7 ms·

I'm not quite sure I fully buy into it. Crime has been steadily declining all over the Western world since the '90s, with a few notable exceptions like Baltimor

I'm not quite sure I fully buy into it. Crime has been steadily declining all over the Western world since the '90s, with a few notable exceptions like Baltimore post-BLM, and so the entire VRU concept may be specious. New York has seen its murder rate plunge 75% since its height in 1990 despite not employing this technique, which is a larger drop than Glasgow experienced. Perhaps doing nothing would have been just as effective? Or perhaps this: >This meant ramping up traditional penal measures – increased stop-and-search and stricter sentencing for knife possession – alongside preventive measures in line with the public health approach. Resulted in all of the most recalcitrant offenders being put behind bars right at the onset of the program, leaving behind only those people more amenable to non-violence. Or put another way, when the doctor mentions seeing constant repeated faces in her ER: >Often, the same people would come back through the accident and emergency departments again and again, repeated victims and perpetrators of violent attacks. Would simply locking up every one of those people have produced a similar or greater drop in violent crime compared to the VRU approach? Is the "violent interceptor" and community outreach and counselors and all that simply gilding a lily? Also: >The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become. Well that or it's 1890s Germany. The Junkers loved to scar each other on the face with their dueling swords, as a way to prove their manhood and as a mark of inclusion in the aristocratic orders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dueling_scar Some cultures get barbed wire tattoos around their arm, others a superficial slashing wound to the face. Tomato tomato ....that expression really doesn't work in text.

