargony, if you run a "structural break" test, it detects the week post Floyd as the most plausible week for a structural break for black people. (And in fact, if you run the same test for car crash deaths, it looks like the structural break happens almost immediately thereafter too. Strongly suggests its about depolicing and BLM).
Can you link the specific analysis you're using?
(I'm aware of Steve Sailer's version, but I'm specifically trying NOT to cite Steve Sailer here)
I actually downloaded the data from CDC Wonder myself and did the analysis myself. Happy to email my code and data to you if there is a way to do that?
CDC Wonder allows you to save urls for specific searches, hopefully these still work:
Black Homicides:
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D293F081
Black Motor Vehicle Deaths:
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D293F820
Why not? Fear of being canceled?
Er, FWIW, that's usually *not* what people mean by N day rolling (or moving) averages. Usually the window is only backward looking not forward looking. So an increase on day X will get picked up by the 7dma between X and X+6. (Of course, it's possible to center the window elsewhere. No comment on what is being done in said graphs).
I also have no idea about the graph's data source, but you are correct. I'm not aware of anyone who does a rolling average of the week AHEAD of a date. Rarely you will see centered, but when that happens the centering should be explicitly mentioned in the methodology so as to avoid confusion.
Centered is pretty common in historical data analysis precisely because it retains correct timing of events.
You've got it backwards. You can check wikipedia or whatever source you like. Moving averages nearly always take the average of the previous N values, or more rarely, the average of N values in both directions. I've never heard of taking N values forward. So, the Minneapolis Figure 5 is even worse for your argument than you thought and suggests that the protests may actually have occurred at the peak of a crime wave which began to subside at their onset. That doesn't mean your overall hypothesis is wrong, or right, of course.
If you can, please add this to the article for the relevant graphs. This is definitely something worth pointing out right next to those graphs.
Another commenter pointed this out, and I think you did yourself in another recent post, and I think it would be something worth pointing out to 'raise awareness' of generally too.
Murders were declining pretty steadily through 2014, but then BLM emerged at Ferguson in August 2014. Murders started going up where BLM triumphed over local police: in St. Louis, then in Baltimore after Freddie Gray, then in Chicago after the release of the LaQuan MacDonald bad shooting videotape on 11/23/2015.
But then various over-enthusiastic BLM supporters assassinated cops in 2014-2016, helping Trump get elected.
Strikingly, traffic fatalities followed the same trajectory. But it all makes sense if you think of it as how scared are potential bad actors of being pulled over by the cops.
BLM sort of vanished after 2016 as intelligent people like George Soros switched to emphasizing more respectable methods of fighting the New Jim Crow like funding candidates in DA races.
Murders stopped going up in 2017 and dropped an encouraging amount in 2018. At some point in 2019, however, things changed for whatever reason and the post-Ferguson decline stopped and started going back up. This was before both George Floyd and before covid.
The increase before the George Floyd era wasn't enormous, so it could be just random noise. On the other hand, it could be that from mid-2019 the criminal element was once again feeling its oats as during the Ferguson era. Or that could just be hindsight is 20-20.
On the other hand, the black traffic fatality surge is hard to see coming until it suddenly happens after George Floyd's demise.
One possibility is that the kind of people likely to carry and shoot illegal hand guns are a much smaller and more hard core population than the kind likely to drive recklessly if the cops are cowed.
Perhaps the gun criminal element was already beginning to sense a change in the winds regarding enforcement of gun and warrant laws well before George Floyd, while the huge number of average people who'd enjoy driving fast if they didn't have to worry so much about getting pulled over by the cops didn't realize we were entering a new historic era until after the beginning of the celebrated "racial reckoning."
Unfortunately, Scott's tone and reponse to you confirms my feeling that he has no interest in being convinced otherwise. I noted in my comment that this article was a defense of his claim and not an exploratory post. I find it biased, erroneous, and lacking greater context. Sorry not sorry Scott.
There are a lot of comments any time Scott does a political post that sound exactly like something I would have written back in 2016, when I was a dyed-in-the-wool Bernie supporter and quick to gaslight analyses that did not support my left-leaning assumptions.
But when Scott persistently puts in the work and develops these longer posts explaining his reasoning, the burden of proof falls on his cynical detractors to prove him wrong. In this case, the statistics are clear enough (particularly internationally) that I am frankly disappointed to see this kind of obstinance. Scott's "tone" here (as in his post about parties moving away from the center) is based on the weight of the statistical evidence he has found. Your tone, by contrast, seems to demonstrate a lack of interest in accepting this evidence, in favor of nitpicking at the kind of technicalities that will always exist when statistical methods are not perfectly homogenous among jurisdictions. I'd invite you (and others with this view) to kindly consider the overall argument holistically from a neutral point of view, rather than blaming Scott for failing to shift your entrenched priors.
What a passive aggressive comment... and then some directly aggressive. Really. I could say more to the pieces of your comment that have objective merit, but the rest of this leaves me unwanting to carry on the conversation. Toodles
It's this kind of specious hypocritical moralizing that I really dislike and that inspired me to comment previously. If you have something to contribute to the discussion, if you identify something with "objective merit", you're free to say so. If you disagree with the tone or substance of something said, please expand on those specific details. If you don't have a rebuttal or if you were in the wrong, no one will judge you for saying so.
Discussion here should be rigorous and topical whilst allowing for changing minds. It's intellectually virtuous to be able to retreat from a previous position in the face of strong, well-founded pushback. Debate is not a war. Posturing in place of concrete engagement brings the level of discourse down to that of a thread on r/all.
I really don't love being aggressive in any way, shape, or form. I don't believe my previous comment to have been particularly aggressive. But it was fairly blunt. I'm sure we agree on plenty of issues, but on comment quality, I don't believe in compromising. The natural tendency of online discussion (in the absence of self-enforcement) trends towards entropic deterioration.
> If you have something to contribute to the discussion, if you identify something with "objective merit", you're free to say so.
- Agreed
> If you disagree with the tone or substance of something said, please expand on those specific details.
- I did my best to construct and express my thoughts thoroughly. I stand by what I said, especially since no one has answered the questions that I was genuinely asking. You are always welcome to engage with curiosity and learn more.
> If you don't have a rebuttal or if you were in the wrong, no one will judge you for saying so.
- Agreed
> Discussion here should be rigorous and topical whilst allowing for changing minds. It's intellectually virtuous to be able to retreat from a previous position in the face of strong, well-founded pushback. Debate is not a war. Posturing in place of concrete engagement brings the level of discourse down to that of a thread on r/all.
- Agreed 100%
>I really don't love being aggressive in any way, shape, or form. I don't believe my previous comment to have been particularly aggressive. But it was fairly blunt.
- Generally speaking words are a clumsy vehicle for the human experience, stepping on toes is easy to do without realizing it and I recognize it happens and try to call it out without holding it against people. I'm having issues with the site so I can't revisit your prior comment. The thing I always try to center on is the behavior or actions and not the person. e.g. saying "specious hypocritical moralizing" rather than calling me a "specious hypocritical moralizer". e.g. saying "that was a dumb comment" instead of "you are dumb".
> I'm sure we agree on plenty of issues, but on comment quality, I don't believe in compromising.
- I'm not sure what minimum bar you are expecting but as far as I know there are no requirements here, only guidelines on civility.
> The natural tendency of online discussion (in the absence of self-enforcement) trends towards entropic deterioration.
- 100% I have left many communities because of this. There is a lot about how this community operates that I appreciate, including the thoughtful and thoroughness of Scott and commenters. That being said, I don't believe in a minimum bar to entry... especially in a case where the other party was amassed a large amount of data.
In this case, I am accepting the data Scott presented and questioning the broader context in which it is presented, as well as what Scott actually accomplished here. I don't see a problem with that kind of meta commentary and I do find it constructive, at least to anyone interested in the scoping, definition and conceptualization of problems. In other words, Scott defined an initial scope and I questioned it. With more time and interest, I could amass more data and present a counterclaim to Scott but I am not trying to do that. I am just trying to ask a rigorous question about his methodology and purpose. Again, nobody seems to have answered these questions for me and that's fine. I remain curious and life moves on.
The discussion of those NYT and Vox articles on the Ferguson Effect reminds me that so much of modern "reporting" and "fact-checking" is about determining who has the right or wrong vibes or context, rather than the facts.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1541507378805440513?cxt=HHwWgoC8xeayxOQqAAAA
There was a point brought up earlier, regarding causal factors, and it seemed quite persuasive to me as a mechanism: if the black community, due to the protests (and the various grotesque murders that served to catalyze various BLM protest waves), began to perceive the police as less trustworthy, this would increase the homicide rate because homicide is correlated to distrust in institutions. It would also explain why the increase is largely confined to the black community.
The police arbitrate violent disputes. If your friend gets shot, if you're in a community with a functioning relationship with the police, the police investigate, find and arrest the perpetrator and put them in prison. If you don't trust the police and dont rely on them to deal with it, you're more likely to get revenge personally and violently.
Retaliations drive a lot of gang violence.
https://www.city-journal.org/retaliatory-gang-violence
So there is a possible causation.
This is extremely silly reasoning. You think gangs would prefer to deal with things thru the police by proxy if only they could trust those mean police? fucking hell, cmon.
I think it's plausible that in practice, having the police deal with shootings will lead to less revenge violence. Anything that decreases the extent to which the police can do that - whether it's fewer police officers, less community coperation with the police force, an unwillingness to call 911 etc. - will lead to more revenge violence. I'm not convinced that my comment explains it all, but it fits the time line and could explain some.
I'd think this effect would be less important for homicide than other crimes. I mean, however little you trust or like the police, you're probably going to call them if someone gets murdered or is trying to murder you.
So an increase in murders after the BLM protests is an indication of reduced policing. Because there is NO possible causal path between the BLM protests (or the events that provoked them) and increased murder, except for reduced policing.
And BLM and the pandemic are the only possible causes for an increase in murder in black communities, so if it doesn't look like the pandemic, it must be BLM.
You are better than that.
What other causal path are you claiming?
And why else would there be a sudden spike in murders in May 2020 in particular?
I don't have to name any causal paths; YOU have to exclude the possibility of any other causal path. There are probably thousands of things that COULD have caused it.
This commenter is banned. You will question whether this was really worth a ban, but in fact, you can't prove that it was because of this post. There are thousands of things that could have caused it!
No, that's not the way thinking works at all.
So by this standard, Scott should identify every possible discrete solution to the distribution, with no statistical weight on likelihood, solve chaos theory, and toss out the prevailing ideological dichotomous idea-space status quo in favor of universal epoché before admitting defeat?
Cartesian doubt can be useful, but it doesn't have to be universal and it certainly shouldn't hold as a bulwark against the preponderance of evidence. Scott identified a domain in which there has been some political squabbling over which one of two broadly defined arguments is correct, proved that one (the pandemic explanation) was extremely unlikely, and provided further supporting statistical evidence in favor of the alternative (the BLM/depolicing argument). Sure, you can argue that the interaction of the pandemic and the depolicing movement was far more potent than depolicing by itself, but it is the latter that is inextricable from the causal chain. The pandemic, in isolation, had no significant, widespread effect on murder rates in other areas.
An example: if I were to try and analyze the principal cause of global energy inflation in 2022, I have a couple extant arguments to choose from, preselected in terms of prominence by the idea marketplace; that the principal cause is supply chain constraints, aggravated by the pandemic and corporate greed, or that the principal cause is sanctions on Russia, limiting their ability to sell natural gas and oil into the international market. These arguments are not perfectly bounded -- there is plenty of possible overlap between them -- but they provide a useful initial basis for analysis. Whether there is more evidence for the former explanation or the latter, it would be counterproductive and extraordinarily selective to respond to a long post providing that analysis that the analysis is useless and a third, orthogonal explanation is more likely (and no you will not explain what it is).
Another pathway to more black-on-black murders during the celebrated racial reckoning is the same one that led to more traffic fatalities among blacks during the same period: confidence and exuberance. When the media decides, as it did in the summer 2020, to capitalize "Black" but not "white", that sure says something about who is top dog.
How would we distinguish between "police retreat to the donut shop" and "black exuberance?" Increased crime and car accidents are consistent with both theories. Is there some observation we could make that would be consistent with one and not the other?
Theoretically, blacks might have self-policed themselves more than normal after George Floyd's death so that the retreat to the donut shop wouldn't have mattered, but that clearly didn't happen.
I read scores of op-eds in the national press after May 25, 2020 about how blacks were in mourning for George Floyd and were terrified of the police and so forth, all of which would logically suggest they'd stay home. But then I'd turn on the local if-it-bleeds-it-leads local TV news and watch hours of live footage of ecstatic mobs looting fashionable sneaker stores in West Hollywood. And then I'd read police blotter items about one dead and eight wounded in a mass shooting at a block party in South-Central. And then I'd look up on Gun Violence Archive and see that mass shootings of at least 4 victims struck by bulletts (which are typically at black social events) were up about 50%.
Yeah I literally spent like 10 minutes trying to figure out what you were getting at, and whatever it is, it's not obvious
But what was causing the increase in murders? Just the reduction in police presence? I wish we had some data on the situation surrounding the murder. Was it drug gang violence, domestic violence, robbery, etc.
It was widely predicted, not unreasonably, that domestic murders would soar during lockdowns, but that didn't happen. Instead, mass shooting at black social events exploded as did black traffic fatalities.
3 things I would say:
-The difference between an assault and a homicide is often the speed and quality of medical care provided - anything that reduced 911 efficiency/usage or interfered with ambulances and hospitals will increase the homicide rate.
-These numbers all come from police reports on number of homicides, we have no 'objective' count of homicides. And the numbers just happened to be overwhelmingly flattering to the people producing the numbers.
-A community without police is a community that has to handle criminal justice on it's own. Historically, communities without a strong criminal justice system have had much higher homicide rate as there's no other mechanism to protect yourself from an aggressor or punish a criminal available. It's not clear that you shouldn't *want* the homicide rate to go up if you remove police from a community, assuming some of those victims are people the police would have arrested otherwise and would have been victimizing people if left alone.
Generally if a police report shows x homicides, it's because for each of them there is a body, and the police are looking for a killer. If there isn't a body, it's going to be hard to go to court to prove homicide.
So these will be undercounts, and if the police are doing less then the undercount will be more severe. Balancing that is that if someone actually calls the police for the body, they are going to investigate.
There may be a few poisoning murders in which the murderer flat out gets away with nobody noticing the dead person was murdered. Same for a few other detective novel quality crimes.
But virtually all shootings are going to wind up being counted as homicides and most of them as murders unless the killers make the body completely vanish like Jimmy Hoffa.
+1
Someone is going to find a dead guy with a bunch of bulletholes in him, and they're going to call the cops.
The FBI reports murders from law enforcement sources.
The CDC reports homicides from health sources.
The CDC figures are always larger than the FBI figures, but they tend to go up and down quite closely together.
The CDC uses typical modern race-ethnic terminology (Hispanic, non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, etc.) The FBI has a problem with some police departments still classify most Hispanics as white like they did in 1960 when Hispanics wanted to be white. So FBI numbers work best as black or nonblack, but that is pretty useful.
The FBI has data on both victims and on perps charged or accused in cleared cases. The CDC has data on just victims, but it's pretty complete.
I suspect that attempts to claim the spike began in March in order to avoid political blame are specious, but I also have to question your implicit assumption that a spike due to covid would necessarily begin in March. What if it took a couple months for lockdowns to make everyone crazy? That could explain both the severity of the riots AND the murder spike.
As I said, I think BLM riots ARE the primary cause. My point isn't that they aren't ... just that even if the cause WERE covid, it wouldn't necessarily have begun in March just as the lockdowns started.
Not enough blacks in UK, Germany, and Denmark for Black Lives Matter to matter.
Why would it happen so suddenly, though?
An analogy: I shoot a target. Why did it get shot? Is it because I pulled the trigger, or because I loaded the gun and took aim at the target?
The pandemic takes aim, and the riots are the trigger, causing sudden action.
I do think the pandemic clearly added to social unrest, and in a counterfactual where there’s no pandemic, the protests would been less widespread and so less influential. They still would have happened though, so I’ll amend my analogy to say that the general undercurrent of societal unrest in America keeps the gun loaded and pointing at the target, while the pandemic nudged it closer to the bulls-eye. The anti-police riots and subsequent fallout are still the trigger.
Minor nitpick on the German murder graph - it looks like this is a graph of "Mord" (murder) as opposed to "Totschlag" (killing), which are separate offences in Germany. Shooting someone because you're angry with them, which is presumably what we're talking about with most of the murder spike here, would be Totschlag. Mord requires the crime to be evil in some sense (eg. treacherous, for the purpose of eating the corpse, committed with poison etc.).
The total rate for both in 2020 was 2,401, which was a 3.7% increase. (https://www.dw.com/en/germany-records-increase-in-murder-and-child-abuse-cases/a-57217668)
Thanks, I've edited this in.
Would the English words be "manslaughter" vs. "murder"?
(Disclaimer: IANAL, jurisdictions vary, etc.)
Not really; "Totschlag" incompletely overlaps both "manslaughter" and "murder".
In modern German law, the Mordmerkmale (murder characteristics), any one of which is sufficient to make an (unlawful) intentional killing Mord, are 1. a 'base motive' (bloodlust, regular lust, greed), 2. a reprehensible manner ('insidiousness', particular cruelty, danger to the public), or 3. intent to facilitate or conceal another crime. Any other intentional killing is Totschlag.
Anglophone common-law manslaughter generally comprises involuntary manslaughter (unintentional killing, e.g. by negligence or recklessness or as a result of the commission of certain other crimes) and voluntary manslaughter (intentional killing under 'adequate' provocation). Totschlag requires intent to kill, so it can't be involuntary manslaughter, but it's indifferent to provocation, so it can be either voluntary manslaughter or murder.
Switchnode's comment is exactly right. The better analogy is first degree vs second degree murder in the US, but Mord is still drawn differently (and generally narrower) than most states' first degree murder statutes. Totschlag is treated a bit more like voluntary manslaughter than murder in terms of seriousness/sentencing though (eg. never/rarely life imprisonment).
Unlike most people who are reading this piece and might bring it up, I would like to say that I think the new blue color for the site is nice and feels less generic and more intentional than the previous white background.
I am also starting to like it.
I dislike it - it tends to clash with images with white backgrounds, including the many graphs that are frequently presented.
I'm using stylebot to disable it with the following site specific filter:
div.comments-page {
background-color: #ffffff;
}
div.topbar-content {
background-color: #ffffff;
}
div.single-post-container {
background-color: #ffffff;
}
form div textarea {
background-color: #ffffff;
}
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbmkiecgbjeifoejpgmdaleoha?hl=en-US
I concur.
Minor gripe: I don't think the phrase "clear evidence" should be used in cases where there's been no attempt to actually isolate a causal effect (e.g. using a convincing differences-in-differences or instrumental variables approach, or an observational approach with a real claim to causality). The methodology this article uses could provide, *at best*, somewhat weak evidence.
Major gripes: making causal claims from time series data is really, really hard, and econometricians put a lot of effort into thinking about how to do it well. This article doesn't do any of that, and the genre "rationalist wades into ongoing academic debate without avoiding any of the pitfalls the field is already aware of" worries me epistemically.
Some specifics: many of your graphs don't show what you say that show, at least not clearly enough to count as evidence. A graph which is increasing before the event isn't evidence that the event had an effect, *even if you have a story to explain why the pretrend exists*. (It isn't evidence that the event had no effect either. It just means you can't make a convincing causal claim from it.) Similarly, the story you give to the Chicago police presence graph doesn't make that graph into evidence either -- you could come up with a similar-sounding story for pretty much any random walk.
To make an "it happened in place X but not Y" claim causal, you need evidence that X and Y would have otherwise responded the same to an outside shock. This doesn't work with America and any other country in crime (so many guns! no reason to assume the pandemic would have the same effect!), and also doesn't work with the black/other races response to the pandemic (black communities were hit much, much harder!).
It's methodologically very, very hard to distinguish "the protests caused this" from "the pandemic caused a huge increase but the first few months also had a large decrease because people were stuck inside" or "the pandemic caused a huge increase but only during the summer because that's when crime usually spikes" or something similar. Doing this right would be dozens of pages of econometrics, not a handful of graphs.
tl;dr there's causal evidence that policing reduces crime, but the spikes in this article would be much larger than any of the well-identified evidence. (I'd expect maybe a 10% increase at most?) I have no idea whether or not that's because they in fact very large, or because they're the results of other causes, but I don't think this article provides strong evidence that they're the result of the protests.
Upvote.
Thank you. I like Scotts article, but comments like yours are one of the reasons I like ACX even more.
Interesting comment, but you are arguably too purist here. There are three ladders of “causal purism”:
(1) A true purist (i.e. an extreme positivist) would say that all talk of causality is nonsense, since we do not observe causality – we just observe if something follows after something else in time (re: grandfather Hume). “Causality” is an interpretive act, it is not something we can observe (re: Kant and his people). And since causality cannot be observed, talk of causality is an act of metaphysics, not (empirical) science (Wien-style positivists). And since metaphysics = nonsense (according to the same philosophers), all talk of an eventual causal relationship between the Floyd incident and homicide rates is nonsense.
(2) A next-ring-of-the-ladder purists are those saying that only controlled experiments can detect causality (the hard-nosed core of the evidence-based science people).
Unless we had set up an experiment to let the police kill Floyd (or someone similar) while having an exact equal city where we avoided them killing an exact similar guy, plus were able to deal with all the fish hooks in a controlled experiment (double blind etc.), we can never be certain of causality. Since we do not have any such experiments, all talk of “causality” in this case is at best imprecise-ordinary-language-concept use, at worst nonsense (see above).
(Then there are the “natural experiment we are lucky enough to detect is sufficient” – people, but since that appears not to be possible with the data we have on this one, we end with the same conclusion.)
(3) Third ring of the ladder, where you seem to be: bring in the diff-in-diff approach, and/or Pearl/Glymour type causal path analysis, or some other econometric stuff.
My hunch is that these approaches, like (2) are also not possible to use in this case, due to lack of adequate data to do these types of analyses. (Digression: Which we often do not have in the social sciences, and even less if we consider all the innumerable possible causal relationships that ordinary people try to deal with in their everyday lives).
Summa summarum: If you are a purist, you can shoot down everything most people everywhere do when they talk about “causality”.
My defense of Scott-type analyses would be that a) the ideal should not be the enemy of the good; b) we must run with the best observations/data we have got, here in the best of all possible (data) worlds; c) you can do a pretty good “ordinary language use is actually ok” - philosophical defense of the ordinary-language use of the concept “causality”; c) eyeballing, combined with intelligent discussion of possible causes/”mechanisms” behind the eyeballed statistical pattern, is actually a fairly good way to reach “fairly certain” conclusions.
…noticing that we can never be more that “fairly certain” of anything at all, that happens under the sky; including the fallout from Floyd’s murder.
Partly due to (1), but also because all talk of “causality” (including Pearl/Glymour talk & diff-in-diff & econometrics), if the causal mechanism is supposed to run through how people interpret a situation, will always run into the fundamental empirical problem that how people (in this case: the police & other criminals) interpret a situation, is not observable.
We cannot observe interpretations, we can only observe behavior (due to a combo of the “other minds” problem and the hard problem of consciousness). That is also why Scott ends up with four possible “mechanisms” through which the Floyd murder may have influenced police interpretations & subsequent behavior (and there may be more, you can literally never know).
I guess this comment is above-average nerdy (as people say these days), but it is always fun to wade into the philosophical debate of what “causality” means, in particular when humans are
involved, and your comment provided me with an opportunity to do so😊.
There's a lot I agree with here, especially the ability of too much methods purism to shoot down any claim whatsoever.
I think my main disagreement here would be with (c), but in a way I don't know how to communicate to another person -- after some econometrics training and a significant amount of time watching economics seminars and working on my own research, I have seen many, many graphs like this and convincing-sounding discussion of possible mechanisms that completely fell apart when subjected to real statistical scrutiny. So my personal experience is that "how convincing your eyeballs and the causal story sound" is not a good measure of whether the underlying claim is true.
I think maybe what you're missing as a 'rationality outsider' is that Scott is claiming something more like 'this is the best model AFAIK' instead of 'this is as solid and convincing a theory as any other scientific theory' (which itself is silly).
I think "real statistical scrutiny" would be great for this issue tho!
So how would we test the theory? We have two big shocks (covid and the Floyd protests). They both hit at about the same time across the country.
A couple random ideas (but I don't know if this is useful):
a. If this is tied to the size/duration/intensity of local protests (protest -> police pullback -> more crime), then we should see a correlation between how serious the local protests were and how big the impact was on murder rates. But this is going to be confounded with a bunch of other stuff, like prior crime rate and size of your poor black population.
b. If the mechanism of action we propose is that police pull back because they're afraid of getting sent to jail or fired, then could we find places where that was a more vs less plausible threat? I'm not sure how we'd measure that, but if police in one city are more worried about being prosecuted/fired for anything going wrong than police in another city, this would be a useful variable.
c. We could look at different cities that had local protests about police killings of blacks over the years that didn't go national, and see if there's a Ferguson effect overall.
This is a great comment! Thanks :)
I think you're applying FAR too stringent of a standard.
+++ for this comment. It’s shocking and disappointing that someone with a medical degree would publish even a blog post with assertions about causality and “evidence” based on time-series data (and without supporting data for the logical model underlying the claim!). Sad.
Do I get any kudos or credibility for having predicted the spike in print? Of course it was police pull-back, with possibly some community withdrawal.
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/09/and-now-we-wait-for-the-bodies-to-fall/
It built off an earlier piece of mine, taking a much more long-term look at homicide patterns in African-American communities in the US.
https://areomagazine.com/2019/04/09/bravado-in-the-absence-of-order-homicide-and-race-talk/
Yes, although for top marks you really need to have a Prediction Log: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,11.0.html
I'm surprised you think there's enough evidence here to confidently state that the pandemic had so little effect. Is your view that had the BLM protests occurred without the pandemic then we would have seen a similar homicide spike? Why can't both the protests and the pandemic be important factors? Why can't the pandemic have potentiated the protests and their knock-on effects?
You cite the timing of the homicide spike vs the beginning of the pandemic many times, but that's unconvincing to me. The beginning of the pandemic was characterized by widespread lockdowns and much less activity. It was also still pretty cold in many northern cities. As you said yourself, murder rates often spike with warmer weather--couldn't the pandemic plus warmer weather potentially explain the timing? (And yes ALSO the protests?)
I also don't think it's useful to compare the US with other countries--other countries have very different homicide rates to begin with (and different social safety nets, and had different responses to the pandemic, and different gun laws, etc). To say this proves the pandemic wasn't a factor in the US specifically seems questionable.
In general I think it's harder to disentangle the various factors here than you claim.
Look at the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore, which show a spike in murders starting exactly at the time of the protests then, in the same way there's a spike in murders starting exactly at the time of the George Floyd protests in 2020. If it had just been warming up during the pandemic, the spike would have ramped up gradually throughout April and May, with the temperature. There is a slight pattern showing that effect (though no larger than the April/May temperature increase every other year), but then a separate very large spike in late May/early June, which is the phenomenon we're trying to explain here.
Also, I predict the gradual April/May rise was the same for all racial groups, but again, the main spike seems to have very disproportionately affected blacks.
I hear you, but you're making a stronger claim than I am--that a) the protests caused subsequent de-policing and b) this de-policing was the principal cause of the spike in homicide rates. I'm merely saying that the pandemic and the warm weather AND the protests likely all had an effect (which is what other sources are also saying it sounds like). I don't see strong evidence in this post or this comment that refute the claim that the pandemic/economic and sociological effects likely potentiated the protests/violence/homicides.
To make your case stronger, I'd love to see an analysis of depolicing vs homicide rates pre-pandemic, something that I think is missing from your post here (you explore this a little, but don't conduct the thorough analysis I think such a question deserves). See this article "Did de-policing cause the increase in homicide rates?" which analyzes rates of arrests vs categories of crime and finds "no evidence of an effect of arrest rates on city homicide rates for any offense category for any year in this period, including 2015, the year of the spike in homicide levels." (https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12414). Notably, they found that arrest rates had been decreasing for several years prior to Ferguson, and the drop after Ferguson was not out of step with that existing trend. You can sort of see this in the Economist graph you posted as well.
At the very least I think it points to a more nuanced picture than "protests caused depolicing caused more homicides"
Homicide rates have stayed elevated beyond warm weather months: https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Screen-Shot-2022-06-26-at-3.19.36-PM.png
The term "spike" is misleading people. We have instead a "plateau" of higher levels of homicide extending through late 2021, the latest month for which we have CDC homicide data.
Why is the discussion of possible causes restricted to covid vs. BLM?
Why not argue that the fervid election of 2020 contributed?
There was a definite "by any means necessary" attitude among elites in 2020. NYT editor Dean Baquet reassured the NYT staff in 2019 that the failure of the NYT's Plan A to dump Trump, Russiagate, just meant they'd keep rolling out Plan B, Racism.
Much of the media and the Democratic party seemed convinced for much of the summer of 2020 that the "racial reckoning" was going to doom Trump, at least up through the Kenosha riots in later August. What are hundreds of riots and thousands of murder compared to the cost of four more years of Trump? Especially when you control the megaphone and can relabel riots as "mostly peaceful protests." I didn't notice the Democrats and media turning definitely against rioting until late October when the Philadelphia riot almost cost Biden that important state. By late October it was clear the media and the Democrats wanted the rioters to go home, but that sure took a long time ...
The more striking data is how wildly successful Mass Incarceration was at reducing murder (and likely other) crime from 1994-2012
Idk, what are your thoughts on the lead-crime hypothesis?
As applied to 1970-1994 crime explosion era, I'm not sure ? Many generations were exposed previously, so not totally sold it was THE major causation. I was shocked to just learn Benjamin Franklin (and most) found it dangerous in the 1700's !! We sure took our time banning it. I think that the combination of Baking Soda & Cocaine had a bigger effect on people....and of course the reaction to that was even bigger. Massive Social Upheaval is a common denominator that seems present at the beginnings of the last surge and the current one.
Leaded gasoline was added to the us in the 1950's so, no, previous generations were not exposed.
1920's actually. Dupont Corp. Known as "Loony" gas. It was bad. But I was speaking to lead in paint, inside houses. Breathing in and in some cases kids chomping on peeling paint. Can only assume these were the pasta eaters as well 😂
Aerosolized inhaled lead in big cities was not nearly as avoidable as the paint and people weren't aware of the risk
It certainly could be, although it feels crazier today with minimal amounts dispersed that way. I tend to think violence is within us, A remnant of...what we were. It breaks out sometimes, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Europe, here. I think it's within us, and can get unleashed with the right (wrong?) conditions.
In the 1934 novel "Studs Lonigan," the Chicago blue collar main characters debate whether the high wages earned by house painters is worth the getting stupider from the lead paint. So people have been aware of the dangers of lead for a long time.
This is one of the things I always love to point out. you find modern people make these weird points always where say coal miners in the 1890s or early 1900s didn't know being a coal miner was dangerous or was bad for you. "if only we had known then what we know now".
No there was not a medicalized explicit definition of what the exact harm vector was, that isn't the same thing.
The people at the time ABSOLUTELY were generally aware of the risks and making tradeoffs, they might not have had all the information, but people rarely do. You see this with concussions too. In the 1980s people would regularly talk about boxers getting "punch drunk", and how hockey players don't want to get their "bell rung" too often because it will permanently fuck you up and ruin your life.
Then we discover the specific mechanism in the early 2000s and suddenly everyone acts like no one knew it was bad for you. It is literally sort of the Ministry of Truth, people re-writing history to make their currently policy goals more palatable.
It couldn't have been that people in the past were weighing costs and benefits and made different choices than we do now (perhaps due to lower life expectancies and standard of living), nope they just didn't know. Ignorant babies we could have saved with modern knowledge.
In fairness to "everyone" (else), having a nice 'concept handle' (i.e. word/phrase) for something _is_, for them, very much like 'the thing suddenly existing' and then, probably via the 'illusion of transparency', people readily generalize to 'no one knew about this until now'.
Having a word for something definitely helps you think about it. That's why in "1984" the Party is eliminating words. Like Orwell, I'm a soft Whorfian about words. The more the better.
If lead had had such a large effect on crime, it would also have had an effect on IQ over the same period, but actually population IQ increased with increased lead in the environment, then plateaued when lead was banned and has since been decreasing with virtually no lead left. I'm not claiming that lead leads to higher IQ, only that it is unlikely that lead would have an effect on crime and no effect on something we know how to measure well and that should be affected more and more directly.
Also, the cohorts that saw decreased crime starting in 1994 were NOT the 20 year olds but the older cohorts. So not the people who had never been exposed to lead. Likewise, since lead was banned in the early 1970s (?) shouldn't we see a reduction before 1994? Unless any amount of lead while the mother was pregnant has a strongly non-linear effect, but then it is the 20yo cohort that should have been less violent and actually they were in 1993/1994 the most violent cohort in several decades.
Your points and questions are totally valid. As a counter argument I would note many (even most) houses built prior to 1974? are likely to have leaded paint, sometimes several layers beneath the layers put down since the ban. Every time you buy a house you have to sign the document acknowledging it is there.
My impression is that the banning-leaded-gasoline-cut-crime theory fits the data better than the famous abortion-cut-crime theory.
But I'd like somebody to look at specific sites of lead pollution and local crime rates, such as the opening and closing of a lead smelter.
Like almost all things, Crime likely has 10+ factors. I do feel that Mass Incarceration was extremely effective (and incredibly heavy-handed) in reducing it. It only makes sense that if you lock up massive amounts of 3 Felony people you will be removing people more likely to repeat & escalate. The 1990's version will not likely return, but if current trends continue I can see 2024 as the beginning of a new, possibly more focused version.
Learning about the lead-crime hypothesis for the first time via Kevin Drum was a major update to my entire world view in several ways.
1. Before that I had assumed everything in sociology must be extremely complex and confounded and only explainable by a large number of factors. Now I am much more amenable to relatively monocausal explanations of societal phenomena.
2. I am now much more worried about ultra long term effects of drugs and environment chemicals that are very difficult to detect even with careful studies. The hypothesized lead-effect on crime has a more than 20-years delay (although, to be fair, there was plenty of evidence for other negative effects of lead which should have led to a ban much earlier).
3. I now distrust the disdain social scientists often have for biological and other reductionist explanations. I think the fact that criminologists have for so long all but ignored the lead-crime hypothesis is a symptom of a wider pathology where such explanations are viewed as vulgar and simple-minded at best and reactionary and outright immoral at worst. This probably has do to with a defensiveness (akin to economists' "physics envy") towards a perceived threat of being taken over and rendered obsolete by natural scientists and their methods. The "backlash" (see, I can do that, too!) to such perceived imperialism manifests itself in postmodern theories according to which all those threatening rigorous scientific results are really just social constructs emanating from the power structures of that patriarchal project called "science".
As a result, I would for example not be surprised at all if it was found that some as of yet unidentified chemical(s) were found to be a major contributor to the massive societal shifts we currently see around gender identity. There is a lot of evidence by now that phtalates used to soften plastics affect fertility and possibly sexual differentiation; Ibuprofen is now suspected to negatively affect the fertility of a pregnant's woman's daughter (!).
At the same time I am quite sure that such research would - fallaciously - be discarded or even be regarded as offensive by a significant part of the population.
Another data point: Miami neither had widespread riots or a major defund the police movement. (Or at least if there was one it didn't succeed.) There were peaceful protests but there was minimal rioting. Miami does have a significant Black population too. Violent crime decreased while arrests went up representing (at least according to the local politicians) the police interrupting people trying to commit crimes. This is despite not having as much of a weather change or sticking people indoors as long and having pretty widespread gun ownership and a long history of organized crime. (Seriously, it's Miami. It's still a major drug port.)
Anecdotally I lived near a lot with a lot of high end cars. The police basically had some officers watching it full time and they'd arrest a few attempted car jackers a day during the first few weeks of the protests. After a week or two the thieves (but not the protests) died down. Either due to thieves taking the hint or literally removing them from the streets. If there was a pullback I didn't notice it. If anything it seemed like the police were more active.
HUGE factor. I sure hope we learned that allowing rage past 7-10 days is really just surrendering to the mob. The "new" way of handling riots (namely, allowing them) was a massive failure on par with Defund!! and we should never try that again.
You are assuming that the goal is public safety and not to advance other social and political goals. The most benefit of the doubt I am able to summon is that people that thought the continuing protests would advance their personal socio/political goals ALSO believed that public safety would not suffer due to the insidious effects of motivated reasoning.
While I would agree that it basically started that way it devolved rapidly, and obviously, to anyone familiar with 1968 or 1992.
The biggest blunder was the Covid Flip-Flop. Having gone from being telling everyone that going to the park or paddle-boarding was possibly "Literally Murder™️" , Govt and Media destroyed their belief in Science in plain view, enabling the deteriorating actions in the streets, and sowing the seeds for all that followed these past 2 years.
Someone should make a list of "uncomfortable facts that the right/left media don't want you to know, that are actually backed by solid evidence".
Not really any incentive to make such a list because the relevant groups will treat you the same either way
Not quite what you're asking for: https://archive.ph/LRe05
"Here are about 700 hatefacts (politically incorrect but true statements) on Islam, race, gender relations, ethnocentrism, diversity, and more."
Perusing, some seem reputable. Some questionable. Wonder how many survive replication attempts or remain compelling under assault. Not clear that the entire set isn't just a mix of cherry picking. Still interesting, thanks for the share.
It's blatantly cherrypicking.
Some are clearly false. One of the claimed facts is "Two-thirds of men and women who were homosexual change their orientation to heterosexual five years later"
Not quite what you're asking for, but your comment reminds me to share something I thought of when reading Scott's piece itself: overall, NYT reporting isn't thoroughly biased.
I've found a few hot-button examples. Would these have been reported by a thoroughly biased paper?
"Some recent robberies — in which large groups rush into a store, overwhelm employees and flee in cars before the police can respond — recall the looting that occurred across the country amid protests after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. At that time, people took advantage of police departments stretched by the protests and ransacked hundreds of stores, including the Macy’s in Herald Square and many smaller retailers, causing millions of dollars in damage." (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/business/retailers-robberies-theft.html)
"Prominent Latino nonprofit and civil rights organizations endorsed the affirmative action proposition even as all 14 of California’s majority-Latino counties voted it down." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/us/liberals-race.html)
"School closures have hit the mental health and academic achievement of nonwhite children the hardest, but many of the families that education leaders have said need in-person education the most are most wary of returning." (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/us/politics/school-reopening-black-families.html)
"New York became the last of the nation’s 10 largest cities to elect a Black mayor." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/nyregion/david-dinkins-dead.html)
For now, the NYT remains a high-quality general news source. It is best read in conjunction with a variety of other sources with differing editorial lines. (That said, to the extent that I know who is who, I have a vague impression that millennial NYT reporters' reporting is on average worse in every way than boomer reporters'.)
I don't know if that's the case with your examples, but Steve Sailer has pointed out that the NYT often includes inconvenient facts but bury them far down in their articles under mountains of tedium.
In general, NYT reporters don't like murder and arson, especially not in New York.
Scott's been making this list for years! :)
As one of the people who questioned your attribution in the previous article, this post causes me to take a significant update in the direction of your thesis. I'm still not totally convinced, primarily because causal inference on observational data is incredibly hard, but the evidence you present here is better than evidence I've seen presented in favor of other points of view.
I also think I was more importantly wrong on a meta point. Part of the reason I questioned your assertion is because I thought something like "this is just the sort of thumb in the eye of sanctimonious establishment media that would be catnip for Scott", so I thought it was likely that you would be biased on the subject and may be making overstated claims on questionable data. While I still think you may have some bias here, I also think your conclusion is honestly arrived at with proper consideration, and I regret any implication of unvirtuousness in my previous comment.
Yay for updating! :)
And extra 'yay' for describing your own reasoning. You're a great example of one of the things I love about Scott, his blog, and (some of) the commenters he attracts.
I predict a spike in comments elsewhere in what used to be called the blogosphere to the effect that "once again Scott Alexander has shown his true colors and good people everywhere will denounce him and never read him again."
Meh – who's left to denounce him _now_?
I appreciate your analysis here, but there were numerous points that left me rather confused. First, "A priori there’s no reason to expect the pandemic to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group" — no? the lowest income groups in the US are blacks, Native Americans, and latinos. All of these had an uptick in the homocide rate during the pandemic (e.g. chart you present midway down). An entirely plausible alternative hypothesis is that lockdowns pushed people in low income groups into more dire economic situations, and this lead to more murders. It seems all non-white/non-asian groups had a rise in homocide rates that you're ignoring here, and class is an obvious potential confounder.
Second, a huge problem in the "Effects of other Protests" section is that protests are perfectly confounded with the underlying event perceived as a huge social injustice worth of mass protest. There are many possible causal hypotheses here, two that come to mind are:
(1) death by police → protest about policing → policy of reduced policing → more homocide/crime
(2) protest about policing ← death by police → less trust in social and government institutions, less prosocial behavior → more homocide/crime
Increase in homocides could be (1) alone, or (2)'s right path alone, or (2)'s left and right paths, or (2)'s left and right paths, with the left path also going along (1)'s entire chain to also lead to more homocide (it's hard to draw DAGs here, so hopefully this makes sense). The point is that death by police and protest are coupled, so it is nearly impossible to disentangle "the effect of protests" from "the effect of less trust in social institutions less prosocial behavior because of police murder". So I think the claim "If Black Lives Matters protests can cause homicide spikes, we would expect to see one around this time also" isn't alone sufficient, because it fails to control for the upstream cause of the protests. In reality, I bet it's both — protests reduce policing, reduced policing changes the economics of crime a bit, and less trust in our social institutions leads to more antisocial behavior. But I wouldn't be so quick to blame protests as much as what caused the protests. Protests could act primarily through an interaction in that they spread awareness of police murder and that reduces social trust much more quickly and widely than without protest.
Regardless, I do agree it is rather unfortunate the media covers these issues with such heavy partisan lenses, and not as a really tricky social problem with unknown causes that we should really work hard to understand, so we can try to have some idea of a sensible intervention.
If Vox and NYT tacitly admit the Ferguson effect is real, you better believe its real.
“The Ferguson effect” is a correlational claim, not a causal claim. Is it awareness of police misconduct that causes crime? Is it protest that causes crime? Is it police dislike of protest that causes crime?
Isn't it called an "effect" precisely because it's a causal claim? The nature of the cause may be argued about, but it's not supposed to just be a correlation.
Hmm, interesting point. It's true that the word "effect" suggests a causal claim. But I've never heard anything in particular attributed as the cause (increased violence, decreased police presence, something else, all of which might be contributing factors). I think it's common to talk about "effect sizes" even for correlations where one suspects they are common effects of some unknown cause.
In any case, correlations usually do indicate *some* causal connection, just not always in the direction that one might initially hypothesize.
