37 ms·

Vanishing Violence

151 points by sctb 8y ago

jonathankoren 8y ago
Just from a graphics design standpoint, the shadow of Snow Fall[0] still looms large. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?part=tunnel-creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?...
Nition 8y ago
Same where I am, in New Zealand[1]. Youth crime starts to drop off rapidly after 2007. [1] https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/youth-prosecution-statistics-data-highlights-2017.pdf https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/yo...
- nabla9 8y ago
  When did NZ stop using lead in gas?
  - Nition 8y ago
    Banned in 1996, same as the USA. I'm not sure how heavily it was phased out before then. Certainly newer vehicles were already using unleaded petrol at the time.
- youraimanager 8y ago
  I can't quite understand the difference here between the crime classes. Burglary (the victim is absent) and robbery (the victim is present) are somehow separate from theft?
  - davidsong 8y ago
    Theft is illegally depriving someone of something. Burglary includes an unlawful entry component.
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    Theft is taking off with something that is in plain view. Burglary includes breaking in, and robbery involves violent force. Lawgivers the world over especially detest violence, so no surprise that the latter two traditionally attract stiffer penalties.
    - derefr 8y ago
      "Cat burglary" isn't a violent crime, though.
  - hopler 8y ago
    Burglary is breaking and entering with intent to commit a crime. There is nothing specific about theft or the presence of the victim in burglary.
  - Nition 8y ago
    There's a glossary here: https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/research-data/nzcass/technical-information/terms-and-definitions/ https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/research-d... In short: Burglary: Entering a building intending to commit a crime. Robbery: Stealing/attempting to steal from someone by force (or threatening force). Theft: The actual stealing of stuff.
- megous 8y ago
  Everyone's probably on their mobile phones and FB.
  - Nition 8y ago
    It really does drop as Facebook grew. Make of that what you will.
draw_down 8y ago
Other causes of death have grown. I just saw this headline, "Fentanyl deaths skyrocketed more than 1,000% over six years in the US" https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/health/fentanyl-deaths-increase-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/health/fentanyl-deaths-increa...
- jandrese 8y ago
  6 years ago hardly anybody had heard of Fentanyl. % growth is a misleading statistic when you're starting out on the bottom of the S curve. I'm not saying it's not a problem, just that the summary is sensationalized.
  - patfla 8y ago
    Still, opiate deaths now outnumber vehicular deaths, although vehicular death has been dropping. Opiate deaths probably skew young and one might ask: just what percent of, on average, poor impulse control young people are now killed by opiate death?
dgellow 8y ago
From Berlin: > 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons > Sorry, this content is not available in your region. :(
- howard941 8y ago
  https://outline.com/nc4cbm https://outline.com/nc4cbm
  - neonate 8y ago
    Unfortunately that only captured a small part of the article. And archive.is is refusing the URL. Is there another option?
    - yorwba 8y ago
      http://web.archive.org/web/20190321184513/https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-violence/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190321184513/https://projects.s... Since it's not a paywall, the good old Internet Archive works flawlessly.
- baxtr 8y ago
  GDPR has served as very well so far by limiting our choices. Thanks EU!
  - hindsightbias 8y ago
    Regulatory Capture goes both ways.
  - Const-me 8y ago
    Same error from Montenegro, which is not in the EU.
    - Kluny 8y ago
      Does this work? https://pastebin.com/7pLaScEv https://pastebin.com/7pLaScEv
jayess 8y ago
The peak in the late 80s seems to correlate well with the global phaseout of leaded gasoline. In the US, the phaseout began in the mid 70s and leaded gasoline was completely banned by 1996. > A 1994 study had indicated that the concentration of lead in the blood of the U.S. population had dropped 78% from 1976 to 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and_phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...
- lostlogin 8y ago
  My go-to on this topic is the Mother Jones article by Kevin Drum. It’s great. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
- bluedino 8y ago
  Leaded gas was in use since the 20's or 30's. Crime/Murders didn't to spike up until 1965. Murders started going down around 1994 or so. And then in the late 2000's, many cities have started to see it go back up. I would wager the reasons for the increase in the late 60's is similar to the recent rise, and that it has nothing to do with lead.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    You actually need to look at the amount of lead exposure not just when leaded gas was first used.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ummonk 8y ago
