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."
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_?