A could be correlated with B because C causes both.
Exactly the sort of thing I mean.
Yes, the "no reason to expect the pandemic to hit blacks much harder" line definitely raised an eyebrow for me, since that was one of the big talking points during the point when we were actively doing something about the pandemic. I would expect it to hit blacks harder, just as I would expect it to hit Native Americans harder. And yes, there's an increase in Native American murders, which is dismissed as being random.
The charts you show reinforce my distaste for rolling average plots. They often confuse when the effect actually happens. That's particularly a problem when you're trying to tease out causation, which is often what those plots are used for!
If you think your data has some artificial noise or periodicity, try leaving it in and just labeling it! I think you'll find that most people can figure that out.
A 7 day rolling average causes lag that can be adjusted (after the fact) by moving the graph back 3 days, so each data point is compared to the three days on either side. (You can't do this in real time because you don't have future data yet.) This seems to be rarely done, though.
Also, I haven't seen the proof, but here's a claim in a digital signal processing textbook that moving average is optimal at removing random white noise from a signal: http://www.dspguide.com/ch15/2.htm
It's not optimal for adjusting for non-random noise, though. If you have a model, like weekly effects or weather effects, you can do better.
I think a factor that's been overlooked is fiscal stimulus contributing to gray market demand for firearms. I've been through the legal system twice (once during and once 5 years before pandemic), and this time it def seemed like the judges were having a strong reaction specifically to the prevalence of guns at the time. Imo, everyone having more money at the same time really raises the perceived value of having a gun (either for greed or protection), and this could explain why there aren't similar spikes in countries where guns aren't readily available
Do you have evidence people had more disposable income (when job losses were at their highest)?
Disposable income spiked in April 2020, and in January and March of 2021 (the stimulus checks, and unemployment insurance) and is only just now getting down to the levels of late 2019.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96
That also could contribute to the rise in traffic fatalities: e.g., lots of people stopped paying rent in 2020, so they had money to get a car. E.g., Los Angeles' Latino community spent an insane amount of money on July 4, 2020 on illegal fireworks.
> But there are lots of reasons to expect that the Black Lives Matter protests would cause police to pull back from black communities in particular.
Here's data on arrests by race: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/arrest
2019 -> 2020
Whites: 5,236,036 -> 3,771,245 (28% decrease)
Blacks: 2,063,765 -> 1,413,290 (32% decrease)
Thanks.
I'm not following how depolicing leads to an immediate uptick in homicide. Petty crime, sure; robbery maybe; murder seems like a stretch. I agree impunity rates affect criminal behavior *on some time frame* but is the feedback that immediate? An alternative hypothesis is that the depolicing is a response to the uptick in crime caused by calls for black lawlessness combined with demoralization of policing. I would guess that the type of policing that falls the most is the kind of "circling the block in a police car type" of beat, not the difficult detective work and DA buy-in needed to bring someone in for homicide. (I know this firsthand: my brother was murdered in August 2020, and we're still fighting to get his killer arrested nearly two years later.) So I think Scott needs to go into more detail on the mechanism behind depolicing -> more murders. But I enjoyed the piece, and I agree that the NYT sucks on this.
Robocop was right!
Nominative determinism strikes again!
This seems way too surly and uncharitable. I'm pretty sympathetic towards people that 'don't want to believe' something. The truth _can_ hurt!
But the only long-term sustainable and effective way to change people's minds is to calmly and patiently point out where and how their 'models' fail to explain or predict whatever they cover.
And, in this specific case, they're probably just ignorant of important details about how policing works. I was too for a long time!
Matt Yglesias presented some evidence that main pathway for police -> crime is simple police presence; i.e. "police visibly driving around communities makes people more nervous about committing crimes", not something lengthier like "more police work means higher clearance rate means crime pays less." The feedback from a reduction in police presence seems like it could be really fast.
That's true it could be!
There's a party you want to go to, but there's a warrant out for your arrest on assault. If a cop pulls you over on the way, you'll spend a month in jail. Also, you kind of want to take your gun in case that guy you're beefing with shows up at the party. But if the cops pull you over and search you and find your illegal hand gun, you'll spend a couple of years in prison. So maybe you should stay home and watch the game on TV.
But now you hear that the cops aren't pulling people over much because they are all deployed on the Magnificent Mile to keep looters away. Plus, it's the racial reckoning and they don't want to be the next face of white supremacy.
OK, you're going to the party!
100% I think cops not being on the street and not responding to crimes gets out among the criminals VERY quickly.
Minneapolis went from normal, to armed bands of dudes showing up and pharmacies miles from any protests at 4PM on a weekday and ransacking them in less than a day. Once the police stopped doing anything other than defending a few key areas, violent crime exploded within hours.
Pinker talks about a police strike in Montreal when he was a kid. It took about 4 hours to progress from motorists changing lanes without putting on their blinkers to armed bank heists.
Concrete example: police pull over a car for, e.g. having a taillight out. The police have some suspicion, or know, that someone in the car is, e.g. a gang member. They search the car, or pat down the driver/occupants, and find a gun. Whomever's gun is taken is now less likely to murder if only because it's a little less convenient.
The NYPD terrified low lifes into not carrying their guns on the street and homicides dropped incredibly far.
Yeah – seems, by far, to be the best explanation.
A big part of policing is basically just 'hassling' the already-known criminals. That almost certainly provides _some_ 'pressure' that reduces all kinds of crimes, including murder.
100%. When I did a week of ride along in a rural area 20 years ago, the cops already knew ~95% of the homes we were called out to. Where/who the crimes were happening was not really a mystery. The mystery was in balancing between discouraging/de-escalating, and trying to nail people and get them in jail so that would stop causing trouble.
This is our fifth ride out to "Bobby-Joe's" trailer this year, maybe we should really try to find an way to lock him up this time.
That's what I've read/heard too.
And it makes a lot of sense if you think about how policing almost _has_ to work, 'mechanically'.
And people do know a great example of this, e.g. 'Al Capone being nailed for tax fraud'!
Great analysis. I think events turned the social tenor toward chaos, and people who are only marginally civil exploited the opportunity. Why are certain races victimized, certain properties targeted? Some blame the pandemic, global warming, colonialism, police abuse and murder of criminal suspects, racism, inflation, white supremacy, etc. If one is determined to act unmoored and/or violent, to dishonor the social contract, any excuse will do. Someone usually benefits from chaos.
The response time of the homicide effect to the protest "intervention" seems awfully fast - faster than I remember the politics moving. When did police departments actually start quitting or pulling back? One could imagine a more immediate effect of "the police are dealing with the protests and not other things", if your theory is that police presence is strongly preventative of crimes. In sports you often double-cover your opponent's star player, so #2 or #3 ends up getting more plays. Maybe it's as simple as the cops having steady-state capacity but not surge capacity.
But at least for homicides the picture still doesn't quite make sense. Even though the timing looks somewhat compelling, the motive is still muddy. Why does inter-racial grievance lead to a spike in intra-racial violence? Does police presence actually work? Are cooler heads who would ordinarily prevent this violence out at the protest? Are people deliberately taking advantage of the lapse in policing to go gunning for someone? Are people of their own race just close at hand when they get back from the protest with their blood still running hot? This seems like a critical part of the story to nail down for it to emerge into that respectable conversation and out of the fringe right.
I've been posting graphs showing what's going on with shootings since the summer of 2020. But I'm some kind of deplorable extremist who you know is a extreme deplorable because he downloads official statistics and makes graphs out of them.
And what is that hypothesis, exactly?
Cute. Why does depolicing instantly - if we believe Scott's charts - turn inter-racial animus into intra-racial violence? That link is not self-evident. Why would you expect that to happen? When wouldn't you expect it to happen? How do you double or halve the effect? Show me the 'physics'.
Let's try again: what assumptions and hypotheses are you holding that explain the phenomenon, precisely? Please share with the class.
And so the prospective criminals, what, keeping a spreadsheet of police car sightings before they shoot someone? Acting promptly, but only when the data is favorable to them? I wish I could hire engineers as rigorous as you think criminals are.
But, please, continue to insist that it's obvious why depolicing black people would have an effect of raising an unrelated crime rate, while not having that effect with white people, while refusing to say why it would be obvious. I'm sure it's a perfectly reasonable reason and not a bias of any sort.
>This seems like a critical part of the story to nail down for it to emerge into that respectable conversation and out of the fringe right.
No, it has absolutely nothing to do with that. The NYT articles show that even when the truth is obvious and right there, liberals willfully ignore it for ideological reasons. There is nothing 'fringe' about this from an epistemological perspective. If the left cared about the truth, this would be a common and accepted fact. And until then, no amount of evidence, no amount of 'nailing down' anything will convince these hyper-partisan ideologues.
Lol, as opposed to who? The right? Who believe that Trump won the 2020 election and that covid wasn’t real and that nothing notable happened on January 6th, 2021?
You reveal yourself to be a hyper-partisan ideologue with your vitriol.
It’s entirely possible to win over enough people that even most fringe lefties will be forced to acknowledge the truth, or at least shift in response to it. We’re discussing this on ACX, a pretty left-leaning space. A space that even has experience with the foibles of the NYT! ;) We’ve also seen arguments that do or don’t persuade, even on partisan issues, and believe they may persuade again.
The reason I had been skeptical of this argument when I’d heard it before is that it seemed on the surface to be Charlottesville and Covid whataboutism, tinged with racist assumptions, about BLM. Scott has produced enough evidence that I’m giving it a second look. The story still has a few big holes in it, though, and I would not feel comfortable trying to defend it beyond “yeah that’s a weird coincidence”. Is it a story widely about policing? Is it a story more narrowly about riots? Is it a story about community support networks?
If we can advance that explanation beyond far-right sneering about black-on-black violence and riot whataboutism, I could feel comfortable discussing it with friends and colleagues.
Yes, you are absolutely correct that the right is fucking crazy and confused and stupid. What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Edit: For what it's worth, Brett's comment definitely seems hostile, but frankly if he had toned it down it would have just felt deceptively neutral instead to me. It's also an important point. If your argument is that the people ignoring the evidence are just a very small fringe, then showing the linked NYT article is very enlightening counterevidence on that very specific issue. It is certainly relevant evidence for the issue being focused on.
For you to then turn about and say "well, the same or even worse is true of Fox news" feels very, very much like a non sequitur. Your comment had the effect of pushing me towards "wow, I guess Brett S is right". Not a whole lot, but a measurable amount. Because you're clearly articulate and intelligent, and instead of coming back with an explanation as to why the NYT writing what it did is *not* indicative of the argument that Brett S makes, you came back with an argument that Fox is even worse when it's pretty clear that nobody disputes that Fox is worse.
And I was inclined to be more charitable to you than Brett at the start!
Yeah the fact that FoxNews is garbage 50% of the time, misleading 40% of the time, and ok 10% of the time, doesn't give the NYT some pass for only hitting 10/45/45 on those marks.
I don't like arbitrary thresholds for accuracy shy of that which is needed to actually get things right, which IME is pretty hard to reliably hit even for determined, talented actors. Convincing someone to ditch the NYT might not be doing them a favor depending on what replaces it.
I think ideally it would be replaced by thinking for yourself? I have no problem with people who use the NYT or FoxNews, if they are approaching them to the requisite amount of skepticism.
John, I guess I found it hard to take Brett's argument of "look at this NYT article, it's proof of liberal bias" seriously in a liberal space with a bone to pick with the NYT. We're having this discussion because Scott - and now a number of us - found the evidence compelling enough to revisit despite our skepticism.
I agree that the NYT not infrequently has an agenda and lets it drive the story, and that's a failing and they should be skewered until their behavior improves. I didn't respond to his charge because I felt the burden was still on him to prove that the failings of the NYT prove some larger story about liberals, against the backdrop of liberals practicing steelmanning. After all, the case was about the evidence being so compelling that even ideologues were forced to admit the truth to their readers.
Personally, I was moved by this article from "yeah, right" to "huh, that's weird". Previously, I had heard people on the right tell a story whose punchline is "and this is why Black people are bad", and I've heard that from them before and learned to tune it out. But in this case, Scott showed that there really was an effect and the timelines line up enough to be worth further study. And I don't believe that Scott has a racial bias, but his story ends with some serious blanks. I personally won't be fully convinced until I can explain the "physics" of the phenomenon. Why did it happen here? Did it also happen after Charlottesville or Occupy Wall Street or other kinds of protests or rallies? Vaguely gesturing at a community and saying "yeah when they're mad at other people and we don't police them they suddenly get violent against each other" seems insufficient. I wouldn't feel comfortable saying it my friends or family or colleagues. Again, I don't believe Scott is biased in that way, I think he just doesn't have the answer, and until he does and I do I won't be fully convinced.
This is a much better response, thank you. I am, myself, convinced; blm -> murder is plausible but unknown and should be investigated
I guess my problem then becomes: is this essay by Scott not the beginning of such an investigation? It feels like Scott started in the position you're in now, where it seemed more plausible than the NYT or the general liberal gestalt was willing to credit, and so he investigated, and a bunch of what he found lined up pretty well, so he publically said that his investigation made him move even closer to tthat position than he started. So far this all seems pretty reasonable. But (some of) the reaction he's getting is less reasonable, even here in these comments there are people saying that the very investigation he's doing is evil. This seems to strongly indicate that "even [if] the truth [were] obvious and right there, liberals [at the NYT at least would] willfully ignore it for ideological reasons"
Although, to me, this feels like moving the goal posts a bit and therefore feels yucky... it's definitely pretty close to the original Brett S claim that I objected to you objecting to
(And pivoting to point out that Fox news is even worse, definitely still feels like a non sequitor to me, I still don't understand why you said that in the first place)
I think in its current state the original essay is hard to swallow precisely because it's unfinished and ends abruptly. It's hard to live with uncomfortable questions - and doubly so while they're open. If there was some more specific claim like - to make up an example - "when both the police and lots of community leaders were at the BLM protests, gangs shot each other up" that was backed up by evidence, I'd personally be more comfortable with it. The longer we have the phenomenon but not the physics, the more we leave the door open for conspiratorial people to drum up cruel and baseless "explanations" based on their assumptions. And I don't think we should blame Scott for it, but I don't think we should be happy about it either.
This whole episode definitely indicates that even liberal spaces can contain people who ignore the truth for ideological reasons. But Brett S went beyond that, generalizing to say:
"The NYT articles show that even when the truth is obvious and right there, liberals willfully ignore it for ideological reasons. There is nothing 'fringe' about this from an epistemological perspective."
With "liberals willfully ignore ... nothing 'fringe' about this", Brett S is not saying some liberals; they're (he's?) saying all liberals. That's the sort of absurd defamation I was tilting at in the first place. If someone's view is that all liberals are hardened ideologues, who do they view as open-minded? I didn't even mention Fox News, their association with ideological radicalization of the right is strong enough that you (not unfairly) assumed that's where I was pointing.
When you say "BLM" are you referring to that ineffable-but-surely-good entity inhabiting the same space as "real communism?" Because I'm allowed to sneer at the actual-concrete-world organization that primarily exists to enrich Patrice Cullors, right?
If you consider "vaguely blaming for a rise in murder rate" to be a kind of sneering then maybe don't? But when you have a specific complaint, sure, go for it.
I think the straightforward explanation is that there was a pretty rapid and immediate adjustment in what police departments were telling their officers at nearly the same time there was more or less a rapid and immediate change in how people viewed police.
So you have more pissed off, less socially invested/trusting people being policed less.
The eroded police presence doesn't cause Sally the Asian non-profit worker to suddenly go commit violent crime, but it does cause Timmy the small time drug dealer to be more comfortable brining a gun to his transaction.
Point-of-use gun control is highly effective. A whole lot of shootings take place because somebody has an illegal handgun close at hand when they are feeling peeved. If you can persuade guys with illegal handguns that they better go hide them up in grandma's attic instead of carrying them around under the seat of the car, you'll get fewer shootings.
My impression as it was happening on May 28, 2020 was the Mayor of Minneapolis ordering the police to evacuate the Third Precinct police station and let the mob burn it down was a historic turning point toward chaos.
"The murder rate in the UK fell in 2020-21 compared to the previous year:"
This is strong evidence *against* the theory that BLM protests caused the homicide spike, because there were massive BLM protests in the UK. All sorts of statues were torn down. Wikipedia's map of protests in the UK shows an incredibly high density of protests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom#/map/0 And while black people only make up 3% of the UK's population, they made up 13% of London's population, quite close to their % of the US population. And homicides *fell* in London in 2020. https://www.onlondon.co.uk/the-number-of-homicides-in-london-fell-in-2020-what-explains-why-these-sad-statistics-change/
This is the big problem with the argument that "COVID was a global event, but the homicide spike only happened in America." The George Floyd/BLM protests were also a global event! There were protests on every continent including Antarctica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_George_Floyd_protests_outside_the_United_States A bunch of protests outside the US got quite rowdy. Just to give one example, on June 6, 2020 the US embassy in Mexico City had to be locked down due to violent anti-police brutality protests in the vicinity that saw cars being set on fire and businesses being vandalized. https://www.newsweek.com/us-embassy-mexico-city-locked-down-due-george-floyd-protests-1509112 Yet I've seen other people cite Mexico's *lack* of a homicide increase in 2020 as evidence for the BLM protests causing the homicide increase.
And as other people have pointed out, several of your graphs show an increase starting before May 25, not after it. Here's another graph that shows the same thing, scraped from the Gun Violence Archive that supposedly covers all of the firearm homicides in the country: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E20sKyAVEAAOAMk?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 It clearly shows an increase above 2019 levels starting in April, not at the end of May. The source is this blog post by none other than Steve Sailer, who claims it was sent in by a reader, so it clearly meets the Criterion of Embarrassment. https://www.takimag.com/article/the-racial-reckonings-new-normal-50-murders-per-day/
You might say that that still doesn't show an increase starting shortly after the pandemic. But we also have to take into account other effects of the pandemic. The most obvious is people spending a lot less time outdoors. Here's a graph of mobility in 2020 compared to 2019: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxre9dVEAQKqP4?format=jpg&name=medium It shows a massive decline starting in March, bottoming out in April, then returning to 2019 levels...in the middle of May. People are obviously less likely to commit murders when they spend less time outside, so this data massively confounds any time series data on homicide.
There are also other time series graphs that I think are worth a look. Here's a graph of opioid overdose deaths, which clearly shows a significant increase starting in February 2020. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxrSCuUcAADqZc?format=png&name=900x900 Alcohol sales show a very similar increase, which strongly suggests that the former data was due to an increase in consumption, not hospitals having less resources or anything like that. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxq-bgVcAA5jKr?format=jpg&name=medium
We would expect that more consumption of alcohol would lead to more alcohol-related murders. We would expect that more consumption of illegal drugs would lead to more drug dealers shooting each other. We would expect decreases in mobility to offset this in the period immediately after the pandemic started. We would expect this to hit black people harder than other races because black people are more likely to deal drugs (and probably even more likely to be involved in urban drug gangs that are more likely to get into violent territorial disputes with each other than IE meth-dealing biker gangs). It isn't that hard to think of reasons why this phenomenon might hit homicide numbers harder in America than in other countries. So it seems extremely plausible that at least some of the increase was due to changes in the consumption patterns of intoxicating substances, and at that point why not apply Occam's Razor?
I admit that one flaw in the alcohol and drugs theory is that Mexico didn't see a homicide increase in 2020, but it's possible that COVID border crossing restrictions made drug smuggling more difficult and that offset some of the impact on the Mexican drug scene.
I also think this article presents a pretty compelling argument that the late 2010s homicide increase may have also been due to drugs (in that case, due to the opioid epidemic) and the timing may have been just a coincidence. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/6/16934054/opioid-epidemic-murder-violent-crime
And here's one thing that I have yet to get a good answer for from "Ferguson Effect" advocates: why wasn't there a homicide increase in Los Angeles following the 1992 riot, which was worse than anything that any single American city has experienced since then? Here's a graph of homicides in major American cities in the 90s: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQxUdYVVUAImPk6?format=png&name=medium Los Angeles doesn't stand out at all.
Great point!
There was no major defund the police movement in the UK in the way there was in the US. The protests were not a result of a particular death in the UK - they were a copy of the US protests.
There's no reason that BLM should be accepted to have the same impact in the UK as the US. There's no evidence police felt any need to retreat from high % black areas in the UK,
>And here's one thing that I have yet to get a good answer for from "Ferguson Effect" advocates: why wasn't there a homicide increase in Los Angeles following the 1992 riot, which was worse than anything that any single American city has experienced since then?
Because the culture changed and the left have more institutional power and are more anti-police today than 30 years ago?
Read this post again. The 'Ferguson effect' is not that protests -> more crime. It's that the BLM movement resulted in police doing less policing. Unless you have evidence that there was less policing in the UK following these protests, then this isn't evidence against the Ferguson effect.
If the pandemic is the cause (which we should have low priors for because less people outside leads to less crime - see: winter), there was no crime spike in 2008. The idea that recessions lead to more crime is a narrative, nothing more.
I posted a link to mobility data in the OP. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxre9dVEAQKqP4?format=jpg&name=medium It clearly shows a return to 2019 levels in the middle of May. Which, of course, should massively confound any time series data.
And my argument is not that it was caused by economic hardship, my argument is that it was caused by increased drug and alcohol consumption, leading to more alcohol-fueled murders and more drug dealers shooting each other and so on. And we have plenty of data that is consistent with a large increase in drug and alcohol consumption in America during the pandemic. Alcohol purchases: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxq-bgVcAA5jKr?format=jpg&name=medium Drug overdose deaths: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxrSCuUcAADqZc?format=png&name=900x900 Combine that with the mobility data and I think it lines up quite well with the homicide time series graphs.
Also, Alex Richards has posted data that indicates that the decrease in policing in 2020 might not have been that different between blacks and whites in America after all. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike/comment/7423994
As Tom Wolfe said about the 1960s, we had a Happiness Explosion after George Floyd's death, which got a lot of people shot at parties and killed in car crashes.
What about the fallout from the Sarah Everard case? The vigil there was the result of a particular death in the UK and the response was a PR nightmare for the police.
I've said for a long time that the Sessions Effect of declining homicides petered out in mid-2019 and started going up again. But the post George Floyd levels of homicides and traffic fatalities are an extraordinarily high plateau.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/homicide-and-motor-vehicle-accident-death-rates-through-2021/
Heritage has nothing to gain by using a less provokative title. The left have overwhelmingly demonstrated their hyperpartisanship on this issue and categorically are not interested in the truth on this issue. A strong claim, but when you have the peak "respectable" news site in the NYT basically reporting something they don't believe to be true, it shouldn't be a controversial claim.
This makes sense if you believe the whole world is divided into “the left” and “the Heritage Foundation”.
From the book review:
> Murders definitely rose a little after Boudin took office, but that’s because that was also when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, which demoralized police and led to a so-far-permanent spike in murders nationwide.
That specific phrase, "demoralized police" was something that I took issue with, and made a comment on. The specific claim was not that police pulled back, it was that they were demoralized. And now in this article you say:
> I don’t want to speculate on which of these factors was most decisive, only to say that at least one of them must be true, and that police did in fact pull back.
But in the previous article you directly attributes it to demoralization, which was what I took issue with, and why I left a comment there.
The evidence does seem to support the case that the protests (and related unrest, especially in black neighborhoods) led to an increase in the murder rate. Though from the stats here I'm not convinced that reduced policing is mediating this? If a policing pullback were the cause, I'd expect a murder spike earlier march/april when policing was reduced for the pandemic response. The Freddie Gray graph also shows a more gradual decline in arrests starting well before the protests, whereas the spike in murder rate was relatively abrupt and more tightly coupled to the protests.
I think Scott makes a good case for the pullback in policing that followed the BLM protests contributing to the 2020 homicide spike. But there's another factor that may have played at least as large, and I think even larger role: the social and economic stress caused by Covid.
One good measure of this additional stress is the number of overdose deaths. This from the CDC:
"Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 12-month period ending in April 2021, an increase of 28.5% from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before."
One can reasonably infer from this, and the increase in overall drug use it implies, that the emotional impact of Covid on the residents of low-income, inner-city areas, most of them living in relatively cramped conditions and with very few financial resources, must have been huge. The added stress falling upon a population with very easy access to guns, suffering acute financial distress and unprecedented social pressure, could have led to an increase in homicides that was unrelated to police withdrawal.
The timing of the spike in killings, a few months after the Covid lockdowns began, is at least as consistent with the evidence as the explosion in BLM street activism, which itself might have been, in part anyway, a consequence of the unparalleled intensity of social stressors in 2020-21.
This needs further analysis.
If only other media had come to the same conclusion of a stew of factors causing the issue…alas, I guess we’ll never know.
Was the increase in suicides among blacks?
Generally, blacks don't commit suicide all that much. American Indians and whites tend to be the most suicidal. It's one reason why so many whites are killed by cops relative to the threat of homicidal violence that whites pose: a lot of whites commit suicide by cop.
“The idea that the police have retreated under siege will not go away. But even if it's true, is it necessarily bad?”
I couldn’t stop laughing at this
Would benefit from more discussion of 2021 and 2022. Here in New Orleans the murder rate is even higher this year, which it’s hard for me to plausibly attribute to BLM protests in the summer of 2020. Also the “pandemic started months earlier” point is unconvincing, could be that it’s prolonged isolation that causes breakdowns in relations
Indeed, the "racial reckoning" was a very big deal. I read thousands of news articles about how this was a landmark in American history.
As the evidence mounts that it was a bad idea, generally speaking, there's an increasing effort to memoryhole the thing.
More shootings is the New Normal.
I live in Columbus Ohio. A city not in these charts. The city population is about 900,000 and the Metro is about 2.1 million. In the city of Columbus, murders did increase dramatically in 2020 and the city set a record with 175 murders. Whether or not it tracked the timing in other areas, I do not know. Whatever the reason, the spike continued and got worse in 2021 when there were 205 murders.
Just when you thought you knew what was going on, and for equally mysterious reasons, there have been only 62 murders as of June 25, 2022, the 176th day of the year. At that rate the number of murders will drop to about 130 a 37% decrease.
There have been no changes in the political leadership of the city since the beginning of 2020.
Here is a link to a Columbus murder database:
https://www.dispatch.com/in-depth/news/crime/2021/07/21/columbus-ohio-homicides-map-and-database/7812208002/
It may be paywalled.
2.1 million, not 21.
One off-the-cuff thought I have -- I was born in Columbus -- is that because of Columbus's history of ad hoc annexations of neighboring municipalities, it has unusually ragged and weird city borders, including in some of what I'd expect to be the highest-crime areas. Is it possible, then, that murders could shift back and forth over the line into Whitehall or Reynoldsburg in more or less arbitrary ways, creating more than usual noise in the year-to-year data?
Thanks for the heads up on the number. I fixed it.
As for annexations to the city of Columbus, it developed a policy of active annexation of unincorporated land before extending services in order to avoid being encircled. It began the 1950s at 40 sq mi and doubled in land area in 5 year. It is now 226 sq mi, extending into the next county to the north (Delaware).
However, cities are not able to annex areas that are incorporated cities, as is the case with Whitehall and Reynoldsberg. My guess from looking at the map I linked above is that most homicides have occurred in inner city areas that were part of Columbus before 1960.
One political change recently in Columbus was that that young cop who on April 20, 2021 made that amazing shoot to save the life of the girl in pink from the knife-wielding Ma’Khia Bryant (a police shooting that drove the NYT into a frenzy) was cleared this year:
"The case went to a grand jury and on March 11, 2022, it declined to charge officer Nicholas Reardon because there was not probable cause that he committed a crime."
That's exactly the kind of thing that encourages cops and discourages criminals.
I doubt that it had much political valence. The video's were so clear cut, that the usual suspects could not profitably use the case as a way to attack the police.
Despite the clarity of the video, the New York Times and Washington Post ran numerous articles about how horrible it was that Ma'K the Knife died for weeks after Officer Reardon heroically saved the girl in pink's life.
Police responses are almost certainly one mediating factor, but let's not overlook the simplest possibility: BLM implied that police all across America murder blacks; this made a lot of people really angry; angrier people are more likely to kill people. I suspect the Marxist founders of BLM would consider a spike in homicide a feature, not a bug. It both signifies an increase in revolutionary consciousness, and destabilizes the society to be overthrown.
That might be so if the anger were purely a result of one thing and one thing only, and a person logically deduced that he should express his anger by killing police or whites.
I don't see people as being that logical, particularly when they're killing in anger.
Also, I don't see homicide as a logical response to a particular stimulus. I see it as being more likely when someone is more angry, and I see anger over killings as being just one more thing to be angry about. Likely most of their anger is over something else entirely.
The "racial reckoning" wasn't just about how awful whites are, it was also about how awesome blacks are (e.g., everybody started capitalizing the word "Black" in July 2020 -- that sounds trivial but that episode of Reverential Capitalization was indicative of the National Mood). There is a lot of evidence that blacks got much more exuberant after May 25, 2020, which led to a lot of deaths of exuberance, such as dying in shootings at parties and in car crashes.
This isn't a tight empirical/causal argument so the level of confidence in these statements exceed the available evidence. For example, what if the pandemic caused BLM and both had contributions to homicide. The level of data storytelling presented here could be explained by this same model and we're back at square one.
It's clear that the media has an agenda - and perhaps they left the conclusion to this unusually and purposefully vague. However, I think that vagueness is the right answer to reach, however inconsistent, and "data" presented here is short of being the evidence needed to match the confidence of your claims.
Any amount of causal reasoning, lets say you take this graphical causal model approach, can always be confounded by unmeasured confounders. Unless there's some good exogenous variation in this protest factor, you're not going to recover an estimate of this effect. State the model and run the regression. This back of the envelope causal reasoning is just as flimsy as your usual journalistic storytelling.
There were BLM protests in 2020 in UK, Denmark, and Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_George_Floyd_protests_outside_the_United_States#Europe The ones in the UK and Germany were large enough to get their own Wikipedia articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Germany
And we would expect the timing to be confounded by people spending more time indoors. He's a time-series graph of mobility data in 2020: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxre9dVEAQKqP4?format=jpg&name=medium
Those protests were not about policing in those countries though, they were about policing in the US, right?
this is the correct point here:
- if we want to talk about policing policy in the US we should focus on US as our sample
- if we want to make a more than n = 1 claim about a poilcy - we should breakdown our units of observation within the country of concern (US) into numbers great enough to have statistical inference between a comparable group of units that were more heavily affected and less heavily affected by covid - a statistical t-test can then get us at a reasonably rigorous answer about these effects. not this back of the envelope pointing at time series trends in data.
I’d like to see better policing, not just more of it. Excessive force happens, and not just to POC.
this is an important point too, how a police force responds to BLM could vary as well and that response could be a) dependent on the environmental factors in the community they serve and b) have implications for what the actual learned policy is (less policing? better policing? police depts fudging the stats we're looking at?)
so i wasn't able to dig up any great evidence on the impacts of policing on societal outcomes but i was able to find one on the enforcement of police arrests on social welfare outcomes through the pre-trial detention channel:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20161503
by not detaining arrested folks pre-trial we see statistically significant drops in future arrests/crime (less obvious) as well as welfare benefits for the individual (more obvious). this amounts to $55,143 and $99,124 of social welfare impacts per released defendant depending on how you "value" deterrence of various types of future crime.
this leverages some random variation on how bail judges are assigned so you're not using your usual granger causality type arguments for making these claims. not perfect but a much stronger argument than these interrupted time series methodologies.
here's another finding similar affects on future crime in boston:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28600
happy to discuss more of this if needed. unfortunately the direct effects of policing doesn't have a good empirical paper out here. the best we have is the enforcement of policing at the district attorney level.
The pandemic clearly did not cause BLM, did you even read the post? Ferguson had a similar effect and long predates the pandemic.
These aren't binary cause and effects. Pandemic could've created a set of social circumstances that made protest more likely, how is this n = 1 Ferguson example definitive proof otherwise?
If you're going to be nitpicky about the confidence level of statements it behooves you to not say blatantly untrue things like the pandemic could've caused BLM, which is obviously impossible and only requires an n=1 example to disprove because time is linear.
oh jesus, lets not do causal reasoning without a counterfactual please. this will get us no where. we should just stop now.
*could have*
I think the issue of guns is kind of too easily hand waved here.
The idea that, because most guns in the US are bought by white people they can't have an impact on a subcommunity seems specious.
For example, people buying weaponry to smuggle down into Mexico is not a large proportion of US gun sales. But, if you then said, therefore the availability of guns from the US is not a factor in making the Mexican cartel wars super violent, it would be wrong.
Similar with all those countries that aren't awash in guns that didn't see a spike in the murder rate.
I like the article and I find it mostly convincing as a whole.
If you look at the proportion of households that own guns it's not that different, 26% in Canada compared to 32% in the US in Scott's old article about homicide rates. I'd guess the difference is that the US has a lot more blacks with handguns than those other countries.
One part which I don't understand is the relationship between people choosing to commit more murders and the decline in police presence/action/screening or perhaps it is the anger stirred up by the protests and angry people kill more often, just like hot people do with more summer murders. Are we just x amount of irritation away from attacking each other to death?
I get random stops by police might cause an arrest for illegal firearm possession or something which then prevents a murder by removing the gun and interrupting a crime of passion....but can that really add up to so many more murders?
I get we look at the protests and we look at the police actions...but no one is saying it is the police or protesters themselves going around murdering people. It is random other people killing more.
Do people who want to kill think they are less likely to be caught and decide to kill more often? Are we saying that police presence and actions to arrest for minor crimes are a huge deterrent and/or they interrupt such rare events by harassing the general population? Or a targeted population of young men of a certain race? It just seems like you could stop thousands of people and not interrupt or stop a single murder.
One factor which is hard to pin down is if the desire or circumstances for murder to occur have themselves gone up. Which I don't understand. The police killed a black guy one didn't know, so one is going to go out and also murder some other guy?
I don't get the logic...I saw only 3 police patrols instead of 7 police patrols in my neighbourhood over the past week....time to go kill someone?! I don't get it. Is seeing a few cops and a handful of extra guns or drugs taken off the streets here and there really the reason people choose to kill others or not? It isn't like murder isn't already very very illegal with heavy penalties. Or that a lower police patrol rate means you think the cops are going to work less hard in a murder investigation? Do killers think this?
Is a 10% or 20% less likelihood of feeling like you'll get caught the threshold for people to go out and commit the murders they already wanted to commit? Is that all that separates life from death for so many victims of murder? Are gangs just going nuts because there might be a 30% reduced rate of cops driving around?
I just feel like something is missing here. Do people want to kill more than before? Do they want to kill but feel like they were being held back and those barriers are gone? Is killing like other crime from the 'broken windows' hypothesis and simply needs a context? Killing seems like far less of a crime of opportunity than shoplifting does and context feels very weak as an explanation. But again, summer murders are higher, so maybe context matters far more than I'm thinking?
I suppose people just wanted to murder each other more in 2020. Why do americans like to murder so much more than other nations. Perhaps there are tipping points or thresholds of poverty or population or gun ownership or gang violence or drugs and despair or undemocratic abusive workplaces, but even when you 'control' using statistics for the number of guns or whatever...the US murder rates are higher. And that's not even counting the invasions, wars, or drone strikes of the american empire!
Sensible scenario
Well said.
I think the "normies" show up in the big increase in traffic fatalities. The urge to have a few drinks and drive 100 mph doesn't mark you as a member of the hard-core criminal element, it's just a fun thing that younger people do more when they feel less likely to get pulled over by the police. (3 recent NFL first-round draft picks have been in fatal car crashes recently, and one Kentucky basketball player who was headed for the first round of the NBA draft.
Among normie blacks, fear of the police dropped like a rock after George Floyd's death and black traffic fatalities were 55% higher in June 2020 than in June 2019, which is a crazy difference. (Car crash deaths tend to be pretty stable year to year.)
Among the hard-core criminal element (the kind who bring illegal hand guns to parties), I'd say that they were getting more restless and shooty from some point in 2019. Still, the horrific levels monthly homicides have reached and more or less stabilized at since George Floyd's death through 2021 was not predictable from the pre-May 25, 2020 data.
For weird reasons I've read a lot about this issue so here are a few points I want to raise wrt to your argument:
- Using only city data seems like it could be misleading if you're making conclusions about a murder spike that happened nationally. CDC data is probably more useful here if you're interested in figuring out the timing of the spike. The CDC found that murder was already up 20% nationwide in April 2020 and up almost 30% for blacks. Then there was an additional spike in June after the protests started.
- The causality of the protests on the murder spike is kinda dubious even though part of the spike does line up with the protests beginning. I brought this up in a previous post but the 2020 BLM protests saw an outpouring of young people, particularly black and in urban areas, into the streets after months of lockdown. When tons of young people start all coming out into public at once, you're going to get a rise in murders no matter whether police behavior changes or not. For example holiday weekends in the summer (i.e. the 4th of July) are often the deadliest times of the year for murder because people are socializing all over the place and you end up with tons of drive-by shootings and the like. So based on this you could explain the spike by saying that propensity to murder was already up before the protests (which I think is born out in the CDC murder stats) but lockdowns were holding people back a bit from actually carrying out murders - until, that is, the protests hit and the dam of social distancing broke.
- Interestingly murder went way up in 2020 but almost all other crimes didn't. Both police reports and victimization surveys (which don't rely on changes in police reporting) corroborate this. So this begs the question of why, if de-policing caused a murder surge, it didn't cause a surge in other crimes as well. Is murder just unusually sensitive to changes in policing, compared to other crimes? It's possible, but the difference would have to be huge to explain the lack of any changes in, for instance, theft and robbery.
> So this begs the question of why, if de-policing caused a murder surge, it didn't cause a surge in other crimes as well.
Murders are much better reported and harder to ignore than other crime, maybe for other crime increase had also lowering in reporting rate, leading to inconclusive effects?
For example, crime in CHAZ could be mostly not reported - but murders still would be.
This is a good point but the lack of an increase in non-murder crime also shows up in the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks people directly what crimes they've been a victim of in the past year instead of relying on police.
This is me speculating rather than being informed by any kind of knowledge of criminological studies. But I think it does make sense to expect murder to be especially sensitive to changes in policing.
Murder isn't particularly opportunistic with respect to motive. Generally speaking, you kill people to get back at them for something. They stole your drugs, double-crossed you, have dirt on you, killed one of your people, etc. If you kill them 2 or 5 or 10 years later, that still has pretty much the same deterrent effect. You can afford to lie in wait for the right moment.
On the other hand, murder is extremely opportunistic with respect to enforcement. If you get caught doing it, the state will likely either kill you or put you away for a long, long time. It's not like breaking and entering where you can sort of expect to skate. The system either manages to pin the crime on you or it doesn't.
Consequently, it's a big deal whether the police are sort of around in the neighborhood and will hear the gunshots, find the body within 24 hours, be able to locate witnesses and roll up on you while memories are still fresh and some forensic evidence is still findable. The cops declare a de facto holiday on that, and murder is likely to be the crime that most noticeably manifests. There's a backlog of desired murders that every would-be murderer now sees an occasion to clear.
> Murder isn't particularly opportunistic with respect to motive.
I don't think this is necessarily true though. People who kill someone out of a personal grievance are probably not going to feel just as angry about that grievance years later, or even months later to be honest. So I doubt anger strong enough to drive murder is something that usually lingers for long - consider that one of the best individual-level predictors of violent crime is low impulse control. Although to be fair there are situations like organized crime where killers will wait years for just the right moment.
I doubt if there were a huge number of murders at BLM marches proper. Having thousands of witnesses you don't know around, lots of TV cameras, tons of cops, and you aren't on your home turf isn't conducive to the shooting spirit.
Instead, black on black mass shootings (4 or more struck by bullets), which exploded in 2020 tend to take place at black social events in neighborhoods where everybody knows snitches get stitches.
Shockingly, validating crime increases it. Shocking.
Somehow this reminds me of a tweet thread I saw recently presenting a study that paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN instead. The author made it out to be about the pitfalls of partisan media in general—they just happened to pick fox because it matched the current administration. But pretty clearly the big selling point was that it confirmed liberals’ biases about right wing media without requiring them to face up to any of their own media’s blind spots.
Wonder what a study would look like that paid NYT readers to follow ACX for a while.
https://twitter.com/dbroockman/status/1510607409294692352?s=21&t=1eem7vmYLYmQtvOBatR2_A
Has anyone bothered to see if all-causes deaths went up by the amount indicated by the increase in reported murders? Meaning, did more people die in those communities because there were more murders, or were there the same number of deaths and more were officially classified as murders?
Because, maybe I'm getting a biased view from listening to liberal-minded podcasts and interviews and articles on this subject, but it really feels to me like official crime statistics have more to do with what the police are incentivized to report than with the actual amount of crime happening. And they were certainly incentivized to report an increase in black-on-black crime immediately following the protests.
It look like the spike is something like a 50% increase immediately, dropping back to baseline over a few months. Do I think police have enough wiggle room in how they report things to invent such a spike in their statistics even with zero change in actual rates? I think it's plausible, yes - that seems like an increase of 1 homicide per 100k citizens per month, not a huge number of bodies to reclassify.
Classify some marginal things as homicide instead of manslaughter or accidental death. Does the coroner usually take 2 months to file cause of death paperwork? Get them to dump the backlog this week and speed up the process this month. Do you often ignore people who look like gang members or criminals when they try to report a crime? Take the report this time.
I feel like this wouldn't be hard to do, especially if your previous incentive was to keep the reported numbers as low as possible to look good to your superiors, so you're starting from an artificially depressed baseline.
I'm not claiming to be an expert or know for sure that this is happening or could happen, but from everything I've heard about police departments being driven by arrest metrics and community-safety metrics and how this has affected reporting over the years, I'm surprised this isn't one of the first hypotheses tested for whenever the crime numbers do something odd.
Because of articles like this one saying that BLM caused decreased policing and decreased policing caused more murders. Overwhelmingly powerful narrative in favor of shutting up and being thankful for police and giving them more funding.
As opposed to the 10,000 articles about how overwhelming wonderful BLM is, there's the combined might of Scott, Heather Mac Donald, Charles Fain Lehman, Tucker Carlson, and myself perpetrating a giant hoax by claiming that lots more black people were getting shot when they were really just dying of a special type of covid whose symptoms happen to look like bullet holes in the chest.
If you look at the CDC homicide data, it jumps by 50% soon afterward and was still ~50% elevated a year later. I suspect (without knowing or checking) that the CDC does not separate out homicides from manslaughters (manslaughter seems to be considered a type of homicide).
But where do the CDC numbers come from?
I'm having trouble tracking down the specifics with Google, so commentary from someone with direct knowledge would be appreciated.
But as far as I can tell from this: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/ntmh.pdf, the CDC numbers are coming from the 'cause of death' field of death certificates written by coroners, and state laws require that coroners investigate all deaths ruled a homicide by the police.