    Lead affects childhood development, and crime happens in adulthood. That lag is exactly what you would expect.
  - jahewson 8y ago
    Leaded gasoline was for many years a premium product, patented and produced initially by a single manufacturer. Production really takes off after WWII (3x the amount before the war). Assuming a child takes 20 years to grow up then 1945 + 20 = 1965. That's exactly when we start seeing a sizable jump in crime. Furthermore, lead use increases until a peak around 1970 with violent crime peaking around 1990, 20 years later. In other words, the pattern of violent crime follows the pattern of lead usage +20 years, including a small dip in lead use in the early 1960s which corresponds to a small dip in violent crime in the early 1980s. This isn't just about the start - their entire histories are remarkably correlated.
SigmundA 8y ago
Correlation ins't causation of course, but not one mention of video games in the article: https://66.media.tumblr.com/6e0d3c2533b37df820432f5e6d929c83/tumblr_inline_mx9peioujI1r7b0fw.png https://66.media.tumblr.com/6e0d3c2533b37df820432f5e6d929c83... I have always though video game especially violent ones were an outlet for aggression and could actually curbs those tendencies, not make them worse, it sure seemed like that way for me growing up, playing Doom and Carmageddon later Battlefield and GTA. Time line matches up pretty well with violent crime decline.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  If nothing else you can’t be out engaging in violence if you are at home playing games.
  - jimmy1 8y ago
    This is the real reason. Heck even real drugs were less appealing to the rush I got completing a raid with my clan back in the day in WoW.
- throwaway6766 8y ago
  I think the most important thing here is whether or not the person consuming the violent media has fantasies of violence. Purely anecdotal, but in my own life, I'm convinced certain types of media have pushed me over the edge from fantasy for reality. For example, ever since I was a young child, I found smoking women to be sexy. I fantasized about it in my adolescent years. Then I discovered smoking fetish pornography and that really got me going and I started to think maybe I should actually date smokers. Then I did and I started to think it might not be to badd to try smoking myself. I doubt I would have made it this far down my current road had I never taken that initial jump from purely in my mind to consuming smoking fetish media. In other words, I think the smoking fetish media helped me take a harmless fantasy and turn it a ruinous reality. I wonder if the same could happen for other people with other (not even necessarily sexual) fantasies.
  - chaostheory 8y ago
herostratus101 8y ago
Pretty misleading title. US homicides are up significantly since 2013 (they rose by almost 25% from 2014 to 2016 before leveling off in 2017 and dropping perhaps 7% in 2018).
- rhcom2 8y ago
  The article is specifically about youth crime in California.
scythe 8y ago
>As he pulled the trigger, Monroe said, he flashed on an image of his alcoholic father beating his mother. Well, I think I found a possible explanation. Domestic violence has always been shameful, but it only became unacceptable with the rise of second-wave feminism. The first generation of kids raised under the new rules hit adolescence in... you guessed it, the late '90s. Unlike other trends, this one was transnational.
DoubleCribble 8y ago
How much of the precipitous drop in SF juvenile crime is simply because there are fewer juveniles in the city? SF used to have a large middle class population that has largely vanished with the rise in the cost of housing combined with a reduction in the number of kids per household. While once pretty common, those big families with 4-5 kids are as rare as 4 leaf clovers these days.
- Patrick_Devine 8y ago
  That might be the case for SF, but the effect is being seen globally.
- refurb 8y ago
  As well, it’s more correct to say “reported crimes have decreased”, not “crimes have decreased”. I know in SF a lot of people have stopped reporting petty crimes since the cops don’t care or do anything about it.
  - 24gttghh 8y ago
    This is likely not the case as someone else posted: https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artwork/Fact_Sheets/2017NCVRW_CrimeTrends_508.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artw... Reporting rates haven't changed a whole lot according to that. So yes, crime on the whole has decreased nationally since the early 90's.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  The arrest rate for violent crimes for juveniles in SF went from 100 per 10,000 to 10.
- jahewson 8y ago
  The arrest rates at least are given per 10,000 juveniles, not as an absolute number, for exactly the reason you mention. Some of the other numbers aren't adjusted though.
  - 8y ago
bjourne 8y ago
