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.
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.
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"!