Meaning the CDC numbers are in a real sense downstream of the police numbers, and certainly not an independent counting.
Yes, they have overlapping/common sources, so they're not "independent counting". But there are some differences between them that would allow for detecting the most obvious fudging. For example in your OP you say "classify some marginal things as homicide instead of manslaughter". That won't really help in the CDC data, which includes negligent homicides (aka what you are almost certainly thinking of as manslaughter) among the standard homicide count.
(In your link: "Homicides reported through the NVSS are classified according to the ICD system into two general categories: homicide or legal intervention. Both intentional and negligent homicides are defined as “homicides” in the NVSS, which makes no judgment of criminal intent. The legal intervention deaths in NVSS generally align with the FBI definition of “justifiable homicide,” while the single NVSS category of “homicide” includes the SHR’s two categories of intentional and negligent homicide. Unlike the SHR, the NVSS homicide classification includes assault by the crashing of a motor vehicle, but this category generally accounts for less than 100 deaths per year.3")
So fudging categories at the margin won't really help. You either need large scale fraud - e.g. invert the common trope and start calling lots of Covid deaths of Black people homicides, or you need to fake dead bodies from somewhere. The odds you give to either of these should be reallllllllly low.
Murders are a famously hard-to-juke stat. Where would you just gin up bodies from?
I literally gave examples in my comment.
Keep in mind this looks to be like, 1 extra body per 100,000 residents per month, not a huge number of bodies to produce.
Pretzel logic
1 extra body per 100,000 residents per monthwould be a HUGE number of bodies
We're talking 240 bodies per year at that point
County morgues... I mean... do you realize
This is literally not possible
At a national scale, 1 per 100k residents per month is approx 40k extra dead bodies a year. *I think someone might notice.*
Yea, the examples you gave don't make any sense....I charitably thought they were off the top of your head as part of a longer comment, and was giving you the chance to elaborate how one can invent murders at scale. I guess that was the best you had?
> Does the coroner usually take 2 months to file cause of death paperwork? Get them to dump the backlog this week and speed up the process this month.
The date the cause of death is filed is not the same as the date of the death....if a person dies in January and the coroner processes it in March, it doesn't show up in the records as a murder occurring in March. Also, we're talking about a sustained increase in murder, not a one-time spike that can be exhausted by spending down a backlog.
> Do you often ignore people who look like gang members or criminals when they try to report a crime? Take the report this time.
What is your impression of what "not taking a report" looks like, in the case of homicide? Leave a bullet-ridden body in the street and hope that nobody notices until the crows pick it over (even after that...skeletons in the street are not normal)? The fundamental point here is that, unlike many other violent crimes (rape, assault), murders have to deal with the physical evidence of a body with violent injuries. Systematically hiding murders at the scale we're talking about is beyond a fake-the-moon-landing level of conspiracy. Like at a basic level, where do the bodies go? How much of society has to be in on this ongoing conspiracy for it not to leak?
> Classify some marginal things as homicide instead of manslaughter or accidental death.
This is the only idea that makes any sense, but I'm skeptical that you can subvert the profession of medical examiner enough to make this happen at scale. Not quite as batshit crazy as your other suggestions, though.
>.if a person dies in January and the coroner processes it in March, it doesn't show up in the records as a murder occurring in March.
Yes, that is how it would work if the system was run by competent scientists concerned with providing accurate data for analysis.
How sure are you that's how it works in reality?
Because during Covid, there were lots of concerns early on about weird cyclical spikes in cases in various areas, which turned out to be based on when cases were reported in batches by various agencies and added to databases al at once.
This type of thing is not uncommon. Creating clean, easily analyzed data is not a naturally intuitive thing that all human beings inherently strive for. You actually have to work really hard to make people do it, and they still don't do it anyway most of the time.
Maybe you're correct and the system is both designed to get that right and never fails even when there is heavy institutional pressure to make it fail for specific political reasons. But it certainly wouldn't be my first guess.
What is your impression of what "not taking a report" looks like, in the case of homicide? Leave a bullet-ridden body in the street and hope that nobody notices until the crows pick it over
>What is your impression of what "not taking a report" looks like, in the case of homicide? Leave a bullet-ridden body in the street and hope that nobody notices until the crows pick it over
I imagine their family would arrange a funeral? Like what normally happens in a normal world?
I'm having a really hard time understanding how you think the world works. Police aren't the only way that bodies can ever be managed, they're in fact not involved in the majority of body collection and funeral situations.
> but I'm skeptical that you can subvert the profession of medical examiner enough to make this happen at scale.
Again, I think you're imagining fantastical things, like a vast conspiracy to make coroners knowingly lie. Instead of normal things, like coroners always making probabilistic best-guesses anyway, and those guesses being heavily influenced by what the police tell them about the surrounding circumstances, and their decision criteria in 51%-likely cases being vulnerable to being shifted 5% by what the police tell them and a general attitude about what people they work with/for will be happier to see on their reports.
To hopefully put this (rather silly/unlikely, imho) doubt to bed, it is not in fact that hard to check the all cause mortality data.
Since looking at all causes adds a tonne of noise, it makes sense to focus on the demographic where Black homicides / Ferguson effects are concentrated, and see if total mortality rises there too. The majority of all Black homicide victims are males aged 15-34, and this other mortality is relatively low for this group (since it is young). Indeed, across recent years, homicide is approx 1/3 deaths for this group. Here's what we see.
Black male 15-34 Homicide: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D297F197
Black Homicide: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D293F081
Black male 15-34 All Cause Mortality: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D176/D297F196
It looks pretty clear to me that the same spike we see in overall Black homicide deaths is evident in Black male 15-34 yo homicide deaths. Furthermore, there is a pretty clear concurrent spike in all cause mortality for this latter demographic group that persists as of a year later. Hopefully that puts your question to bed. (P.S. If you respond to this saying "but the jump in all cause mortality occurs in week X rather than week Y" I am not going to dignify it with a response. You ask for a series that has more noise, you get a series that has more noise).
No, these weren't some kind of "marginal homicides" (whatever that would be.) There was an explosion in shootings. In fact, woundings were up more than killings: e.g., people shot in NYC went up 100% but people killed only went up 40%. All evidence (e.g., Shot Spotters in cities with that technology) points toward a lot more shots being fired in anger during the George Floyd era.
And of course the framing of this conclusion as "right wing" is a political construct in itself - assuming that suburban whites won't care why policing declined because they're so fearful and easy to manipulate (having been a suburban white surrounded by suburban whites my whole life, I'm not sure they're wrong).
David Simon, for instance, just did a whole mini-series about how, yes crime has gone up due to police protest, and how that makes police a bunch of cowards who don't deserve the public trust.
You can ideologue with any data, and I won't even be mad. The annoying bit is the strategizing. I don't care what you think, just say that thing and not the thing you think you need to say to make me think what you think.
This made me wonder about homicide rates after the LA riots. This Time Mag article points out that immediately afterwards “In May and June, only four people were killed, down from twenty-two during the same period in 1991. Drive-by shootings fell by nearly 50 percent from 1991 to 1992, and gang-related homicides by 62 percent.” The decrease is primarily attributed to the effects of the formal truce and peace pact agreement between the Crips and the Bloods the day before the riots. So this essentially supports your hypothesis as well.
https://time.com/6049185/los-angeles-rodney-king-misunderstand-what-happened/
Why do you say this supports the hypothesis? Crime falling because of non-police reasons doesn’t seem to imply that a modern police pullback caused crime to increase.
It’s not just like crime fell randomly for non-police reasons, crime fell at the very moment that data tells us we should expect it to spike. Why? Because the gangs started to police themselves. If not but for the historic gang truce the LA homicide rate would likely have exploded due to less organized policing in the riot aftermath. If hypothetically there’d been a widely-accepted violence-reducing truce prior to Ferguson, etc. maybe the crime rates would not have spiked as they did. So I do think he’s on to something regarding the trend being related to policing in crime prone areas following these events, as purposeful gang self-policing in this case measurably reduced crime.
I agree that the LA data doesn't prove that policing *doesn't* affect murder, but your conclusion that it shows policing *does* affect murder is entirely based off a hypothetical that just begs the question.
I agree it is not definitive evidence, it just seems to support his hypothesis. What do you think? Do you think the post-event crime spikes are related to a lack of policing?
You should graph the murder rate in Detroit over the 50 years following the 1967 Detroit riot.
In “Votes, Drugs and Violence,” Trejo & Ley make the argument that in a society with some corruption (overlap of bandits with govt&police), periods of political upheaval generate ripples through the bandit-establishment interface. This triggers turf wars among bandits, leading to increased killings. It can be as direct as “the leader of the corrupt police was promoted & left the city, so now other corrupt police and their factions in the bandit community are battling for control.) In order to have a society with fewer bandit killings, the corruption has to reach a steady state with leadership hierarchies that are clear to those involved.
Is this the mechanism by which changes in protest behavior cause increased murders? I don’t know how tightly the police-bandit connection is held in these cities.
I do wonder if, rather than A caused B, perhaps both A and B are caused by a different C, not the pandemic. Perhaps whoever organizes protests made friends among the bandits and conducted a two-pronged campaign, political street protests to weaken police plus community violence to weaken the community & establish dominance over underground economies.
I could imagine that happening in, say, Chicago in the 1960s when Senator Percy was playing around with the Blackstone Ranger gang. But the BLM 2 Era shooting rise happened almost everywhere almost all at once. Nobody has that kind of organizational ability. Instead, it was cultural contagion through social and mass media.
The fact that you need this many graphs to demonstrate this to smart readers is the reason I'm giving up on smart people. They are worse than dumb people.
Need pages of sources to tell you that there's a correlation between a spike in the murder rate, and the most expensive riot in US history--which happened at the same time, occurred because of the police, coincided with a widely-broadcasted pullback in policing, and of which oodles of videos of the reality were available. Gunfire going off like popcorn in all directions.
Also need pages and pages of sources to tell you that women are not the same as men.
Need pages of sources to prove anything that an effete intellectual would find unpleasant if it were true.
Videos can be cherry-picked and sensationalized. Media coverage can be biased. Memories of what happened a year or two ago can be foggy. So I'm still going with the statistics. It seems like proving this sort of thing is what statistics is for?
Statistics can be cherry-picked, manipulated and presented in biased ways.
Cherry picking direct experiential evidence is only possible when the evidence would otherwise have existed in the null hypothesis.
If someone posts a study saying that men's and women's brains are the same, you can either jump off an intellectual cliff and cannonball into a sea of blinkered absurdity, or you can hazard a guess that such studies have flaws based on the fact that you live on this planet. And they did.
All information that lands in your brain comes from somewhere. There is a time and a place for learning counter-intuitive truths through rigorous analysis of the data--but there is also time (most of the time) for believing the obvious unless there is a compelling argument to the contrary. Especially in an environment where the truth is increasingly irrelevant, and everyone has a strong motivation to bamboozle you for political reasons.
I put in my time reading tens of thousands of "interesting facts of the day" on RSS feeds, many of them counter-intuitive. But this has led to a world where people will just let you tell them stuff if you dress it up correctly.
Thanks for the laugh: “Based on the fact you live on this planet.” I’d say a lot of research happens to try to prove what it already believed (confirmation bias masquerading as science) rather than a disinterested inquiry by means of falsification.
"If someone posts a study saying that men's and women's brains are the same"
Being old enough to have seen both sides of this debate, I do remember the days when it was "men's brains and women's brains are different, the poor little dears just can't process things like reason and logic" and "men are naturally smarter, they have bigger brains than women" (the Harry Enfield skit is extreme, but only in an exaggerated way of this line of thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w)
So I do understand, and am sympathetic to, the first strain of feminism which fought for "women's and men's brains are functionally identical, women can think logically and do 'male' work like STEM".
Then it went to "there is *no* difference between women and men, and if you say that on average over the global population men tend to be greebs and women tend to be meebs, you are a sexist pig" and I can't agree with that.
But then it kept right on swinging to "of course men's brains and women's brains are different, tee-hee! I have a girly brain, that is why I am a real girly who likes girly things even if the silly old doctors insisted I was a boy when I was born!" and the kind of presentation of a person like this, where if I dare to say "that is *not* a woman, however they want to socially gender present themselves which is a different matter" then yeah, I'm a bigot pig: https://rdrama.net/images/16563440260631292.webp
I find your idea of "obvious" to be rather strange. Little about crime is obvious to me, because it rarely happens in front of me. I'm not a cop and I don't hang out in the streets. I don't work in a store. Honestly, I don't leave the house much since the pandemic. Why should anything be obvious?
Or do you mean it should be obvious from reading the news, or from social media? Why should that be? Should I believe other people's accounts? Which ones?
Point taken.
"Also need pages and pages of sources to tell you that women are not the same as men."
Citation please! After all, are you a biologist to have the expertise to be able to define a woman?
(I have sympathy for Justice Brown Jackson as that was a 'gotcha' question, but the creeping-Jesus commentary around it makes me roll my eyes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/03/25/ketanji-brown-jackson-woman/)
The big advantage to being smart is being _able_ to change one's mind – in the right/correct/true direction!
Yes, 'smart' people are also better at convincing/deceiving themselves about all kinds of things, but 'dumb' people are still worse at recognizing that, let alone fixing it.
Well written, I applaud the effort to rebut griping from commenters. Thank you for researching and putting all of this together.
Police do useful work *and* commit atrocities. Probably the same is true of the justice system in general. What policies would help maintain or increase the useful work while making atrocities less likely?
Honestly I think a lot of sentencing reform would help reduce the adversarial relationship police have with these communities, which could help these problems a lot.
Like, the atrocities are eye-catching and become nucleation sites for outrage, but atrocities are not needed for police to be dangerous and harmful presences in poor communities. Just enforcing the laws as written and acting within their SOP is enough to decimate heavily-policed communities, since almost everyone in the country is a criminal (I pirate jaywalk, speed, etc) and since the penalties for everything are extremely heavy (especially if you're poor and can't afford fines).
I’d like to think our society is capable of going down this sensible road. Too often, people will say this is what they want while actually tending to much shorter term selfish goals.
I like what "Graham" has written – he's been commenting here on ACX but also has his own blog on Substack that I've found to the best policing blog since Peter Moskos stopped blogging.
It seems to me like there's a great deal of evidence here that around the time of George Floyd's murder, and a couple other high-profile police killings, there was immediately after a spike in homicides.
But it doesn't seem like any of the above data proves, or even really provides strong evidence for the idea that, it was because of the specific mechanisms you state.
Here is a way to test the theory - do homicides increase after killings *of police*? I would think that actual cops being killed is a bigger cause of cops being afraid to do their job, then BLM protesters.
Deaths of police on the job went way up in 2020, but IIRC the increase was due to cops dying of COVID.
Seems like it could be a bit of both. But Scott cited a police fear of being punished severely for any mistake - why would they be more worried about that than actually being killed? Especially when cops actually being held accountable for excessive force seems to be pretty uncommon.
Just because people know it's a job with a risk of being killed doesn't mean magnitude of risk doesn't matter. If suddenly the rate of car crashes goes up, you might want to drive less or be more careful when you drive, even though you've always known there was a risk.
And the risk of being killed is more stark than the risk of being fired or something, especially how often police are *not* disciplined for these sorts of things. I actually would think that if police are pulling back after efforts to punish them for normal policework like putting your knee on someone's neck for 9 minutes until they're dead, it's probably less about fear and more about resentment/payback.
Cops worry about their pensions.
The assassination during the first BLM Era of two NYPD officers on December 20, 2014 by a BLM supporter led to a soft mutiny by NYPD against Mayor De Blasio, and a rise in killings. Eventually, the mayor backed down in his war with the cops and the cops went back to doing what they do and crime fell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_killings_of_NYPD_officers
Hard to tell but I don't see anything on that link saying crime went up and a couple things saying that it went down:
https://twitter.com/samswey/status/1166565967608123392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/09/nyc-cops-did-a-work-stop-yet-crime-dropped/
It also appears there was an NYPD slowdown in 2019 after the cop who killed Eric Garner was fired. Another data point to look at considering that it didn't happen contemporaneously with a high-profile shooting of anyone, it was 5 years after the triggering incident. In any case none of these seem to have had the major impact that happened with Floyd.
Perhaps respectable people should read more right wing sources then.
Or just read more _accurate_ sources, regardless of whatever 'wing' they are (or 'painted' as).
There's no shortcut! You have to use your own judgement, or at least pick someone and use their own judgement by proxy.
There's no escape from having to trust _someone_!
But this is a BIG topic that Scott's covered, e.g. 'bounded distrust', and basically all of modern 'rationality'.
But it's certainly easier to 'triangulate' multiple sources than try to 'score' a single source in some kind of absolute sense.
I also appreciate people that even just _share_ their reasoning, even if I disagree with them about specific facts or conclusions derived from them.
Trying to 'reverse' Gell-Mann's Amnesia helps, i.e. go back and 'de-trust' sources for which you know they've overreached/misrepresented something that you, personally, DO know about.
It's a lot of work regardless!
Thank you Scott. So much enlightened (also from the comments)
Yes! This was a great post and I'm glad Scott wrote it. And a lot of the comments, and commenters, are as excellent as ever.
Unrelated to the content of the post, but I much preferred the plain white background to the new pale blue background. Just my two graphic design cents.
I prefer the white background (habit? aesthetics?), but I'm pretty sure the blue background is easier for me to read.
I wonder how an even lighter blue would work out.
I find "plain white" to be a _little_ 'too bright' generally and myself prefer 'muted' colors like the current background. It's _probably_ easier to read as-is.
A couple of reasons for thinking covid played a sizable role in the U.S.:
When I was a kid watching Westerns, the term "masked man" was synonymous with bandit. I suspect that encouraging masked men to roam the streets contributed to the return of car-jacking during the pandemic.
Also, lots of dangerous people were released from lock-ups during the lock-downs due to fears of infections in jails and the like. Of course, this was also something the Establishment had been wanting to do since the war on mass incarceration got going about a decade ago, so it's hard to disentangle covid and wokeness.
Similarly, both covid and wokeness played a role in the war on college admissions testing: in-person testing was called off in 2020, and then many colleges announced they were getting rid of testing, to one extent or another, to fight racism. I call this the Not So Great Reset in which temporary expedients during the worse of the pandemic feed into long-term changes in directions the Woke had been wanting to go.
Yeah it looked like the unrest was stoked by off stage players interested in advancing an agenda.
Portland had 4 homicides in the first 6 months of 2020 and 55 in the last 6 months. The only thing that changed from the first half of the year to the second was that BLM and Antifa became very "active" in the city so I think we can all guess why the homicide spike occurred
Not exactly. Less police activity is one theory, and it's not the same as BLM and antifa killing people. The former strikes me as more likely.
That’s an insanely large increase
I understand THAT this is supposed to be some sort of right-wing point, but I don't understand WHY without some SERIOUSLY uncharitable assumptions about how the right-wingers making the point think about black people. After all, the idea of a police strike, by which police are punishing communities for their insolence by failing to properly protect them from violent crime, would seem to me to be a pretty LEFT-WING point about toxic police culture.
On a tangential note, a few weeks ago my wife called the police because there was an African man sitting in a crosswalk drinking hard liquor at about two in the afternoon. The police arrived, helped him up, and took him aside to politely ask him if he was doing OK, how much he'd had to drink, and whether he needed medical help. The man was obviously somewhat indignant, feeling racially profiled, but my wife was not the first person to call the police, because he was sitting IN A CROSSWALK and was clearly not doing great. At no point was anyone in danger of being arrested, jailed, shot, strangled, or hurt in any way, because this was in Germany, where police are generally well trained and disposed to be helpful and resolve situations as peacefully as possible. This is policing that is actually useful.
Note that "police strike" is only one of explanations.
And even in such case it still makes "defund police" a problematic idea.
And https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike#%C2%A7police-pullback lists 3 other explanations.
Right, but the idea that this is an INHERENTLY right-wing idea seems clearly wrong, unless everyone is going around with beliefs about black communities that are too odious to write.
I think that "inherent" part was not claimed, but left-right talking points/activity in USA is aligned in way that makes it a right-wing idea.
Well there are some ideas about black communities that are very very unpopular, even with statistical backup.
In 2017, Berlin, Germany had an _order of magnitude_ more police officers per annual homicide (approximately 17,000 officers / 91 homicides = 187 officers per homicide) as 2019* Minneapolis, Minnesota had (approximately 900 officers / 48 homicides = 18.7).
When police officers have an order of magnitude lower rate of having to deal with killers than Minneapolis PD officers (like they do in Berlin or wealthy American suburbs), they quite obviously have _much_ more margin to be helpful and polite (and intervene in cases that aren't obviously crimes) rather than suspicious and wary (and skipping simple welfare checks in favor of dealing with actual crime), even before considering the long-term psychological/social coarsening effects of being in a group that is exposed to so much more violent crime.
"Policing that is actually useful" starts with enough police officers relative to criminals that they can actually be of use. Germany has that, parts of the US have that . . . and cities like Minneapolis don't.
So, of course, the people who want American cops to behave more like Berlin police call for defunding the already vastly-overworked US urban police departments.
*2019 is _before_ both the homicide spike discussed in this article and a recent one-third decline in the number of MPD officers. The situation is now obviously much worse than it was then.
More police officers per homicide is a function of having way fewer homicides, and gee I wonder why that might be.
1) Berlin-2017 had twice as many officers per capita as Minneapolis-2019, so Minneapolis-2019 was under-policed by a factor of two relative to Berlin-2017 even before considering homicide rate . . . unless you believe residents of Minneapolis are half as likely to take action that should be met with a police response as the average Berliner.
2) The US non-gun homicide rate equals or exceeds the German total homicide rate, even in the face of the substitution effect where it's much easier to kill with guns and not particularly hard to get one in the US. So if you're not policing Americans under the assumption they're more prone to violence than Germans, you're refusing to deal with reality.
3) The guns are in the US regardless, and accordingly are a facet of reality that American police have to deal with.
So, Minneapolis-2019 was under-policed by somewhere between a factor of two and ten compared to Berlin-2017. You want Minneapolis police to act like German police, the force needs to be massively expanded from 2019 levels, not (as happened) cut by a third.
More police and higher quality police are not opposites. However, America has an unfortunate record of getting extremely poor ROI on investment in public goods, whether it be mass transit or public safety or health care, so no matter how much money is spent, I have to question whether America can ever achieve the quality of life enjoyed by many European countries. Goes to show the limits of GDP in measuring standard of living, I suppose.
>More police and higher quality police are not opposites
Maybe it is, beyond a point. If you hire some number of policemen (say, 100k), you can assume that these 100k are the best you can find (or at least the best at fitting the recruitment process). If you hire another 100k just after, then you can assume this 2nd group are (mostly) those that failed to reach the top the first time.
If the population that wants to be a policeman is limited (and it has to be, it seems to be a shit job, per policemen testimonies), then I wouldn't be surprised if you reached the bottom of the barrel quite quickly.
Lowering the average quality of the police applicant as a consequence of increasing enrolment is only inevitable if the pool of applicants is fixed. I can envisage that changes in the job conditions/oversigbt /public standing/benefits could be made such that some qualified people who nowadays would not touch that job migjt decide to apply. Not easyto do, ofc, like any social change
There have been studies on the effect of police on crime in the US. They actually are effective, which is why a "police strike" is so bad.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/12/police-crime-and-the-usefulness-of-economics.html
I see it more as a reflection of the modern extreme left, who like to claim that police are of no benefit to society and should be abolished. (It sounds like a dumb straw man, but it's not, here in the states. Though it is fringe).
Under this view, the fact that less policing leads to more homicide is actually a surprise, because the police weren't stopping homicides; just oppressing people or whatever.
...
I hope there's a conservation law about dumb politics, because I would hate it if I'm living in the only country with discourse this dysfunctional.
Having spent equal parts of my life in the USA and Germany, the police in the USA are of tremendously less benefit and I can understand why Americans might conclude they're a waste of money. As a white guy in a fairly white place, I learned from both explicit instruction and several unpleasant experiences (my own and those of friends) that under no circumstances should you ever call the police, talk to the police, or interact with them if you can possibly avoid it. The police can only hurt you, not help you, I was told by a teacher who was a white, buzzcut-sporting retired 82nd Airborne artilleryman. To this day, every time I see a Crown Vic, my stomach drops.
I guess it's a bit like public transit: American public transit is so horrendous that quite a lot of people ask why it should get any funding at all, and you can kind of see their point.
That could be the universal experience (it's not, as my experience is different. Also white) and it would still appear to be worthwhile, according to the data in the article we're commenting on. Well, depending on how many fewer inconveniences are worth an extra homicide (note: I know that *enough* inconveniences actually can add up to a death in terms of tradeoffs we choose to make in society all the time. From what I observe, it's not enough inconveniences in this case.)
Higher quality policing, including potentially more police officers, is absolutely a necessity. The protests were sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, an obvious outrage that a jury confirmed was, in fact, murder. Yet blaming the protests against a police murder for the rise in homicides, whose proximate cause was not the protests themselves but reduced policing seems to be offering up an insidious choice: the implicit bargain being offered is to look the other way on cops murdering people with impunity or else they won't do their jobs at all. That understandably ruffles feathers.
“the implicit bargain being offered is to look the other way on cops murdering people….”Congratulations for being quite near the first person to write this explicitly. Others have danced around this but not put it into so many words. Presumably because they feel, as you said earlier, it’s too odious to write.
Too odious, or perhaps too obvious.
That’s sad. I’ve met both great and awful cops. But not when I was personally involved. I’d certainly exercise extreme caution if I was ever any kind of suspect.
I've only personally known a few dozen cops, though they were in multiple states. Some I consider friends, others I've worked closely with.
All of them, without exception thought lying was a legitimate tool and all of them, without exception were willing to abuse their authority if the target of the abuse deserved it. Anecdote: a gay member of Dallas PD would provoke confrontations with protestors at Dallas' Pride parade so he could arrest/remove them. Yes the charges were dropped, but the process was the punishment.
I think the 'never trust police' rhetoric is _terrible_ and untrue. I find it very sad that that's something like the 'sophisticated' view, e.g. among lawyers.
It seems obviously corrosive, socially, and it doesn't even seem to be true!
And I'm libertarian-ish AND have had a (friend of a) friend die because of police incompetence/neglect/malice _because_ they cooperated with police.
Um, your opinion and your personal experience seem to be pretty divergent.
Reverse stupidity is not intelligence.
I can observe something terrible, but 'do the math' and _also_ observe that the terrible thing is in fact relatively rare, and then decide that terrible thing isn't in fact representative of whatever it might otherwise represent.
Is there any concrete element of this that you think you're missing that would explain my apparent 'divergence'?
What exactly are you saying is relatively rare?
As humans we tend not to evaluate risk rationally, or even understand fully what risks might be involved in any particular action. But it would be totally rational to completely avoid whatever relatively rare risk you're referring to.
I think that most of the people calling for "abolish the police/defund the police" were activists, and that ordinary black people living in those neighbourhoods instead wanted the police presence.
Then the foreseeable consequences of their actions happened, and suddenly it was all "no no by 'defund the police' we never meant *abolish* the police, we just meant hire more social workers!"
This sort of helpful policing does occur in the US as well. But long before Floyd, it looked to me as if, in general, the cops had redefined their job to include judge and executioner. There were a lot of stories about cops going too far and many involved white people.
There are too many innocent people shot by the police without the officer being punished, but the number of people killed by police in the US is tiny compared to the total number of people killed.
> police are punishing communities for their insolence by failing to properly protect them from violent crime, would seem to me to be a pretty LEFT-WING point about toxic police culture.
I don't think it's 'left wing' to think that the police DO protect anyone from violent crime, no?
I'm pretty sure the modal left wing view of policing is that's essentially oppression; definitely not 'protection', or only of 'capitalist property'.
Do you think this kind of helpful policing never happens in the US?
Or would you consider, perhaps, that it's less likely to make national news than the case where the police kill someone?
> Here’s number of arrests in Chicago. We can see that it goes way down in March when the pandemic starts and everybody (including police and criminals) are indoors, then starts going up again before the protests. Then after the protests it goes back down and stays down. My interpretation is that people complied with the strict lockdown early in the pandemic, that effect was played out by May, and then separately the protests caused a longer-term decrease in policing.
I found this unconvincing. On all other graphs the effect of the protests was immediate, but here there was seemingly a several week delay? On top of that, the downturn in arrests coincides with a downturn in the average for previous years too, suggesting that this could be a normal thing in June for some reason. (Though usually with a much smaller magnitude.)
The Minneapolis traffic stops graph also shows the downturn clearly starting before the protests, and it doesn't look like data smoothing since there's a small spike shortly before. I found it strange to see this graph presented as though it backed up your conclusion.
There's another explanation, which might be slightly conspirational:
Police officiers and prosecutors have some pretty hefty leeway in what gets investigated and prosecuted as a crime.
During a time of threat to the police budget, it is in their interest to make the world appear as "unsafe" as possible.
It doesn't mean they're inventing murder cases, but simply that their behavior changed compared to the previous baseline.
It would be hard to prove, maybe a dip in manslaughter, suicides and accidental deaths?
Another point, the assault clearly started rising before the protests. Random noise?
Most crime statistics are dubious except for car thefts (for insurance reasons) and homicides. A dead body with a hole in it or a hole with a dead body in it simply demands bureaucratic record-keeping attention.
Homicides have been an obsession of the English system of criminal justice for 800 or 1000 years.
The difference between manslaughter and murder is quite slim sometimes.
Comparing with suicides, accidental deaths and manslaughter can only be enlightening. If they rise too, it could be attributed with COVID and failing mental health. If they don't change, it reinforces the theories above. If they lower, it reinforces mine.
The ratio between homicide and manslaughter should also be compared in older social upheaval events
AFAIK both manslaughter and murder count as homicide, so they both show up in the reports.
I’d say instead “most statistics are dubious”
>50% of statistics are dubious?
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests."
I'd argue that causation went like this:
The riots start -->
The Establishment more or less encourages them as "mostly peaceful protests" -->
The police are discouraged and potential bad actors (e.g., shooters and reckless drivers) are encouraged.
Potential bad actors are encouraged in two ways: they fear the cops less so they do things like carry illegal handguns more and speed more. And they feel more exuberant because Society is telling them they are the good guys and the cops are the bad guys.
Case and Deaton coined the term "deaths of despair" for white working class losers killing themselves, dying of opioid addictions, or drinking themselves to death. The high rates of black homicide and traffic fatalities deaths after May 25, 2020 look more like "deaths of exuberance." For example, mass shootings (4 or more killed or wounded) at black social events went way up in the summer of 2020. Traffic accident deaths among blacks were 36% higher in the 7 months after George Floyd's death in 2020 than in the same period in 2019, whereas the other 87% of the population saw traffic deaths go up 9%.
The increase in traffic deaths is a pretty important observation.
It rules out some other (less plausible) mechanisms, such as:
Socially acceptable masks use makes criminals bolder->increases tendency to murder
Lockdowns suppress increase in total murder due to potential victims staying inside.
Large-scale protest-> Everyone goes outside again-> victim pool increases->
Total murder rates spike to higher levels
Why "exuberance"? This does not match, at all, what I've seen from interviews. Most of what I've seen is anger, disillusionment, being fed up, etc., which seems, to me, that it would better explain shootings, mass shootings, and reckless driving.
"Exuberance" might not be the best word, but I can see a case of deaths from hopelessness and deaths from intensity.
Sure, lots of people after George Floyd's death were asked to tell the viewing public about their anger, disillusionment, being fed up, etc. So they did.
But watch security camera videos of 2020 looters. They didn't make the national news often because they undermined the Narrative, but the looters were having a blast.
Didn't a lot of cops quit as well in relation to the protests? Leading to fewer police and more experienced cops replaced by less experienced cops. I think I have read that a few times.
Yup!
I've certainly noticed quite a few police recruiting ads too, e.g. the _DC_ police recruiting via ads in the _NYC_ subway!
In 2019, Dean Baquet, chief editor of the New York Times, addressed his staff after Robert Mueller's testimony. He said that while he, too, was sad that the NYT's Plan A to get rid of Trump via RussiaGate had failed, they should not despair because the NYT was rolling out its Plan B to get rid of Trump via playing up racism.
My impression is that, for months, many Democrats saw the "mostly peaceful protests" as a way to get rid of Trump, either in November or possibly earlier in a mostly democratic color revolution. Thus, Joe Biden, who is not by nature a progressive extremist, didn't seem to recognize that the riots were bad for his campaign until the third day of the Kenosha riots in later August 2020, when he finally started calling for calm.
Interesting that the correlation is parsed as "BLM causes homicide spike" and not "video footage of police murdering a man causes homicide spike".
Restated correlation still doesn't imply causation.
In terms of unpicking that, I'd imagine we're still a couple of years or more from having the data on *what sort* of murders spiked (pending convictions), which might shed more light on root cause. And of course 2020 was .... rather an unusual year in many other regards. There could possibly be other confounders?
And "police have murdered plenty of people" is a phrase you'll not heard blithely used about most democracies. *Even if* BLM is shown to have triggered the homicide spike, I think a reasonable supposition that police murdering "plenty of people" might just have triggered BLM.
One thing that went up about 50% were mass shootings (4 or more victims struck). As the NYT reported after looking at all mass shootings in 2015, approaching 75% are black shooters and black victims, typically at black social events:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/23/us/americas-overlooked-gun-violence.html
Video killed the radio star, but I had no idea it went around the cities of the USA shooting people.
There were multiple videos of deaths in police custody, including of a white guy killed pretty much just like Floyd, as well as video of a guy on his knees begging for his life. No riots. BLM took an opportunity to inflame sensibilities in a racial manner and ran with it.
Was there video footage of Freddie Gray?
That's probably intended as a rhetorical question, but I don't recall that being a big news story over on this (British) side of the pond.
My point isn't so much the video per se, but that the narrative assumes:
Cops kill someone (again) -> people protest -> changes to policing -> murder!
rather than, say,
Cops kill someone (again) -> people get real mad -> murder!
Most murders, IIRC, aren't premeditated, but rather spontaneous crimes of passion. Speaking for myself, no changes to policing are going to incentivise me to murder. Getting real mad .... might.
If I were to go to the trouble of doing a deep dive on this, I'd be interested in looking at the types of murder that have spiked.
Organised crime: would add credence to Scott's narrative.
Murders of police officers and those associated with them: would add credence to my alternative.
Domestic murders: would add credence to the lockdown theory.
But that level of curiosity seems sadly lacking.
Domestic murders didn't go up much under lockdown. Shootings went way up, as did reckless driving. Both respond to police activity.
I will also add that organized crime, precisely because they are organized, doesn't require as many murders as UN-organized crime (street gangs).
>Cops kill someone (again) -> people get real mad -> murder!
Has a police killing of a white person ever resulted in riots and homicide spikes?
If not, there has to be something perculiar to this situation or to black people beyond 'police killed someone'.
You could even be generous and include anyone other than blacks in the contemporary US, since it's not just blacks & whites anymore.
Well, the glib answer would be that they've not been afforded the same "opportunities" -unless there are some equivalent cases (including similarly-damning video footage) that you have in mind?
But have white people ever rioted, and for less reason? Have homicides by white people ever increased? The answer to both is trivially yes.
The footage of Daniel Shaver was quite damning. He was at least the person a caller was complaining about, whereas in the case of Justine Diamond she was the one who called the police and was then shot when they arrived (in Minneapolis, of all places).
So the extra murders were _deserved_ somehow?
It's not clear what your point is.
Apologies. As per my reply below, there's a a sequence of events that may or may not start with "cop kills man" and end with "homicide spike". The article establishes some level of correlation, but assigns causation to "people protest about cops killing man", somewhere in the middle of the putative chain, between initial incident (and the widely-shared video of it) and adjusted policing policies in some jurisdictions.
*If* there's correlation, and I don't see that that's been established, why pick out the protests specifically, in the absence of evidence, over any other link in the chain?
And for the avoidance of doubt: I'm in that crazy "anti-murder" sector of society, and I think identifying factors that cause homicides to rise is a Good Thing. It can drive better policies and lead to fewer murders. I'm a fan of Scott's writing, but I don't this particular piece does that.
The protests are the most visible and salient manifestation of the 'cultural uprising' that's degrading police performance. I think of 'BLM' and 'the protests' as shorthand for that – they're both legible effects of the relevant political culture.
I think there's a larger 'inferential distance' than this post can bridge, even among the readers/commenters of this blog, let alone anyone else.
Some elements you might be missing in a quick sketch of the 'causal pathway':
- Police resentment increased – even just with most recent protests – and is probably increasing _faster_ now too; that's directly impacting cops' willingness to be 'proactive'.
- Lots of police departments, in the wake of the most recent protests, have been officially ordered to NOT engage in lots of otherwise normal (before recently) proactive policing, e.g. traffic stops.
- Criminals absolutely are aware of all of this. If you know any retail workers, I would bet they could corroborate this, and at length.
What I've observed having become MUCH more frequent are statements like "Police are useless."; pretty in-line with "Defund the police." and, e.g. the view that police are racist oppressors serving only the capitalists/white-people. And, in that light, proposals for 'reform' probably really _are_ cover for 'abolishing' the police.
> why pick out the protests specifically, in the absence of evidence, over any other link in the chain?
One, 'the protests' are just 'wrong' – their facts are wrong, their inferences are mistaken, and their (implicit) values are bad. Two, the protests have had a HUGE impact, e.g. hundreds or thousands of extra murders, and most/many of them the very people about which the protests are nominally focused!
The specific 'cop kills man/woman' incidents ARE bad – tragic, if nothing else, even when justified. But a protest movement, nominally protesting police violence, that results in _more_ murders, and probably a LOT more, is just an abject failure. It's not _pushing against_ the new extra murders – it's directly causing them! And it's refusing to even admit that this _might_ be happening!
I'm with you on most of that. And please bear in mind I'm approaching this from across in the UK, so I may miss some general cultural assumptions, but may also be able to bring an outside view.
And from over here, the idea that police are killing 1000+ people per year is *horrific*. It's just unthinkable. If that started happening, no matter who those people were, there'd be uproar. For comparison, Wikipedia lists *seven* people killed by UK police in total for the 2020s to date. Consider that a plausible root cause for anything else.
And consider that maybe the protests aren't "just wrong".
And yeah, I get the inferential distance thing - in fact I was clearly guilty of contributing to it with my initial comment! There's a long causal path being discussed, and each step in that path doesn't just make it more difficult to follow, it makes it more difficult to mis-step. I'd be genuinely interested - in due course, when the cases have gone through the courts - to see the detail of the homicide spike. Who is killing whom? Where? And why? And how? What are the specifics of the spike?
I find it difficult, intuitively, to imagine that someone who otherwise would do no murder changes their mind purely based on policing policies. Or that a committed murderer decides to do a few more. That doesn't match what I understand of most murders (although, admittedly, from a UK perspective).
If, on the other hand, you told me fewer murders where being resolved (especially in African American communities) because of BLM/distrust of the law, then that I'd understand. It'd make intuitive sense.
As things stand though, the conclusions seem firmer than the data provides.
>And from over here, the idea that police are killing 1000+ people per year is *horrific*. It's just unthinkable. If that started happening, no matter who those people were, there'd be uproar.
Suppose it turned out that somewhere in your country a criminal gang sexually abused 1000+ children and the police refused to intervene for years to avoid accusations of racism. Would this be considered unthinkable and cause BLM-style riots?
Well, something similar has certainly fuelled unrest (I think I know what you're getting at - and you should factor in similar revelations of child sexual abuse from white establishment figures revealed around the same time) - but the UK homicide rate has remained stubbornly static. Perhaps hinting that anti-police/establishment protests don't necessarily cause an increase in homicides. See also the poll tax riots of 1990, anti-Iraq war protests of 2003, and anti-lockdown protests of 2020-2021. We've a long history here of protesting about things and then not going home to our communities and killing each other because there are no police around.
Perhaps there's a perceived difference between "taking insufficient measures to prevent/prosecute crime" and "being active perpetrators of crime"? Certainly from here there's an air of disbelief that "you" (the US public) have accepted this level of police violence for years. What may seem unavoidable to some there seems unthinkable to many here.
I've no knowledge of local sex abuse scandals in the US, but I suspect there must have been some.
And the closest we've got here in recent decades to a "storming of the Capitol" moment was in 2005 over a bill about fox hunting, of all things. And that certainly wasn't by the dispossessed.
And life went on.
> And from over here, the idea that police are killing 1000+ people per year is *horrific*.
Sure – it's horrific here too, even if not as surprising. But 'policies' that result in more people being killed, even if it's not by police, seems, to me, to be even _more_ horrifying. It's not even saving any lives on net!
> And consider that maybe the protests aren't "just wrong".
I mean, maybe there's _some_ valid points in all of the many (and extremely varied) ideas of which 'the protests' are 'composed'.
But many of their 'key facts' are plainly incorrect. And 'their policies', as vague and bullshit as they are, when the can even be pinned down at all, are likewise terrible, i.e. counter-productive or outright disastrous.
I certainly sympathize with all of the people that are convinced of the justness of their cause or its expected efficacy. I don't think almost any of them are malicious or insincere. (Some definitely are tho.)
> Who is killing whom? Where? And why? And how? What are the specifics of the spike?
It seems like it's mostly young men in fairly urban cities and in the 'typical' places, for the typical reasons, and via the typical methods, e.g. on contested drug turf or at gatherings of opposing 'crews'/gangs/groups, for standard turf/status beefs, and via generally indiscriminate shooting into crowds, and almost always with handguns or semi-automatic guns. If you listen to a good range of { hip hop / rap }, there's LOTS of songs openly describing exactly how these killings/attacks happen, and why/where/by-whom.
These kinds of murders are happening all of the time but what proactive policing had been doing before was provide 'pressure' on the relevant people's abilities to kill quite as much. A traffic stop that results in a gun being confiscated might not stop a killing; merely delay it. But sometimes they probably did stop killings too, e.g. if an illegal gun charge results in a long prison term.
Given the both voluntary _and_ officially ordered end to a lot of proactive policing, the pressure is basically non-existent now, so there's little 'up front' pressure against these killings happening.
> I find it difficult, intuitively, to imagine that someone who otherwise would do no murder changes their mind purely based on policing policies. Or that a committed murderer decides to do a few more. That doesn't match what I understand of most murders (although, admittedly, from a UK perspective).
Have you never watched The Wire? It's VERY accurate – for 'Hollywood' – and 'okay' even according to people that do know more.
There don't seem to be a lot of 'mobsters' in the UK anymore. I'm sure there are still some, but they might be 'disappearing' people nowadays over there more than just shooting people (and leaving the body).
But there are lots of elements of society here in which threatening to shoot someone is either a 'fact of business' or a 'fact of life'. It's sad for sure.
> If, on the other hand, you told me fewer murders where being resolved (especially in African American communities) because of BLM/distrust of the law, then that I'd understand. It'd make intuitive sense.