The trend is global and not limited to the US. For example, violent crime has dropped dramatically in Sweden since the mid 90s. Of course you would never believe that by only reading the headlines! One of the causes pointed out by criminologists is the decrease in alcohol consumption. Among the general population it has decreased slightly, but enormously among youths. For example, the average alcohol consumption in liters per year for 16 year old boys has decreased from 7.4 l in 2004 to 3.0 l in 2018. When young males aren't drinking there are much fewer incidents of unnecessary violence. Less of these "misunderstandings" in nightclubs and pubs that always caused fights in the decades prior. RE: Clearly, people high on cannabis doesn't get nearly as violent as some people get when they are drunk. However, the Swedish statistics doesn't indicate that young people are switching from alcohol to cannabis. Cannabis use remains fairly low as it has always been. The kids are just partying less it seems.
- easymodex 8y ago
  Pure speculation but increased marihuana usage and acceptance could have been a contributing factor as well. A lot of young adults switching from binge drinking to chilling out while smoking with friends.
- ZeroFries 8y ago
  Less drugs, less sex, less rock-and-roll.
  - drilldrive 8y ago
    I wonder if the in-house reason for liberating military recruitment protocols is the same reason for liberation of sexual standards: there is a smaller pool of interested applicants/mates, so we make do with what we can.
- WillPostForFood 8y ago
  This chart suggest Rapes/Sexual assaults are way up, Assaults are up, Murder/Robbery are the same or up a tiny bit. The only number in decline from the 90s looks like burglary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#/media/File:Number_of_crimes_reported_per_100,000_population_in_Sweden,_1993-2013.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#/media/File:Nu... And if you go back earlier than the 90s, crime looks like it has broadly gotten much worse: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-crime-1976-2016-robbery-sex-murder.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-c...
harmful_stereo 8y ago
I wouldn't limit it to smartphones, or the elimination of physical education, or the mainstreaming of online couch potatoing, or any other part of that. But overall, and there is more than one reason, domestic existence has become nearly universally white collar in the way time is spent. Desperate people can resort to using social media instead of taking things into the streets. And if you do go outside, you're in a much smaller minority, and the cops don't have to contend with a whole generation that will be there between you and them. That raises the encounter rate. In fact it's only in extremely wealthy extremely poor neighborhoods that i see children playing outside nowadays. That exacerbates the psychological strain on poor communities, especially black, because of the difference in how and where black communities are located versus the methodology of Hispanic and overseas immigrant population distribution. I think this is a reflection of the shift. Humans have become housepets to a society-changing extent. And housing geography has changed to a new phase of post-suburban internal migration. Police still exist to keep poor people from troubling the rich, but now the distances and physical barriers are greater and have systems built on top of them by the declines in population growth.
ppeetteerr 8y ago
I bet it was due to video games. Kids who play video games don't join IRL gangs.
- zackmorris 8y ago
  Ya I was just thinking that the arrival of the internet around 1995 should show up as a drop in violence (by increasing connection and reducing angst for young people). Also I wonder if widespread use of marijuana and magic mushrooms in the relatively prosperous late 90s would have led to a drop in violence, like what happened during the free love era of the late 60s. Of course, coming from the Napoleon Dynamite region of southern Idaho, I could very well have no idea what I'm talking about.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    > Of course, coming from the Napoleon Dynamite region of southern Idaho, I could very well have no idea what I'm talking about. Don't be so hard on yourself, in the grand scheme of things, none of us do :)
shambolicfroli 8y ago
What about countries where there is still a lot of violence?
- danso 8y ago
  What about them? Are you suggesting that the entire world be documented in an article that has this as its subhead? > Serious youth crime has fallen off drastically since the 1990s, leaving juvenile halls emptied. So why is California still spending so much?
Eliezer 8y ago
I claim not that it is the whole effect size, but certainly the massive drop in testosterone must account for some of it. Would be interesting to see the state-by-state, year-by-year correlation.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Going off topic, but: Does anyone know what's causing the drop in testosterone?
  - ummonk 8y ago
    Sedentary lifestyle and pthalates seem to be at least a part of the story.
  - ashleyn 8y ago
    Possibly the fact that we've locked up everyone who has high testosterone.
    - krapp 8y ago
      > Possibly the fact that we've locked up everyone who has high testosterone. Do you know what a "fact" is? Because this isn't one.
  - zackmorris 8y ago