sometimesijust 8y ago
You should be quoting violent crime rates rather than murder rates. The articles premise is that violent crime is infectious but the infection does not spread if the patients all die.
- ptaipale 8y ago
  Even if "patients" die, their friends and brothers don't, and the violence spreads. When looking at trends, murder rate is a better metric than counting violent crimes, because statistics for other violence are quite easily impacted by changes in policies of how to record reports. A dead person is a dead person, it's a very consistent metric. Of course, it is also a changing metric as emergency care improves - wounds that used to be deadly can now be treated. For instance, Swedish cities are reporting a vastly improved care for shooting wounds, as hospitals have gained experience and developed methods in treating them.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  David Simon (The Wire, Tremane) notes that murder stats are hard to game: there's a corpse, and the determination is made by the coroner, not chief of police or sherrif. Othe crime stats can be easily and massively gamed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw
  - toolslive 8y ago
    The inverse can also be true: the famous French paradox (The French drink more red wine, but are healthier than the rest of Europe) might be caused lazy French coroners.
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    It's a murder if there's a corpse. What if there's a living person who would have died if they had not received prompt medical care? https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/research-finds-us-murder-rate-suppressed-improved-emergency-medical-response https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/research-finds-us-m...
    - SiempreViernes 8y ago
      You can control for that by looking at the rate of treatment for gunshot wounds and similar, which in some countries show a similar decrease as in the overall deadly violence.
  - Jach 8y ago
    The game just shifts to one of attribution rather than what the rates are. A lot of physical violence would have resulted in death not too long ago, but thanks to medical technology like washing wounds, getting looked at by a doctor, ambulances, surgery, drugs, etc. it's much harder to die. The lack of as many deaths is then attributed to whatever cause is expedient (democracy, authoritarian crackdown, etc.) when technology and access to it is probably the best explanatory factor.
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      I was going to mention that: trauma care has become very good. Though you still have gross bodily harm. And non-dead men generally do tell tales.
- testvox 8y ago
  Also murder rates have a confounding factor in that they can go down simply due to better medical technology allowing more people to survive murder attempts.
ajuc 8y ago
> Crime has been steadily declining all over the Western world since the '90s It's probably caused by the ban on leaded gasoline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/74298000/gif/_74298891_lead_crime_gra624.gif https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/74298000/gif/... https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/blog_lead_crime_international.jpg https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/blog_...
- ekianjo 8y ago
  certainly not. It hasnt been banned everywhere in the world at the same time yet crimes rates have been declining pretty much worldwide.
  - bpchaps 8y ago
    Almost certainly so. I'm really interested in knowing why you're so positive in saying it's not. There are significant signs that the reduction of lead emissions leads to a time-delayed reduction in crime when geographically mapped: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935116301037 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393511... https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-016-0122-3 https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...
  - ajuc 8y ago
    That's the point. It has been correlated with same delay between tipping point of lead in air and tipping point of crime in each country, even though in each country the tipping points were at different time.
goodcanadian 8y ago
You mention New York had a drop in murder rate of 75% since 1990. Fine. The article mentions a 67% drop in the West Garfield neighbourhood of Chicago WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR. While the violent crime rate may be going down in general over time, it is hard to dismiss such a result out of hand.
- j9461701 8y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/ Extrapolating from a single neighbourhood to an entire city is not valid reasoning. Perhaps the neighbourhood was especially amenable to the program, perhaps the crime rate failed to stay low, perhaps some extra-judicial phenomena struck that particular area (say a new factory opening up that boosted the local economy significantly). Or coming at it from the other angle, who's to say New York hasn't had one or two of its neighbourhoods experience extreme marked drops in crime year-over-year too? The 75% over a decade figure is an aggregate for the entire city, and surely it's going to have happened faster in some areas and slower in others. Only by comparing apples to apples, or in this case cities to cities, and not just for a single year but over many years can we reach valid conclusions. And in that case we find the VRU approach in Glasgow failed to out perform the null hypothesis.
  - brilee 8y ago
    Unsure why this is downvoted. When averaging results over a whole city, you've eliminated most sources of noise. But if you average neighborhood by neighborhood, then you have 20x smaller samples, and on top of that, 20x more chances to p-hack. So it's unsurprising to me that there exists some neighborhood where crime rates dropped significantly in one year. I think GP's comment would be stronger if they had given absolute numbers instead of "67% decrease".
watwut 8y ago
How is 1890s Germany an example of of a culture where everythig is right? They literally glorified violence and conquest which lead to colonialism, revolution and two world wars later on. These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too.
- j9461701 8y ago
  >How is 1890s Germany an example of of a culture where everythig is right? I am only pointing out ritualistic marking of men as a sort of "manhood rite" is hardly unique to Glasgow, or the poor/rundown. It has historical precedent all over the world with all kinds of groups, from landed German aristocrats to ...well Violent Glaswegians (which I am surprised to learn is actually a tv trope!). >These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too. The Prussian junkers were really not too fond of the Nazis, and were behind several attempts to assassinate Hitler including the July 20 plot.
  - watwut 8y ago
    Quote: "The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become." It does not says it is unique nor that is unique to poor/rundown. It says that it is bad sign. Landed German aristocrats, aka military of country with about to expand and with highly militarized culture is not an argument it is ok not that it is not bad sign. The Prussian junkers were supporting monarchism, were anti-democratic, were largely racist. Some were against nazi, others joined being attracted to fight-eager culture and ideology of great Germany.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      everyone was racist in 1890. A lot of people supported monarchy and opposed democracy - that was basically the right wing of the time. You really can't view people from 120 years ago through today's moral standards - you can only get a reasonable understanding of their position by viewing them relative to other groups from their era.
panic 8y ago
Violent crime may be going down, but the human cost is real. There are almost 2.3 million people (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html) locked up in the United States alone. If the jails and prisons of the US were made a state, it would have a larger population than New Mexico! The question can't just be, how do we reduce crime? We also have to think about how the system affects the people caught up in it.
- rectang 8y ago
  Those massive numbers serve a social and political purpose: through disenfranchisement of convicted felons and large disparities in enforcement, prosecution, sentencing, and so on, the political power of minority voters is degraded. Reducing the prison population means diminishing that political advantage, so there will be resistance from those who benefit from it.
  - panic 8y ago
    Not to mention the massive amount of money you can make off of this disenfranchised population (by selling phone calls and commissary items, collecting bail fees, and even making the prisoners do work for you -- the 13th Amendment doesn't cover punishments for crimes!)
  - atlantic 8y ago
    Just because prison policy can also serve a political purpose does not mean that its primary function is not what it is: to punish criminals, and to protect the public from them. The discrimination narrative is very compelling on a large scale, but offers courts no alternatives when facing a specific instance of rape, assault or murder. What is the judge supposed to do, pat the criminal on the head and send him home?
joshgel 8y ago
In finance they use the terms Alpha and Beta which would be very applicable here. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Alpha is the improvement in excess of average market improvement. So if your investments are returning 8%, knowing that the S&P500 went up 7% over the same time period is critical information especially compared to the same 8% when the S&P500 went down 2% over that time period. I think beta is just that average of market returns. Perhaps we could develop Alpha and Beta for violence as a better tool to understand what works and what doesn't.