I don't remember off-mind whether I've read anything about this _changing_, but AFAIK, it's been VERY bad in this way for a LONG time. "Snitches get stitches!" does NOT have an obvious exception for cooperation with homicide detectives. Again – The Wire is a good illustration of this and it's 20 years old now!
"The 2020 homicide spike primarily targeted blacks"
As an Englishman, it's always a surprise to hear about the depth of the systemic discrimination in America. It's not just people and institutions, you also seem to have racist graphs!
We call them "hate facts".
Everybody already knew that the murder rates are driven by the minority communities.
The light blue background is much nicer than the bright white we had before.
I like it too, but don't think it's _that_ much of an improvement.
“Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike.”
I’ve read many “news articles” which variously asserted that the spike in violent crime and the decrease in ratings for TV sports were due to the pandemic. If someone writes an alleged news article saying that, you know that he’s a transparent, pathological liar. If someone cites a transparent, pathological liar as an authority, what does that make him? An “expert”? A “tenured professor”? A close relative of mine?
Why do you think it's not just wrong but pathological lying?
I hadn't heard about the decline in ratings for professional sports. It seems odd that they'd decline during the pandemic, since I'd assume that the appetite for at-home distractions would increase. Too expensive? Badly produced (too many ads and fluff)? Some other reason, like competition from other sports?
The decline in TV ratings for professional began before the China Flu. It started when black supremacist nfl players began refusing to stand for our national anthem, and instead took a knee. At the time, people started posting photos of nfl stadia that were 30-50% empty, in spite of having sold out.
The causal nexus was obvious, but msm journalists always deny the obvious. Later, they asserted that covid somehow “caused” TV ratings to drop.
On March 23, 2020, the nyt launched the hoax, whereby President Trump had caused the explosion in “hate crime attacks” against asian-americans. I debunked that hoax eight days later at VDARE.
https://vdare.com/articles/russia-hoax-impeachment-hoax-didn-t-stop-trump-so-new-york-times-tries-anti-asian-hate-crimes-hoax
There was no explosion in anti-asian hate crimes, but what violent crimes were being committed against asians were almost all being committed by blacks.
How did White “racism” cause blacks to die from the China flu? That’s a blood libel the MSM promoted, beginning in spring 2020.
When is the last time you heard of msm journalists reporting on anti-white hate crimes? Blacks commit such crimes constantly, and yet, msm “reporters” never talk about them. And yet, the same “reporters” constantly promote blood libels against Whites.
Thus, msm reporters lie coming and going, in denying constant black-on-White hate crimes, and in promoting blood libels against Whites. Since such dishonesty always goes in one direction, its practitioners are either pathological liars, or they’re telling the truth.
What black supremacists? It seemed to me that they were opposed to police killing black people and did a symbolic gesture which damaged the fun of people who like football. I usually don't weigh in on this because I don't have sympathy for football or patriotic displays and I'm not convinced it was worth Kaepernick losing his career over, but it that affected interest in all sports, it seems like an overreaction.
Evidence about possible hate crimes against Asian-Americans? I've got a Chinese-American friend I'd like to reassure. She's very worried.
I agree that the fact that the attacks are almost all by black people gets obscured in the press. There are people who want to believe that poc have something in common, and it's a false idea.
Blood libel is taking it too far, I think, but I don't think it's wrong to say that prejudice has something to do with black people living in more crowded conditions and having more public facing jobs.
On the other hand, I do think that anti-white prejudice among SJWs is a serious matter, and it doesn't matter that a lot of the people with the prejudice are white.
Time-series data on homicide rates across all European countries can be found at Eurostar. This table in particular.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00146/default/table?lang=en
Unfortunately, no data here for 2020 yet.
Eurostat falling behind? That’s unusual?
Numbers for 2020 can be found in this table instead:
https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=crim_hom_vrel&lang=en
Reassuring to find an independent voice on a topic that has become (needlessly) controversial. If people are being killed, when it happens is a good start in figuring out why.
I'll put forward another theory to add to the mix. Blacks in the United States are less restrained in their behavior because they feel like they are winning. Winners get to do what they like. Similarly, fans of sports teams tend to riot more after a win than after a loss.
I think it's unfair to lump all black people into one monolithic group like that. The problem seems mainly to be, as the report on the 2021 spike says, "gang-related arguments, drug deals gone awry and disputes among people living on the streets."
The BLM protests probably *encouraged* the trouble-making elements who saw that in many places they were being given what amounted to free rein by city and local governments - remember the "no, you can't go to a religious service in your local church, singing hymns will spread Covid which is the Greatest Threat Imaginable!/of course you can have unmasked protests of multiple people marching and mingling in the streets shouting slogans, Systemic Racism is a bigger threat than Covid" fudging?
And that encouragement means they are emboldened to keep on doing what they were doing, but even more so now. If you aren't going to be arrested for open drug dealing and public nuisances because you are 'unhoused', why stop at shooting your enemies/rivals?
It’s also unfair to define the rioters as black. Lots of skeevy whites, and also a pretty big contingent of the well meaning liberal variety. As a former well meaning liberal myself, I was dismayed to see the whole discussion over policing come down to “those poor blacks.” I’d like to be part of a community that includes all colors and all economic strata. That’s the only way the policing issue moves forward for real. I’m dreaming I guess.
Yeah, I think that a lot of white guys (and gals) leaped at the chance to do some destruction under the guise of 'marching for justice'. Some just wanted to feel like they were part of something Big and Important and sticking it to The Man, some were just criminals/mentally ill who took the chance to be destructive under cover of the legitmate protesters.
People, including a lot of the most shown on media black activists, forget or ignore the black people living in those neighbourhoods which were full of rioting and violence, the small business owners whose premises were smashed up (because we're fighting capitalism, hell yeah!) and those who don't like or trust the cops but also don't want local criminal gangs taking the opportunity to act like warlords ruling their own little fiefdom.
The three guys shot by Kyle Rittenhouse were probably a pretty representative sample of your intense white riot enthusiasts.
The pattern I saw at times in 2020 was local black kids looting stores for fun on the first night of a riot, and then on the second night, hard core white rioting hobbyists flood into town for some serious action. To keep riots going a long time, like in Portland, you needed white riot enthusiasts who have studied manuals about how to fight the cops without looking bad to the media.
I agree with Deiseach. Maybe you didn't intend any imprecision with your comment but it's not black people at large who are rioting across the board. I'll admit to some personal bias in this belief as I'm married to and related to several black people (quite a few who are generally conservative and even some Trump supporters) and I find myself annoyed at sweeping statements that lump them in with those black people who commit crimes. The black people who are being victimized by said criminals do not feel like they are winning.
It's not a bad theory. 2020's BLM protests were followed by big waves of kids setting off fireworks for weeks in some black communities, it looked almost like an independence celebration.
A large number of 2020's mass shootings were black people shooting up house parties after some grievance. Simply having more exuberance, more drunken house parties, in a community could cause some part of the spike.
But I doubt that's the entire effect, I doubt all shootings were at parties. And even that case might relate to policing -- like, there might have been an increased willingness to carry a handgun without fear of consequences from the police, leading to both more impulsive shootings at parties as well as more murders in other circumstances.
"A large number of 2020's mass shootings were black people shooting up house parties after some grievance. Simply having more exuberance, more drunken house parties, in a community could cause some part of the spike."
Like the case of the British activist who was shot at a house party in 2021. Initially there were suggestions that this was because of her activism in arranging protests (starting off with ones to pull down statues of Cecil Rhodes, do we remember when statue-toppling was The Big Thing?) but then it was alleged it was just random shooting by people with a grievance against somebody living in that house who turned up to shoot the place up:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/22/sasha-johnson-shooting-case-against-four-men-collapses
And ironically, the investigation has been hampered because nobody is willing to talk to the police:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-60522505
I imagine part of that is down to the whole "don't talk to the cops, don't be a snitch, the police are not your friends" attitude, but also perhaps in part to "I don't want to come forward as a witness because I don't want these guys or their friends turning up to shoot *my* house up".
Yes, that London party shooting was like a slice of America transplanted across the Atlantic.
Good analogy. Victory riots started to become a thing in the US in the 1980s. There probably would have been one after the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986 if it weren't sub-zero. During the 1992 Michael Jordan Riot in Chicago, the best book store on Michigan Avenue, Stuart Brent's (where I once saw Saul Bellow dressed head to toe in Burberry), was looted by a mob of white yuppies.
Has anyone worked out the total number of above trend deaths for the year? Would help to know how many extra individuals died in absolute terms. Quick estimate looking at the first graph seems to be a 1.4% increase / 100 000 people x 330million citizens = ~4620 individuals, more accurate calculations welcome
I think your 1.4% increase / 100 000 people is somewhat misleading. If the total number of above trend deaths is 4620, that's an increase of 25-30%. The total number of homicides is about 20,000 per year.
CDC has current murders at 24 576 so seems like 4620 wasn't far off. It's a 1.4% absolute increase, which is a 23% relative increase.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
The FBI's murder count for 2020 was up 4,901 over 2019.
56.5% of known murder offenders in 2020 were black.
This is a strange post by Scott.
It spends a whole lot of words conclusively proving that there is a strong correlation between the BLM protests and an increased homicide rate.
Then it triumphantly declares clear proof of causation.
And, as far as I can tell, there is no actual case for causation. The arrow could go the other way, both could be caused by a third or multiple other effects, or there could be circular causation.
My takeaway is that Scott is fed up with what he perceives as a liberal propensity to refuse to believe inconvenient things, and that led him to beliefs further than the evidence supports.
Why do you refuse the connection?
(1) Big spike in homicides
(2) Big event happened with lots of protests and lots of violence
(3) "Hm, what can possibly have caused this, could it be related to Big Event? No, surely not, it's all down to Orange Man Still Bad"
You had people coming out and setting fire to buildings, smashing things up, setting up their own little Autonomous Zones (and then their 'security forces' shot many more people than the cops had done), for heck's sake are we forgetting the Rittenhouse trial so early? But noooo, it must be something else like Covid that caused people to spontaneously keel over with bullets inside them.
it's not refusing a connection. it's questioning how the causation works. Assuming that having a protest causes people to go out and murder is a pretty wild claim, and shouldn't be made with regard to only one event. There are so many possible interactions, simply saying the BLM protests "caused" homicides is just kinda abusing the sort of inferences we can make from correlations.
I'm with you on that, at least.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear enough! What I was trying to say is that Scott did a great job of establishing the *correlation* between protests and homicides, and I don’t think there’s any doubt.
But just because two things are correlated (“connected” if you prefer) does not mean one necessarily caused the other. And your point #3 is basically the same hand wave Scott did. You seem unabashedly ideological and abusive, but that’s not usually Scott’s brand. I’d expect more than “of course A and B happening at the same time means A caused B” from Scott.
Since we’re all just asserting our beliefs without evidence, I’ll share mine: I think the world is a complex place, and I think some of Scott’s speculations are likely correct: police backed off, out of a combination of genuine reaction to having overstepped and also some passive aggressive “if anyone criticizes is we’ll stop doing our jobs”.
And I think the really strange social changes of the pandemic and lockdowns created more stress that caused more barely-sane people to act out.
And I think having a president that openly advocated violence against political foes set a dark tone.
And I think we’ll-meaning but misguided progressive ideals excused terrible behaviors and led to poor choices in prosecutions and sentencing.
And I think that COVID was serious enough that concerns about overcrowding in jails furthered under-prosecution of crimes.
And I think police were under all of those same stresses, on top of being called to account for past abuses, and some officers and some departments reacted badly.
And I think the BLM protests were a focal point for a lot of these things.
But I think it’s a mistake to go with the simple “A caused B” view of protests = homicides, and I think that would be a poor basis to make moral judgments or policy decisions.
I think if we had flairs here, I'd adopt "unabashedly ideological and abusive", so thanks for that 😀
You know what. If you’re going to wait for conclusive evidence every time some data goes against your priors, you end up just where you started. “Man, that can’t be true!” The spirit of disinterested inquiry instead considers what could be true, without having to reach a definitive conclusion. I’d say you just don’t like the hypothesis and have therefore looked at the data with a jaundiced eye.
My prior is that this is too complex of a topic to be explained as “two things happened at the same time, therefore one caused the other, and it’s obvious which direction causation goes”.
Show me ANY data that contradicts that prior and even suggests this is a two-variable isolated system. I sure didn’t see any, so maybe you’re right and I’m missing it. Where is the evidence of *causation*?
I think the RCT got held up by the IRB again.
What would be evidence of causation in a situation like this?
Beats me. So why would anyone argue that causation is clear when we can’t even identify any evidence?
It seems like you just don't want to believe this.
I don't think the standard you're implying that Scott failed to meet is one that you're applying to everything else you believe.
Explanation for the German murder-spike in 2018: The German Police adds murders to the statistic in the year they learn about them, not in the year the murder happened (since otherwise you would have to correct the statistics when it takes them a while to figure out a murder happened). In 2018 there was a trial against a man, Niels Högel, who confessed to around 100 murders he commited by killing patients while working as a nurse. This alone accounts for half the spike you see in the statistic.
It might be better to correct the data to include when the murder happened, and keep an edit history for the statistics.
While I agree with the research and the numbers, I don't think your conclusion is well formulated. Saying that "the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests" makes it sound like there is a one-step causal connection. As in the act of protesting bad police work will always cause more homicides. This kinda reads like blaming the protesters for the murders, as if protesting somehow leads to murdering someone. This can't possibly be a satisfying conclusion if your goal is to know why more homicides happen directly after BLM protests. Of course this is fantastic if all you care about is finding SOME truth to prove main stream media wrong.
You go on to mention that "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas." just to fully ignore it the conclusion, as if the police simply have no agency in this matter. What you really do here is no better or worse than NYT or Vox since all you end up doing is focusing on an irrelevant truth to strengthen your contrarian position. Anyway, thanks for linking protesters to homicides, surely nobody would use that to justify crushing legitimate important protests.
There's also the option that the police were too busy dealing with the massive protests to do other things. Crowd control takes manpower, and undermanned police departments would naturally have to shift people away from other priorities if they felt the need to manage (or even suppress) large protest marches. We saw plenty of examples of looting that opportunistically used distracted police resources for property crime, and it wouldn't be that odd if murder followed a similar logic.
This would make sense if the murders happened during the protests and in the places where the protests were happening, but the murders were more spread out in time and place.
"Anyway, thanks for linking protesters to homicides, surely nobody would use that to justify crushing legitimate important protests."
This is either terrible reasoning or no reasoning at all. If there is a link between protesting and murders, then it's entirely reasonable to say so. The fact that some people might use this as a reason to be critical of protesting is neither here nor there.
Oh, and in your manipulative rhetoric ('justify crushing legitimate important protests') you forgot to include the obligatory 'Mostly peaceful'.
I don't think BLM protests were all that peaceful compared to regular protests. What I'm saying is that if you wanted to construct a valid but not sound argument for stopping future legitimate protests, this "research" is pure gold.
Now you can go like "Look, anytime there are protests, homicides go up. There clearly is a connection. We cannot tolerate the loss of innocent lives caused by protests. Hence, no more protests. Stand down and obey" Now we can pet ourselves on the shoulder, because science wins. fantastic!
I take your point. However I'm not particularly worried about there being 'no more' protests - I think that would probably take something like a constitutional amendment.
And it is also true that there doesn't seem to have been any major uptick in homicides following other protests, whether they've been about the climate, gay rights, abortions or whatever.
So the next time a group of people start a protest about transgender boxer's rights I doubt there will be a single voice saying "Hang on, this protest should be stopped because the homicide rate is likely to increase as a result"
He literally said it was due to police pullback
Another potentially interesting factor to consider:
Most courts closed for the pandemic. Many of them, especially in cities, didn't reopen for several years or reopened with much lower capacity. A lot fewer murder cases were being tried in court because of the pandemic. The justice system either had to detain people without speedy trials, or it had to not prosecute crimes. Neither of which are good options.
If this were the main cause of the increase in murders, I would expect a gradual increase starting in March. Instead, we see a sudden increase starting in May. So I don't think that this is the main contributing factor. But it could contribute to why murders haven't gone back down.
This cannot explain the Ferguson effect in Ferguson to begin with.
Here's a new piece in the Atlantic exploring this angle: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/covid-court-closings-violent-crime-wave/670559/
Assuming that this was the largest factor for the increase, I wouldn't expect murders to increase gradually starting in march; I'd expect a phase transition some time later. (I'm not sure how long to expect -- more than 2 weeks but less than 5 months.) The reasoning is this: if people are going to be committing crimes based on the reasoning of "I'm not going to get punished" it's going to be due to an open social understanding (in their social circles) that criminals are not being punished. That kind of open social acknowledgment of hidden statistics takes time to respond to changes and requires a (potentially very rapid) phase transition at the end to turn into open information.
A gradual increase from March seems like it is modeling each criminal-to-be as updating their own individual rationalist probabilities of being caught based off of each new case they hear about. I don't think that model accurately describes the decision making processes of people likely to commit crimes.
Maybe I missed this in the article -- is there evidence that the depolicing caused the increase in murders (rather than just both being responses to the Floyd incident)? Genuine question. In my head, I had assumed that it was something like increased anger/tension/despair in black communities as a response to Floyd's death.
That might be true, but the spike being in murders of blacks only would imply their anger/tension/despair was being taken out solely on other blacks, which would be odd. If murders were up across all races the general anger cause would seem more likely.
Fair point. I think the usual explanation for why most violence is within-race is segregation -- like, black people tend to live near other black people, white people tend to live near other white people, etc. So if you had a general increase in anger/tension/etc within black communities, it still makes sense to me that the resulting violence might be within-race?
A bit perhaps, but given the nature of the incident triggering the anger/tension it would make more sense that it was more outgroup targeting than ingroup I would think. The near total lack of increase among other groups makes it seem oddly inner directed, since even in a fairly segregated city you can't be more than a few miles from people of a different race to vent on. Minneapolis/St Paul are pretty quick and easy to drive across, and not terribly segregated, for instance, but the violence is pretty intra-group there.
One way to test your idea a bit might be to consider how for example the Twin Cities reacted to Ferguson in earlier years. That would be another anger/tension heightening situation but so far as I know there wasn't the national anti-police sentiment resulting in less police activity. Less anger perhaps, but also much less affect on policing, so if murders didn't spike as much (I have no idea if they did) that would suggest that more policing helps prevent anger turning into murder, and the reduction in policing in 2020 allowed more murder from the anger.
Other races don't party much with the type of blacks who bring illegal handguns to parties. There have been some nonblacks killed when blacks start shooting at each other in a downtown entertainment district, such as the white tourist who got murdered on 6th Street in Austin during a gun battle between black youths. But, generally speaking, the arrival of folks who look like they might be packing tends to diminish the party mood among nonblacks.
Homicides in general occur mostly within one's proximate community, and there's no reason to believe that an increase in anger/despair would precipitate increased criminality that is different than whatever crime precipitated by the baseline level of anger/despair.
Anger / despair is just what op-ed writers said about what they call the "racial reckoning." Watch videos of the looters and you'll see triumph / enjoyment. Like somebody said above, this was a huge Victory Riot.
Homicide victimizations were up across all races in 2020 over 2019 other than Asians.
By 2021, blacks were dying 49% more by homicide than in 2018, and Hispanics a little less but still way up. Whites, Asians, and Native Americans were up 9% to 13%.
Did despair cause people to loot electorinics?
no, but it seems like anger could
If I believed the Intercept graph, the safest city in the US was Baltimore and, um, I think the rest of the data quoted contradicts that.
Also, how did Portland have *negative* murder rates? Was there a necromancer passing through who resurrected a lot of the formerly dead? There is definitely something odd going on with that graph, and I think it may have to do with "percentage change in murders" - percent change compared to when? If there were 1,000 murders in March and only 100 in April, that would give a negative percent, but it wouldn't mean that there were no murders going on.
And if I instead believe those lying liars in Oregonian media, Portland had its own little sharp increase in murders over the period 2019-2021:
36 murders in 2019
55 murders in 2020 (83% increase according to the FBI as reported by KOIN 6 News, with nice colourful bar charts and what the hell is going on in Milwaukee, I would not have pegged it for 'murder spree city'? https://www.koin.com/news/crime/fbi-data-portland-homicides-up-83-from-2019-to-2020/)
90 murders in 2021 and the fun goes on:
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/01/15/2021-was-a-record-year-for-homicides-in-portland/
"City police and officials say last year’s increase — which disproportionally impacted Portland’s Black community — was fueled by gang-related arguments, drug deals gone array and disputes among people living on the streets. In addition, the situation was exacerbated by the pandemic, economic hardships and mental health crises.
In a May statement, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler warned residents that “groups” were traveling to the city from Washington and California to “engage in and advance gun violence.” In addition, Wheeler said “groups involved in this violence have issued an order to shoot someone in the next 30 days or be shot for not showing loyalty.”
Similar to the ’90s, Portland officials have said the city faces a rampant gang problem. Comparatively, police and residents say the boldness of shooters, their young age and the amount of shots fired surpass what they have seen before."
Those are percent changes in murder rate. So Baltimore's murder rate didn't change and Portland's decreased, for those months, according to that graph.
The title of the chart is literally PERCENT CHANGE IN MURDERS 2019 - 2020
There wasn't neagtive murders, the rate of murder decreased. The rate of change was negative.
> percent change compared to when?
Since 2019, its right there in the title
What I want to know is, why aren't black people vocally concerned about the rise in homicide in their communities? Could it just be that the media-favored activists don't care, but the average black person does?
How about "Better police, not no police"?
I can certainly see how wanting more police in one's locality could be compatible with the broader BLM goals of demanding higher standards of conduct from police, and more accountability and punishment for police misconduct.
It's much harder for me to envision how a person could want there to be more police in their immediate locality AND that the police be defunded. I'm not saying the latter goal NECESSARILY precludes the former, but it might as well, all things considered.
Ordinary people of whatever hue don’t have the media bullhorn. You do see however, in the “right-wing” press, occasional stories about how ordinary black people don’t like criminals and murderers running wild. Duh
This is not “right wing media,” any mainstream media where ordinary black people are covered will without a doubt have this angle at least occasionally. Despite the frequency with which people will say that media like this doesn’t exist it’s actually pretty common.
You won’t see it on CNN or in the New York Times or the Atlantic. Journalism is agenda driven, including these “ordinary people” stories. I’d say you could easily find people who’d say “racist” and “right-wing” about any story that said ordinary blacks want police to curb the criminals and murderers in their neighborhoods.
“Black people against crime” are the kinds of stories that you can find on your local ABC, NBC, or CBS affiliate station at 6pm on any given day.
This is true. I’ve watched a lot of them.
Sure – but they're not part of The National Narrative.
This is true in the same way that every single local crime is also not part of the “National Narrative”.
These stories are primarily of local interest, but they are ubiquitous.
It's actually extremely common to see that in NYT and the Atlantic. This was just published last week for example: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/us-city-violent-crime-rate-perception/661337/
The Atlantic enjoys sticking it to the wokes just as much as anyone here.
Exactly. 81% of black Americans want the same amount of police OR MORE in their communities.
The black Americans calling for police defunding are very much the exception rather than the rule.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx
They are. This has been extensively covered in the Mpls television and print media. Ilhan Omar is being challenged in the Democratic primary by a black man who lives in predominantly black North Minneapolis. I’m hoping he gets the nod.
There are some black men I follow online-- Glen Loury, John McWhorter, Colman Hughes who are quite concerned about crime in black communities. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, it's just the people I happen to know about.
My impression is that there's a long history of black organizations who have tried to help lower the crime rate. They may have made matters better than they otherwise would have been.
Oh, you asked about *vocally concerned*. I'm inclined to think that the mainstream media isn't amplifying them, and possibly that there are black people who are concerned but don't want to give fuel to racists.
Not just homicides. Motor vehicle accident deaths increased a great deal, especially amongst blacks. I plotted car accident deaths and homicides on a monthly basis from 1999-2021 as standard deviations of each groups' monthly mean to help separate seasonal effects from secular trends. It's pretty compelling. You can see both increased in 2014 and then again a great deal around May 2020.
https://twitter.com/RCAFDM/status/1536419294107602944
Hi, just wanted to say thank you for your health analysis! Helped change my mind about not one but two things that I thought I knew reasonably well - health economics and casual inference.
thank you!
I'd like to add one small factor: Drug trafficking is way up.
When you heard about a 40% increase in overdoses, did you consider the size of the iceberg underneath that? Anybody who ever had a habit started again during the lockdowns. With lots of demand, lots of product and lots of manpower, local dealers have been making $$$. Naturally, there has been some conflict up the chain, and anywhere there is that much $$$, there will be criminal violence.
But that is maybe 15% of the increase in crime. The police pullback is the rest. Based on conversations I have heard *IN JAIL*, amongst criminals and Sherrifs, criminals know the cops' hands are tied, they are in defensive mode. Criminals are far more aggressive from the start when the feeling on the street changes from,
"violence or shootings are certain to bring a big LEO response",
to
"Cops on duty are down 25% already, and some are at mandatory diversity seminars. 95% chance we just get away with this crime right now...." and
"...any fool has a 90% chance of getting away with murder."
This creates some real sympathy for the cops, in a soldier-ly way.
BR
Wait, sympathy for the cops among whom? The criminals in jail??
I mean, they're almost like 'coworkers' and it's pretty common for people to sympathize with their 'nemeses', if they 'work together' long enough!
And criminals probably have a lot of concrete, detailed knowledge about how policing actually works!
Opioids weren't seen much in the black inner city up until about 2015. According to Sam Quinones, Mexican dealers preferred to stick to white areas like Kentucky where users died quietly, rather than have to deal with black gangs that shoot a lot and attract attention. But fentanyl has been pretty big in the inner city in recent years, as George Floyd's toxicology report would suggest.
Looking at all of this data, the more interesting question to me now is related to the figure of US murder rate by year and asking what caused the murder rate to double in the decade following ~1964?
The article also implicitly answers that, I think?
Then I completely missed it.
Same phenomenon but larger.
EDIT: Although, if you look at comments from Scott on this post, I think he personally prefers the lead hypothesis?*
*In case you're not familiar, the hypothesis is:
(1) We know substantial lead exposure in childhood has many developmentally harmful effects.
(2) We know that (because of leaded gasoline) there was a period of time in American history that saw significantly increased childhood exposure to lead.
(3) It's sort of maybe possible to line up the onset + abolition of leaded gasoline with the onset + end of the 1960s-1990s crime wave, although the correlation is loose -- leaded gasoline started to be used in 1924, but it took a while for it to be widespread and car use was much higher in the 1940s than 1920s. On the other end, "A 1994 study had indicated that the concentration of lead in the blood of the U.S. population had dropped 78% from 1976 to 1991."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#In_fuel
Notably, there are a few other high-spots of lead contamination for idiosyncratic local reasons (Central America due to leaded glazes being used in local pottery, Afghanistan due to leaded gasoline (?) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6025484/]) that also have elevated rates of violence, but this was an anecdotal correlation I noticed a while ago and not something that I've found a good statistically rigorous study of.*
*Probably because collecting blood lead levels is time consuming and expensive so a global database of different countries's lead levels doesn't exist.
Are you meaning to suggest that the Civil Rights movement caused a decade-long increase in homicide?
The start in 1964 is a lagged effect of the baby boom, which increased the birth rate 50% about 18 years prior. That larger youthful cohort should lead that 50% more crimes per capita, since most violent crime is committed by the young. The actual rise was more than 50% and the reasons for that aren't as clear.
The causes of the decline seem a bit clearer to me, but even that involved multiple factors. I wrote a bit trying to sort it all out, came to a clearer understanding but still don't think I have the full picture:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/explaining-the-crime-wave-of-the-1980s-d98395133dfc
This is a very impressive analysis, thank you for sharing!
That the murder rate doubled over the course of the liberal 1960s and 1970s, doing huge damage to most American cities, used to be well known.
The background turns blue, and then Scott backs the blue. Coincidence?
View from the inside. I'm two steps removed from several police officers, and the reduction in policing verifiably comes from these factors:
1) Cops willfully and consciously stopped going to black neighborhoods. Literally stopped responding to 911 calls there, because the risk of themselves getting roasted in the media, skewered by a social media mob, fired, and jailed was not worth the risk of going to the black area. They stated this privately, and they acted on this on the ground. A great example was the entirely justifiable Wendy's Atlanta shooting. The police officer was acquitted, but the media mob attacks on him literally caused his familial relatives to be fired from unrelated jobs.
2) Cops quit their jobs. Staffing across the country is down, especially in urban police forces that had to deal with ACAB social pressures. They decided to work lower stress jobs such as private security.
It was less of a "own the libs" thing as it was a "well if this is what they want I guess we'll give it to them" thing and a "they've made the personal risks too high to do my ordinary job" thing.
It seems to me that Americans have a lot of trust in punishment. Not all Americans, of course, but I see this weird hypnosis where the idea of punishing someone leads to believing that the punishment will have exactly the effects one wants. The unwanted behavior will go away, and there will be no blowback or side effects.
This shows up both in long prison sentences and in the left wanting to punish the police. I'm not saying punishment never works, but it's not all that reliable.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/
Note that more white people numerically (though not proportionally) are shot by police than black. I've been angry that police shootings of white people (some of them sketchy) aren't taken seriously, but maybe the net effect has been better for white people. On the other hand, the justice system shouldn't just be about net effect.
One more angle, the police are trained to be very afraid of the public-- as long as that's in play, it's going to be hard to get them to treat people more carefully.
Another difficult plan/goal would be to get a lot of people to be more pro-social.
Yes! I'm working on it. It's surprisingly hard, I don't have much power myself, but lots of other people are doing their part. I'd guess you are too :)
Punishment seems to be a behavior modification across species, so it would seem to work at least somewhat. Or miscreants spontaneously conform to desired behavior standards randomly.
Punishment seems pretty effective.
What would probably be even _more_ effective is MORE but _less sever_ punishment, i.e. increasing the rate of which crimes are punished (while not punishing innocents _too_ much more, ideally).
But jailing/imprisoning seems perfectly effective at preventing crimes (outside of jail/prison anyways).
There's no secret American sauce to it. People respond to incentives. Punishment is an incentive, as long as it is applied consistently with high probability.
My point is that punishment has some effect to control behavior, but it can also be incentivizing for the punisher, and the latter seems strong in the US.
>though not proportionally
It's absout the same once you control for crime rate and rate of vilence against police.
>One more angle, the police are trained to be very afraid of the public-- as long as that's in play, it's going to be hard to get them to treat people more carefully.
People in America have guns, and black Americans are more violent than a majoirity (if not all) major populations in developed countries
> A priori there’s no reason to expect lockdowns and “cabin fever” to hit blacks much harder than every other ethnic group.
Blacks are more likely to be poor, and so live in tinier and more rundown apartments and in neighbourhoods with fewer parks, and they have more children. Sounds like a recipe for cabin fever to me. That would also explain the uptick in arrests prior to the George Floyd murder.
> No country except the United States had a large homicide spike in 2020, which suggests that the spike was unrelated to the pandemic and more associated with US-specific factors, for which the BLM protests and subsequent pullback of policing in black communities seem to me to be the most obvious suspect.
To play devil's advocate, the US arguably has the strongest culture around freedom to move and associate.
What about 2021 and 2022? As far as I can tell the trend continues. An overarching theory as to perhaps why:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-26/why-is-the-u-s-murder-rate-spiking
The effect on police is likely much longer term than the protests themselves. And the continuing crime rate invalidates other theories much more than Scott's.
This raises the question: what's the "natural" level of black-on-black crime? Will it always rise as policing intensity decreases?
Wouldn’t you expect a crime spike after the protest even if BLM caused no increased propensity toward crime?
State #1: Lockdown. People are inside so there are fewer potential murder victims. Crime is down.
State #2: Everyone is outside again, and total number of murders go up.
Protest certainly seemed like the de facto end of lockdown where I live.
Owen G made a similar point in a previous comments thread.
This does not invalidate your other points, but it could mean that we should take the spike in late May less seriously.
Not to excuse how things played out but the particular circumstances at the time of George Floyd’s death did make things worse than they might have been.
The COVID lockdown did provide a large pool of young people with no work or school to attend. Warm weather had made it’s first appearance at the same moment of the crowd violence too. If things had played out between November and April, Minnesota winter weather would have made for much smaller crowds.
1) Yet the crime spike has continued into 2021 and 2022, after Covid measures have subsided.
2) Other countries had the same lockdowns. As Scott as pointed out they don't have the same crime.
They didn’t have the video of George Floyd dying on camera either. The guy was kind of a fuck up but his death was not necessary. He was cuffed and loosing consciousness and the knee remained on his neck. Watching it play out remains a gut punch. A jury called it murder. Chauvin wanted to plea second degree murder but the DA didn’t let him. He’s appealing on the grounds that public sentiment in the community was biased against him. It probably was.
I only know the situation in the Twin Cities first hand. Mpls police are still understaffed. Enforcement is still lower than pre pandemic lockdown and George Floyd’s death.
My main point above is that there was a confluence of circumstances that contributed in to scale of events in Mpls after the event.
As I said above the violence that followed is not excusable.
Maybe it's Floyd, maybe it's the police giving up. Either way my point was that it's not Covid.
I think the fact that no one had a job to go to or classes to attend made for a much larger pool of protesters.
As I pointed out that no longer holds true today. And yet the violence continues unabated.
1. The pandemic essentially continued in the US until Jan-Feb 2022 when omicrone essentially produced not-quite-but-close-enough-for-gov't-work herd immunity so that most people changed from pandemic behavior to 'new normal' behavior.
2. Other countries had real lockdowns...as in you stay in your house and come out on the street with a permission slip from the gov't to, say, do quick grocery shopping. By April-May the US had moved to a type of de facto lockdown where people were mostly not at work or school but could be outdoors as much as they pleased and many businesses that facilitated that were open (for take out). At that time you also had the breaking of cold winter weather and a growing recognition that Covid did not transmit outdoors very well.
All other countries? Uniformly for the last three years?
The US crime spike was worse in 2021 than 2020 and every indication that I could find is that so far 2022 is worse than 2021. If the country has largely returned to normal then why is the rise in crime still accelerating?
The data is not really in that I can find to show acceleration. You want to drop out 2020 since that's going to be totally abnormal and look instead at how does 2019 compare as a baseline to 2021 and 2022.
If crime is accelerating, though, that really blows a huge hole in the 'BLM protests caused this' thesis. Huge.
The US's response to Covid was exceptionally bad cross the board. That is pretty much undeniable. The US's 'lockdown' looked very different from other nations. You don't have to pretend other nations had a 3 year don't leave your house lockdown to acknowledge that.
1) The homicide rate in the US is the worst it's been in at least 26 years. I think you have to go back to 1996 to find a year with a homicide rate that's comparable. That's almost 30 years of falling crime rates wiped out. Pick any year in the last 26 and the current homicide rate by comparison shows a remarkable increase.
2) Crime rates in the first half of 2022:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/major-cities-violent-crimes-data-murders-shootings
3) When you look at Covid measures you have a tremendous diversity in response across countries. My point is that as far as I can tell there is a single country on the planet that saw historic gains in the homicide rate: the United States. No other country, whether it locked down tight or very loosely, saw an increase in violent crime like the US.
Like Scot said - *this didn't happen in other countries*, even those with stricter lockdowns.
And it cannot possibly explain the Ferguson effect *in Ferguson* to begin with.
The other countries didn’t have the video of George Floyd’s death.
Not quite to my point.
Imagine a world that had protest yet no increase in crime.
A) Before lockdown crime is at some normal level: X.
B) During lockdown fewer people are out. Crime lowers to: X-b.
C) After lockdown crime returns to normal level: X.
If there’s a rapid transition from B->C, then it will look like a “spike” in crime. My point is only that the protest may have triggered a rapid transition (“de facto end of lockdown”).
Obviously crime went up to some level X+c after the protest. The first part of Scott’s argument is titled “timing”. I’m merely pointing out you could have a theoretical situation:
A) X
B) X-b+c
(protest)
C) X+c
Where +c precedes the protest.
*Didn’t happen in other countries—> lockdown didn’t end abruptly.
*Doesn’t explain the Ferguson effect in Ferguson. True.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate here. I don’t think this theoretical world is our own.
Thank you for this. Maybe you are the brave, investigative journalists I've been dreaming of? I have one question, it's a doozy and no one is bothering because the corporate media are stasi hacks. HOW MUCH DID THE "PEACEFUL" PROTESTS OF 2020 REALLY COST? One measly Axios report, estimating the damage between $1 and 2$ billion, covered only two weeks- when we all know it went on much longer. Some of these areas will never recover- and they aren't in the rich parts of town.
What we don't know yet is how big of a transfer of wealth there was from urban property owners to suburban and small town property owners. Land prices are up all over so it's hard to tell, but it looks like Blackstone et al bought in heavily to places where there are unlikely to be riots or black crime. But it's hard to disentangle this from the work-from-home revolution.
The cost in urban land prices from the mid-1960s onward was colossal: e.g., Detroit pre-1967 riot vs. today. In contrast, the appreciation in Brooklyn as crime came down was immense.
I don't think the police decided to relax policing in black neighborhoods as much as they were ordered to do so by people now trying to rewrite history and hide their actions.
Looking at fig. 1 - eyeballing the data, you could just as easily say that there was no spike before july 2020. The peak in may is only very slightly higher than peaks in the previous 3 years. I would have liked to see a statistical analysis of whether this peak sufficiently explained by random noice. Certainly, if you consider the last 20 years to be homogenous (probably not a perfect assumtion, but still, looking at the last 10 years seem just as arbitrary) that spike does not seem that abnormal at all.
I guess I'm arguing that the whole post may be about nothing - sorry....
It's obvious the BLM protests and riots caused the homicide spike, but it is also obvious that the pandemic caused the BLM protests and riots to happen on a scale ten times or more greater than they would have otherwise. Perhaps without the pandemic we don't get widespread BLM riots and an increase in homicide.
That's not clear at all. If the riots were smaller, you would be saying this was a result of the pandemic and people wanting to socially distance.
What does "the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests." actually mean?
If social issues had been accumulating like tinder, and May 2020 sparked the match, does that make the match the cause? If the match is the cause, then you should be able to decrease murder rates by targeting the cause... but I laugh at the idea that BLM Protests is the social issue to address in order to reduce murder rates. It is the underlying social issues that are driving these murder rates and need to be addressed. This is why I'd like to understand what it means to scott claim BLM as the primary cause. This article lacks a broader context to make the conversation meaningful or practical. The context feels like "here is my defense of my prior claim". Cool?
I see many faults with this analysis. We lack a comprehensive baseline for the seasonality of murder rates year over year. There is no explicit causation, just casual inference. I agree with the inferences but not the conclusion. And the opposing perspecties are dismissed outright.... Scott is explicitly trying to explain his perspective so this post is inherently biased rather than exploratory.
Do I think the civil events of 2020 Summer affected murder rates? Absolutely... and it happened during a pandemic at the end of Trump's presidency. Still, it feels completely irrational to try and focus on a singular primary cause to a complex social issue. Again, if "BLM Protests" were the match, how much tinder was already there and what is the real cause? What is the purpose of writing this? What is the message to be taken from it?
> We lack a comprehensive baseline for the seasonality of murder rates year over year.
If you're demanding something _more_ comprehensive than what's already in the post, then that seems like an 'isolated demand for rigor'.
> There is no explicit causation, just casual inference.
I have, I think, a fairly detailed and concrete 'model' for "explicit causation", but there are levels of what you might mean by "explicit causation" and it _seems_ like maybe nothing could possibly satisfy you in this case – because you don't _want_ to believe Scott's 'inferences'.
> I agree with the inferences but not the conclusion.
What does this mean?
> And the opposing perspecties are dismissed outright.... Scott is explicitly trying to explain his perspective so this post is inherently biased rather than exploratory.
Yes, Scott wrote this at the explicit request of commenters on recent posts and I'm very sure that this is a 'rough sketch' of his, Scott's, model of this topic/subject. That doesn't make it "biased".
But Scott also isn't just 'dismissing outright' other explanations. He mentions several of them and explains why he finds them relatively lacking.
> Still, it feels completely irrational to try and focus on a singular primary cause to a complex social issue.
Why? Is there some reason why complex social issues _can't_ have a singular _primary_ cause?
It sure seems like you just don't want to believe what Scott (and others) believe!
But believing this is true doesn't in fact, e.g. imply that you're racist. It's just a (sad) way the world might be.
I will try to say this again more simply... I believe what the data shows and I don't agree with the narrative derived from it. We interpret data, and in the scope of what Scott did in this post I think his inferences were appropriate. However, I think Scott's scope was too narrow, lacking in root cause analysis, and poorly situated in any broader context (this last bit is particularly understandable as it arose organically from comments in the San Francisco review). As a result, his narrative feels impotent to me.
I'll also say, I find so many people here use data as justification for "belief" and I worry about an under-appreciation for the limitations and caveats to the utility of data. Do you hear yourself when you say "It sure seems like you just don't want to believe what Scott (and others) believe!"? I could say the exact same thing for another thought leader and their community that steeps its belief from another cause... and it would leave us at odds with no remedy because our conflict would stem from the means by which we assemble our beliefs rather than our beliefs themselves. e.g. scientific revolution vs established religion
Perhaps It goes without saying, this is a Rationalist community and I do not believe in Rationalism as it is defined. I am someone who appreciates the utility of rational thinking in conjunction with other modes of evaluating the world around us. I will always find things to be critical of Scott, I have a right to say them so long as Scott welcomes me here, and I am under no obligation to fully agree with what Scott narrates because he provides data that supports it. That's my reality.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
My comment was, perhaps, somewhat 'inflammatory', but this _is_ a "Rationalist community" (to a large extent anyways), and my advice is standard for us '(aspiring) rationalists'.
(Minor quibble – our philosophy isn't "Rationalism" – it's more accurately 'modern rationality' (no capitals) and it's less of a _compact_ 'philosophy' than a much more nebulous 'cloud' of ideas/aspects from all kinds of prior/current bodies of knowledge.)
> I will always find things to be critical of Scott, I have a right to say them so long as Scott welcomes me here, and I am under no obligation to fully agree with what Scott narrates because he provides data that supports it. That's my reality.
I don't like that first part – you will _definitely_ "always find things to be critical of Scott"? Even if Scott states "I agree with Jordan."? That just seems _deliberately_ contrarian :)
But, yes, _of course_ you have a "right" to express disagreement (to the standards Scott requires/demands), and, yes, you're not 'under an obligation' to agree with Scott, or anyone else.
But it also seems like a mistake to _believe_ anything because of an 'obligation' – that's not how accurate beliefs are assembled! Truth is neither an obligation nor 'allowed', but info that's accurate independent of our thinking or desires/fears/hopes/'obligations'.
It sure seems like you just want to believe what Scott believes. Research on complex social issues finds, over and over again, that there are not single, primary causes to health or disease, prosperity or poverty, social order or civil enmity. Wanting there to be One Weird Trick is a very human desire, but not rational in the least.