    After working out for 20 years, here's what I've learned anecdotally: * Testosterone is proportional to lean mass and inversely proportional to fat mass. * Cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone, so gen x being raised with the "eggs are bad" mentality lowered testosterone. * Sugar and carbs cause body fat increase, not fat/saturated fat/cholesterol. * High weight, low reps like the 5x5 workout seem to raise testosterone and strength better than 3x8-12, but power lifting fell out of fashion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s due to injury concerns which were unjustified. Luckily, this is reversing due to the instruction available on YouTube. * Lower and misallocated funding for public education has resulted in poor school lunch programs and no money available for extracurricular activities like strength training during adolescence when testosterone is highest. * Phytoestrogens in factory farm foods like soy antagonize testosterone in boys and cause early puberty in girls. * Our economy moved from industry to information, so gen x and millennials are far more sedentary than baby boomers and previous generations. I'll let other commenters expand on that!
kenneth 8y ago
There is still way too much crime in California and in the Bay Area in particular. Perhaps violent crime from juveniles is down; but my observation as a decade-long SF resident is that crime overall is certainly not getting better, and it certainly seems to be getting worse. Muggings, break-ins, theft, etc. are absolutely rampant. The authorities couldn't give two shits about preventing, investigating, or prosecuting it. Some anecdotes: I've personally been mugged at gunpoint in Oakland. I luckily managed to hold on to my cellphone and called 911 right away. The police showed up right away, but only cared to take a statement and left without going after the perpetrators, or even giving us a ride to somewhere safe. The only other time I called 911 because a woman collapsed on the street in front of me. She was bleeding from the head and making a scary-looking pool of blood. It took 45min for an ambulance to show up, in downtown San Francisco, around noon on a weekend day (no traffic). The authorities are entirely useless and unreliable. It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing. There's a big issue with that. I feel like we need much tougher police that actually prevents and prosecutes all types of crime, including rampant petty theft, car break-ins, muggings, shootings (which are common), harassment by deranged drug-addicts all over the streets, etc. etc.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Preventing that kind of street crime requires Guilani-style "stop and frisk" police work that I would guess most people in San Francisco would not tolerate for a day.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    When NYPD did a "work slowdown" and stopped "proactive policing" because they were mad about Eric Garner protests, major crimes went down: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proactive-policing-crime-20170925-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - 8y ago
nickelcitymario 8y ago
In a different HN thread, people were discussing how racially diverse California has become, largely due to the tech industry. I wonder if that could have anything to do with it? As youth see more and more people who look like them find success, maybe they're less inclined to turn to a career in crime? (Pure speculation here. I'm not from the area.)
KorematsuFred 8y ago
That presentation has ended with a question that ends most of the discussion on anything related to California. "Why does California spend so much ?"
rusabd 8y ago
this quote caught my eyes: ``In San Francisco, said Gascón, prosecutors moved away from incarcerating children for low-level offenses like truancy or petty theft as research showed that even one stint in juvenile hall led to a higher likelihood of recidivism.`` This effect was known from the beginning of the traditional prison system. Here is the quote from "Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault: ``. And, just as the project of a corrective technique accompanied the principle of punitive detention, the critique of the prison and its methods appeared very early on, in those same years 1820-45; indeed, it was embodied in a number of formulation which - figures apart - are today repeated almost unchanged: ... - Detention causes recidivism; those leaving prison have more chance than before of going back to itl convicts are, in a very high proportion, former inmates 38 per cent of those who left the maisons centrales were convicted again and 33 per cent of those sent to con-vict-ships (a figure given by G. de Rochefoucauld during the debate on the reform of the penal code, 2 December 1831 Archives parle-mentaires, LXXII, 209-10); between 1828 and 1834, out of almost 30,000 convicted of crime, about 7,400 were recidivists (that is,1 out of 4.7 of those convicted); out of over 200,000 correctionels, or petty offenders, almost 35,000 were also recidivists (1 out of 6);in all, one recidivist out of 5.8 of those convicted (Ducpdtiaux, 1837,276ff);in 1831, out of 2,174 of those condemned for recidivism, 350 had been in convict-ships, 1,682 in maisons cenffales, 142 in four maisons de correction that followed the same regime as the centrales (Ducp6tiaux, 1837, 276ff). And the diagnosis became even more severe during the July monarchy: in 1835, out of 7,223 convicted criminals, 1,486 were recidivists; in 1839, 1749 out of 7,858 '' Keep in mind, "Discipline and Punish" was published in 1975 which is whooping 44 years ago. P.S sorry for typos, scanned version of the book is not very good quality