sometimesijust 8y ago

You should be quoting violent crime rates rather than murder rates. The articles premise is that violent crime is infectious but the infection does not spread if the patients all die.

ptaipale 8y ago
Even if "patients" die, their friends and brothers don't, and the violence spreads. When looking at trends, murder rate is a better metric than counting violent crimes, because statistics for other violence are quite easily impacted by changes in policies of how to record reports. A dead person is a dead person, it's a very consistent metric. Of course, it is also a changing metric as emergency care improves - wounds that used to be deadly can now be treated. For instance, Swedish cities are reporting a vastly improved care for shooting wounds, as hospitals have gained experience and developed methods in treating them.
dredmorbius 8y ago
David Simon (The Wire, Tremane) notes that murder stats are hard to game: there's a corpse, and the determination is made by the coroner, not chief of police or sherrif. Othe crime stats can be easily and massively gamed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://youtube.com/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw
- toolslive 8y ago
  The inverse can also be true: the famous French paradox (The French drink more red wine, but are healthier than the rest of Europe) might be caused lazy French coroners.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  It's a murder if there's a corpse. What if there's a living person who would have died if they had not received prompt medical care? https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/research-finds-us-murder-rate-suppressed-improved-emergency-medical-response https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/research-finds-us-m...
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    You can control for that by looking at the rate of treatment for gunshot wounds and similar, which in some countries show a similar decrease as in the overall deadly violence.
- Jach 8y ago
  The game just shifts to one of attribution rather than what the rates are. A lot of physical violence would have resulted in death not too long ago, but thanks to medical technology like washing wounds, getting looked at by a doctor, ambulances, surgery, drugs, etc. it's much harder to die. The lack of as many deaths is then attributed to whatever cause is expedient (democracy, authoritarian crackdown, etc.) when technology and access to it is probably the best explanatory factor.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    I was going to mention that: trauma care has become very good. Though you still have gross bodily harm. And non-dead men generally do tell tales.
testvox 8y ago
Also murder rates have a confounding factor in that they can go down simply due to better medical technology allowing more people to survive murder attempts.

ajuc 8y ago

> Crime has been steadily declining all over the Western world since the '90s It's probably caused by the ban on leaded gasoline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead-crime_hypothesis https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/74298000/gif/_74298891_lead_crime_gra624.gif https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/74298000/gif/... https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/blog_lead_crime_international.jpg https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/blog_...

ekianjo 8y ago
certainly not. It hasnt been banned everywhere in the world at the same time yet crimes rates have been declining pretty much worldwide.
- bpchaps 8y ago
  Almost certainly so. I'm really interested in knowing why you're so positive in saying it's not. There are significant signs that the reduction of lead emissions leads to a time-delayed reduction in crime when geographically mapped: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935116301037 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393511... https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-016-0122-3 https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-...
- ajuc 8y ago
  That's the point. It has been correlated with same delay between tipping point of lead in air and tipping point of crime in each country, even though in each country the tipping points were at different time.

goodcanadian 8y ago

You mention New York had a drop in murder rate of 75% since 1990. Fine. The article mentions a 67% drop in the West Garfield neighbourhood of Chicago WITHIN THE FIRST YEAR. While the violent crime rate may be going down in general over time, it is hard to dismiss such a result out of hand.