Um... no I do not. I have seriously disagreed with Scott on many things and I'm also not a reductionist
Why is everyone ignoring the ENORMOUS datum that is the Ferguson effect IN FERGUSON? It completely eviscerates any of the explanations given here.
>What is the purpose of writing this? What is the message to be taken from it?
Take note everyone - this is virtually an admission that narratives are more important than the truth.
Your "take note everyone" feels fallacious and quite curt. You ignore my query into the root cause of things and fail to answer the question you quoted directly. Can you answer it?
What Scott communicates is a narrative. Having data points to back that doesn't mean it isn't a narrative, and I'm going to save us my diatribe about general concerns of data collection, concept validity, and inferred causation.
The central point I'm making is about the lack of root cause analysis in this piece and it's practical context (e.g. the bit you quoted). Here, I'm not debating the validity of the "Ferguson effect" and other patterns observed in data because I see it. I'm questioning the meaning and practicality of concepts like that. You picking up what I'm putting down?
I was discussing this essay online and my interlocutor pointed out, and I'm copying/pasting this:
"A very simple falsification of his theory would be if the bulk of the increase was in-household homicide."
Do we have numbers for that?
(To be honest, I think that if the bulk of the increase was in-household then that opens up even uglier questions but, hey. The point of science is to go where the data inexorably leads.)
Is "in-household homicide" about the _relationship_ between the perpetrator and victim or _where_ the murder occurred?
I think it'd be difficult to get data on the relationships – a LOT of murders are unsolved, and probably a good portion don't even have a 'official' lead suspect. The kind of people that commit these murders don't generally 'snitch'.
The FBI tracks murders by type. Domestic murders have a high clearance rate -- e.g., the man of the house probably did it. In fact, a lot of domestic murderers clear their crime themselves by then shooting themselves.
But do you know how those 'types' are defined? Is it _where_ the murders take place or _by whom_ they're (suspected to have been) done?
I'd guess in most cases the two are related, e.g. "domestic murders" take place in a domicile.
And maybe that's good enough. If someone is murdered in a private residence, and not from, e.g. a drive-by shooting, it's probably (or almost certainly) a 'domestic' murder. And similarly for, e.g. a murder at a family gathering outside somewhere.
One count I saw was that murders were up 29% in 2020 but domestic murders were up only 4%.
That seems to indicate that most happened outside the home.
Thanks.
I think your interpretation of the effect of the moving average is backwards.
When using a moving average, the measurement should lag behind drivers, not go ahead of them.
Stylised example: If the murder rate is always 5/day, then on Day N the atmospheric lead concentration goes up and stays up and changes the murder rate to 10/day on all future days, then the 7-day moving average murder rate will start rising slowly on Day N+1, reach 10/day on Day N+7, then stay there.
But you use the fact it's a 7-day moving average in some of the charts to argue for the measurement starting to go up *before* the event, as far as I can see, and that's completely backwards. Moving averages can't give us advanced predictions of the things that will eventually cause them to have risen!
All round, a lot of the very good time-resolution graphs seem to show the effect starting before the protests, and even before the protested murder itself (which was May 25th, I think), more like the beginning of May. That's very confusing to me.
But it's always tough to say when a trend change actually occurs in noisy data. Oftentimes if you just looked up to Day Y, you'd say, well, yes, Day Y is high and it's been trending up since Day X, but it "trends" up and back down again all the time just due to noise, and there's nothing particularly "trendy" about the Day X to Day Y period. But the if you look onwards up to Day Z, you find out that the increase just keeps on going and going until Day Z is clearly way out of noise range and there's definitely been a start of an upward trend at some point, and then the temptation is to go all the way back to that last inflection point on Day X and call that the start of the new upward trend, even though when you'd only seen up to Day Y, Day X didn't look at all special, just one more inflection point in a noisy bounce up and down.
I dunno why but my comment kept cutting off partway through (even though it would all be there when I tried to edit) so I've copied the rest here:
Maybe murder was up throughout May due to noise or some transient effect like easing some lockdowns and everyone having some built up murders to get through quickly or the weather or aliens, but it would have just subsided back to trend without the protest effect. It's really hard to say.
Clearly something has happened (most likely, anyhow, I guess maybe not but it seems probable), and this is as good an explanation as I've heard (pandemic explanations really don't ring true given worldwide data and the racial split), but I'm still allocating quite a lot of my probability mass to "some weird shit nobody's thought of yet" or "just sort of, you know, stuff".
This completely depends on how you apply the 'moving average'. There's a whole subfield of digital signal processing devoted to different filtering techniques. When you're dealing with a data series where you have all of it ahead of time (generally historical data rather than current data) it's common to do a symmetrical filter. The simplest is a centered boxcar filter, where the output is f(x[n]) = (x[n-1] + x[n] + x[n+1])/3. That's still a 3-day moving average, but it keeps spikes and other anomalies centered on their actual time and spreads them out on each side.
Using a filter like that, a sudden discontinuous rise on a particular day will be filtered to a straight line of the width of the filter, with the date of the rise half-way up the line. That's pretty close to what we see in the graph, so I suspect Scott's right about the cause. (The rise looks a bit more like a sigmoid than a straight line, so they might be doing a more 'rounded' symmetrical filter like a Butterworth.)
You can check the website those data are from (citycrimestats.com). They don't provide the raw data but from inspecting plots of "count" vs "count - 7 day moving avg" it's clear that the latter is the average of the count for the previous seven days (e.g., the first "February" day is the average of the last seven "January" days). So Scott is simply wrong here.
Yep, you're right. For anyone else struggling to be sure, take a look at the Incidents in Austin. There's a giant dip in mid Feb 2021, which is clearly delayed by several days in the rolling average plot.
Yeah. @Scott please retract the moving average part of your claim. The moving averages for that source in particular pull events _later_ in time: https://imgur.com/8xSgzYl
However, the point is sort of moot, because if you go to the raw unaveraged data, it looks like the spike in Minneapolis starts on May 26 or 27, which lines up ~perfectly with the start of the protests. So there's really no discrepancy that needs explaining away. I think citycrimestats.com doesn't draw the line in the right place, maybe because the protests started in Minneapolis before spreading elsewhere?
You discount the spike in gun sales too much. Sure the protests led to the increase in gun sales so they are correlated. Homicide rates are still high though and that is because gun sales are still high. Police do tend to pull back when convenient to set a narrative and in some countries you even see that with gang violence.
If gun sales played a major role, states with strong gun control laws on sales should have had lower increases in homicides. Did they? That would be interesting to check.
I don't think that's impossible, but my impression is that the increases were pretty similar across the country.
My guess would be that lax gun control states would average the biggest increases in gun accidents and gun suicided, but that gun homicides trends depend more on NYPD-style point-of-use illegal hand gun control than on point of sale control of scary rifles.
"Guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black"
I think Scott's overall analysis is right, but this particular sentence doesn't ring true, because legally-bought guns have a tendency to make their way into the black market via theft. In 2014 Tennessee allowed residents to keep guns in their vehicles without a permit, and then in 2020 there was a huge spike in gun purchases, related to the general craziness of 2020. Here's a graph of "guns stolen from vehicles" in Memphis, TN, by year.
https://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/fancy_images/TNMEMPHIS/2022/06/5997697/guns-stolen_original.png
Right. The mayor of New York was complaining this week, pretty reasonably, that the Supreme Court's concealed carry decision would lead to more thefts of guns from cars -- a law-abiding citizen with a concealed carry permit wants to visit his mother in the hospital where guns aren't allowed, so he stashes his gun under his car seat and his car gets broken into and his gun stolen.
My general bias is that guns for self-defense make sense in Wyoming when the cops are 30 miles and there's no bystanders to accidentally plug in the background, but guns make a lot less sense in NYC where the NYPD is a few minutes away and you might miss the bad guy and shoot a random pedestrian.
It was possible to predict it for exactly these reasons. I did on June 2, 2020: https://twitter.com/LechMazur/status/1267863723013820416.
I'm really skeptical about one connection here. I don't think the homicide spike could be mediated by cop pullback. The timing doesn't work. Intuitively, there should be some amount of lag behind any of the reasons you proposed for cop pullback. Funding isn't cut instantly. The 'Defund the police' messaging took a little while to dominate. Police didn't instantly grow resentful; most condemned the Floyd killing anyhow, so only became resentful due to the protests. And this fits with the graph of arrests in Chicago; the arrests only started to fall off a week after the protests started.
But the homicide spike happened as soon as the protests happened. It needs to have been mediated by a much faster effect. I'd suggest the mundane 'there were just more people spending more time outside.' We know that murders in cities already go up when the weather is nice and people are outside, and go down in the winter and in rainstorms/blizzards. It makes sense that if some social effect made even more people go outside, there might be even more murders.
Based on what the 'police' themselves have written, the police were already resentful and the protests just exacerbated that.
But then what exactly happened? If resentful police means less speeding tickets are written. That would not necessarily imply speeding will increase, just that fewer people get tickets. On the other hand if word gets out the police aren't around, then speeding will probably go up (and during lockdown, there were quite a few people who gleefully posted about breaking 100mph on interstate highways that would normally be clogged with commuters).
Did you just answer your own question?
Besides _increasing_ resentment, and probably at a faster rate too, in the wake of the most recent 'BLM protests', the effect you just described was at play.
But then, beyond that, the police were officially ordered to, in many cities, NOT engage in all kinds of similar proactive policing.
And _of course_ the 'criminals' would know of all of this! It's in their professional interests to know this kind of thing.
Steve Pinker I think had a story (which I suspect he misremembered) about the police going on strike in his city when he was young. The first week there was an absurd number of very serious crimes.
While he concluded from this policing saves the day, I thought it was very obvious if his story was halfway true there was coordination between criminals and police. Probably not formal but all it takes is someone to overhear cops saying something like "well I hope the mayor knows there ain't going to be anyone covering the north side next week, he better be ready with excuses if anything happens!" and word will get out fast.
Tyler Cowen, likewise, likes to cite an ancedote about DC where sometimes random terrorism alerts cause police to increase patrols at odd times. This leads to a decrease in crime. Again the lesson he takes is more police = less crime, but I think it is pretty obvious the criminal ecosystem works around the work habits of police. Shifts in either direction can cause a temporary change in crime but the reversion to the mean asserts itself over time.
Yeah, I'm _very_ sure something like what you describe happens.
Fiction – not _great_ evidence generally! – _does_ describe, in stories about 'criminal' protagonists, pretty detailed knowledge, on the part of criminals, of their 'adversaries', e.g. the police, guards, etc..
I realize a lot of people don't remember the day-by-day change in the media climate over the last week of May 2020 but by the weekend of May 29-31 it was already extraordinarily hostile toward police and white people in general and stayed that way for months as a "racial reckoning" was declared to make up for 401 years of white sins against blacks.
That weekend I watched hours of Los Angeles news helicopter coverage of mobs breaking into and setting fire to luxury sneaker boutiques on Melrose Avenue and smashing up Jewish delis on Fairfax Boulevard in the closest thing I've seen to a pogrom in this century and was amazed the next morning to see the national prestige press egging on the "peaceful protesters." And it went on like that all summer, with the media eventually changing their term to "mostly peaceful protesters."
My impression is the American Establishment thought George Floyd protesters were, at least potentially, a mostly peaceful color revolution that would bring down Donald Trump in a mostly democratic coup after they'd attacked the White House, and the Joint Chiefs denied Trump's request for troops. Bill Barr defused the dangerous situation on the last weekend in May 2020 by pointing out that if the Pentagon refused to defend the President from the mob, the federal government employed huge numbers of armed men, such as the Border Patrol, who would be happy to protect their President.
Eyeballing these graphs and invoking priors about crime does not make a "compelling statistical case". Correlations in timing are weak evidence for claims that one thing was "caused primarily" by another, not "clear evidence". The observations made in "right-wing sources", or at least those you repeat in this post, are also made in the other sources you link. I don't believe it's correct to say a point has "gone unnoticed" when it is taken into account in justifiably more careful causal inference.
You've shown through your use of statistics that BLM protests directly correlate to the rise in homicides in black communities in the cities where the protests took place. Great. Now how did BLM protests influence this rise? Working out this more difficult question that should produce a nuanced answer, but you'd going to need more than stats to make it clear. What you've done at this stage is give fodder to those who care to use it.
It's important whether something is true independent of whether it gives any of your political enemies "fodder" for their cause(s).
It's weird how you people never demand this level of evidence for claims that """Racism""" is the cause of something.
Maybe try to let me be a human being instead of part of the mob that lives in your head?
Really liking the new design here.
well done
After notable incidents of police brutality, calls to 911 drop. Most interestingly, some cities have microphones designed to pickup gun shots and pinpoint them to a block. This provides useful data since the microphones will pick up all gun shots and you can look at call logs to see how often neighbors call the police when guns are fired.
The problem with the claims of the Ferguson effect is quite frankly cops do not prevent many murders. If you want to kill someone, you're not going to do it if you see a cop standing on the street, but that just means you'll do it when your target isn't near a cop. If you kill someone because you are in a fit of rage, again that often happens in places where you normally wouldn't have a cop just standing around anyway.
The Ferguson effect is not that protests cause crime spikes, it's that when trust between police and a community breaks, crime spikes because the community no longer trusts the police and will not engage them, for example, if they hear two people arguing in the street late at night. My father-in-law was Italian and grew up in Newark NJ and his motto from the streets was "you never call the cops unless someone has a knife sticking out of them"
Now I also think 2020 had another impact on crime. The pandemic hurt open air drug sales and as a result dealers tried to move in on each other's territories to maintain themselves in a shrinking market. At least from watching a lot of shooting headlines from NYC in 2020 and early 21, a lot of them seemed very much like hits rather than the peak of a generalized crime wave (i.e. someone zips up on someone in scooter, shoots him, zips away). This can be tested when there's good data on all types of crimes. Usually one would expect homicide to be on the top of a crime pyramid with lesser crimes making up larger numbers underneath. In that model if homicides increase, all other crimes should too. If, however, we find most other crime stays the same but homicides go up much more, that indicates something is going on with the distribution of crime.
I'm a big fan of L.A. Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy's 2015 book "Ghettoside" that portrays a tall, handsome blond surfer dude LAPD detective who winningly talks South-Central witnesses into naming shooters in the war on impunity (although I suspect she wrote it with Brad Pitt in mind to play her hero).
But ... the single most successful war on crime in my lifetime was in NYC in the Giuliani-Bloomberg-Bratton era. Did it consist of winning the trust of the community by Brad Pitt types charming witnesses? Maybe, in part. But mostly it consisted of rounding up guys who were carrying illegal handguns and sending them upstate. After awhile, the guys left on the street were more afraid of the NYPD than they were of each other, so they stashed their pieces in hard to access places and NYC stopped having so many shootings.
>The Ferguson effect is not that protests cause crime spikes, it's that when trust between police and a community breaks, crime spikes because the community no longer trusts the police and will not engage them, for example, if they hear two people arguing in the street late at night. My father-in-law was Italian and grew up in Newark NJ and his motto from the streets was "you never call the cops unless someone has a knife sticking out of them"
But this is precisely what BLM/defund the police want. So they're promoting polcicies that lead to more black people dying.
Actually quite the opposite. The breakdown in trust happens not because there are BLM protests, there are BLM protests because trust has broken down. Defund is not a solution in the sense that having the fire department come and shoot hundreds of gallons of water on your house is not a solution to you doing a sloppy job wiring. Water damage will gut your house but if you've allowed a fire to start it's better than letting it burn but obviously the better solution would be to avoid the fire in the first place.
Anyone who realized how embedded police unions are knew that defund was never going to happen on any scale and it didn't. Find me any major police force with less officers today than it had ten years ago, or twenty years ago? Unless you have a very small area or an area that had a massive population decrease such places will be few and far between.
You can, however, rethink defund in terms of paying police less to harass with quota offenses and overpolicing and more with lighter touch policing and community building.
+1 to that. This article was really disappointing because it completely skipped a step, much as environmentalists skip a step (well, multiple steps) when they say "there is plastic in the ocean, therefore we should ban plastic bags."
Here Scott says "increase in homicides coincide with the protests, therefore the protests caused less policing which *pretty much instantly* increased the national homicide rate". Scott's proposed mechanisms:
> - Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
> - Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them.
> - Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk.
Plus he makes a fourth suggestion about police being "defunded" that doesn't make any sense (any reduction in police funding surely would have occurred after the homicide rate increased).
Somehow Scott fails to notice that he is implying a questionable theory of action for how police prevent homicides. Indeed, I fear that he has completely left the realm of "gears-level models" here. Scott is making a claim about *how* police prevent homicides, but doesn't notice that he is doing so! If I try to come up with a gears-level model of Scott's claim, the model I see is this: right before a homicide, cops often arrive on the scene just in time to prevent it. Therefore, if you reduce policing, homicides go up.
Consider: the size of the spike is about 28%. If we assume cops reduce the amount of policing by half (surely an exaggeration?), then it would seem that Scott's unstated assumption is that in about 36% of all would-be homicides, cops arrive on scene just in time to prevent the homicide before it occurs. Then, because cops are policing only half as much, they only show up on-scene half as much, so they only prevent half as many homicides as before; therefore half of those 36% go unprevented, so what used to be 64% of homicides materializing becomes 82%, which is an increase of 28%.
(Here's the equation I solved for this where b=baseline homocides without cops, p=prevented homicides, assuming policing dropped by half: (b-p/2) / (b-p) = 1.28, implying 0.78p = 0.28b; 1.28 represents the 28% increase in homicides)
Of course, I'm pretty sure it doesn't work this way. I would guess that well over 90% of the time, cops are not around when an attempted homicide is about to occur, and that instead, homicides are primarily prevented by a combination of (1) people not usually wanting to kill other people and (2) people being afraid of the consequences of killing people, plus (3) people killing people accidentally (e.g. during an assault or while driving badly)
In my model, police mainly prevent homicides indirectly via detective work rather than ordinary "policing". Detective work (and other pieces of the system, like courts and prisons) create a deterrent. And there's no way that criminals were thinking to themselves "hmm, George Floyd died, so I bet cops will *investigate murders less* now, so killing is safer now."
Scott doesn't follow the "Rationality A-Z" advice of spending five minutes on hypothesis generation (even though he does take the time to list out four ways that his one and only hypothesis could turn out to be right). So, here are the ideas that came to my mind during *one* minute of hypothesis generation:
1. people didn't stop *wanting* to kill people when the pandemic started, but put off the murders until lockdowns eased, leading to a spike
2. while people were in lockdowns, they got some homicidal thoughts and followed through when lockdowns eased (or otherwise had lower mental health leading to a greater tendency to kill)
3. people got into angrier moods because of the general anxiety after Floyd's death, and became more likely to kill other people as a result
4. more than one of the above
See also: Get Real notes that Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020.
It's also interesting that homicides did *not* decrease during lockdowns as compared to March/April of the previous 3 years according to figure 1 (oops, this is evidence against my hypothesis #1)
Finally, I notice that Scott's first three mechanisms do not involve police being defunded, which implies that they're doing less policing while being paid the same amount. But if cops aren't doing the job they are paid to do, why does Scott label the BLM protestors rather than the cops as "the cause"? As Nobody Special notes:
Step 1 - Police killings that lead to the protests <= not the cause
Step 2 - Protests against the police killings <= THE CAUSE
Step 3 - Police pullback in response to the protests <= not the cause
Step 4 - Increased crime
(edit: okay, I see how they could still "do policing" but leave the black neighborhoods, so they would technically not be skipping work, but I am not seeing how this makes them blameless. But this is a moot point: I bet cops *did not* leave black neighborhoods *nationwide* at the end of May.)
Comment of the year here! Excelling analysis.
On a 'gear level' model, I could see how police could trigger a crime spike. Cops are mad at the mayor over pay negotiations. They let things 'drop' when arresting people like "Well, I hope the Mayor has something planned for the north side because there's not going to be anyone there next month". When calls come in, maybe they drive 'extra careful' responding. Word gets out if you want to get away with something, do it on the North side. Businesses complain and then the Mayor is coming to neogitations with hat in hand.
But that would probably result in lower level crimes going up first rather than the upside down pyramid where homicides spike but other crimes move slower.
Tyler Cowen made an error looking at this dynamic in DC policing. In DC policing is sometimes ramped up due to things like intelligence on terrorist threats rather than responding to the ebb and flow of crime in the streets. When that happens crime drops, from this Cown concluded more police = less crime. But what I would conclude crime is like a business and like a business that has competition, a dramatic change in tactics may throw it off guard but it will readjust itself. Crime in the streets is aware of things like when cops are nearing the end of their shift and at their lowest energy. You can get a temporary shift by making crazy changes to shifts but the other side will adjust to that eventually.
Scott: When you consider murders exclusively your conclusions make sense, but when you consider the stats for other types of violent crimes, it makes less sense. If policing went down post BLM, how do explain the fact that other types of violent crime didn't rise along with the murder rates? Violent crimes other than murders have only risen slightly (too bad I can't paste graphs into my comments).
Another data point you missed is that gun ownership among blacks went up 58% in 2021, and it had been rising for several years before that.
OTOH gun ownership also went up significantly in Latino and Asian communities (albeit not as fast as in black communities). I'd be interested if we saw any increase in homicides and or crime in either of those communities — which you'd expect to see if police started patrolling less post BLM.
I don't have an alternative theory, but any explanation needs to explain why other other violent crimes haven't risen alongside murders.
Indeed. Homicides generally can be divided into a few buckets:
Pre-meditation: "Hits" so to speak. Cops simply out and about are unlikely to prevent many of these. If you want to kill a gang member and see a cop nearby, you'll just wait until later to kill him.
Fits of emotion: Again these happen generally outside the eyes of cops. A man beating his wife probably does it at home and not in the middle of the street in front of a cop who is walking a beat.
If you want to argue that protests caused cops to pull back OR protests made criminals push forward (perhaps thinking cops are distracted), then the entire crime pyramid would have to increase. If a criminal thinks cops are out of the picture, all types of crime are on the table now and murder is typically the least common crime. If the bulk of crime did not increase dramatically, the protests fail as a causal factor.
Yes, and domestic homicides were something like 45% of the increase.
So that seems really very odd. You mean BLM protests caused police to pull back but that caused people to kill people they live with? But why?
Did police not respond to 911 calls for domestic violence because they were mad about protests? If that's the case the data should be easy to come by since 911 calls are logged as are police responses.
This was data from FBI NIBRS that was regurgitated by Kevin Drum. But I'm no longer sure whether he meant that domestic homicides were 45% of the increase in homicides, or whether there was a 45% increase in domestic homicides. I'm suspecting the latter, because I see another chart where domestic homicides are only 20% of the overall 2021 homicides. My bad.
But even so, I agree with you that we should see an increase in all crime, not just murders, if post-BLM reduction in policing is the cause.
I have to say it is hard to get good current data. There are some cities that have portals with good data but a lot of it is articles with things like "X has gone up Y% this June from last year" with no baselines, no previous years, no context nothing.
No, domestic murders only went up 4% in 2020.
beowulf888 wrote that domestic murders were 45% of the increase. I'm now not sure what he meant. Did he mean if murders increased by 100 in 2020, 45 of them were domestic (i.e. within family) and 55 outside or did he mean of 100 additional crimes in 2020, 45 were murders?
Are we talking about a crime increase or a homicide increase?
Violent crimes typically refers to murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.
It's been a year since I dug through that stats, but my recollection is that aggravated assaults rose along with murders and spiked at exactly the same times, while rape and robbery did not.
Rapes went down in many places, in 2020, and the timing generally coincided with the start of the lockdowns -- more women staying inside and less women dating because of covid -> less rape. There was a slight increase in the summer when some people stopped taking covid seriously, I don't recall if the numbers returned to normal or remained slightly below. I believe that rape still tracks the behavior of women, not just the behavior of criminals. Robbery rates might also depend on the number of targets to rob, for similar reasons.
Notice that grand theft auto did go up, in a number of cities, but robbery didn't. Perhaps because cars didn't stay inside to social distance, but people did?
I broke down some numbers by crime, back in 2020, but I haven't done an extensive follow-up.
https://medium.com/@tgof137/crime-and-covid-spiked-in-june-7fb73fdba1ad
NYC has a good UI for graphing crimes, that might be one good place to start, if you want to dig further. Also, this page is a good aggregator of city data:
https://citycrimestats.com/covid/
The data graphs are a lot of information. It would seem to me if you broke rapes between date/family/intimate rapes and stranger rapes, then the thesis of police pull back being the cause would mean that while overall rapes went down, the later would increase or at least the ratio of stranger/non-stranger rapes would go up.
I feel the 'drug market consolidation' thesis needs testing. That namely is street level dealing saw a massive hit in the pandemic. Dealers responded by trying to take over larger territorities causing violence. I recall a lot of the shootings that made the headlines TV news each evening in NYC during late 2020 and 2021 seemed a lot like hits rather than just general crime at all levels going up resulting in a handful of murders at the top of that crime pyramid.
Agree that breaking down rapes by date/stranger would be informative and probably show the patterns you suggest, but I have no idea where to get that data.
Also agree that some of the murders and shootings could have been caused by changes in drug markets. The two worst US murder waves of the past century were caused by fighting over drug turf (prohibition in the 20's and crack cocaine in the 1980's).
It's certainly possible that drug markets were somehow rearranged by the pandemic and lead to more violence as a result -- maybe more drug consumption moved to online purchases, depriving street level dealers of income?
I wouldn't favor the hypothesis, based on the timing and location of the crime increase, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out as a factor.
Well you know all other business got huge government support with things like the Paycheck Protection Act and let's be frank, all the "these closed businesses will doom the economy" have ended up being wrong. Here we are two years later and frankly getting food outside your house has never been booming this much (granted takeout is huge versus sit down).
How exactly could the drug market have *NOT* had major reshuffling during lockdown and after?
I am also surprised that all the restaurants in my town didn't go under. I have also moved from dining out to UberEats. I do find it sad there is no UberDrugs to bring me psychoactive chemicals.
That said... why was there little/no crime spike in other countries? There are no drug markets and associated violence? What explains the racial distribution of the murder spike in the US? Like, why was it so much worse in some cities than others?
Cities with a large black population did poorly:
New Orleans, 62% increase in murders
Atlanta, 58%
Chicago 55%
Los Angeles only saw a 30% increase, I'd imagine there's quite a lot of drug use and trafficking in LA. But the racial demographics are different.
Miami also saw about 30%. Different demographics.
Las Vegas only saw 15%. Surely there's ample drug use in Vegas. But maybe less tourism reduced demand?
Seattle had one of the highest scores, 74% increase, I think that was both because of a low baseline plus big police protests/defunding
And Portland saw a 52% increase (low baseline, mass protest insanity)
Generally the theory holds up that places with defunding of police or big protests or depolicing of black populations did poorly. It being drug related... could be true, I don't know. You're gonna have to work harder to make the case to me.
There wasn't any 'defunding of police'. Not too long ago there was an article about a Washington assistant police chief who liked to decorate his office with nazi symbols. It took over a year and a $1.5M settlement to get rid of him.
When I look at NYC for aggrevated assault, I notice that there was a massive dip in early after March in 2020 (pandemic). And then an increase that that went up quickly in May (consistent with the BLM protest/Floyd thesis). BUT the increase returned to the pre-lockdown baseline only to fall again near the end of June leaving it lower for most of the year. Shooting follows the same pattern.
If one saw a general increase in all types of mayham (with some variation like robberies falling because you can't be sure a home is empty while carjacking goes up) this seems inconsistent.
I think you'd want something like a 6 month total to deal with noise/dips after May. I believe the total number of assaults for the second half of 2020 was higher than 2019, but NYC compstat is a little hard to work, I can only get YoY comparisons of June or of year to date.
https://compstat.nypdonline.org/2e5c3f4b-85c1-4635-83c6-22b27fe7c75c/view/89
We can trust crime statistics on homicides, shooting woundings, and auto thefts more than we can trust other crime statistics.
It's not so much about trusting statistics versus having them. The statistics get a lot more plentiful if you wait a year or two but real time statistics are pretty sporadic unless you happen to be looking at a city that has exceptionally good reporting (with, perhaps, a helpful web based dashboard).
Homicide victims in Asian communities dropped a slight amount from 2019 to 2020, then went up in 2021.
Carjackings are a violent crime that are almost always reported to the police for insurance reasons. They've soared since George Floyd's death, especially in Minnesota.
"‘Staggering’ surge in violent carjackings continues across Minneapolis
"A triple-digit percentage increase over this time last year has residents in fear.
"By Liz Sawyer Minneapolis Star Tribune DECEMBER 1, 2020 — 7:42PM
As I pointed out, media is not very helpful here. Triple digit increase means what? And what does it mean in relation to all crime versus a specific type of crime or crime in a specific area? I too heard carjackings went up in NYC but bulgaries went down and that seems a logical reaction to the pandemic....you can not longer be so sure people will be away at work during working hours but if you're hanging on the street all day, it's easy to get access to someone driving that is stuck at a red light or stop sign.
"I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests."
Very sound analysis, but the conclusion seems flawed. The murder spike was likely caused by the police pullback from the streets. While the police may have pulled back in response to the protests, I do not see how we could say that the protests 'caused' the police pullback (and hence the murder spike). If I call Scott a bad logician (which he is not) and he pulls a gun on me, is it right to say that I caused him to shoot me?
Indeed, and it is not like the protests covered every street. In reality protests would be in a few high profile areas but outside of them business went on as normal.
"If I call Scott a bad logician (which he is not) and he pulls a gun on me, is it right to say that I caused him to shoot me?"
If he would have shot you either way, no. If he wouldn't have shot you without the provocation, you have contributed in some way to it.
This is kind of an argument for general social fragility increasing a lot in the US after the pandemic. If Scott prepandemic let insults slide more and people insulted less then after the pandemic insults increased and Scott had less patience for insults, then things like shootings will go up. So will things that are not shootings like, say, people flipping out at fast food workers and throwing things at them or making scenes on airplanes.
Huge difference between "contributed to" and "caused". The thing is, "caused" suggests Scott/the police don't have agency. But they do. They make choices. Scott doesn't have to shoot me. The police can keep doing their job, even though they disagree with the protesters.
Scott and right leaning people here like the idea that BLM protests literally cause crime via some type of white fragility? But it's actually an amazing anti-police assertion. Imagine if a town voted down teacher raises in the school budget and the next month every kid was given detention, got D-'s, numerous refferals made to child services for psychological checks, etc. People would go ballistic.
Yet here we casually entertain the idea that police, many earning close or more than six figures, have been purposefully allowing crime to happen for two years plus now as revenge for....being mean to Trump I guess... Not a good thing if this is actually true because if it is the answer is not to stop protests.
I fully agree. I didn't want to get into this bc I'm European and I may not be getting all the nuances right, but I also fail to understand why the Democrats would try to conceal the fact that the crime spike followed the BLM protests and the police pullback from the streets. This is damning for the police, not the protesters.
The Democrats encouraged the BLM protests and then provided the police with the incentive to pull back from the streets. The American people are at least occasionally observant enough to notice that sort of correlation, so the Democrats in general would obviously prefer not to have them thinking in terms of "why was there a big crime wave starting in Summer 2020?"
But this is exactly what the BLM rioters and defund the police people wanted.
The demand to defund the police is not very smart. But we all surely agree that a structural way out of the crisis is to end the impunity of the police? This is the way to avoid BLM protests altogether (or at least unite the US society squarely against them) and avoid the spike crime "caused" by them. Right?
No. BLM will protest even when police do perfectly legal things that are necessary to protect innocent life. To avoid BLM protests *altogether*, you'd need to basically either not have police, or order the police to never ever use force against a black person even if the black person is actively trying to kill them or some other innocent person. And no, US society will not "unite squarely against" protesters who protest police using force against black people attempting to commit murder.
Policemen abusing their authority in ways that ought not be allowed, is only a subset of things that cause BLM protests.
Strange, haven't heard about BLM protests for nearly two years from now yet not a few days ago I passed police having pulled someone over. Perhaps the best way to avoid BLM protests is to be for professinal policing rather than openly embracing thuggish policing as certain previous administrations did.
Then try to solve this subset. I bet it'll help, but even it if it won't, you'll have the satisfaction of having been right all along (while also having saved a couple of innocent lives).
"Policemen abusing their authority in ways that ought not be allowed, is only a subset of things that cause BLM protests."
It seems odd that critics of BLM criticize BLM for protesting police too rarely? I mean if you think there should be more protest when targets of police abuse are not Black, then what has been stopping you from protesting those incidents over the last few decades?
You misunderstand John, who is accurately saying that BLM launches protests over perfectly reasonable and just uses of force. For example, Ferguson and Michael Brown.
It feels a bit weird to attribute it to the protests and not the killing that they were a reaction to.
Not really, considering the number of similar incidents involved both African American and Caucasian suspects that happened without nationwide riots and murders.
TRANSLATION: Because you didn't protest like this when X happened, you're now punished for protesting when Y happens. It's as if whataboutism floating lifeless in a pool has suddenly become sentient and become a new lifeform. Yawn.
Naw, it's because in one case, when someone gets killed, BLM doesn't care unless it's a black person. When it is a black person, BLM cares so much that they burn down the town.
20-30 million took part on BLM events. If even 1% wanted to burn down towns there wouldn't be nothing left standing in the US.
It's not whataboutism. OP is claiming X is a cause of Y, but numerous Xs have happened before without Y happening, so X is a bad explanation for Y.
But last time BLM protests and riots happened, there was a crime spike too, which makes it a good explanation.
It also kind of takes the police pullback as a given, rather than a choice. It's like the proposed chain of causation here is:
Step 1 - Police killings that lead to the protests
Step 2 - Protests against the police killings
Step 3 - Police pullback in response to the protests
Step 4 - Increased crime
But for some reason, the people in step 2 are deemed to have "caused" the crime spike, rather than the police doing the killings in step 1, the police pulling back in step 3, or the criminals committing more crimes in step 4. Like only the protestors have moral agency, for some reason.
The people at step 2 are the only ones who expressly endorsed the present situation as their explicitly desired policy outcome.
I think that can be disputed in a couple of ways:
- Firstly, I don't remember "give us more murders" as an endorsed desired outcome of the protestors, and I think it's more than a bit of a stretch to say that's "what they wanted"
- And even if we do apply some sort of "this is what you wanted" framework to the protestors, doesn't it then apply equally to the police in step 3? Aren't the increased crime rates the intended outcome of the police pullback? If you believe that you are the only thing standing between people and high murder rates, and then pull out of communities in order to show your detractors "what a world without cops looks like," it seems to me that "communities I pull out of experience higher crime rates" is part of the outcome you are trying to create by pulling back. Also at Step 4 "more crimes" seems very much like the intended outcome of the criminals who took advantage of police absence to do more crimes.
The protestors' stated goal was less policing. They explicitly said that's what they wanted, over and over again. What did they think would follow from that? I honestly have no idea. But they evidently thought it would be something good. Insofar as they were wrong about that, that's their problem, not mine.
I've never heard police saying what they want is less policing. What they've implicitly said is, "Apparently you guys want less policing, so that's what we'll give you." That's the opposite of actually desiring less policing as a policy outcome. The police hope that by doing less policing in the short run, they'll make people see how much they miss policing, and cause them in the long run to abandon the "less policing" platform.
I suppose in a certain sense criminals are in favor of less policing. But probably not all that much; what criminals mostly want is to free-ride on a system that polices and thereby protects them from other criminals, but just happens not to notice their own crimes specifically.
>>The police hope that by doing less policing in the short run, they'll make people see how much they miss policing, and cause them in the long run to abandon the "less policing" platform.
But that's just my point. The means by which police hope to "make people see how much they miss policing" is the crime spike resulting from the pullback. If the pullback doesn't result in a crime spike, it doesn't "make people see how much they miss policing" and the strategy fails.
So the crime spike is very much the outcome police intend to produce by pulling back. Granted, it's intended as a means to an end, not an end in and of itself, but it's still the effect that they hoped to achieve.
Okay, but the protestors are still the ones who insisted that this was a good idea. Nobody else thought that. But for the protestors, none of this would ever have happened.
Attributing causal responsibility to the people who pioneered the idea, emphatically called for its implementation, and ultimately achieved it -- even if only through the mechanism of other people's cynical acquiescence -- seems like the most natural thing in the world to me.
Oh for crying out loud. If the police pull back and there is no crime spike, then the protestors are correct and the cops are being violent oppressors out to kill young black men, the American justice system is constructed the wrong way, and putting the funding into community measures not more cops is the right way to deal with preventing crime.
The crime spikes happened. That means there were criminals out there just waiting for the chance to take advantage. Blaming the police for the existence of criminals is a new one on me, is this along the lines of "if there were no laws, there would be no guilt"?
It was a rough way to do it, but how else would the police prove their point? If they had continued where they were and no crime spike happened, you'd be here arguing that this proves the police presence is unnecessary because the 'peaceful protests' didn't cause any rise in crime.
Should the cops have pulled back? No. But if the mayor and the chief of police are telling them "don't engage with protestors, don't make arrests, just let them set fires" and protestors are yelling in their faces that they should go away and if they stay protestors deliberately interfere with their attempts to police events, then what do you do?
You do as you're being demanded, and pull back. And then the consequences of that happen. You can't have it both ways - you can't have both 'the police should not be here, the police should not engage suspects' and 'why aren't the cops here to arrest those shooters?'.
Sure, it's "choices" all the way down/thru this.
Everyone has (some degree) of moral agency – there's LOTS of blame to spread around!
"But for some reason, the people in step 2 are deemed to have "caused" the crime spike, rather than the police doing the killings in step 1, the police pulling back in step 3, or the criminals committing more crimes in step 4. Like only the protestors have moral agency, for some reason."
That's because if the protestors march and demand "No more cops! All Cops Are Bastards! No Pigs Here! Cops Are Killers!", then if they get their demand - police pull back out of the neighbourhoods they are being told to leave - then step 4 happens as night follows day. All the proposed alternatives - no cops, just specially trained social workers - are not going to work, and neither will the home-grown 'community policing' we saw with CHAZ and CHOP which very soon degenerated into "goons with guns set themselves up as tinpot militias and shoot people just as much as the cops ever did".
"I want those peanuts!" "But you have a peanut allergy, they will make you very sick and might kill you" "Gimme those peanuts!" *grabs peanuts* *gets very sick* "Who could possibly be to blame here, it must be those dastardly peanut growers!"
Again, I think that argument oversimplifies.
In the first place, the protests don’t happen without the police killings they were in response to, and a quick google of names like Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Philando Castile, and George Floyd will tell you that whatever you think of the percentages, at least *some* of those killings were totally unjustified and legitimate to complain about. So there’s a role in police causing the protests that we have to ignore if we want to simplify things down to “the protests caused the crime increase.”
As for the protests themselves, they’re hardly monolithic. For every extreme position shouting “all cops are bastards defund the police,” you can point to somebody clarifying “abolishing the police would be stupid and ‘defund’ is really a buzzword for getting cops out of the social services business and redirecting that money to social services,” or asserting a more moderate position like “I want more community oversight of cops in my community.” We can argue about the mix of percentages, but the argument that the protestors “got what they wanted” when the police stopped showing up relies on outright ignoring that any reasonable voices existed, which is demonstrably untrue. The protests at 12AM were very different from the protests at 4PM, as they always are, but the argument proposed requires the illusion that the 4PM protests simply didn't exist at all.
Then you have the police reaction. Nobody forced them to engage what was essentially a stealth slowdown strike. That was another choice they made, one which was to many degrees informed by a desire to punish people for disrespecting them and a hope that rising crime in their absence would make people regret having demanded weakening their authority. Other factors like fear of liability and public shaming for honest mistakes were certainly part of it as well, but you can't just say "once crime goes up they’ll all be sorry and come crawling back” in one breath and then "I didn't mean for crime to go up" in the other. So again, people trying to simplify things down to “the protests caused the crime increase” have an inconvenient fact to ignore, and end up effectively pretending that police are just machines that automatically stop policing when criticized, instead of being adult human beings who made choices.
So you can get to “the protestors demanded less policing and got what they wanted, which was a crime increase, so the crime increase is all their fault” but only if you cherry pick actors and choices to remove from the narrative until that’s the only explanation left. But I don’t think that honestly represents the police’s role in the history. They aren’t the sole cause, but it’s silly to pretend that they’re somehow totally on the sidelines of it.
For clarity, I'm not arguing the converse - the protesters aren't robots either. Any attempt to write them out of the cause-mix would be asinine, and I'd be writing this same kind of novella if someone was in here arguing "police caused the crime spike."
It's just that it seems like people here are well familiar with the protestors' agency but overlooking that of the police.
It doesn't feel weird to me at all. There have been numerous unjustified killings by police that resulted in no change in the crime rate whatsoever. The difference with this particular killing was that it led to protests on a massive scale. The protests, not the unjustified killing itself, would appear to be the obviously decisive causal variable.
Moreover, the protestors chose to adopt as their most prominent desideratum a demand that the police cease to function, or cease to exist. They could've chosen any number of messages to broadcast in response to an unjustified police killing. It was their unconstrained free choice, not determined by the actions of Derek Chauvin in any way, to settle on the message that would be maximally hostile to law enforcement officials as such, and most likely to demoralize and alienate them if and to the extent that the protests received mainstream support. That was their decision. It's for them to reap the whirlwind.
It's the same thing?
But it's an extra sad story – police kill some people they shouldn't and then other non-police people kill WAY more other non-police people.
Also, _some_ of the (police) killings were justified, e.g. Michael Brown.
It feels a bit weird to NOT attribute _some_ blame to these protests, especially the ones that were basically entirely mistaken!
Okay, but most police killings (even unjustified ones) do not lead to protests, and BLM protests have followed completely justifiable shootings (e.g. Mike Brown).
Also, what does it say for the black community if their response to a black man being killed is to...kill more black men?
>> Also, what does it say for the black community if their response to a black man being killed is to...kill more black men?
What do you think it says? I disagree with the premise, but it seems like you’re trying to imply something.
I could have saved this author a lot of work. What causes lawlessness? Leadership practicing lawlessness as an example to the people.
Tired of lawlessness? Stop electing Democrats (or helping them cheat).
Unfortunately, the Republicans seem to have now adopted the tactic as well to some extent. The Jan 6 riot seemed like a "We're copying your playbook, how do you like it?" moment to me, as a foreigner watching from abroad.
We have a right to protest peacefully, which the VAST majority of people there (estimates between 200k-500k) did. Almost zero property damage, a few dustups considered "normal" for protests these days, and nobody killed except an unarmed, non-threatening female veteran murdered point blank by police while she was standing right next to a SWAT officer. And they were fully justified in being angry - it is impossible that the elections in the swing states were legitimate EVEN IF the actual number of legitimate votes for Biden exceeded those for Trump. We can NEVER know the truth of that. Why? Because in breaking their own election integrity laws (refusing to collect, evaluate, and properly store the evidence required by law to prove legitimacy, thus making it IMPOSSIBLE to know for certain if the tallies were legitimate), the act of declaring those elections "certified" was an act of felony fraud.