ucaetano 8y ago
Damn millennials, ruining juvenile crime!
alanh 8y ago
Working in San Francisco and living in Oakland, I have to imagine that to a significant degree, it is not (just) that there is less crime, but that there are fewer arrests. I see crime every day — literally every day. My co-workers have been sent to the hospital by random street violence. I have not heard of any resulting arrests.
- baby 8y ago
  Oakland is pretty different from San Francisco though, it's on the list of highest number of crimes in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
  - alanh 8y ago
    To be clear, I am saying that personally I see crime daily, whether I am in San Francisco or Oakland, and my co-workers have been sent to the hospital via attacks right in front of our offices on Market Street in San Francisco. I will also add that I rarely report crime. This is somewhat learned helplessness as I do not expect any results. For example, calling Oakland's non-emergency number has resulted in me eventually giving up after getting nothing but a busy signal over and over. I was attacked by one of San Francisco's street addicts, but as I did not suffer any serious injuries, I did not waste my time reporting it. (I regret this on principle as surely that person has attacked others and will continue to do so.) I also do not report the obvious dealers hanging out on corners by our offices because I know from following the local (Tenderloin) police force's Twitter account that even if they make the arrest, the dealer will be released within weeks (possibly hours or days; not sure) back onto the streets. It is common for them to arrest the same dealers three times in two-month periods. (And no, they aren’t pot dealers; they are arrested with meth, crack, heroin, and other hard drugs ready for sale.)
  - alanh 8y ago
    Taking a look at the table in that Wikipedia page, you can notice that while Oakland has more violent crime per capital than SF, SF has more property crime per capita than Oakland. No wonder it can seem that the streets are paved with shattered auto glass.
chrisbrandow 8y ago
This trend is very real. My wife works with juvenile delinquents and a couple years ago remarked how surprising the change in occupancy in central juvenile hall in LA is. Entire units are just closed off now. This is happening all across the country. I still don’t see anything as compelling as the elemental lead hypothesis that Kevin Drum has been pushing for the last couple of years.
- tropdrop 8y ago
  Given that this trend is global, doesn't increased access to safe abortion make more sense than claims about lead specifically in the United States? In the US, the sharp reduction in crime happened 18-24 years after the legalization of Roe v. Wade. Unwanted children who would have been juvenile delinquents were simply never born. This would fit in nicely with the claims other commenters have made about some places that have had an increase in sexually violent crimes, since again, the children who would have been products of those encounters are never born, so the overall trend is still a decrease in violent crime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
  - chrisbrandow 8y ago
    It’s not precisely global. Throughout the world it correlates best by far with the year that a given country, state, or region phased out leaded gasoline. I.e. declines did not start in same year in every country. They almost entirely began 18-30 years after phase-out of leaded gasoline.
mirimir 8y ago
Another GDPR hater, so: https://web.archive.org/web20190322023033/http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-violence/ https://web.archive.org/web20190322023033/http://projects.sf... Edit: Except that all of the images are extremely low resolution. Maybe an archiving artifact?
mirimir 8y ago
TFA mentions some interesting possibilities. Reduced lead exposures. Increased prosecution of drug dealers who use minors as soldiers. And non-punitive management of nonviolent crime, leading to reduced recidivism. [Except maybe more broken vehicle windows :(] But maybe it's also the availability of recreational drugs from online dark markets. That'd be quite the trip, no?
DrScump 8y ago
Fewer arrests != Fewer crimes. When no arrest is made, the crime is not counted as committed by a juvenile.
tropdrop 8y ago
What about Steven Levitt's proposal that legalized abortion is the cause of suddenly vanishing juvenile crime, 20 years after Roe v. Wade? "Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children... states that had abortion legalized earlier should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago
"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" Annoying as that may be, it's nice to see that it was implemented using the proper HTTP Status code.