j9461701 8y ago
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/ Extrapolating from a single neighbourhood to an entire city is not valid reasoning. Perhaps the neighbourhood was especially amenable to the program, perhaps the crime rate failed to stay low, perhaps some extra-judicial phenomena struck that particular area (say a new factory opening up that boosted the local economy significantly). Or coming at it from the other angle, who's to say New York hasn't had one or two of its neighbourhoods experience extreme marked drops in crime year-over-year too? The 75% over a decade figure is an aggregate for the entire city, and surely it's going to have happened faster in some areas and slower in others. Only by comparing apples to apples, or in this case cities to cities, and not just for a single year but over many years can we reach valid conclusions. And in that case we find the VRU approach in Glasgow failed to out perform the null hypothesis.
- brilee 8y ago
  Unsure why this is downvoted. When averaging results over a whole city, you've eliminated most sources of noise. But if you average neighborhood by neighborhood, then you have 20x smaller samples, and on top of that, 20x more chances to p-hack. So it's unsurprising to me that there exists some neighborhood where crime rates dropped significantly in one year. I think GP's comment would be stronger if they had given absolute numbers instead of "67% decrease".

watwut 8y ago

How is 1890s Germany an example of of a culture where everythig is right? They literally glorified violence and conquest which lead to colonialism, revolution and two world wars later on. These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too.

j9461701 8y ago
>How is 1890s Germany an example of of a culture where everythig is right? I am only pointing out ritualistic marking of men as a sort of "manhood rite" is hardly unique to Glasgow, or the poor/rundown. It has historical precedent all over the world with all kinds of groups, from landed German aristocrats to ...well Violent Glaswegians (which I am surprised to learn is actually a tv trope!). >These students groups were also great recruiting grounds for nazi later on too. The Prussian junkers were really not too fond of the Nazis, and were behind several attempts to assassinate Hitler including the July 20 plot.
- watwut 8y ago
  Quote: "The incident has stayed with her, an indication of how bad the situation in her city had become." It does not says it is unique nor that is unique to poor/rundown. It says that it is bad sign. Landed German aristocrats, aka military of country with about to expand and with highly militarized culture is not an argument it is ok not that it is not bad sign. The Prussian junkers were supporting monarchism, were anti-democratic, were largely racist. Some were against nazi, others joined being attracted to fight-eager culture and ideology of great Germany.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    everyone was racist in 1890. A lot of people supported monarchy and opposed democracy - that was basically the right wing of the time. You really can't view people from 120 years ago through today's moral standards - you can only get a reasonable understanding of their position by viewing them relative to other groups from their era.

panic 8y ago

Violent crime may be going down, but the human cost is real. There are almost 2.3 million people (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2018.html) locked up in the United States alone. If the jails and prisons of the US were made a state, it would have a larger population than New Mexico! The question can't just be, how do we reduce crime? We also have to think about how the system affects the people caught up in it.

rectang 8y ago
Those massive numbers serve a social and political purpose: through disenfranchisement of convicted felons and large disparities in enforcement, prosecution, sentencing, and so on, the political power of minority voters is degraded. Reducing the prison population means diminishing that political advantage, so there will be resistance from those who benefit from it.
- panic 8y ago
  Not to mention the massive amount of money you can make off of this disenfranchised population (by selling phone calls and commissary items, collecting bail fees, and even making the prisoners do work for you -- the 13th Amendment doesn't cover punishments for crimes!)
- atlantic 8y ago
  Just because prison policy can also serve a political purpose does not mean that its primary function is not what it is: to punish criminals, and to protect the public from them. The discrimination narrative is very compelling on a large scale, but offers courts no alternatives when facing a specific instance of rape, assault or murder. What is the judge supposed to do, pat the criminal on the head and send him home?

joshgel 8y ago

In finance they use the terms Alpha and Beta which would be very applicable here. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Alpha is the improvement in excess of average market improvement. So if your investments are returning 8%, knowing that the S&P500 went up 7% over the same time period is critical information especially compared to the same 8% when the S&P500 went down 2% over that time period. I think beta is just that average of market returns. Perhaps we could develop Alpha and Beta for violence as a better tool to understand what works and what doesn't.