Trump got 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. I find it astonishing that anyone could be gullible enough to believe that 81 million people (16 million more than voted for Hillary) came out to vote for a turnip.
Hahahahaha, yea ok Jan 6 was just a normal protest. Or it was confused tourists who thought the building was open. Or it was ANTIFA secret agents who wanted to scuttle the election because, errrr, everyone would blame it on Trump supporters who were in Church that day? Yawn..
Oh it definitely wasn't "normal." It's the first time in our country's history when we have an illegitimate, un-elected administration.
Enjoy your shellacking this November, your coming decades out of power, and President Trump's second term - you earned them!
Yes because you've done such a careful job presenting a case with real evidence. People like you cannot be allowed to have power because we all know what you are when the mask drops.
Hilarious - a totalitarian trying to decide for us who is qualified to have power.
The correct answer, as our founders knew well, is, "Nobody." That answer absolutely enrages you.
That is why you will take a shellacking this November, will spend decades out of power, and Trump will serve his second term - because you over-reached, and everyone knows it.
Republicans were in charge in 2020 and of the two major candidates, only one embraced law and order and rejected violence in protests. That's the one that won.
Not in the cities, they weren't. That was all Dems.
You must be very sad this week. Roe shot down. Gun rights affirmed. Next up - SCOTUS is about to revoke all the powers unelected bureaucrats have wielded for 70 years. Your totalitarian dreams are all going into the trash heap.
At least you have a shellacking to look forward to in November, decades out of power, and Trump's second term. Right?
You do realize this statement is no more valid than saying that the solution is to stop electing Republicans because Donald Trump was a leader "practicing lawlessness as an example to the people," and it's therefore all the fault of the Republican party, right?
I mean, it's so on the nose that one almost has to assume you're trolling here, so if you really are serious, I'd reconsider this claim and the thinking that lead you to it.
Only Democrats "realize" things that aren't true.
Lawless leaders encourage lawlessness from citizens. This is a historical fact traceable across millennia of recorded history. Furthermore, President Trump was doing his Constitutional duty to try to avert the consequences of the massive election fraud which we all know happened.
So, it's no surprise that, with no facts to support you, you resort to gaslighting and projection.
Somewhat off-topic, but do we know why murder rates increased rapidly from1964 - 1974, and then decreased rapidly from 1990 - 2000?
Johnson's war on poverty and against the black family unit.
Steven Pinker speculates about this in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature" - highly recommended.
There are a lot of competing theories, I made an effort to sort through them and see which ones are most convincing:
https://medium.com/@tgof137/explaining-the-crime-wave-of-the-1980s-d98395133dfc
I think the lead-crime hypothesis makes the most sense, but I'm not completely convinced.
I'm skeptical of the lead-crime hypothesis after looking into it:
https://medium.com/p/949e6fc2b0dc
"I looked into Central America, and found that Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala also all saw murders decline rather than spike in 2020."
A gigantic portion of crime in Mexico and Central America is tied to smuggling drugs into the United States. In 2020, the US imposed restrictions on entry over land from Mexico. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/24/2020-06253/notification-of-temporary-travel-restrictions-applicable-to-land-ports-of-entry-and-ferries-service One would expect this to make drug smuggling across the US border more difficult, and therefore to lead to a decrease in the volume of the drug trade in countries South of it.
But drug overdose data indicates an increase in demand for drugs in the US during the pandemic. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIxrSCuUcAADqZc?format=png&name=900x900
Taking these two factors into account, it isn't hard to see why this might lead to a large increase in homicide specifically in the United States. Demand for drugs increased, but dealers who sourced their products from South of the border were unable to meet that demand. So more money went to dealers who got their drugs from other sources, and some of them used their increased resources to expand into territories of the dealers who got their product from down South. When people started to go outside again in Summer 2020, some of those new territorial disputes turned violent.
It makes perfect sense why we would see this more in the US than in other countries. Compared to other developed countries, an unusually large portion of American illegal drugs come across one particular land border, the American drug trade is unusually violent, the easy availability of guns might have something to do with it, etc. That's without even getting to the question of whether cultural or other idiosyncratic factors might have led to a greater increase in drugs and alcohol consumption in America during the pandemic than in other countries (for the record, the first Google hit for drug overdose deaths in the UK in 2020 shows a pretty small increase of just 3.8% https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsrelatedtodrugpoisoninginenglandandwales/2020 ). And it makes perfect sense why the homicide increase would be greater in demographics that are more likely to be members of drug gangs in high population density areas where we would expect territorial disputes to be more frequent.
It all seems very consistent with the available data.
A theory I heard tossed around in 2020 was that the pandemic hit drug markets very hard. As a result actors in the market may have tried to take over more territory in order to offset the shrinking market. Since those in other territories are facing the same problem, you have an incentive for using force to 'downsize' the industry.
This would make a lot of sense if the crime spike hit Latin America as well. The BLM protests then are more likely a correlation than a causation despite appearences.
Looks like I misread this comment as an increase rather than decline in crime in 2020 in those countries. I wonder, how good are our data? Even US data always seems to be a year old.
I wrote a whole substack article about how the media has its own agenda, and since I'm a big believer in self-promotion, I'll link it here.
https://questioner.substack.com/p/the-censored-of-censored
But in all seriousness, I think that the refusal of so-called "expert sources" and media outlets to self-correct when they get something wrong (like their explanation for this big crime spike) is a huge problem. It seems to me like it's mostly based on ego. People in power don't have the humility to admit when they're wrong and because they hold power, they typically don't have to.
That's why you should vote for me when I eventually run as president. I promise that if any media source or person of influence makes a mistake and doesn't own up to it when new information comes out, I will punish them in a terrifying way. Egotistical narcissism is a hard personality trait to eliminate but when it is put in direct opposition to the self-preservation instinct, anything is possible.
The left doesn't look good here and they haven't for a long time. Dating back to The New Jim Crowe (2011?) I've seen a lot of slight of hand from the left, and then when someone raises an inconvenient fact, there is more smoke, mirrors, and ad hominem arguments.
The causal chain between BLM riots and the rise in violent crime seems crystal clear to anyone without an agenda. Considering the progressive effort that goes into convincing us that black white disparities are the mostly the result of a history of institutional racism (a claim that is highly disputed even among many black intellectuals), this link looks much more direct and well supported by evidence. If we can't agree on something so seemingly obvious as criminals do more crime when they know they won't be punished for it, how can we solve any meaningful problem? Isn't this a "hard conversation?"
This highlights an area that cause a lot of compassionate but logical people to question whether the left cares more about their own sacred ideas rather than the underlying problem.
"The causal chain between BLM riots and the rise in violent crime seems crystal clear to anyone without an agenda. "
Why of course, because the right will literally blame everything on BLM protests. I've seen conservatives trying to blame the bad police response in the Texas shooting on BLM protests (sure it's literally years out and I don't think rural Texas was a hotbed of BLM protests even then but why not?)
But this creates an interesting dynamic. If the theory is that police pull back because of BLM protests and the responsibility for crime falls on the protests because that caused a pull back....then that really means all responsibility is pushed out. In other words, the criminal blames the cops not being there, the cops not being there blame the protests (even if they only saw them on TV 2 years ago), but hey the protests get to blame who? Yea, keep playing with this double edged sword my friend.
I'm not making any sort of connection between protests and all crime. I'm talking about poor young black men killing other young poor black men--which is what Scott is talking about. This crime is disproportionately concentrated within certain communities that is also the focus of BLM protests.
In 2014, 2015 and again in 2020 we convinced the whole country that the bad element to focus on was actually law enforcement and not the underlying crime that law enforcement was responding to (and admittedly doing horrible things in some circumstances). We DEFINITELY didn't care about the 99% of these communities that is trying to live around this despair. Either way, once the cops saw that there was zero upside in preventing or responding to violent crime, they decreased activities, and crime exploded relative to when police were incentivized to work.
I have never "stretched" this to a mass shooting or other non-related violent crime and I don't see the connection there. Again, it's amazing how hard people work to explain away what seems clear as day from a "common sense" perspective, but which is also supported by evidence as the article shows.
"I'm not making any sort of connection between protests and all crime. I'm talking about poor young black men killing other young poor black men--which is what Scott is talking about. This crime is disproportionately concentrated within certain communities that is also the focus of BLM protests."
You have the following problems:
1. What communities had high Black populations but no BLM protests? If you don't have this, you can't really test the question can you? You might as well say lots of people watching Tiger King on Netflix caused a surge in homicides in 2020.
2. We are treating BLM protests as if they just happen for no particular reason. They happen after a breakdown in trust between police and the community. You can say the inspiration for that distrust is an unfair focus on individual incidents that are unfair from some hypothetical 'objective' mind. But that's kind of stupid. In the 90's, Bill Clinton getting a haircut on Air Force One became highly important cause. A odd 'yeaaa' captured on a mic at a rally sank Howard Dean's presidential aspirations. A few high placed people in the UK attending parties during official lockdown almost sank Johnson's government. Telling people something that has caught their attention is something they shouldn't pay attention too is, well elitist and stupid.
3. So then what is the impact of the pandemic? Are we really going to be told that the pandemic was nothing? If not for BLM protests, crime or poor black on black crime, would be the ONLY thing in all of American society that would have remained unchanged by such an unprecedented global event? That seems quite a remarkable assertion which would require some really hard evidence for such remarkable stability in the face of such dramatic social change (and why would crime be so amazingly stable in the face of a pandemic, but mostly peaceful BLM protests are too much for that one metric to remain stable?)
4. The global surges in homicides in Latin America do hint that you can't pin this on BLM protests unless you're going to get really voodoo with it and claim even just seeing it on Youtube or foreign news somehow caused people around the world to start killing each other.
1. (a) The test wouldn't need to have any BLM protests in them. The protests and the underlying message of the protests went into just about every home in the country. The most lily white elite privileged adolescent goofballs were going around ripping blue lives matter stickers off of police cars in white suburbs and holdings protests at their cute little private schools. A physical BLM presence was not required within a community for the community to adopt the idea that we should devalue law enforcement. (b) It wouldn't be just black populations, it would high crime black populations that had relatively high crime before the protests. The crime would be relative to other areas and you would ask whether the crime increased after the protests (which it did based on the article) Although I do think it's interesting that even wealthy areas of these affected cities are experiencing much more crime as well. (c) the idea that I would have to "test my questions" is hilarious. Is there anything that can be surmised from living in the world? Talking to the people living through the problem? Looking at all the statistics? I love how people can now declare that water isn't wet unless we can prove it with a peer reviewed study.
2. I'm saying the reason they happen completely misses the point and ends up hurting way more poor black people than it helps. There are corrupt awful cops that should be in jail and there always will be. But to say aggressive policing isn't a net benefit to reducing crime in these communities is ignorant. This would be like blaming not only a terrible trauma surgeon in a high crime district for negligently letting a patient die or reckless manslaughter if they were REALLY bad, it would be like denouncing the entire surgical profession as evil and racist across the whole country and then asking "why is it so hard to get surgery? Probably just the pandemic". These functions are downstream and responding to a much bigger problem that we tried to solve for a while and now, well, we're just kind of saying oh well let's just let crime be not that big of a deal and, well, yeah you read the article. We've allowed the roving gangs to continue terrorizing the townsfolk while we demand more accountability the poor bastards that are tasked with having to try and make a difference. The underlying crime is the problem and it's getting worse, thanks to our helpful progressive "activists".
3. I don't know what the effect of the pandemic was on the most violent areas of our country. Seems pretty clear from the article above the rise in murders didn't really start until the protests started and we told everyone in America that it was ok to burn police stations. Did the pandemic have an effect? If I was running an attribution analysis maybe it would be 5%? It doesn't seem at all to be the proximate cause, and all communities experienced change--it was youth black on black homicide exploded after we allowed "activists" to burn their own communities for a month. "Mostly peaceful". This again is why we'll never solve this problem. We are so desperate to avoid the truth and hold the narrative. I can tell you some things that the pandemic DID cause--(1) a rise in bike sales (2) a rise in rural and vacation real estate (3) a revolution in telecommuting for knowledge workers (4) all sorts of horrific monetary and spending policies. A spike in murders in Baltimore? I don't think so. That was from the lack of police, and we have BLM to thank.
4. A global surge in Latin America I honestly don't know. Sure...maybe that's good evidence that the rise in US cities wasn't all because we told police to stop policing. I don't really know anything about Latin America and why crime there is similar to or different than kids shooting each other in Chicago.
Why is the vested interest in a certain narrative on the left so strong on anything to do with helping black people? I truly can't think of a situation that is more of "no brainer" than this one and it's still pulling teeth. BLM is a nightmare for black communities.
The 'e' from 'sleight' seems to have been tacked onto the end of 'Crow'.
I guess I'm stupid and misspelled something. Thanks for letting me know. Please disregard everything I said.
"In the second graph, you can see a more traditional presentation of homicide rates, which shows them *shooting up* after Gray’s death to a level higher than they had been in the previous twenty years."
Insert laughing facepalm emoji here.
There's an alternative explanation that fits the evidence here: the killing of Floyd itself caused the crime increase by damaging trust in the police, which led to an increase in retaliatory violence.
https://www.city-journal.org/retaliatory-gang-violence
I posted some of this as a reply but it occurred to me that it might be worth elaborating on as a main comment. The police arbitrate violent disputes. If your friend is shot and the police to deal with it, there's probably no further violence: the perpetrator is arrested and sent to prison, end of story. But if you don't trust the police to deal with it - because there has been an extremely prominent example of them being untrustworthy - you might decide to take matters into your own hands and seek violent revenge.
This is just as compatible with the timing of the evidence you've described, including the pre-pandemic stuff in Baltimore and Ferguson.
This argument could be strengthened or weakened by research on how trust in the police changed among young black men, especially those adjacent to or involved in gangs.
I did see another comment mentioning that reported trust of the police among white people was affected more but at the risk of speculating a bit, even if a white American reported trusting the police less post-Floyd, I'm not sure they would turn to revenge violence in the event that they were the victim of a crime. Given that retaliatory violence is already common in gang disputes, I think it makes sense that it would go up there and not suddenly appear in other parts of society.
This completely undermines the BLM narrative that police do not stop/reduce crime. Police being less effective at policing is *exactly what BLM supporters want*, so they are promoting policies (defund the police) which will lead to more black people dying.
Yeah - I'm not a "defund the police" person, I do think they reduce crime. To be more charitable to defund the police people, they generally argue for shifting the funding to other social and first response services that they believe will reduce crime (I'm not saying this is a position I hold).
This old Tabarrok papers cleanly explains a mechanism through which we should expect riots to lead to permanently higher crime rates. Having read it long time ago, when I saw these riots I was pretty confident that they would lead to permanent increase in crime. As a bonus its explanation is less morally charged than your proposed mechanisms.
The thing is, given constant police resources the equilibrium crime rate is not self correcting. Exogenous temporary shocks to total crime will lead to a permanent change in total crime.
This happens because the decision to commit crime depends on the share of crime that is caught, but with constant police resources the share of crime that is caught depends on total crime.
So what happens is a temporary exogenous rise in total crime leads to share of crime caught falling, this makes people more prone to commit crimes, and that makes crime rise even more. When the exogenous shock is gone, there are still more crimes than before, so the share of crime caught is still lower, perpetuating the new higher crime equilibrium.
(Incidentally that is a minor plot point in True Dectective's second season, where a group of mostly law enforcement officers take advantage of the LA riots, and the consequent straining of police resources to make a hit on a jewelry store)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02298409
An interesting question would be how the homicide rate moved in cities that previously experienced the Ferguson effect compared to large cities in general.
Baltimore, for example, saw a spike in homicides after the Freddy Gray riots in 2015, which has remained until now. Notably, unlike the rest of the country, it did not have a homicide spike in 2020. Total homicides in Baltimore actually dropped in 2020.
This fits nicely with the thesis of this article. Baltimore has experienced the effects of the effects of the hypothesized depolicing, the George Floyd riots thus had little additional impact.
Edits: 1 ) removed grammar mistake, 2) clarified in the first sentence that I'm objecting mostly vehemently to Scott's characterization of the criminological literature regarding the OG Ferguson effect (see his section titled "Effects Of Previous Protests") which serves as kind of a robustness check to his claim that protests -> homicides.
Scott, you are wrong (about the original Ferguson effect, which serves as a robustness check of your more general claim of protests -> homicides)! And I can show you why. Why should you read this random comment among a sea of meshugas? Argument from authority: I'm a PhD candidate in one of the top criminology programs. In other words, I'm intimately familiar with both the content area and the issues of time-series analyses. I'm happy to privately verify this and/or share full text articles I source below if they are paywalled. Key points:
0) Begging the question and also not citing relevant literature that tests+disproves your claims
Throughout this letter (which should be revised to become a mea culpa), you conflate two separate hypotheses:
a) There is a POSITIVE ferguson effect (aka protest effect) on DEPOLICING (aka less 'active' or 'proactive' policing)
b) There is a POSITIVE ferguson/protest effect on violent crime, PARTICULARLY HOMICIDE
Hypothesis A appears true: police do pull back from policing when facing public scrutiny. The extent of this pullback is debated. For more info, see MacDonald 2019; Marier and Fridell 2020; Mourtgos, Adams, and Nix 2022; Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. However, you beg the question by showing hypothesis A is true, and claiming hypothesis B is also true!
Hypothesis B is plausible and worth exploring! This is because at the extremes both 1) more and/or well targeted police(ing) reduces crime (Evans and Owens 2007; Sherman 2022) and 2) poorly targeted and/or no police(ing) increases crime (Loeffler and Braga 2022; Piza and Conneally 2022). Deterrence - particularly versus nothing - does exist (Nagin 2013)!
However, the problem is that we have actually tested hypothesis B and found it lacking! See the Criminology and Public Policy Volume 18 Issue 1 (2019), particularly Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019. The issue is that there's an assumption that arrests (and other CJS interventions) have a UNIFORM marginal effect, but this may not be the case. Instead, imagine that the marginal effects of incrementing/decrementing a(n) arrest/imprisonment/search/stop etc. is conditional on the cumulative exposure, much like a laffer curve! In this case, it is not so clear that reducing police interventions would result in increased crime, as long as the reduction isn't 'too large'. See Owens 2019 for a very good short summary on this economic perspective on CJS interventions.
So, TL;DR hypothesis A doesn't mean hypothesis B, and in fact we (criminologists) have already done this work and found hypothesis B lacking.
1) Causal and validity problems - aka time series analysis is hard
You've done some work, but it isn't even close to enough. To help get there, read the very approachable McCleary, McDowall, and Bartos 2017, with particular attention to the chapter on construct validity.
2) too high an expectation of there to be a parsimonious explanation - aka homicide is a highly contingent social event
It shouldn't be surprising that a reasonable desire for a parsimonious explanation - like protests -> homicide - falls apart. Why? Because homicide is actually the culmination of highly complex social phenomena. You have to have 2+ people, a place, a social context, a particular reason, and (usually in the US) a gun! Parsimonious explanations seldom provide enough of those elements.
3) Why does it matter if you are wrong?
Well, because being wrong about attributing the rise in homicide constitutes perpetuates a historic trend of perversely individualizes general social problems, creating variations of the following viewpoint (not to mention Sailer in the comments of course): 'The reason black people suffer in the US is that the poor and/or black community is composed of individuals who have low self-control, make poor decisions, have broken families, bad cultures, excessive disobedience, immoral norms, and self-perpetuating poverty. Therefore poor and/or black people profligately inflict crime (particularly bad ones) both within their community and across the US.'
Basically, this view of the world is like watching a cut of The Wire that only features drug busts and scenes of violence (aka the media up until 5-10 years ago). This means that structural conditions are ignored, or perversely endorsed in a 'race realism' mode to morally justify inequity. This is a lazy interpretation and it's uninspiring you stan for it when, in other arenas, you seek novel explanations. Like, instead of this hogwash you could write about when regulations and higher education intersect with negative externalities (e.g. Lovenheim and Owens 2014).
Bibliography:
Evans, William N., and Emily G. Owens. 2007. “COPS and Crime.” Journal of Public Economics 91(1):181–201. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2006.05.014.
Loeffler, Charles E., and Anthony A. Braga. 2022. “Estimating the Effects of Shrinking the Criminal Justice System on Criminal Recidivism.” Criminology & Public Policy (online first). doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12588.
MacDonald, John M. 2019. “De-Policing as a Consequence of the so-Called ‘Ferguson Effect.’” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1):47–49. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12430.
Marier, Christopher J., and Lorie A. Fridell. 2020. “Demonstrations, Demoralization, and de-Policing.” Criminology & Public Policy 19(3):693–719. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12492.
McCleary, Richard, David McDowall, and Bradley Bartos. 2017. Design and Analysis of Time Series Experiments. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mourtgos, Scott M., Ian T. Adams, and Justin Nix. 2022. “Elevated Police Turnover Following the Summer of George Floyd Protests: A Synthetic Control Study.” Criminology & Public Policy 21(1):9–33. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12556.
Nagin, Daniel S. 2013. “Deterrence: A Review of the Evidence by a Criminologist for Economists.” Annual Review of Economics 5(1):83–105. doi: 10.1146/annurev-economics-072412-131310.
Ouss, Aurélie. 2020. “Misaligned Incentives and the Scale of Incarceration in the United States.” Journal of Public Economics 191:104285. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104285.
Piza, Eric L., and Nathan T. Connealy. 2022. “The Effect of the Seattle Police-Free CHOP Zone on Crime: A Microsynthetic Control Evaluation.” Criminology & Public Policy 21(1):35–58. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12570.
Rosenfeld, Richard, and Joel Wallman. 2019. “Did De-Policing Cause the Increase in Homicide Rates?” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1):51–75. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12414.
Sherman, Lawrence W. 2022. “Goldilocks and the Three ‘Ts’: Targeting, Testing, and Tracking for ‘Just Right’ Democratic Policing.” Criminology & Public Policy 21(1):175–96. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12578.
Have you looked into whether it's just IQ differences rather than anything more complex?
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F99be84ff-5ad7-4b54-a7f4-98c1beebac78_2358x1048.jpeg
The effect of age seems to be huge compared to the effect of cognitive ability.
You're not getting that from the graphs I linked I assume, since they're both controlling for age?
You're right, I didn't register that both graphs controlled for age.
What is the point you’re trying to make with these graphs, and how does it relate to the comment above?
OP called for exploring complex causes for racial differences in crime("regulations and higher education intersect with negative externalities"). I was curious if he had disproven the explanation that Occam's razor would suggest: the IQ differences that explain most racial differences in socioeconomic outcomes also explain most of the crime differences.
I'm not sure I really follow what you're saying. Is your argument that the apparent uptick in certain categories of violent crime starting in May 2020 is a statistical artifact or otherwise illusory? Or are you arguing that the uptick did happen and happened at that time, but de-policing can be ruled out as a cause? If it's the latter, is there some hypothesis you're proposing as an alternative?
> "It shouldn't be surprising that a reasonable desire for a parsimonious explanation - like protests -> homicide - falls apart. Why? Because homicide is actually the culmination of highly complex social phenomena. You have to have 2+ people, a place, a social context, a particular reason, and (usually in the US) a gun!"
I am particularly baffled by this claim. Homicide, as you describe it, is the culmination of highly complex social phenomena in more or less the same sense that buying a DVD player is the culmination of highly complex social phenomena. You have to have 2+ people, a place, a social context, a particular reason, and (usually in the US) a credit card! If purchases of DVD players have been dropping since the advent of streaming services, a parsimonious explanation like "the advent of streaming services" doesn't strike me as being defeasible simply by pointing to the inherent complexity of the consumption of leisure goods in a capitalist society.
The paper's I referenced deal with the existence of the 'ferguson' effect on depolicing (what I call hypothesis a), and then that effect's causal relationship to crime (hypothesis b). The reason for that is simple - Ferguson (and similar) was not commingled with an economic crisis / lockdown / unprecedented pandemic. Therefore, it's a far cleaner test of Scott's hypothesis that protests -> homicides.
I don't put forth an explanation of why crime increased in 2020, because that's unsettled ground. There isn't some grand conspiracy to conceal the truth - it's an area of active research and debate! That shouldn't be surprising because it takes forever to get good data, analyze them, and publish articles. The best analyses I can find that have been published are:
Kim, Dae-Young. 2022. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Gun Violence Across Census Tracts in NYC.” Homicide Studies 10887679221077036. doi: 10.1177/10887679221077036.
Schleimer, Julia P., Veronica A. Pear, Christopher D. McCort, Aaron B. Shev, Alaina De Biasi, Elizabeth Tomsich, Shani Buggs, Hannah S. Laqueur, and Garen J. Wintemute. 2022. “Unemployment and Crime in US Cities During the Coronavirus Pandemic.” Journal of Urban Health 99(1):82–91. doi: 10.1007/s11524-021-00605-3.
(see supplemental table 14 to see mild attenuation of effects controlling for protests - https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11524-021-00605-3/MediaObjects/11524_2021_605_MOESM1_ESM.pdf)
https://secure.counciloncj.org/np/viewDocument?orgId=counciloncj&id=402887967ad84a0b017aef438c7901db
(particularly pages 5 onwards, note however these aren't models)
Probably the best:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12103-021-09666-1#Sec9
(particularly table 4, a segmented poisson regression that finding a significant increase in shootings, but not of homicides, in the post-protest time segmentation)
All together, these studies suggest again that hypothesis b is PLAUSIBLE but do not substantiate it, if that makes sense. Perhaps another study will, given enough time (it took ~4 years for good Ferguson research to be published). Together, these articles seem to show that 2020 protests are associated with a subset of crimes (not necessarily homicide), but the story is unclear: is depolicing, driven by protests, enabling more crime? Is it a crisis of police legitimacy (aka views of the police rather than police actions)? Are protests merely accelerating a latent pandemic effect as compliance with Stay-At-Home orders was falling anyway? Did the cumulative socioeconomic precarity of the pandemic predispose BOTH protests and crime?
All in all, the mechanism that protests -> homicide is plausible in a context-free sense. But the evidence did not support it in the past, and does not support it yet, particularly in light of more complex alternative models. And, yes, that should not be surprising.
EDIT
One published study found a significant relationship between the BLM protest period (as a dummy variable) and Philadelphian fatal shootings: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08874034221088742?
So, that seems to conflict a bit with the findings of the other studies, and suggest that hypothesis B is more plausible. My interpretation is that homicide is complicated, and Philly may honestly be different than Boston, NYC, New Orleans, Chicago, etc - so the quest for a general protests -> homicide causal story might be to simplistic.
"These studies suggest again that hypothesis b is PLAUSIBLE but do not substantiate it" strikes me as a very different preliminary conclusion from "Scott you are wrong!" and "we have actually tested hypothesis B and found it lacking!" And not just because of the shift from exclamation points to all caps as a means of emphasis.
I guess I'll lay my cards on the table and say that I sense in your posts a certain between-the-lines implication that the protests --> homicide hypothesis might well be somewhat true, but it's embarrassingly low-status within the field of criminology. Because it's sort of obvious and unsophisticated and lay-coded as well as right-coded, and what's high-status is fun counterintuitive stuff like Lovenheim and Owens (2014) on higher ed and regulations and whatever.
Maybe protests --> homicide eventually turns out to be empirically sort of right, but nobody's making tenure for substantiating that. Okay, fine. But your summaries of the criminology literature aren't really giving me a reason why I as an outsider should care.
Scott stated there was a clear and obvious effect Ferguson effect on homicide, and cited 2016 era criminology literature about the original (2014-15) Ferguson. The section in which he did was is titled "Effects Of Previous Protests".
Positive causal claims rightfully demand more rigor than a null hypothesis! So, that's where I started - with the Ferguson effect Scott claimed. And Scott was wrong about the original Ferguson on homicide, because we criminologists have found it lacking (Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019).
The 2014/2015 era is easier to analyze because it's clearer - more time has passed, and it's not commingled (with pandemic). Therefore my first pass was to regurgitate scholarship clearly demonstrated this lack of a significant ferguson effect on homicide. Which was my first post, along with other stuff. Perhaps I should edit my first post to explain this, I agree it's less clear. If you'd like I can edit my original post.
In your response, you questioned me about the 2020 protest era. Good point! Moving the question to 2020 is more difficult, and the range of plausible answers expands. You note that my answers are different. That's because the questions are different, and it's a good thing to answer different questions differently.
My conclusion to the question of 'do protests cause homicide' is that the best research says no for the Ferguson era, which is the cleanest test. My conclusion to the specific question of 'did the 2020 BLM protests cause homicide?' is 'I don't know yet', or as I said "these studies suggest again that hypothesis b is PLAUSIBLE but do not substantiate it"
I lay out my cards on the table about why I don't like it when Scott does amateur hour social science in point three of my original post.
To your characterization: What I think is actually embarrassingly low status in social sciences is 1) not testing the robustness of effects to different specifications and 2) not exploring the the mechanism of that effect. Claiming that there is a Ferguson effect that doesn't exist for Ferguson, but only for other time-space locales (e.g. Philly but not NYC) is rather silly. Better to place preregistration or bet given data, or if there's adequate data create a true model to account for concerns of validity. Which are really damn important given the simultaneous nature of the pandemic + its highly differentiated (rather than nicely homogeneous) local impacts on communities and economies.
If you don't care about the data, debates, methods, and findings of criminology, more power to you! But I'm not sure why I should care that you don't care.
> Claiming that there is a Ferguson effect that doesn't exist for Ferguson, but only for other time-space locales (e.g. Philly but not NYC) is rather silly.
That certainly does sound silly! Except that Scott isn't claiming anything like that. That's what Scott's claims sound like, apparently, once they've passed through your idiosyncratic methodological filter.
You're about to say, "Idiosyncratic?? What do you mean? I represent the consensus of an entire academic field!" And what I say is that if academic criminology takes so many words to say so little about such a basic question as "does less policing mean more crime?", it's either useless or obfuscatory.
Concisely, yes policing's relationship to crime is negative! In that more police generally means less crime. But the devil is in the details of that (e.g. order maintenance policing actually 'creates' crime by pre-empting complaints to issue loitering, marijuana possession, etc. misdemeanor citations). For a really superb and concise look at that question, see Emily Owen's 4 pager: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12413 (happy to share a link if you can't access)
To your more general point:
Scott uses the Ferguson effect as an important section of his piece. That section is titled "Effects Of Previous Protests". It serves as a robustness check of his claim that protests -> pandemic. I show that good research finds no such OG Ferguson effect. You don't actually debate me on merits (or literature), and instead verbally sparring with an imaginary version of me. So I'll repeat myself to you:
"To your characterization: What I think is actually embarrassingly low status in social sciences is 1) not testing the robustness of effects to different specifications and 2) not exploring the the mechanism of that effect. Claiming that there is a Ferguson effect that doesn't exist for Ferguson, but only for other time-space locales (e.g. Philly but not NYC) is rather silly. Better to place preregistration or bet given data, or if there's adequate data create a true model to account for concerns of validity. Which are really damn important given the simultaneous nature of the pandemic + its highly differentiated (rather than nicely homogeneous) local impacts on communities and economies."
If you don't care about the data, debates, methods, and findings of criminology, more power to you! But I'm not sure why I should care that you don't care."
Note - I made two edits to my original post, and noted them.
I appreciate your attempt to pummel me into submission with papers, but the ones I checked are a bit off from the actual thing under debate - for example, Rosenfeld only shows that it isn't mediated by arrest rates.
In the article, I discussed Pyrooz et al as representative of the papers in breakpoint literature most directly addressing my question, and explained why, although it did somewhat find a breakpoint in some subgroups, I'm overall less convinced of its conclusions compared to the ocular trauma test in eg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc630cd5a-14c6-4476-9ea4-09001b0559eb_1190x696.png - and the fact that my theory correctly predicted that homicide rates would go up ~30% the exact week of mass BLM protests across the country and yours didn't.
You say that "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas". To support the existence of depolicing (I agree, btw, see my Hypothesis A), you use two variables as measures of this depolicing: Chicago arrests and Minneapolis vehicle stops.
Is your argument that Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 are wrong - that arrests don't move in concert with depolicing? The Cassell 2020 paper you reference actually likes the Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 paper, and instead says that the 'treatment' - protests - was instead probably too weak in the original Ferguson era to find statistical significance (pages 55-56). I'm not sure I believe that, but I prefer that argument to the argument you make here Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019 aren't discussing what you're discussing. For that to be true, you'd have to claim that depolicing's relationship to arrests is weak at the same time you use a decline in arrests as evidence of depolicing. Pick one!
The claim "a police pullback motivated by the protests caused the murder spike" is weaker/broader than the claim "there is a certain statistical relationship between arrest rates and homicides in 2015".
I'm not able to fully follow the exact specifications of Rosenfeld's model. I see that when they just correlate arrest rate change and homicide change the way I would have done, they find a significant relationship. They note that you can make that relationship go below the threshold of significance by removing Baltimore (or two other cities with strong relationships), but you could also *not* remove the data points where you would expect this effect to be clearest, and even when you do, all it shows is that this real effect goes below an arbitrary significance threshold once you remove the places where it's most visible.
This is the alternative version of what I mentioned in the post in the part about the Ferguson studies - they generally have trouble finding significance at the nationwide level (especially when they remove inconvenient outliers), but do find significance in subsets of the places you would most expect to find the effect.
I think investigating questions like these is less about "can I find one paper where the effect didn't reach significance, then I win!" and more trying to holistically look at what things the data do and don't show. To me, the data show murders reversing a 10-15 year secular decline in 2014-2015, just after these protests, concentrated in the cities where the protests were worst. The Baltimore data show that the breakpoint was exactly at the time of the protests in Baltimore, to within a week or two of resolution. We also know there was a 30% decline in policing in Baltimore - and that, when we repeated this experiment in 2020, we got the same result. To me, the clearest explanation for all of this is that the protests caused a limited decline in policing, and subsequent limited rise in homicides, concentrated in the cities where they happened, breaking a statistical significance boundary by some specifications but not others. I don't really see an alternative explanation here for what seems to me to be very holistically-compelling data.
It also seems possible to me, as Rosenfeld mentions, that the protests exerted their effect through some means that didn't affect (or appear to affect) overall arrests, but this seems less plausible to me since I can't imagine what it would be. Given that Baltimore did fewer arrests after Gray, and Minneapolis after Floyd, and that Rosenfeld fails to find a general trend in arrest rates nationally after Ferguson/Gray, it seems to me that it still makes sense to explain Baltimore through arrest rates, and (assuming that better studies replicate the anecdotal evidence that arrest rates have fallen after Floyd) to explain the more recent spike that way also.
Damn my whole big comment was lost to the ether and I'm not going to rewrite the entirety atm. TL;DR:
1) You need a model rather than a correlation b/c shit's simultaneous: "sanctions, such as arrests, may be both a cause and a consequence of crime. If sanctions are dependent on crime, estimates of the effect of sanction levels on crime rates in which this endogeneity is ignored are likely to be biased (Fisher & Nagin, 1978; Greenberg et al., 1979). To obtain unbiased estimates of the effect of arrest rates on crime rates, therefore, empirical methods should be used in which analysts control for the simultaneity of arrests and crime" (page 57 of Rosenfeld and Wallman 2019).
SEM (structural, meaning multilevel, equation modeling) lets you have the opportunity to disentangle such simultaneous relationships. I did NOT choose this article because it was the one article that showed what I wanted - I chose it because it was the most recent full evaluation of the question across all localities, has an appropriate method, and because the journal is well-regarded for its review process weeding out methodological problems. Note how often economists contribute stuff.
2) More generally, I agree with you about how important it is to "holistically look at what things the data do and don't show". It's just that visual inspection is notoriously bad as a method for time series analysis when you are doing causal, rather than descriptive, analyses. McCleary et al's book on time series analysis (2017) discuss how modeling is really necessary (see pages 17-18) especially when the underlying phenomena has complex factors and/or the intervention (here protests) is dynamic rather than fixed (not a singular policy shift, but a cumulative phenomena). Therefore what I need is:
3) a solid modeling approach. This is going to happen, it's just still pretty damn early in academic time frames. Which also calls into question the role of protests... for example, if police policy shifts in response to protests, at what point would a police policy shift have its own distinct agency apart from its origin story? What I'd like is to delve into mechanism and test counterfactuals. Some other commenter (who seemed to be getting frustrated with me) complained that I was obfuscating or some such. I'm not - it's just seems very clear to me that protest have little unmediated ability to influence homicide rates months after the protest itself happened. So... the interesting story is in the meat!
4) Otherwise it would be like saying "Economic activity causes climate change" and complaining that the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge this fact because it's too pro having things to consume. That's a far more causally supported relationship than the one we're discussing here, yet it's also kinda equally unhelpful in that it's overbroad - the interesting story is in the meat and the tradeoffs (again, love Emily Owen's 2019 piece accompanying Rosenfeld and Wallman - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1745-9133.12413 - happy to share if you don't have access).
Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld was the most prominently quoted critic of the "Ferguson Effect" theory in 2015, but in 2016 he changed his mind and said there was a Ferguson Effect.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/liberal-researcher-now-admits-ferguson-effect-on-murder-is-real/
Rosenfeld's homicides by week data for big cities in 2020 show a clear "structural break" at the end of May 2020:
https://www.takimag.com/article/slaughter-in-the-cities/
edit: two grammar errors, one clarification
Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. I should have learned from South Park (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3J7AmojLGrs). Nevertheless, I will engage because, at the very least, readers should know the truth.
Parker, Trey, and Matt Stone. 2006. “Hell on Earth 2006.” South Park.
1) Scott explicitly described the effect as protests -> depolicing -> homicides. In 2016, Rosenfeld actually said that there was not yet good data / analysis to test this depolicing hypothesis. So, your 'sources' (self-citing much) are not only unhinged and wrong - they don't refer to the actual National Institute of Justice report that Rosenfeld wrote about this:
"What has become known as the “Ferguson effect” on the homicide increase, as noted, is subject to considerable controversy and evidence-free rhetoric. The term is also unfortunate, because it does not only apply to the police killing in Ferguson and because its precise meaning is unclear. The dominant de-policing interpretation is that highly publicized incidents of police use of deadly force against minority citizens, including but not limited to the Ferguson incident, caused police officers to disengage from their duties, particularly proactive tactics that prevent crime. Interestingly, however, that is not the interpretation of the individual who evidently coined the term. Sam Dotson, Chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, used the term in an interview with a reporter in November of 2014, three months after Michael Brown was killed. “It’s the Ferguson effect,” Dotson said. “I see it not only on the law enforcement side, but the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment” (Byers 2014). [page 18]
[several paragraphs later, when Rosenfeld returns to the question of the de-policing hypothesis...]
If de-policing was the operative mechanism, we should observe larger drops in arrests and other self-initiated police activities in cities that experienced the greatest homicide increases. The arrest data are readily available from the UCR, or will be when the 2015 UCR data are released in the fall of 2016. Data on pedestrian and traffic stops, building checks, and other self-initiated police activity will have to be obtained from local police departments. It should be noted, however, that the de-policing hypothesis presupposes a very large effect of policing on crime, large enough to explain homicide increases from de-policing of 50 percent or more in some cities. Effect sizes of that magnitude far surpass those revealed in research on the most effective policing strategies to prevent crime (Braga, Papachristos, and Hureau 2014). [page 21]"
Rosenfeld, R. (2016). Documenting and Explaining the 2015 Homicide Rise: Research Directions. National Institute of Justice. URL: https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249895.pdf
2) I had thought that most readers could infer that the 2019 Rosenfeld and Wallman paper came at a later point in time that 2016. In your case at least, that assumption was clearly wrong.
Rosenfeld's 2016 complaint was that there was not good data + analysis on the de-policing hypothesis. His 2019 article took that question on directly, and was titled "Did De-Policing Cause the Increase in Homicide Rates?" Rosenfeld and Wallman (2019) lived up to this title, and their analysis found the depolicing-hypothesis lacking: "De-policing, at least as measured by declining arrest rates, did not have a significant effect on city homicide rates in recent years, but arrests will play an important supportive role in this multipronged effort to stem future crime rate increases associated with controversial police violence." (page 70)
Rosenfeld, Richard, and Joel Wallman. 2019. “Did De-Policing Cause the Increase in Homicide Rates?” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1):51–75. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12414.
3) Lastly, why not straight from the horses mouth about the 2020 homicide rise's relationship to the Ferguson effect vs other possibilities? Rosenfeld presented on this in November 2021 for over an hour. See his powerpoint (https://nationalpress.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/PRESENTATIONS_TUESDAY_Rosenfeld.pptx). Most recently, Rosenfeld and Lopez (2022) released an update to for the non-partisan Council on Criminal Justice that also explores this (https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-yearend-2021-update/). Their conclusion is similar to Rosenfeld's 2016 report (and similar to mine in other posts): protest -> depolicing -> homicide seems unlikely to be a sufficient cause, but we need better data and analysis to test this.
This entire thread is the perfect example of what happens when you release the "experts" into an area where it's difficult to conduct empirical science, but those eager to conduct the science report and act on their findings as if they've just engaged in physics or math. The attempt at being so empirical in areas of human behavior is a relatively novel concept and seems have serious limits. I don't know that it should be valued over the consistent and persistent testimony of those that have lived and worked in the communities that are at issue here. I have a hard time trusting the eager beaver Ph.D student outsider vs. the thirty year police vet or 70 year old resident of Baltimore as to "what happened here?" Cops and citizens all over the country are coming up with the same explanation based on experience. Thomas Sowell's famous book Knowledge and Decisions is something that comes to mind here. As does Shop Class for Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford when he discusses how a twenty year motorcycle mechanic could diagnose a problem much quicker than a newly trained mechanic with a manual. Often times the manual would send the young mechanic down multiple dead ends, where the experienced mechanic could articulate exactly the issue and found the manual to be useless. I realize this is a tangent and abstract, and there is a huge need for empirical data, but in so many areas of human behavior (crime, wealth, child rearing, education) I think we are hitting the limits of empiricism and should go back to valuing localized knowledges (cops, teachers, parents, business owners) rather than the "experts" that many times haven't lived a day in the shoes of those that they regulate or control.
I really like your comment, because I share much of your opinion that the "attempt at being so empirical in areas of human behavior is a relatively novel concept and seems have serious limits. I don't know that it should be valued over the consistent and persistent testimony of those that have lived and worked in the communities that are at issue here. I have a hard time trusting the eager beaver Ph.D student outsider..." 100% agree, localized knowledge is frequently both 1) more valuable and 2) more accurate than outsider/academic perspectives.