151 points by sctb 8y ago

Just from a graphics design standpoint, the shadow of Snow Fall[0] still looms large. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?part=tunnel-creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/index.html#/?...

Nition 8y ago

Same where I am, in New Zealand[1]. Youth crime starts to drop off rapidly after 2007. [1] https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/youth-prosecution-statistics-data-highlights-2017.pdf https://www.justice.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Publications/yo...

nabla9 8y ago
When did NZ stop using lead in gas?
- Nition 8y ago
  Banned in 1996, same as the USA. I'm not sure how heavily it was phased out before then. Certainly newer vehicles were already using unleaded petrol at the time.
youraimanager 8y ago
I can't quite understand the difference here between the crime classes. Burglary (the victim is absent) and robbery (the victim is present) are somehow separate from theft?
- davidsong 8y ago
  Theft is illegally depriving someone of something. Burglary includes an unlawful entry component.
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  Theft is taking off with something that is in plain view. Burglary includes breaking in, and robbery involves violent force. Lawgivers the world over especially detest violence, so no surprise that the latter two traditionally attract stiffer penalties.
  - derefr 8y ago
    "Cat burglary" isn't a violent crime, though.
- hopler 8y ago
  Burglary is breaking and entering with intent to commit a crime. There is nothing specific about theft or the presence of the victim in burglary.
- Nition 8y ago
  There's a glossary here: https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/research-data/nzcass/technical-information/terms-and-definitions/ https://www.justice.govt.nz/justice-sector-policy/research-d... In short: Burglary: Entering a building intending to commit a crime. Robbery: Stealing/attempting to steal from someone by force (or threatening force). Theft: The actual stealing of stuff.
megous 8y ago
Everyone's probably on their mobile phones and FB.
- Nition 8y ago
  It really does drop as Facebook grew. Make of that what you will.

draw_down 8y ago

Other causes of death have grown. I just saw this headline, "Fentanyl deaths skyrocketed more than 1,000% over six years in the US" https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/health/fentanyl-deaths-increase-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/21/health/fentanyl-deaths-increa...

jandrese 8y ago
6 years ago hardly anybody had heard of Fentanyl. % growth is a misleading statistic when you're starting out on the bottom of the S curve. I'm not saying it's not a problem, just that the summary is sensationalized.
- patfla 8y ago
  Still, opiate deaths now outnumber vehicular deaths, although vehicular death has been dropping. Opiate deaths probably skew young and one might ask: just what percent of, on average, poor impulse control young people are now killed by opiate death?