That being said, I don't agree with your conclusion - that because of the limits of empiricism we should "go back to valuing localized knowledges... rather than the 'experts' that many times haven't lived a day in the shoes of that they regulate or control":
1) If you think that, you should first object to Scott. The way that Scott argues and draws upon evidence is in very the same 'science report and act on their findings as if they've just engaged in physics or math' mode that you critique. You know, Scott's causal claims, evaluation of counterfactuals, discussion of academic findings, time-series analyses, (ad hoc) robustness checks, etc. Where are the on-the-ground interviews with the police vets or 70 year old residents of Baltimore? Given that Scott adopted that mode, I don't think it's quite fare to lay the burden on me. Or maybe you're not - it's a bit unclear. Is it me you're identifying as among the problematic 'experts', or both Scott and me? Genuinely unsure upon a re-reading.
2) Local knowledge compliments empirical evaluations rather than precluding it! Saying we need to return to localized knowledge implies that you can't empirically evaluate localized knowledge. I don't think that's true - claims about the world are frequently testable! And we shouldn't be afraid of testing them. Theory and hypotheses - derived from lived experience - are critical to my work. Furthermore I've done, and do, observations, interviews, and participant observations. That doesn't mean I have local knowledge, but it does mean that I don't just do statistical work.
For example, folk theories of the 'Karen' can be narrowed down to testable hypotheses about theorized relationship between demographics (e.g. middle-aged white female) and behavior (e.g. entitled behavior and racial stereotyping). Or, at the meta-level, you can explore about the emergence of the folk theory of the 'Karen'.
Objecting to the external validity, fishing expeditions, construct validity, data, sampling, and analytic method are great ways to find flaws social science literature. And you will find those flaws... because honestly a LOT of social science literature is shitty in one or more of those ways. But I think it would odd to be relegated to a pre-scientific understanding of knowledge that insists that local knowledge is superior to scientific knowledge... and further that the supremacy of local knowledge is untestable.
I feel like we are mostly in agreement here. On your first point, I find that Scott's analysis was an historical lookback of "what happened" based on crime data to validate some easily identifiable questions of when/where did the murder rate actually spike and run THAT against the more anecdotal accounts of what police and residents THOUGHT was happening. If the actual data did not support the claim that the violence rose around the time of the protest and affected the types of communities that the protests sought to protect, I would have happily declared victory based on the crime data. I think crime data is basically pretty straightforward and tells a clear story. This is not true for a lot of empirical data and studies that I see, particularly around the area of social mobility and wealth inequality.
So I have two issues with empirical data vs. anecdotal accounts - (1) the quality of the data (empirical or anecdotal) available given the question (2) the burden for some group accepting a conclusion on the data. If a substantial amount in various geographic locations of people are testifying to the same phenomenon that's carries quite a bit of weight. If there is straight forward data to corroborate these accounts (which I think there is here), I'm good.
I think that some groups will then weaponize (2) and demand MORE EMPIRICAL DATA almost to no end, and there really can't be enough to ever satisfy them because they have a vested interest in the well supported story to be false. It's like a defense lawyer always finding some angle on "reasonable doubt" but the burden of proof in social science is not the same in a murder trial. It also could be called what Scott refers to as "isolated demands for rigor". Our incredibly bright, well-resourced, and heavily agenda'd (not a word) academic sector is wildly effective at this type of weaponization of "studies" to use as a blunt object and over the years I've been sort of amazed at what I've seen in terms of (1) denying reality and (2) putting forth some academic argument with a causal chain a mile long made up of wet paper towels that concludes something that goes against the advice of, say, a teacher, cop, parent, etc.
I know I'm being very abstract and I'm just a guy that works for a living with three kids so not on your level of training, but to summarize I take academic research within social science more and more grains of salt with each passing year. I feel that as a society we overvalue Ph.D's and peer reviewed studies in this area, an we would all be better off deferring to practitioners.
I don't think you're wrong that there are isolated demands for rigor. But I'm not sure there's a solution. Our experience as people / researchers gives us opinions and heuristics that necessarily operate before we can empirically evaluate claims. Noting this - that we have, and will always have, biases - doesn't 1) excise our bias or 2) result in a superior way to adjudicate debates about either the world or about results. Using rationalism to LARP that we have no bias and are more 'reasonable' is unconvincing to me. I mean, look at the comment section as a whole - it's largely people saying "Yup this confirms my preexisting POV" or "Nope you're wrong".
Instead, I like the old-fashioned war of ideas vision of academia - a meta-solution of science as a process. I'm a curmudgeon in that I don't believe in post-structural or relativist epistemologies - like Popper, I believe in testing and falsifying hypotheses. So, the threat I see to science is not that people have biases, it's that the research they do is poor and/or the publication process is not doing a good job interrogating research. And that occurs distressingly often in criminology - among other social science disciplines: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1428743882511159297.html
The truth is that there is good research, and that research contributes to knowledge. But, perversely, you need to be inside the discipline to actually figure out which research is good, because there is reason to be suspicious of a paper without knowing more about it.
Side notes:
People are often wrong in their perception of reality. For example, a classic criminology finding is that people believe that crime is worsening regardless of whether it is or not: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/16/voters-perceptions-of-crime-continue-to-conflict-with-reality/
And practitioners are also often wrong! For example, many police claimed that 2020 was a year in which they were both vilified and hunted down, increasing their risk of violent death. But the greatest risk was COVID-19, and violent deaths were at a low point: https://dailymedia.case.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/02214818/2020-LE-Officers-Fatalities-Report-opt.pdf
2021 did show an increase in violent deaths (38% increase over the low point of 2020), but it exactly mirrored the the 38% increase in traffic-related deaths, so it's not clear how much the risk of death was driven by changes in police behavior / exposure. And, again, COVID-19 was the most massive contributor: https://nleomf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021-EOY-Fatality-Report-Final-web.pdf
The flaws on both sides are clear. On the "common sense" side you have the careful practitioner of 50 years or the person that had one traumatic experience and they have the same opinion on the issue. One of those opinions is much more valuable than the other because of the way they got there.
On the other side we have an academic that has been carefully studying a topic for forty years and has, many times, discovered something that changed their mind and/or presented an inconvenient truth to the status quo. We also have glorified propagandists wielding their politically motivated and bias-funded "studies" around that end up as headlines on the NYT, which most of the managerial class then takes as "fact".
My biggest issue with the research has been that (1) there are areas where research is limited in ability to solve a problem (maybe you don't agree here but I do); and (2) when the research says something inconvenient to a narrative, the research and the researcher are immediately pressured into changing their conclusion, and again (3) where bad research is used as a bludgeon.
To your three points: (1) Of course people are often wrong and perception is warped. To that crime study I could say the same exact thing about racism. This is a reflection of a political strategy to scare people into voting a certain way. And also it's great to have clear crime data at our fingertips to verify something.
(2) This is exactly the thing I'm talking about that Ph.D's and stats people need to stop doing. Scott talked about this a while ago when he showed that more people die from furniture dropping on their heads than from terrorist attacks in the US. The question isn't being a police officer vs. all deaths, it's being a police officer now vs. last year or five years, ten years, etc. Do you feel less safe? Yes, and you should. Here's an example of what I'm saying. White sharks are now pretty prevalent off of cape cod--something that just wasn't happening in 2010. If in 2020 I took you out on a boat 400 yards off shore with seals swimming everywhere and said "It's ok. Hardly anyone dies from shark attacks, and actually the biggest cause of death is COVID. So you're probably fine." 2020 marked a shift that was palpable for police in their subjective perception of safety as the country did nothing to support them.
As to the stat about traffic--this is along the same lines. We are finding some other area that caused human death that is outside the one most tragic type of death that is senselessly and intentionally cased by other humans (homicide). Traffic deaths aren't intentional crimes. 99% of traffic deaths are, by nature, accidents. With 330 million people buzzing around in metal death traps looking at their phones there is some level of "accidents" that we should expect. Why did they increase? I don't know but there is no necessary baseline in homicides in the world. It's plausible that we could reduce homicides by 90%--traffic or disease is really not the same thing. Lastly--where does COVID come in as a proximate cause in traffic deaths or homicides? The link between BLM --> riots --> homicides passes every smell and data test. I still wonder why so many people just stretch to anything to say "well look at this totally other separate thing, so yeah, we don't really know what caused the spike in homicide". We will never solve this problem with that approach.
So… basing decisions on personal experience rather than research, analysis, and attention to potential sources of bias?
Having now looked at a few of these articles, I'm a bit confused by your characterization of how they relate to what you're calling Hypotheses A and B. MacDonald explicitly presents Rosenfeld & Wallman as undermining Hypothesis A. They don't address Hypothesis B because their claim is that de-policing didn't happen in the first place. MacDonald even seems to say that we should still expect Hypothesis B to hold true, under alternate circumstances in which Hypothesis A is correct.
As I read them, Marier & Fridell are making a claim that's even farther back in the causal chain: they think the police weren't even demoralized to begin with. They acknowledge that studies asking police about whether they're demoralized and whether it's affecting their behavior have generally concluded that this did in fact happen to some significant extent. But Marier & Fridell point out that if you look at cops' survey responses to generic questions about e.g. job satisfaction, the results before and after Ferguson look essentially the same. That does arguably complicate the picture, and should maybe make one update one's priors slightly against a major demoralization effect. But it strikes me as very far from a conclusive or universally accepted refutation of the conventional narrative on this point.
That's an interesting point. I read the literature as more supportive of hypothesis a (decline in policing caused by protests) than you did. I agree that hypothesis A isn't clad in iron - there was a secular trend of decreasing arrests pre-Ferguson, so it's not totally clear that the further decline in arrests at a national level is in turn a clear consequence of the Ferguson-related protests. This doesn't mean you can't also test whether further arrest declines (or local increases) increase (decrease) homicides across the localities -- as long as there is some variance (not every city has the same decline), that test is fine. Hypothesis B (in my words: "There is a POSITIVE ferguson/protest effect on violent crime, PARTICULARLY HOMICIDE") can be tested even if Hypothesis A (in my words: "There is a POSITIVE ferguson effect (aka protest effect) on DEPOLICING (aka less 'active' or 'proactive' policing)") is not true.
However, as I said I think that there was some effect of declining policing: Macdonald says "Although it is evident from the data Rosenfeld and Wallman (2019) show that arrest rates have been declining nationally (see Figure 2 in their article), there is little evidence that city-level changes in arrest patterns explain the 2015 uptick in the homicide rate." Rosenfeld and Wallman directly say that their lack of a clear NATIONAL Ferguson-spurred decrease in arrest rates "could mask sharper arrest rate declines in cities with larger homicide rate increases and obscure possible effects of arrest rates on homicide levels" - which is why they go to the trouble of building their SEM model to test the effect of arrests on homicide in the Ferguson context. They don't find it. Which I would say offers some support for hypothesis A and no support for B.
The Ferguson Effect was highly localized: e.g., on 11/23/2015 Chicago finally released the video of a cop shooting Laquan MacDonald in the back and immediately the Obama Administration and the ACLU descended upon the CPD with all sorts of restrictions. By January 2016 murders were higher and the full year of 2016 wound up extremely lethal in Chicago.
The Floyd Effect was much faster and more national.
Applause. Thank you.
Gell-Mann Amnesia runs both ways. I've found claims about what "The Media" says to nearly always be false or cherrypicked when I bother to check them. (Also, is The Economist not part of "The Media"? If it is, then citing their graphs here is a self-defeating argument.)
I point to four articles that make the mistake I'm accusing of in this post. You can follow the links to them and see whether they say what I'm arguing they're saying. Have you done this, or are you just accusing me of something you could easily confirm I'm not doing?
The NYT is paywalled, so I checked the WP and Atlantic. I think it's fair to criticize the WP article, but the Atlantic article spends a lot of time saying basically the same things that you did. It even *explicitly* mentions that previous anti-police protests were followed by crime waves and that the current rise in crime is concentrated in black neighborhoods.
> A second major potential factor is the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in May 2020, a few months into the pandemic. Floyd’s death—along with several other high-profile killings of Black people by police—set off some of the largest protests in American history, and police came under scrutiny around the country. Although murders were rising before those protests, the largest spike occurred after them (though murders do typically rise in the summer). Murder rates have spiked after previous major protests against police too.
> But unlike the crime wave of the 1980s and ’90s, which affected many Americans of all walks of life, the current spike appears to be heavily concentrated. Many homicide victims are Black men, living in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
There's also the question of how representative those articles are. There are lots of journalistic outfits, even excluding right wing ones, and they're constantly publishing tons of articles and opinion pieces, so it is easy to cherry pick to support any narrative you want. The fact that you used graphs from The Economist to demonstrate "what the media doesn't want you to know" is pretty ironic.
> (Also, is The Economist not part of "The Media"? If it is, then citing their graphs here is a self-defeating argument.)
Graphs are (mostly) just direct depictions of data. They are sometimes misleading, but these ones ostensibly aren't so it makes sense to use them. Most of the misleading is done in the writing - the pushing of narratives. Like how the NYT tacitly admit the Ferguson effect is real, but the headline point of the article is that you're bad if you think its true.
To throw in another theory for the general situation, maybe double time for overtime is a bad incentive. Perhaps the police are too sleep-deprived to be thinking well. I've never seen discussion of when dubious behavior happens compared to number of hours worked.
Related: https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/the-bad-cop
I'm with you on sleep-deprivation being a (potentially) terrible component! But that doesn't seem like the kind of thing that could be address by anything in The Overton Window currently.
This one covers 'overtime' (in passing at least): https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/how-depolicing-happens
People wanting to party after bars closed, restaurants. No fun. A riot was a big party where anything goes. For that crowd, police officers would be in danger. Gangs could kill them. All the prisoners being released would likely go find those who got them incarcerated. Deadly game for officers, families, informants. All people who needed to make a living suddenly hitting the streets. Many may have died from drug overdoses.
This cannot possibly explain the Ferguson effect *IN FERGUSON*. And this did not happen in any other country, even those with stricter lockdowns.
I'm inclined to think the decrease in policing was a large factor---and indeed there's a large literature showing that increasing policing decreases crime---but it does seem like there are some bugs in the argument here.
How does this comport with the observation that all kinds of bad behavior went up substantially? E.g., https://www.slowboring.com/p/all-kinds-of-bad-behavior-is-on-the
It seems implausible that BLM protests would cause a rise in people to get into fights on airplanes. Given that we know anti-social behaviour generally went way up, the simplest explanation for the murder rise is that it's the right-tail of the general phenomena. The concentration of rise in murders in black communities could be explained by a model that just says everyone now commits crimes 1 degree more severe than they were pre-covid.
That leaves the questions of why the murder phenomena is America specific, and why the violence spike started in May. One possible answer: CARES act stimulus checks were sent out in April. This large cash infusion may have enabled many relatively poor people to buy (additional) guns.
(Both for and against this theory, this paper claims that gun purchasing started going up in March, but finds no association between increased gun purchasing and increased violence at the state level https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-021-00339-5)
My point here is not that this is a better theory for the murder spike, but just that it fits with the main points of your argument and is additionally consistent with the general rise in (non-murder) anti-social behavior.
'Crime' and 'bad behavior' seem VERY much related to me – why do you think they'd be (totally) separate things?
This is the point that I'm making. The BLM thing explains a rise in murders via underpolicing, but doesn't explain, e.g., a rise in scuffles on airplanes or traffic accidents. Given that we know that bad behaviour in general went up, it seems that we should be suspicious of murder-specific explanations.
I think of 'BLM' as a shorthand for a wider/more-general breakdown in trust and various 'social norm enforcement mechanisms', of which 'policing' is just one.
And I think under-policing _can_ explain, e.g. a rise in scuffles on airplanes or traffic accidents. Those kinds of things absolutely DO sometimes, or _did_ more often, result in police being involved. I think a LOT of people are, now and recently, explicitly considering 'Should I call the police?'. If you sincerely believe the police are oppressive and that their involvement in a situation is _likely_ to lead to someone's death, it'd be (more than) _reasonable_ to NOT involve the police.
But what's the alternative to, e.g. breaking-up a scuffle on an airplane, if no one wants to call the police? It sure seems to me like _someone_ has to, if only effectively, be 'the cop'.
Homicides and traffic fatalities are what we have good data on. But, yeah, there's a lot of anecdata that the "racial reckoning" saw more, say, weave-yanking brawls at Spirit Airline boarding gates and the like.
This cannot possibly explain teh Ferguson effect IN FERGUSON.
Also, lots of renters stopped paying rent during covid, which paid for a lot of alcohol, drugs, ribs, DJs, cars, guns, fireworks, and other fun stuff.
They let offenders out of jail and prison that normally would have been in cages. Most offenders are black. They went home and killed people. Very simple.
Increases in police retirements and difficulties in recruiting tends to support the points made regarding police reactions to Ferguson, Grey and Floyd effects. What is worth recking you retirement, your life, your assets or even criminal prosecution? At some point you have to be practical.
First, what is this "elite establishment" that you refer to? The WSJ, the NYT, or USA Today, or all three or are you referring to news networks like Fox or Yahoo News?
Your calling a "protest" a "riot" already highlights a bias. Protests can become violent, but riots start out that way--I should know, I worked in a prison and went through several riots and I can testify that I would never call them protests, but you seem to have no problem calling a protest against police violence on black people a riot. Is it because that's all black people can do? And was it "your city" being looted? That sounds like something a white person would say while people of color facepalm in the background--I saw the same thing with Occupy where suburban white kinds would march in some inner city neighborhood they didn't know jack about while shouting "Whose streets? Our streets!"
Sorry, I'm not intentionally trying to be confrontational, but I thought that this site was more about using rational means to address problems.
A lot of different things happened in May-June 2020. There were some protests that had absolutely no riot-like features. There were also some events that would count as riots under any conceivable definition, even if they also had some protest-like elements.
I have no idea why you'd think that observation is some sort of a priori deduction from somebody's idea of what "black people can do." It's just an empirical description of a thing that happened.
When people riot, there's no agenda beyond destroying property. When people protest there is an agenda in place. A word like "riot" has a bias already built into it as does "protest." If I want to make the grievances of the people who are protesting invisible, or if I want to undercut their grievances I call their gathering a riot regardless of whether or not the level of property destruction is in keeping with the use of the term. In the prison system, we were told to avoid the use of the word "riot" because it left the correctional system looking impotent and so we were told to use words like "melee" or "disturbance," but not "riot."
Riot is a word situated within a hierarchy of words. To pick "riot" over other more suitable terms says more about the writer/speaker than about the event itself.
I guess my sense of the linguistic valence is just different. I've been calling, and hearing people call, the 1992 civil turmoil in Los Angeles the "Rodney King riots" for 30 years, without any sense of tension with the understanding that it sprung from the acquittal of some LA cops who beat the living hell out of Rodney King.
Or, to take a fictional document from the same era, suppose you're summarizing the plot of the film Do the Right Thing for somebody who hasn't seen it. At the film's climax, a cop kills Radio Raheem, Mookie picks up a trashcan and throws it through a window, and it sparks -- a protest? A melee? A disturbance? Nah, I think what Spike Lee was going for, and what you'd say if you were trying to most helpfully describe what happens in the film, is a riot. Which is true even though, in context, the reality of the grievance couldn't be more explicit.
So no, I think sometimes "riot" is absolutely the most suitable term, irrespective of what you or I might think about the legitimacy of the associated grievance.
Their grievances are BS. Black people are no more likely to be the recipients of force from police once you control for crime rate and violence against police. Which means either that BLM are profoundly ignorant, or that this is really just tribalism and BLM only care about police violence when it affects their tribe (or both).
“ Riot is a word situated within a hierarchy of words. To pick "riot" over other more suitable terms says more about the writer/speaker than about the event itself.”
Hear, hear.
You just need to look up the definition of a riot. Most of the riots were largely white people so I don't think it has anything to do with race. White leftists are by far the most race-obsessed.
Where is you evidence for this? People keep claiming this but never, ever substantiate it with evidence.
The sound of 2005 - I Predict A Riot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84qWb8i_Q_A
The argument here is that BLM protests caused changes in police behaviour which in turn led to the homicide spike, while covid and restrictions did not in turn lead to the same.
BLM caused the spike, covid not. Timelines don't match up otherwise. So far pretty convincing!
At the same time, though, we can see that covid restrictions did lead to less policing, just like BLM, without being correlated with any homicide spike. Wouldn't this imply that BLM caused the spike by some other mechanism, or at least that there is some meaningful additional variable making a difference in how police withdrawal affected homicide rates between the spring and summer?
It's not totally off tye wall to use the weather to explain the increased severity of the protests/riots. The February Revolution happened because St Petersburg had a "warm" spell in the middle of a general workers' strike, and at the same time as International Women's Day. If the weather had stayed cold in February 1917, the protests would likely have been less severe and the Tsar may have held on a few months longer. If Floyd had died in February or March 2020, maybe the protests are less intense.
But the weather itself can't explain the sustained levels of violence. 2020 didn't see a spike on Memorial Day followed by a decline to pre-2020 levels. Murder rates went up and stayed there. And murder rates have retained their seasonal pattern (higher in summer than winter), which is almost-but-not-quite counter-cyclical to covid and covid restrictions. If the spike in violence was simply an outburst of suppressed energy from lockdowns, then lockdowns would decrease the murder rates and ending the lockdowns would cause a temporary uptick. That isn't really seen in any of these cities.
On the comparison to other countries - I can attest to the strictness and insanity of Covid rules in Germany, as I spent the entirety of the pandemic there with occasional trips back to the USA. Lockdowns in Germany were far stricter and longer lasting, and letting up lockdowns didn't lead to mass numbers of shootings or stabbings. It did lead to a lot of outdoor celebrations with masked people dancing 2 meters apart from each other, but that was about it.
"Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied."
Coming from a family of New York City policemen, this reason caused great laughter around the table. The police do not comply with the demands of protesters but The second choice also seems wrong
"Police felt angry and disrespected after the protests, and decided to police less in order to show everybody how much they needed them."
Yes to 'angry and disrespected', but the decision by the police was to punish, to avenge, and in doing so to violate their oaths.
I did a search on the murder spike in this period in the NYT:
“ Changes in policing. The fallout from the 2020 racial justice protests and riots could have contributed to the murder spike. Police officers, scared of being caught in the next viral video, may have pulled back on proactive anti-violence practices. More of the public lost confidence in the police, possibly reducing the kind of cooperation needed to prevent murders. In extreme circumstances, the lack of confidence in the police could have led some people to take the law into their own hands — in acts of street or vigilante violence.
The timing supports this theory, with homicides rising unusually quickly shortly after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests. Killings also spiked in 2015 and 2016, after protests over policing during those years.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/briefing/crime-surge-homicides-us.html?referringSource=articleShare
Another NYT article
“ The protests that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis were also an important factor, in 2020, although experts differ about why. Some argue that the police, under intense scrutiny and demoralized, pulled back from some aspects of crime prevention. Others put the emphasis on the public, suggesting that diminished respect for the police prompted more people to try to take the law into their own hands.
“The distrust of police, the low morale among police, the fact that the police are being less proactive because they are legitimately worried about being backed up by their superiors” were all contributing factors, Mr. Winograd said.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/fbi-murders-2020-cities.html?referringSource=articleShare
Sounds like the Atlantic article that Scott linked. What a surprise that "the media" gives a much more nuanced picture than the right claims.
If this is sarcasm you probably should put square quotes around “more nuanced” too.
Update. I read some of your other comments. I don’t think it was sarcasm. Sorry for reading your tone incorrectly.
Well it is sarcasm in the sense that I'm not actually surprised.
Without nuance, simply saying “BLM protests caused more murders” sound like a racial dog whistle
typo
"an compelling statistical case"
should be "a compelling"
Comment deleted
Something I've always wondered about is why there isn't a massive push to hire a ton of black cops. That should help a lot right? After BLM there are extremely aggressive pushes for affirmative action in academia, the media, and so on but not in the one place where it's really needed. Electing Eric Adams mayor of NYC was a good start. But society actually has a compelling interest in the demographics of the cops matching the demographics of the population in a way that it really doesn't with the demographics of say, scientists. I'm generally not a fan of affirmative action but I would probably support black quotas in police departments at this point.
Aren't there a ton of black cops, and aren't black cops often involved in these incidents? I think 3 of the cops in the Freddy Gray case were black?
I've seen an argument that black cops don't make a difference for prejudiced policing, but black heads of police departments do.
And that there should be black police because it's a relatively well-paid job, so black people should get them too.
Are they as effective? Easy to have less prejudiced policing if you pull police out of the highest crime areas, but then you get crime increased.
The first Mpls police officer to be indicted for murder was a black officer. He was convicted. The victim was white.
That was the first. Chauvin was the second.
Didn't know that. But anyway, that first killing did not cause our entire country to go up in flames.
There is a massive push to hire a ton of black cops. There has been one for a half century. America has a fairly high percentage of its cops who are black. Unfortunately, it has a much higher percentage of its criminals who are black.
There just aren't that many blacks who don't have criminal records and can pass drug and cognitive tests who don't have some even better opportunity.
:(
What proportion of blacks fail criminal records / drug / cognitive tests? I would imagine the cognitive tests are the biggest obstacle, my guess is you need an IQ of like 100 to be a cop, and most 100+ IQ blacks are fine on the other stuff.
Scott, you said this "My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of:
...
Police worried they would be punished so severely for any fatal mistake that they made during policing that they were less willing to take the risk" <-- I would add a related option... Police worried they would be punished so severely for any action, even if legal, they were less willing to take the risk.
Even shooting someone grabbing your gun gets your picture in the paper, a long suspension, protestors outside your house, and the mayor condemning the white supremacy of your profession. Who wants to stop a minority and frisk him, even if you can see what looks like a gun? People are going to start filming and chanting as you do it.
"Most of these points have already been made in right-wing sources, but have gone unnoticed because respectable people don’t read right-wing sources."
Do respectable people read this blog?
Depends on what you mean by "respectable"; as per this excerpt from Chesterton's autobiography:
"I was born of respectable but honest parents; that is, in a world where the word "respectability" was not yet exclusively a term of abuse, but retained some dim philological connection with the idea of being respected. It is true that even in my own youth the sense of the word was changing; as I remember in a conversation between my parents, in which it was used with both implications. My father, who was serene, humorous and full of hobbies, remarked casually that he had been asked to go on what was then called The Vestry. At this my mother, who was more swift, restless and generally Radical in her instincts, uttered something like a cry of pain; she said, "Oh, Edward, don't! You will be so respectable! We never have been respectable yet; don't let's begin now." And I remember my father mildly replying, "My dear, you present a rather alarming picture of our lives, if you say that we have never for one single instant been respectable." Readers of Pride and Prejudice will perceive that there was something of Mr. Bennet about my father; though there was certainly nothing of Mrs. Bennet about my mother."
And because I can never only quote *some* Chesterton:
"Anyhow, what I mean here is that my people belonged to that rather old-fashioned English middle class; in which a business man was still permitted to mind his own business. They had been granted no glimpse of our later and loftier vision, of that more advanced and adventurous conception of commerce, in which a business man is supposed to rival, ruin, destroy, absorb and swallow up everybody else's business. My father was a Liberal of the school that existed before the rise of Socialism; he took it for granted that all sane people believed in private property; but he did not trouble to translate it into private enterprise. His people were of the sort that were always sufficiently successful; but hardly, in the modern sense, enterprising. My father was the head of a hereditary business of house agents and surveyors, which had already been established for some three generations in Kensington; and I remember that there was a sort of local patriotism about it and a little reluctance in the elder members, when the younger first proposed that it should have branches outside Kensington. This particular sort of unobtrusive pride was very characteristic of this sort of older business men. I remember that it once created a comedy of cross-purposes, which could hardly have occurred unless there had been some such secret self-congratulation upon any accretion of local status. The incident is in more ways than one a glimpse of the tone and talk of those distant days.
My grandfather, my father's father, was a fine-looking old man with white hair and beard and manners that had something of that rounded solemnity that went with the old-fashioned customs of proposing toasts and sentiments. He kept up the ancient Christian custom of singing at the dinner-table, and it did not seem incongruous when he sang "The Fine Old English Gentleman" as well as more pompous songs of the period of Waterloo and Trafalgar. And I may remark in passing that, having lived to see Mafeking Night and the later Jingo lyrics, I have retained a considerable respect for those old and pompous patriotic songs. I rather fancy it was better for the tradition of the English tongue to hear such rhetorical lines as these, about Wellington at the deathbed of William the Fourth,
For he came on the Angel of Victory's wing
But the Angel of Death was awaiting the King,
than to be entirely satisfied with howling the following lines, heard in all music-halls some twenty years afterwards:
And when we say we've always won
And when they ask us how it's done
We proudly point to every one
Of England's soldiers of the Queen.
I cannot help having a dim suspicion that dignity has something to do with style; but anyhow the gestures, like the songs, of my grandfather's time and type had a good deal to do with dignity. But, used as he was to ceremonial manners, he must have been a good deal mystified by a strange gentleman who entered the office and, having conferred with my father briefly on business, asked in a hushed voice if he might have the high privilege of being presented to the more ancient or ancestral head of the firm. He then approached my grandfather as if the old gentleman had been a sort of shrine, with profound bows and reverential apostrophes.
"You are a Monument," said the strange gentleman, "Sir, you are a Landmark."
My grandfather, slightly flattered, murmured politely that they had certainly been in Kensington for some little time.
"You are an Historical Character," said the admiring stranger. "You have changed the whole destiny of Church and State."
My grandfather still assumed airily that this might be a poetical manner of describing a successful house-agency. But a light began to break on my father, who had thought his way through all the High Church and Broad Church movements and was well-read in such things. He suddenly remembered the case of "Westerton versus Liddell" in which a Protestant churchwarden prosecuted a parson for one of the darker crimes of Popery, possibly wearing a surplice.
"And I only hope," went on the stranger firmly, still addressing the Protestant Champion, "that the services at the Parish Church are now conducted in a manner of which you approve."
My grandfather observed in a genial manner that he didn't care how they were conducted. These remarkable words of the Protestant Champion caused his worshipper to gaze upon him with a new dawn of wonder, when my father intervened and explained the error pointing out the fine shade that divides Westerton and Chesterton. I may add that my grandfather, when the story was told, always used to insist that he had added to the phrase "I don't care how they are conducted," the qualifying words (repeated with a grave motion ot the hand) "provided it is with reverence and sincerity." But I grieve to say that sceptics in the younger generation believed this to have been an afterthought."
My own work on this:
“ This study investigated whether homicides increased after protested police-involved deaths, focusing on the period after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson in August 2014. It also tests for effects of legal cynicism by comparing effects in homicide and aggravated assault on the assumption that reporting of the latter is discretionary and police abuses may make communities reluctant to notify police. Using FBI data from 44 U.S. cities, homicide and assault rates from 2011 to 2019 were analyzed using an interrupted time series design and combined in a meta-analysis to calculate pooled effects. A meta-regression tested effect moderators including external investigations and city/county sociodemographic characteristics. With a conservative threshold of p ≤ .01, 21 of the 44 cities experienced a significant increase and one had a significant decrease. The pooled effect was a 26.1% increase in the homicide (99% CI: 15.3% to 36.8%). Aggravated assaults increased above baseline, though the effect was 15.2 percentage points smaller (99% CI: –26.7 to –3.6) than the effect in homicides. When outcomes were measured as percent change, there were no significant effect moderators, but when measured as absolute change, homicides increased to a greater extent when the death was subject to external investigation and in cities with higher Black populations, poverty rates, and baseline homicide rates. The findings suggest that protested police-involved deaths led to an increase in homicides and other violence due to the distrust fomented within the very communities whom police are meant to protect.”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08862605211028315
If policy Q leads to significantly more black people murdered compared to policy P, then my respect for the substance rather than the rhetoric of anti-racism seems to leave "more P" as the only morally viable choice to support.
Can both protests and homicide spike amoung blacks be caused by the same event? Obvious hypothesis is that the outrageous murder made lots of people very angry, some people ventilated this anger through protests others in a different way, including other murders. The distinction here is pretty important because in one case we would like to have as less protests as possible even when outrageous things happen, while in the other we would have the opposite incentive.
There's been outrageous murders of white and hispanic people by police and this has never resulted in nationwide homicide spikes.
And before you say it - no, black people are not idsporportionately the victims of police violence when you control for crime rates and violence gainst police, so its not part of a broader trend.
Probably has something to do with public trust deplition which makes even totally reasonable amount of outrageous murders by police resulting in lots of outrage.
THANK YOU!!!
I don't think there's any better way to convince or persuade (those that can be) than to calmly, and repeatedly, 'look at the facts', "insist on thinking on a completely literal level", and walk thru careful reasoning about what's most likely true.
Have not been here in some time. Began reading the post and immediately felt a cringe. Seems all too common these days is to present various data to support various conclusions that are left hanging without context. And thus, we've generally become mistrusting of any presented data, assuming (often too quickly) a cynical attitude about where the presenter intends to lead us. Maybe that’s the point?
I'm not sure what conclusions we are intended to draw from this presentation, but I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes... in this case regarding race. Can this post lead to a more insightful and nuanced discussion about why murder rates rose in these areas, in these communities, that includes a comprehensive and objective accounting of this nation's history toward black communities? Might also be worthy of discussion to understand how a generalized fear pushes white folks to embrace these stereotypes so readily.
"but I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes"
And while that is a legitimate fear, that is also contributing to the problem of investigating "what is happening, why is it happening, and what can be done about it?" be that the spikes in violence here or the homelessness question in another post.
I'm Irish. I think it's fair to say, in the words of a comedy sketch from my own country, that we have the reputation of being a nation of pissheads. Is this a negative stereotype? Yes. Do Irish people suffer real reputational and other harms when they are confronted with this belief when they go abroad? Also yes.
Do we have a god damn national alcohol abuse probem? Hell, yes!
So - would tip-toeing around going "Oh no, you must not draw any conclusions from this study which might help reinforce the very negative stereotypes" is not going to help when you need to tackle the reality that although the legal age of drinking in Ireland is 18, most people have had their first drink around age 15 and are indeed regularly drinking and getting drunk by 17.
https://www.hrb.ie/news/press-releases/single-press-release/article/new-hrb-overview-presents-latest-research-on-alcohol-consumption-harm-and-policy-in-ireland/
"n 2019, on average every person in Ireland aged 15 and over drank 10.8 litres of pure alcohol a year – the equivalent of either 40 bottles of vodka, 113 bottles of wine or 436 pints of beer. Given one in four people in Ireland don’t drink at all, actual consumption rates among those who do drink would be much higher than this. "
"Please don't draw the conclusion from this study that the Irish are a nation of drunks" may be well-intentioned, but if the facts are that we are indeed a nation of drunks, you are not helping to find a solution, you are helping those who don't want to change their ways by attacking the people pointing out the truth.
> Might also be worthy of discussion to understand how a generalized fear pushes white folks to embrace these stereotypes so readily.
Denial that any negative stereotypes may be in some way true is a great way to cause overcorrection and end with people believing the most extreme versions unrelated to reality. And vote for incompetent useless rapey ineffective buffon, just because he is willing to say loud some things (that are often detached from reality, just in opposed direction from official version).
> I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes...
If you try to suppress things based on "I dislike potential conclusion" then sooner or later people will notice it.
> If you try to suppress things based on "I dislike potential conclusion" then sooner or later people will notice it.
I do not think I was in fact promoting suppressing things… in this case, discussion. What I was trying to point out is that there is far more to these discussions that we seem to be choosing not to consider. Or... that we are becoming lazy in our conferences and then drawing far too generalized conclusions. We are getting good about sorting humanity into bigger and bigger boxes... for example, the Irish "are indeed a nation of drunks."
What I hear you saying is that the stereotypes people may infer from a discussion, whether true or not, are worthy of discussion. That without further discussion and understanding… exploration… will invariably lead us to make uninformed decisions that could then lead to potentially disastrous decision making. I am not pushing against this idea.
My fear is that the discussion could reinforce generalized stereotypes that, without further context, will invariably lead us to make uninformed decisions that could then lead to potentially disastrous decision making. My fear is that discussion points, left hanging without context, will lead to willfully uninformed decision making. Are we in agreement here?
I'm for greater understanding... not less. And I apologize if I've misunderstood your comment.
> I do not think I was in fact promoting suppressing things…
maybe I am misinterpreting what you want, but for me
> I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes...
implies "and we should get rid of it no matter the cost", as it was used in this way many times in many context. Sorry if you are actually interested in actual discussion as this was basically poisoned by people using it as pretext to ban things they wanted to ban anyway.
No, you saw something that contradicted your ideology so you desperately began looking for ways to dismiss it. The data are clear, the data were clear after Ferguson too.
>I'm not sure what conclusions we are intended to draw from this presentation, but I fear that any conclusion drawn has the potential to reinforce very negative stereotypes... in this case regarding race.
See? Exactly waht I said, You don't like what it says so you don't want it to be true.
>Can this post lead to a more insightful and nuanced discussion about why murder rates rose in these areas, in these communities, that includes a comprehensive and objective accounting of this nation's history toward black communities?
You talk about data, and yet you base your views entirely upon NARRATIVES.
Black homicide rates were lower during segregation, so the data shows that your narratives are plainly untrue.
>Might also be worthy of discussion to understand how a generalized fear pushes white folks to embrace these stereotypes so readily.
It's not sterotypes. Its an absolute, empirical fact that black americans have a vastly higher homicide rate than white americans, and this is true even after controlling for education, income and employment rates.
You're mad that reality doesn't conform to your ideology, which simply means that you don't belong here. Go back to whatever dataphobic echo-chamber you normally inhabit.
Why bring in the RK riots --which actually were riots!--when the BLM protests had a grievance and an organization behind them?
RK riots were confined to one location. The BLM movement had 7305 events in various cities across the country, the vast majority of which were peaceful.
Do the Right Thing was a movie, not RL. Spike Lee's character thinks hard for a moment before launching that trash can through Danny Aiello's store front window. We could debate what Lee is asking his audience to consider about the urban black's situation and race relations during this period when he performs this act, but that's as far as I'd go. You seem to be suggesting that art is imitating life and so we can use this film to what? Draw an analogy not to the motives behind BLM, but to justify using the word "riot"?
I'd argue that Spike Lee's character is provoking a riot out of frustration. This was the 80s. Today, there's enough statistical evidence and terms (i.e., structural racism) to create an agenda, demands, and a call to action.
Employing a word like "riot" when referring to a complex situation that has a history of grievances attached to it seems to me to be a way of dismissing that history and those grievances--we were listening until they rioted, now we know that we don't need to listen. Riot puts all of the weight on the black people attempting to address an existential problem that they now have the tools to articulate, but when you employ this word you are relegating them to all action and no thought.
Were there pockets of violence during these protests? Yeah, sometimes, but the larger movement eschewed that violence.
I'm not clear on how you are exercising "linguistic valence" here when you are using the very word that conservative news organizations picked to describe the BLM protests.
Regarding "linguistic valence," I'd say I'm operating in that field by addressing the RK riots as riots while seeing the BLM events as something more complex and thoughtful. You just keep using the same word.
And with your post, the thread of the conversation has just left the building.
I prefer not to.
The peaceful metric was the entire event being peaceful and it was over 90%. That meant if you had an event that had 10,000 people marching and one guy got into a fist fight with a Proud Boy, it wouldn't make the cut.
"Really? Did the larger movement refuse to allow antifa and other agitators to march with them? Did they turn rioters in to the police?"
Tell me you never left your basement for the last two years and attended any large outdoor event in person without telling me you never left your basement for the last two years and attended any large outdoor event in person.
"And over 90% of Trump rally attendees on J6 did not storm the Capitol, so J6 was peaceful too, right? You can't wiggle out of this."
Nope, the 90% figure is for the entire event. As I said if you had an event with 10,000 people and 1 person did something violent, actually even if 1 person from outside the group started something, then the entire event is excluded. Jan 6 in DC then would fail that test even if individuals who were there were peaceful.
"I note that you declined to answer the questions, which speaks volumes."
Because you don't have an answer.
Let's be constructive here. Consider this video from Jake Paul, a 25 year old man-child who makes a living as a 'influencer'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZHacns4n6c
The video caused a ruckus because Paul, purporting to be a journalist, appeared to be participating in the looting of an Arizona mall. Some interesting things:
1. Seems like a bunch of kids.
2. Most seem to be just wondering around aimlessly watching other people do stuff.
3. No one seems to be wearing any nametags that say "Hi, I'm Bill, I'm from ANTIFA. Ask me about membership benefits!"
QUESTION: If I attended an event at the local park on the same day 900+ miles away, where was I supposed to log my, errr, 'denouncement' of this event? Why does this event magically become connected to me?
"If you attended a completely peaceful event hundreds of miles away, you have no responsibility... except that if the topic comes up in a discussion and somebody challenges you,"
And no such person did challenge me. Nor did I see anyone in body armor, nor did I hear anyone yelling anything like "let's hear it for our boys in AZ giving it to that mall!" So ends the entire case against BLM protests. Really the entire case. If you want to talk about Portland feel free.
"As we all know, people younger than 18 years of age have never done anything bad."
Hard to tell but it does seem rather unorganized to me.
"As we all know, if they haven't filed a 501 (c) (3) a group simply doesn't exist and any windows they may have broken are merely a figment of your imagination. That's how it works."
Well you did seem to imply I have/had some special durty to eject such people. Leave aside the fact that mass protests are often not centrally organized, this is not really impossible since the only way to assert authority is to assert force to begin with. It does create a rather tricky set of 'duties' you'd impose since even things like wearing body armor or protection does make sense if you have a bunch of Proud Boys happily shooting paintball and gas at people.
I think this indicates the right's inability to really process this intelligently. You would try to analyze a figure like crime rates as if they were dependent variables (i.e. insert policing and add whether or not protests happen = crime rate) but protests has some type of indepen. variable....as if somewhere deep in BLM headquartes there's a dial and someone said in May "let's set it to 30M people protesting!" This produces some deep incoherence.
For example. Here's Bill. A week after a big BLM protest Bill has an argument with his gf's brother and he shoots and kills him.
If you ask a child what caused this, they would probably say Bill caused it.
But if you ask the amateur sociologist amonst the rational community, no no. It was caused by, errr, a week before Tina a 17 yr old high school student marched in a BLM protest 20 blocks away from where Bill shot his victim. Or it is because Officer Dan did not make it to the scene in less than 15 minutes from when the 911 call came in....because he was mad at Tina so it's Tina's fault. Hmmm
And before you dismiss this, when you're talking about 'murder spikes' that consist of a number going from 50 to 75 or something like that, you're literally talking about Bills. You can literally list each one with a sentence or two description in a comment on this blog.
So whereever you want to go with this, if you think it's that anyone in the Tina group owes an apology, you've gone down the wrong path.
AFAIK there was never an “autonomous zone” in Mpls. Never saw a specimen of antifa produced either.
I did see a guy in a guy fawkes mask breaking store front windows that turned out to be a redneck biker from Stillwater MN with a history of run ins with the law for harassing blacks at open air restaurants in his hometown.
The very worst I saw was the burning of the 3rd precinct police building and that was pretty flipping scary. That was pure anarchy.
Probably the second most frightening moment was when a tanker truck accidentally got past barricades and turned a curve into a crowd of protesters blocking the freeway. Miraculously the driver managed to make a jack knifed stop without hitting anyone. The driver was initially roughed up by assholes in the crowd but they were pulled off by a larger group. The driver was not seriously injured and AFAICR he was cited for some traffic violation but didn’t receive any other criminal charges.
That was a long night of intense real time coverage. When daylight came people came into their front yards and shared stories of how they got through the night. But at a distance. COVID was still perceived as a serious threat.
I found video of the tanker incident.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bg6SytDanlc
Was the police station you saw burning also the one shot at by some "boogaloo bois"?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boogaloo-bois-member-charged-connection-shooting-minneapolis-police-station-during-n1244562
Yeah, that’s the third precinct building. About 15 minutes by Trek from my house. I rode all over the neighborhood a couple weeks after the event.
Was that also near the mysterious 'man in black with an umbrella' who seems to have set off the looting by smashing the windows of an Autozone? Still at large despite ample Internet speculation on his identity.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/06/02/whats-up-with-umbrella-man/
I’m not sure if was the man in black. I saw a white guy with a guy fawkes mask breaking windows with a 4 pound hammer somewhere on Lake Street in Mpls. I thought local new identified that guy as a Stillwater resident that was arrested. Or at least had a warrant out.
I found this related item
https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/self-described-member-boogaloo-bois-pleads-guilty-riot
Indeed. Let's not forget we had right wing groups like the Proud Boys openly starting violence at various events as well (there's plenty of videos of PB roaming around places like Portland shooting people with paintball guns).
You can't have a major football game without someone doing something stupid like throwing a drink at someone, the fact is tens of millions of people protested without incident and rational people cannot use as an argument against that the same stupid meme with the CNN reporter in front of a burning building.
Actually I recall watching a bunch of videos from some real estate guy who did tours of that autonomous zone or whatever. It was basically 90% obvious tourists passing through it day in day out, didn't see anyone armed or even anyone who was 'in charge' in any real way. Much like militias, a lot of cosplaying going on here.
The reality is any public event with lots of people carries a risk of danger. If you ever been to an NFL game, you may catch a glimpse at the massive security that operates mostly invisible because given the huge money to be made, stadiums absolutely cannot allow a natural mass gathering of people (think European soccar hooligans in the 80's who regularly riped seats out and stormed the field).
I thought it was esp. unhelpful to have a President at the time who took great delight in stoking the flames and encouraging street battles between different factions and then escalated it even more by having law enforcement without bades, in plain clothes even in plain vehicles. Thankfully the election was won by the only candidate who actually rejected violence.
"your "cosplayers and tourists" murdered..."
My? I don't seem to remember owning a droid or a bunch of cosplayers, tourists, protesters, Proud Boys, street people and so on. And not even a day passed before you admitted that no, there is no guilt trip merited here for much of anyone unless you're actually talking to specific people who did things or people who plausibly could have done something to stop people from doing things.
"Nothing Trump did made your goons take over those streets and murder those streets. "
Nor did BLM or anti-Trump protests. Sorry your double standard game doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
I highly recommend this blog for an 'inside baseball' view of concrete details of policing; some posts:
* https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/how-depolicing-happens
* https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/the-bad-cop
* https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/its-not-about-police-reform
The author of this blog has been commenting here in this post himself, as "Graham", and on a few other recent posts too on ACX.
Hmmm, there must be more to this but rather amazingly the effectiveness of police to solve murders has been droping. It took a hit in 2020 but more amazing to me is that it's been declining since the 1960's and 70's. In particular, we saw police buildup in the 90's while at the same time tools to solve murders have gotten better and more available. A lot of stuff we take for granted today like cameras almost everywhere, people's cell phones producing logs of their geographical locations over time, DNA testing, a lot of forensics, this all should have made it a lot easier to solve murders. Yet police effectiveness here seems to be falling. Are murderers getting more cunning, super-villian types that only a Bruce Wayne or Sherlock Holmes can figure out? I doubt it.
If police effectiveness is going down, then any theory that BLM protests increases crime by causing police to pull back is flawed. If police are less effective, then it matters less and less that they pull back.
I suspect what you're seeing is a gradual decline in social trust, in particular between communities with high crime and police. The reality is probably half of murders are brain dead easy to solve, the police literally roll up on the killer covered in blood holding the murder weapon. Beyond that social trust does a huge amount of work AND things like CSI science can only substitute for that at the margins. Incidents like Floyd and the pandemic accelerated and confirmed that trust was lacking.
Less that BLM protests magically cause crime, more like they are both symptoms of the same underlying dynamic.
https://twitter.com/chrishnews/status/1542173173008957441
Some of the forensics turned out not to be as good as hoped. For example, fingerprints at crime scenes are apt to be incomplete and/or blurry.
True but I can't believe fingerprint tech is *worse* in the 2000's than it was in the 1970's!
One explanation is the innocence project implies a lot of convictions were either frame ups or relying on bad science hence the solve rate in the 70's and 80's was overstated and the rise of better science like DNA is not lowering the solve rate but actually revealing just how low the correct solve rate was all along.
That would require believing before, say, 2000 a massive amount of murder convictions were pinning it on the wrong person. Do you think if you visited a prison in 1979 up to 4% of the convicted murderers were actually innocent people?
I'm not sure. There are a lot of bad procedures leading to false convictions, and the Innocence Project specializes is cases where there's a lot of countervailing evidence. For all I know, 10% is too low.
It could indeed be the case that before the 90's a lot of wrong people were getting locked up and crime was much higher because while police locked up people, they were bad at locking up the right people. Yet the solve rate keeps marching down and down despite more and more data and science coming along.
It feels like every week I see at least one case where some total stranger does something violent and is caught within days because camera footage is able to follow him as he leaves the scene all the way home. Or because a single image is broadcast and social media figures out who he is. Look at all the Jan 6 people arrested because a single image caught their face.
I could see the rise of the Innocence Project, DNA etc. leading to a decline in murder solve cases initially but then that should have started to rise as we've added more and more pretty objective tools.
My alternative hypothesis is that the technology is just the cherry on top. Most of the solve rate is driven by social trust. People go to the cops with information or try to help the cops with what they know. If social trust starts to go down, that invaluable help starts to get retracted and things like cell phone data is not enough to make up for it.
From what I understand: forensics are not magic, TV crime dramas have led people to have unrealistic expectations, and oftentimes the way samples are taken, stored and treated is a steaming mess, never mind the backlog of testing in the labs. And that's before ever you get to the point of bringing a case to court.
Def. agreed. But still you have to admit we are able to do things today that would have blown the mind of law enforcement in 1980. We have people who committed murder 45 years ago getting caught because their third nephew, who they never meet, sent his spit off to an Ancestry site. We have massive depositories of DNA from convicted criminals that can be used to screen against DNA collected from crime scenes.
The solve rate must be going down because while science is helping some hard cases get unlocked, many cases that should be easier with old fashioned community based policing are not getting done.
Whether decreased policing leads to increased crime, and if so the effect size and exact type of policing that reduces crime, is a pretty open empirical question. That said, regardless of the causal mechanism, it sure seems like the crime increase of the BLM protests outweighs the minor police reform that followed (though perhaps it sets the stage for more police reform down the road... long-term consequences are always intractable). This is not to mention the political consequences of Democrats losing votes due to Defund and thus an increased chance of our democracy collapsing, less climate change action, etc.
This was not obvious at the time though. There was a brief period where it looked like we might be getting actual police reform: Minneapolis looked like it was going to remake their police force, a bunch of red states passed (very) minor police reform legislation, etc. Support for BLM and racial justice went significantly up for a brief period, figures which had been stable for a long time.
What does this means for future BLM protests? It is clear that if you are going to have them at all, make them super policy-focused, to actually get something for our troubles. But at this point it's probably not worth having them at all in the foreseeable future, as all they do is polarize the debate around left-wing Defund.
Nice piece!
It was pretty clearly the pandemic lockdowns. It makes sense that crime didn't spike immediately but instead took a couple months before people really got cabin fever.
No, it wasn't. There was no pandemic lockdown when the BLM riots first broke out in Ferguson and we saw the exact same thing. You're literally just creating an ad hoc explanation that suits your ideology with nothing to support it.
If you had bothered to read the post, you would have also seen that there wasn't an increase in crime in most of the rest of teh world which had equally or more strict lockdowns than America, so 'cabin fever' cannot possibly explain it.
In support of “it’s complicated”.
The Minneapolis police killing prior to George Floyd was that of a white woman by a black cop,
Noor - the black cop - was convicted of manslaughter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Justine_Damond
AFAICR this was the first time that a jury decided that a Mpls police killing was murder.
A couple years later, Derek Chauvin was the second.
Really, the thrust of this post seem to imply that the BLM movement is some sort of first cause. There was a long history of fear and anger about unequal treatment of non whites by Mpls police.
It became common in the Twin Cities to hear of a police shooting and respond with the question “Driving while black?”
Again I’ll say the violence that followed Floyd’s death was not justified. A lot of the people taking part didn’t give a damn about Floyd. There were many people - mostly white - taking advantage of the opportunity to indulge any malicious impulse that occurred to them. The police were in a crouch, all bets were off. What better time to plunder the OxyContin shelf at the local pharmacy? To pin all of that behavior on the BLM movement is just wrong. One of the felony conviction from the early period was against a masked white biker knucklehead smashing storefront windows with a 4 pound hammer, just out for a little recreational mayhem. Another was a white kid who was so dim that he brought police tactical gear that he looted from a police station to work to show off as souvenirs.
Hell, the only houses in my rather sedate St Paul neighborhood without a “Black Lives Matter” sign on their lawn are mine and the black couple across the street.
Murder increased because the police pulled back after the George Floyd riot? Yes, I already knew that and fully expected it.
But it’s flipping complicated.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_Minnesota
“Here’s what the Minnesota Department of Human Rights discovered in it’s investigating of MPD”
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/minneapolis-police-department-human-rights-investigation/89-82ed0eeb-ac93-4c8d-a55c-7f887eb63c9c
>The Minneapolis police killing prior to George Floyd was that of a white woman by a black cop,
Noor - the black cop - was convicted of manslaughter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Justine_Damond
AFAICR this was the first time that a jury decided that a Mpls police killing was murder.
This did not result in massive protests and riots. It didn't cause police to broadly condemned. It didn't set off 'defund the police' movements. Because the victim was white, Democratic politicians didn't care, and if anything the left were angry about this (there were literally BLM protestors at the trial SUPPORTING Noor).
>There were many people - mostly white - taking advantage of the opportunity to indulge any malicious impulse that occurred to the
Where's your source for this claim? Every single video I can find of rioting and looting shows black people in a clear majority. Don't make these claims if you're not going to substantiate them.
>It became common in the Twin Cities to hear of a police shooting and respond with the question “Driving while black?”
Your ancedotes are worthless. BLM seem to imagine black people are killed at a higher rate than white people by police, but after controlling for crime rate and violence against police, blacks are no more likely to be the victmi of police force than whites. This conclusively shows peoples perceptions are based on ignorance and so cannot be trusted.
> but after controlling for crime rate and violence against police, blacks are no more likely to be the victmi of police force than whites. This conclusively shows peoples perceptions are based on ignorance and so cannot be trusted.
The data for your conclusive proof?
>Because the victim was white, Democratic politicians didn't care, and if anything the left were angry about this
You are telepathic so you know what Democratic politicians care about, or are you simply making a tribal assumption and assigning a terrible trait to people you disagree with?
Nine police killings in Mpls. One white person.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_Minnesota
Hence the driving while black.
Or are you saying non whites 8 time more violent than whites?
If I see rollers in my review mirror, I can expect a ticket at worst. Philindo Castile, not so lucky. He was driving while black.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
Study of Mpls police department interaction with blacks by Minnesota state.
https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation%20into%20the%20City%20of%20Minneapolis%20and%20the%20Minneapolis%20Police%20Department_tcm1061-526417.pdf
Cost-benefit calculations should not look at only the costs and not the benefits. If your proposed mechanism of action is that the protest caused reduced policing which created a cost in the form of a spike in murders, then I think it would've been cooler if your analysis also included the benefits of reduced policing. What are the costs of policing?
For instance, if you're using reduced arrests as your proxy variable, we should ask how many arrests are we willing to pay in order to prevent one murder? In 2019 USA there were 10,085,207 arrests and 16,669 murders. In 2020 USA there 7,632,573 arrests and 21,570 murders. The ratio of the differences come out to 500 arrests per murder.
Is that worth it? Maybe! Depends on how bad arrests are compared to murders, and what other metrics are at play. I'm not claiming to know the answer, I'm just saying that I wish that this analysis had touched on relevant questions like this. (I get that you're responding in the context of countering the media and all that, but still ... I really feel that considering costs and benefits together and not separately is a good principle to stick to.)
This is just a back of the envelope calculation of course - a real analysis might look at stuff such as prison-life-years welfare metrics, economic losses, etc. And of course, none of this is really establishing causality super well. I'm just making a more general point that even if we grant your model of this mechanism, in order to draw useful conclusions from this analysis about whether the protests are good or bad, the costs of the intervention (here, the protests) must be considered in conjunction with the benefits.
That's an interesting way to look at it. I've noticed from the Washington Post's data that police shootings didn't decline at all in 2020 or 2021:
https://archive.ph/3ctDG
So if the stated aim of the protests was to end police killings, they didn't succeed. They instead cost more lives, with an increase in 5,000 murders.
But you point out that arrests went down massively as well. Suppose the average person murdered loses 50 years of their life, and the average person arrested spends 1 year in jail (just taking a complete guess here).
If it's 500 arrests to stop 1 murder, you've wasted 500 years of people's lives to prevent 50 years lost.
Did arrests rebound in 2021?
But crime increased, so plausibly this would create more opportunities where deadly force may have been necessary.
Why are you only looking at murders? There's all kinds of other categories of crime to include.
You're also ignoring the fact that reducing arrests would most likely increase murders (because murderers spend more time not in jail), so the ratios you mentioned would no longer apply.
I think it's really, *really* irresponsible to express "homicides spiked after the BLM protests" as "BLM protests *caused* the homicide spike." For one thing, there is no way to demonstrate that homicidal-ness somehow increased due to BLM (I seriously doubt that it did), which is what that assertion implies. Moreover, you say yourself that a police pullback led to the increase. So what gives? You already identified the real answer: police stopped doing their jobs. How is that BLM's fault? Cops were never seriously threatened during the protests. As someone who was at them, it was very much the other way around. You've laid out a story where cops were fleeing well-deserved scrutiny, and the result was less deterrence of crime. But this isn't BLM's fault, this is the cops' fault for being bad at doing their jobs under scrutiny. Phrasing the headline as if it was the fault of innocent protesters that crimes *unrelated to the protests* went up is incredibly irresponsible and a massive show of disrespect to people like me who want to see the policing problems raised by BLM taken seriously.
> Cops were never seriously threatened during the protests.
That seems blatantly untrue, even I heard about things like "BLM protesters set Portland police station on fire".
> if it was the fault of innocent protesters that crimes *unrelated to the protests*
What about crimes related to BLM protests/riots?
An officer at the scene of burned police station described thinking he was going to save his last bullet for himself. They were seriously threatened on that occasion at least.
There was a lot crime unrelated to the protest though. The police were in a defensive crouch so any bit of maliciousness conceived at that time could be acted on.
>police stopped doing their jobs.
Great - this completely contradicts the hegemonic left wing narrative of 'police don't stop crime' and completely undermines the defund the police movement. Glad we're on the same page here.
>How is that BLM's fault?
he obvious explanation is that the police didn't want to risk being in a position where they felt they had to use lethal force, because even if it was completely justified, it could very probably ruin their career/life.
>But this isn't BLM's fault, this is the cops' fault for being bad at doing their jobs under scrutiny.
Is anybody good at doing their job under scrutiny? Why should police risk their careers to police people who don't want to be policed? THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BLM WANT, so it's absolutely ABSURD to blame police for this. They're literally giving these people what they want and this is the product of it.
> Phrasing the headline as if it was the fault of innocent protesters that crimes *unrelated to the protests* went up is incredibly irresponsible and a massive show of disrespect to people like me who want to see the policing problems raised by BLM taken seriously.
There are no legitimate policing problems raided by BLM. BLM claim that blacks are under attack from police despite teh evidence overwhelmingly showing that after you control for crime rate and violence against police, black people are no more likely to the victims of police force than white people. They're completely ignorant, black nationalist ideologues.
I have a friend who claims that one of the reasons that the BLM thing blew up so much, at least in the sense that left-leaning institutions like academia and the media talked about it, is that the Democrats wanted to use it to increase black turnout and oust Trump. How plausible is this hypothesis and how would we test it?
Calling the BLM protests "the cause" feels like a bit of a stretch - yes, the data shows good support for "contributed". But either one plays the cause game all the way back (police brutality leads to protests etc.), or one acknowledge that the police making agentic choices is closer in the causal chain to the measured outcome.
When you have a causal chain, what about the BLM protests specifically makes it the thing to single out in the chain? My guess is that there is some empathy and less agency attributed with the stance "of course the cops reduced their policing"; but "of course they protested" has less support. Why?
Nobody here in the TC has forgotten that bit of nonsense.
> The protesters demanded that the cops reduce their policing. They did
The protesters wanted many things across varying degrees; and what they likely shared was wanting less use of violence in policing, and more accountability.
Yet even if we assume you're right, is that how it's supposed to work? Can neighbourhoods just tell the police "hey, we're opting out of law enforcement", and the police will comply?
Instead, I'd say the police had a choice; and they had a job; and a responsibility. And they made their choice. Ignoring that in whatever blame/cause/responsibility assignment one is doing seems oddly biased and selective to me.
Again - is that how it works? And how it's supposed to work? Can I say abolish the government and declare independance for my neighbourhood? Or does the govt. or police have a choice to ignore my demands and continue doing what they're supposed to do and paid to do?
"your guys"? Lol. Be on your way, and have a nice rest of the day.
.
> Can neighbourhoods just tell the police "hey, we're opting out of law enforcement", and the police will comply?
Apparently it happened at least in some areas for some time. With expected results.
That is what happened, because the govt. police complied. My point is that govts and police departments that complied made a mistake, and where I would assign at least some blame. And that would explain a rise in crime in those areas.
Further, that a nationwide police pullpack was a reasonable response to what happened in a few areas, and represents some justifiable risk perceived by police everywhere, deserves a little more skepticism and debate than was offered in the post.
It's worse - it's not even just a 'causal chain' so much as a 'causal web'. There's so many potential interrelated 'causes' at play that the idea that one could look at the data from a mile-high viewpoint like this post does and point at a specific thing and say that caused the spike is really, really questionable.
I've read SSC and ACX for years now and I feel nearly certain that I've seen Scott be doubtful of less strained causal chains than this one. I feel surprised at how lax he is with his willingness to declare a particular cause in this case.
It's extremely easy to construct an equally plausible causal chain motivated by a very different set of prior beliefs than the ones you have. That should give you pause when considering the plausibility of your own preferred causal chain. For instance:
"An authority figure murdered a member of a historically oppressed minority group in an extremely public and well publicized manner" -> "members of that minority group become more stressed and feel more unsafe in their environment" -> "stressed people who feel unsafe are more likely to use violence" -> "more violent crime"
There's a reason why causal inference in *incredibly* hard. You simply believing really really hard in your own set of priors doesn't actually make them anymore plausible.
The same data Scott used above could very easily support a different causal chain whereby the widely publicized murder of a black man by an authority figure directly caused an increase in murder. The only reason you're not arguing for *that* causal chain is the beliefs you came into this post with.
I am suprised by the laxness too. It really doesn't require deep analysis to see that in addition to the protestors, choices made by other groups played a significant role. Those other choices being declared logical and neccessary makes little sense to me, and would require a lot more support.
[EDIT] Example: "The “Defund The Police” movement actually resulted in police being defunded, either of literal funds or political capital, and that made it harder for them to police."
Scott would have to show that "literal" funding dropped, or cops were fired in these areas to support him claim that BLM protests => increased murders. Everything else in his list involves the police making choices, and therefore being a more direct cause of the spike.
A simpler explanation is that police did not want to risk having their lives ruined if they found it necessary to use lethal force in an encounter with a black suspect (no, obviously this doesn't describe Chauvin, but it doesn't take that to become public enemy no 1).
And thus, sympathy for "of course the cops reduced their policing" needs a lot more support IMO. It might seem obvious to you, it doesn't to me - a police force that stops doing it's job because some small subset of the population doesn't give them the respect they think they deserve is problematic to me, and would require more justification. i.e. is the perceived "risk having their lives ruined", overblown?
Showing that many police officers have had their lives ruined uneccessarily to warrant that sort of response would help. One could then debate how high this number needs to be in order for a nationwide police pullback to be reasonable. And the same of course holds true of many claims made by activists.
My primary point is that these debates needs to happen, rather than simply accepting the argument that the police pullback was a necessary outcome. Or accept the claim that all police departments are inherently rascist.
>It's worse - it's not even just a 'causal chain' so much as a 'causal web'. There's so many potential interrelated 'causes' at play that the idea that one could look at the data from a mile-high viewpoint like this post does and point at a specific thing and say that caused the spike is really, really questionable.
Unless you say the same thing when the left confidently declare that ""racism"" is the ""cause"" of whatever racial inequality is being discussed, then this is special pleading from you.
I mean yes, declaring racism as the single cause for everything has the same issues. Something about your comment feels like you're holding your own beliefs hostage: "I'll believe in this tenuous monocausal link as long as the other side believes in this other tenuous monocausal link".
Nothing in what I or @CCubed have said suggests support for one side and political movement over another. It's a comment on motivated reasoning in general.
One might even call it irrational.
"police brutality" cannot possibly be the cause, because white people being murdered by the police never results in nationwide rioting and homicide spikes.
Seems like police behavior in response to the protests as a plausible theory of the cause in the spike of inter-personal violence should be addressed in a lot more detail within this essay that concludes it probably was the protests themselves. That, after all, is what the Ferguson effect is supposed to refer to: People protest the police, and in response, the police refuse to do their jobs. This reduces the deterrent effect of proactive policing, which leads to more crime.
The lesson of such a theory isn't necessarily to stop protesting police misconduct or problems with criminal justice. You could instead try to break the chain of police engaging in traditional striking behavior in response.
Of all the foreign countries mentioned Honduras is the most instructive. Honduras has the highest highest documented murder rate in the world. Other places are probably more violent but they are so chaotic reliable data are hard to come by. In response Honduras banned the private ownership of any firearms. The murder rate continued to climb. This debunked 2 libtard fantasies. That gun control works & that government can make something disappear by banning it. The government tried to ban alcohol. That worked out great didn’t it. The government banned heroin well over a century ago. You can’t find that stuff anywhere can you. Ok it’s been largely replaced by fentanyl an even more dangerous drug but the point remains.
I see you trying to make some legitimate points here, but undermining your own credibility by using the term "libtard." One of the nice things about this site - as opposed to most of the internet - is that the majority of commenters are reasonably intelligent people who are willing to engage in relatively polite conversations about all manner of potentially controversial topics. People will take your opinions and arguments more seriously if you refrain from reflexively insulting anyone who's not on your side.
You're vastly overstating the good nature of commentors here. They still use slurs like 'racist' to silence people they disagree with, for example.
I haven’t noticed that at all, actually.
I am wondering about the use of the word "caused" (rather than, for example, "triggered") by the protests. The post unpacks a potential complex of interrelated phenomenon under the heading of the Ferguson Effect that would explain how anti-police protests set off a set of actions that result in less policing (and possibly less cooperation between communities and police) and other effects. So the pattern would be expected. But to say "caused" carries the sense of a more direct outcome rather than a distal outcome. The difference is significant if one is thinking about how to intervene in a social pattern or whether intervention is possible.
Dang, I remember when this kind of talk (libtards) was called out on this site. Like Stewart Lee, this site really has let itself go.
Boy, some of these comments, complete with CapsLock shouting, because everyone knows a yelled point is truthier. I paid 100 bucks for a year of Facebook level trolling. Not even a tote bag or coffee cup to show for it.
:(
One of the many difficulties with crime data and making inferences on it is the chain of causal effects that occurs before data is collected. For any given effect seen in the data, you generally have to ask: is X going up because more people are doing X, or is X going up because police are paying more attention to X? Murder is actually just about the only crime we can undeniably say is happening more or happening less at any given time, simply because it comes with a body and we're generally pretty good at reporting on bodies. We can say, undeniably, there was a spike in murders after the George Floyd protests - you can literally just look at the data and know for a fact that yes, that happened.
It's everything *else* that you can be much less sure of. Sure, the spike happened *after* the George Floyd protests... but was it *because* of them? That is a much, much harder question and I don't think you've at all answered it here.
There's a few questionable assumptions and assertions being made about the data here. But ignoring all of those and taking absolutely everything said here to be true, are you sure you've drawn an exclusive causal chain? Because I think I could lift most of this evidence as written and instead make the opposing claim: the stress of seeing a black man brutally murdered, in public, by an authority figure drove an increase in homicide nationwide, predominantly centered in black communities where that stress was felt the most. We need not invoke protests or a hypothetical 'police pullback' at all.
I guess what I'm saying is: did you find the data because you had a viewpoint you wanted to prove, or did you let the data lead you to the viewpoint you're expressing here?
The fact that empirical researchers are hesitant to draw a causal conclusion on what caused the spike is specifically because that's the *right* way to interpret data that is literally inundated with idiosyncracies during a year that was itself literally inundated with novel events.
>Because I think I could lift most of this evidence as written and instead make the opposing claim: the stress of seeing a black man brutally murdered, in public, by an authority figure drove an increase in homicide nationwide, predominantly centered in black communities where that stress was felt the most.
How come its not stressful for black people to witness THOUSANDS of black men being murdered each year by other black people? Why isn't it "stressful" for white people when white people are killed by police? Why isn't it "stressful" for white people when ~500 white people are murdered by black people each year (which is about ten times more per capita than the reverse)?
If this is the route you're going down, then it has extraordinarily negative implications for black people and the way they (selectively) react to things they don't like.
And think about what you're saying - they're angry a black man got killed.....so they went out and killed hundreds of other...black men? There's something profoundly wrong about the culture of these people if that's what you're saying.
People are killed by the police on a daily basis. Nationwide riots and homicide spikes rarely follow.
>The fact that empirical researchers are hesitant to draw a causal conclusion on what caused the spike is specifically because that's the *right* way to interpret data that is literally inundated with idiosyncracies during a year that was itself literally inundated with novel events.
This is incredibly silly. These "researchers" have absolutely ZERO issue whatsoever declaring that "racism" (whatever that even means) is the "cause" of racial inequality. They have no problem declaring that higher per capita rates of black people being killed by police is "caused" by police discrimination (despite evidence conclusively showing this not to be the case). Unless you consistently speak out against this, then this is nothing more than special pleading from you.
>I guess what I'm saying is: did you find the data because you had a viewpoint you wanted to prove, or did you let the data lead you to the viewpoint you're expressing here?
Ironic, considering the fact that VOX, the NYT and dozens of commenters here are tying themselves in knots trying to find a way to deny this obvious trend.
Why were murders also up in rural areas w/out BLM protests? https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251
Ah, the sound of a reasonable question! And the vast silence that follows. (Thanks, truly, for trying.)
Made the open thread email lol!
I don't understand why you're so focused on policing changes as causal. If you're right that the increase is predominantly black-on-black in significantly black areas, it seems like level 1 analysis should start with.. black people, not cops. And if black people were more pissed off and angry- not because of the protests, (largely) not because of BLM, but BECAUSE OF WHAT INCITED THE PROTESTS TO BEGIN WITH- then you'd expect more violence ceteris paribus.
What incited the protest? One person dying? At most less than two dozen unarmed black people killed by police per year?
This is simple tribalism. Police killing unarmed black people is a trivially small issue compared to black people killing other people and black people killing white people. Do white people get to be violently angry about black people murdering ~500 white people per year?
The evidence is clear - once you control for the black crime rate and black violence towards police (which can be used as a proxy for black people violently resisting arrest), black people are no more likely to be the victims of police force than white people (and this doesn't even account for the fact that its entirely possible that police killings of black people could be more justified than for white people - you cannot infer this from broad data like this).
Do white people get to riot about police violence against whties? If they did, people like you would be screeching about white people being racist because they only care about police violence when whites are the victim.
You are in so many threads here, Brett S, and you sound really angry about the idea that no one cares about white people killed by the police, or that somehow white people aren’t allowed to be angry about police brutality against white people. If you are genuinely concerned about this issue, you can join the legions of white people who fight to end police brutality, regardless of the race of the victim. Defund and abolition movements aren’t the only option - there are also movements like Campaign Zero are focused on making focused improvements to existing law enforcement systems. I highly recommend checking them out - there’s a lot that citizens can do: https://campaignzero.org/problem
"Cities where large numbers of protesters turned out, relative to their populations, decreased police expenditures by an average of $12 per city resident. Los Angeles’s relatively high protest rate translated into a $2.50 per-capita cut in police spending. Minneapolis had an even higher protest rate of 77 participants per 1,000 residents, which coincided with a $32.50 per-capita chop to police spending. (For reference, cities spent an average of $422 per resident on law enforcement in 2021.)"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/12/did-last-years-black-lives-matter-protests-push-cities-defund-police-yes-no/
The monetary reduction seems pretty small relative to the size of the effect being observed.
Maybe there certain large fixed costs that should be considered that would make the per-officer-on-the-street cost larger compared to the cuts.
There are a number of possible mechanisms for decreased policing, and top-down decreased budgets is merely the least plausible of them.
Police not feeling valued, being worried about punishment, etc. are much more likely. Also, retired police still draw a pension so even a mass resignation wouldn't necessary reduce budgets much.
"you people".
People keep saying things like “oh, I liked when he made an compelling statistical case showing that the media was completely wrong on this one thing they sounded very confident in, but then he started saying the media is often wrong and biased, and that sounded cliched and conspiracy-ish and right-wing, so I lost interest”.
People keep saying a lot of things that are wrong, so don't worry about it. If you sound conspiracy-ish and are correct, so be it. In other words, I think it's best to optimize for accuracy rather than for telling people things that won't put them off. We get too much of the latter already and not enough of the former.
What this doesn't really address is the surge in violent crime in rural areas:
-----
Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government.
The rise came close to the 30% spike in homicide rates in metropolitan areas in 2020.
The CDC hasn’t analyzed 2021 homicide data yet. In some rural counties, murder rates remained high last year, while in others they have begun to recede along with Covid, data from local law-enforcement agencies shows.
...
In cities, law enforcement and civic leaders have blamed the increase in violent crime on factors such as police pulling back after racial-justice protests, the proliferation of guns, initiatives to release more criminal suspects without bail and a pandemic pause in gang-violence prevention programs.
In rural counties, where ties between police and locals are often less fraught, officials say the reasons for the rising violence are hard to pinpoint. They speculate that the breakdown of deeply rooted social connections that bind together many small communities, coupled with the stress of the pandemic, played a role.
Pastors point to the suspension of rituals such as in-person church services, town gatherings and everyday exchanges between neighbors. Such interactions can serve as guardrails, helping to prevent conflicts from turning violent. The psychological and financial stress due to isolation and job loss were especially pronounced in remote areas, where social services were limited even before Covid-19 struck, local leaders say.
As the pandemic took hold in the spring of 2020, fights between family members, acquaintances and even strangers escalated more frequently into deadly confrontations, authorities in some rural counties said.
-----
Obviously, causes could be different in different areas, but they could also be similar or the same in rural as well as urban areas.
But this seems to lend far more credibility to the idea that these trends have many different causes and that they don't fit nearly into any one box.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251
Another person making an excellent point, with no response.
Correlation is not causation.
Sorry, I know that’s a cliché, but it became a cliché for a reason, and it definitely applies here. You literally have nothing but a correlation in time (and an appeal to your personal priors) and you’re using it to dismiss people who say the factors are complex. (And those people are not media editorial boards, as your phrasing implies. They’re named experts quoted in news reports.)
If we’re going to play the game of pointing at graphs and using our common sense to make something up, I think I can do better: The BLM protests and the murder spike shared a common cause – the widespread conviction that police didn’t care about the murder of black people and even did it themselves at the slightest provocation. After all, which would do more to make you feel you could get away with murder? Learning that police don’t care or learning that they won’t be driving around in their cars for a few months?
My raw speculation attributes the spike to a combination of high unemployment and stimulus cash at the time. Lack of a job gives plus a handful of cash led many people to venture into the business of buying and selling illicit drugs. But since there is no court to resolve disputes in that business, these new players found themselves on the wrong side of a gun.
There was a Tom Wolfe-like Happiness Explosion in mid-2020 due to stimmy checks, eviction moratoriums, and the like. Mass shootings at block parties, car crash deaths by ejection, and the like all exploded.
Now the next subject of research should be whether the police in Uvalde were reluctant to act because of the BLM marches in their community in the previous year -- and they did take place -- and whether this isn't the question to ask if Latino police failed to act to suppress a Latino shooter. Still, it's important to research this issue as a school shooting is the most dramatic form of murder short of war and if there were any campaigns or policy changes or funding issues that could contribute to that phenomenon, we need to know it. No good saying that there were school shootings before the pandemic or BLM. THIS school shooting in Uvalde distinctly involved police unwilling to act forcefully, and blaming this on faulty comms or garbled reports when 45 minutes go by doesn't cut it.
I'm very confused by the emphasis of this essay. The narrative it presents is: police kill black people at a disproportionate rate; people protest against that; in response, police shirk their duty and oaths to keep people safe. If that's true, isn't that a *horrible indictment* of the police? In which case, why is it "politically inconvenient" for liberal media? And why would you say that the *protests* caused the homicide spike, rather than the police refusing to do their jobs?
Yeah, actually Scott didn't make the empirical claim about police killings, so drop that part of it if you like. (I think you're wrong on the empirical question, but since it's not relevant to my point I won't argue it.)
As for the protests, I disagree with you on two points. First, despite some fringe police abolitionists, the protests generally did not demand "stop preventing and investigating crimes"; their demand was "stop killing black people." At the level of "government endorsement" (?) there were certainly almost no significant voices calling for police to stop their crime prevention efforts. The "defund the police" slogan was prominent, and I think it was unfortunate, but what it meant was that funds should be invested in social services rather than policing, with the ultimate goal of reducing both police violence and crime.
Second, and more importantly, the public making demands of the police doesn't deprive the police of agency. Their job is, among other things, to prevent homicides. That is what they are hired to do; that is what almost all public officials expect of them; that is what the general public expects of them. It is literally their job. If their attitude is "fine, you want to criticize us, then we won't do the job we're oath-bound to perform" that is on them. It is just not a morally mature attitude. And I don't know about you, but "if people criticize me then I will stop doing my job" is certainly not an attitude I could get away with in my own line of work. Nor should I be able to.
The simplest analysis would just go something like, "black people commit violent crimes at 6-10X the rate white people do, police shoot black people at 2.5X the rate white people do, so it's likely that the increased rate of police shooting black people is driven by crime rates and not by racism"
A more sophisticated analysis would look at something like the rate at which suspects were shooting at the police, as compared to the rates at which police were shooting back, to determine whether officers were actually reacting to a threat.
Scott wrote an old post looking for racism in the justice system. He found data on suspects shooting at police and found they were disproportionately black (at least for one city). He found evidence of racial bias in things like sentencing, but did not find a racial bias in police shootings:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Roland Fryer also did a comprehensive study finding no racial bias in police shootings:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
Should a mixture of two ingredients cause an explosion, the explosion will follow the addition of the second ingredient, but that doesn't exonerate the first ingredient from causal role.
Some logic problems:
> and in the end focuses on rising gun sales (but guns are mostly bought by white people, and so can’t explain why the homicide spike was so overwhelmingly black).
Unless more guns in the hands of black is influenced by guns passing down from white legal purchasers to blacks getting guns through illegal trade. I'm not saying that's the explanation, just that it should be accounted for in your explanation of causality.
> I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests.
Again, "caused" is problematic. You, yourself suggested the "cause" is cops doing less enforcement. Perhaps less enforcement is "caused" by the protests, or maybe it's "caused" by the murder of George Floyd? Or maybe it's "caused" myriad factors that contribute to hundreds of years of discrimination that led to Floyd's death?
How, along the causal mechanism, do you point to a singular "cause?"
>Unless more guns in the hands of black is influenced by guns passing down from white legal purchasers to blacks getting guns through illegal trade. I'm not saying that's the explanation, just that it should be accounted for in your explanation of causality.
The normal timeline from first legal retail sale of a firearm, to that firearm's being used in a homicide, *in the unlikely event that ever happens at all*, is about eight years. Either the weapon is purchased by a law-abiding citizen who at some later date decides to become a killer, or the weapon is purchased by a law-abiding citizen from whom it is eventually stolen, or it is purchased on behalf of a criminal who mostly plans to use it to intimidate people. Buying a gun with the intent or expectation of shooting someone any time soon, is *extremely rare*.
Also, a 50% increase in gun sales in one year, only means a ~2% increase in the total number of firearms in circulation in the US.
So, something really weird would have to be going on for an increase in legal gun sales (to anyone) turning into an increased homicide rate, *that fast*. You'd basically need a large fraction of homicides to suddenly be a new or previously rare *type* of crime, that favors use of a recently purchased gun, and I'm pretty sure that would have been noticed and commented on if that were the case. Yes, headline-style "mass shooting" would qualify, but they're headline-worthy because they're still rare and all of them together would be a barely noticeable blip in the national homicide total.
Thanks for the response. I'll still say there's a problem with Scott's logic although your explanation (I'll assume your timeline is well-informed) would likely apply here. If Scott had laid that out I wouldn't question the logic.
Although, your explanation doesn't address the issue with guns purchased by (white) straw buyers. Again, I'm not saying that's the explanation here - but should be addressed.
So I'll say this info is relevant:
<i>In 2019, the average time from when a gun was first purchased to when it was traced by ATF — a metric the bureau calls “time to crime” — was 8.29 years. But that metric comes with a big caveat. Since ATF traces only to the first retail sale, it can’t see if someone bought a preowned gun at a pawnshop and then used it in a crime the next day, for example. The same goes for private sales and trafficked weapons. Any tracing beyond the first sale is up to local law enforcement. In other words, the time-to-crime metric is limited in what it says about where crime guns originate from</i>
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-has-a-lot-of-guns-involved-in-crimes-but-very-little-data-on-where-they-came-from/
> (Minor quibble – our philosophy isn't "Rationalism" – it's more accurately 'modern rationality' (no capitals) and it's less of a _compact_ 'philosophy' than a much more nebulous 'cloud' of ideas/aspects from all kinds of prior/current bodies of knowledge.)
- I appreciate you nuancing, though I can't say I understand the definition you are trying to express
> "I don't like that first part – you will _definitely_ "always find things to be critical of Scott"? Even if Scott states "I agree with Jordan."? That just seems _deliberately_ contrarian :)"
- I don't like it either because that's not what I intended to express lol. I meant it in the sense that people are different people, I know of no two people fully agreeing on every topic. I was ascertaining my right to disagreement, not my right to being a deliberate contrarian. As an aside, I do like stepping in other shoes for the sake of debate and taking on a contrarian position. The farther from my own beliefs, the more entertaining and thought provoking I find it.
1. I think not enough consideration has been put into the details of the mechanism by which police pullback supposedly caused more murders. It's possible, but how - exactly - did police work stoppages lead to more murders? I think that aspect of the hypothesis matters.
2. There's very clearly an uptick in Native American murders. Handwaving that away as statistical noise undermines the credibility of your argument, I think - it comes across as sweeping data that contradicts your hypothesis under the rug.
So, your analysis is that…. cops stop doing their jobs when publicly criticized? And *specifically* abandon their duty to serve and protect Black communities because they’re mad about and afraid of being critiqued?
I was inspired reading Scott Alexander's piece "What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?" So much so that I included it with 7 other primary resources proving there was a Ferguson Effect, where attacks on police and protest led to further bloodshed.
It's a long piece written the past 24 hours, but I excerpted the section where I focus on the Astral Codex Ten article from a couple weeks ago. Let me know what you think.
https://agent-orange-chicago.medium.com/evidence-of-a-ferguson-effect-costing-thousands-of-ameican-lives-349f606faf94
Is It The Pandemic?
If you think murders increased from the “pandemic,” another hypothesis thrown in here, then you’re also off. Murders fell or remained static across Europe, Central America, and South America, and I’ve yet to find a single country that had a 2020 murder spike except the country (USA! USA!) that had thousands of “mostly peaceful” anti-police protests after George Floyd’s death, 7% of which turned violent. (Again, a situation where all the Minneapolis police involved were immediately arrested. So much for “no justice, no peace.”)
But critics say “more research is needed.” Which I’m all for, but somehow they missed the multitude of studies indicating a “Ferguson Effect” can be shown statistically and with strong methodologies. I don’t think that’s an accident that they ignore brave academics like Wilfred Reilly, Justin Nix, and Roland Fryer.
Is It Weeks of Months of Anti-Police Protest, Civic Disruption, and Attacks on Policing? (Bingo.)
Here’s a vastly more intelligent and thoughtful analysis by famous rationalist and blogger Scott Alexander. He also had a brouhaha with The New York Times, where he has legitimate beefs with them trying to out him publicly and tarnish his reputation, but I won’t get into it.
Simply, the creator of Astral Codex Ten is not beholden to media or academic pressures, where merely suggesting the “Ferguson Effect” means you’re not an “ally” and possibly “racist.” Alexander puts the near 5,000 single year increase in murders squarely on the BLM protests. Is there any incentive for career-minded academics or media journalists to promote this theory, even if painfully obvious? Of course not.
Read for yourself:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike
Excerpt:
Conclusion
I think there’s clear evidence that the current murder spike was caused primarily by the 2020 BLM protests. The timing matches the protests well, and the pandemic poorly. The spike is concentrated in black communities and not in any of the other communities affected by the pandemic. It matches homicide spikes corresponding to other anti-police protests, most notably in the cities where those protests happened but to a lesser degree around the country. And the spike seems limited to the US, while other countries had basically stable murder rates over the same period.
I understand this is the opposite of what lots of other people are saying, but I think they are wrong.
Scott Alexander is brave, but he’s not alone. If more people stand up against the ideological grain, I honestly believe lives can be saved.
xx end excerpt xx READ HERE:
https://agent-orange-chicago.medium.com/evidence-of-a-ferguson-effect-costing-thousands-of-ameican-lives-349f606faf94
The timing made it pretty clear in most cases. I was looking through the data for Oakland, CA, and the spike was very large and happened almost overnight the week after the Floyd death. No other explanation could lead to such a quick shift like that. Pandemic, gun sales, poverty, change in the weather.....all other explanations would surely have more gradual increases and at different points in the year.