dgellow 8y ago

From Berlin: > 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons > Sorry, this content is not available in your region. :(

howard941 8y ago
https://outline.com/nc4cbm https://outline.com/nc4cbm
- neonate 8y ago
  Unfortunately that only captured a small part of the article. And archive.is is refusing the URL. Is there another option?
  - yorwba 8y ago
    http://web.archive.org/web/20190321184513/https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-violence/ http://web.archive.org/web/20190321184513/https://projects.s... Since it's not a paywall, the good old Internet Archive works flawlessly.
baxtr 8y ago
GDPR has served as very well so far by limiting our choices. Thanks EU!
- hindsightbias 8y ago
  Regulatory Capture goes both ways.
- Const-me 8y ago
  Same error from Montenegro, which is not in the EU.
  - Kluny 8y ago
    Does this work? https://pastebin.com/7pLaScEv https://pastebin.com/7pLaScEv

jayess 8y ago

The peak in the late 80s seems to correlate well with the global phaseout of leaded gasoline. In the US, the phaseout began in the mid 70s and leaded gasoline was completely banned by 1996. > A 1994 study had indicated that the concentration of lead in the blood of the U.S. population had dropped 78% from 1976 to 1991. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and_phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Controversy_and...

lostlogin 8y ago
My go-to on this topic is the Mother Jones article by Kevin Drum. It’s great. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
bluedino 8y ago
Leaded gas was in use since the 20's or 30's. Crime/Murders didn't to spike up until 1965. Murders started going down around 1994 or so. And then in the late 2000's, many cities have started to see it go back up. I would wager the reasons for the increase in the late 60's is similar to the recent rise, and that it has nothing to do with lead.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  You actually need to look at the amount of lead exposure not just when leaded gas was first used.
- deleted 8y ago
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- ummonk 8y ago
  Lead affects childhood development, and crime happens in adulthood. That lag is exactly what you would expect.
- jahewson 8y ago
  Leaded gasoline was for many years a premium product, patented and produced initially by a single manufacturer. Production really takes off after WWII (3x the amount before the war). Assuming a child takes 20 years to grow up then 1945 + 20 = 1965. That's exactly when we start seeing a sizable jump in crime. Furthermore, lead use increases until a peak around 1970 with violent crime peaking around 1990, 20 years later. In other words, the pattern of violent crime follows the pattern of lead usage +20 years, including a small dip in lead use in the early 1960s which corresponds to a small dip in violent crime in the early 1980s. This isn't just about the start - their entire histories are remarkably correlated.

SigmundA 8y ago

Correlation ins't causation of course, but not one mention of video games in the article: https://66.media.tumblr.com/6e0d3c2533b37df820432f5e6d929c83/tumblr_inline_mx9peioujI1r7b0fw.png https://66.media.tumblr.com/6e0d3c2533b37df820432f5e6d929c83... I have always though video game especially violent ones were an outlet for aggression and could actually curbs those tendencies, not make them worse, it sure seemed like that way for me growing up, playing Doom and Carmageddon later Battlefield and GTA. Time line matches up pretty well with violent crime decline.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
If nothing else you can’t be out engaging in violence if you are at home playing games.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  This is the real reason. Heck even real drugs were less appealing to the rush I got completing a raid with my clan back in the day in WoW.
throwaway6766 8y ago
I think the most important thing here is whether or not the person consuming the violent media has fantasies of violence. Purely anecdotal, but in my own life, I'm convinced certain types of media have pushed me over the edge from fantasy for reality. For example, ever since I was a young child, I found smoking women to be sexy. I fantasized about it in my adolescent years. Then I discovered smoking fetish pornography and that really got me going and I started to think maybe I should actually date smokers. Then I did and I started to think it might not be to badd to try smoking myself. I doubt I would have made it this far down my current road had I never taken that initial jump from purely in my mind to consuming smoking fetish media. In other words, I think the smoking fetish media helped me take a harmless fantasy and turn it a ruinous reality. I wonder if the same could happen for other people with other (not even necessarily sexual) fantasies.
- chaostheory 8y ago

herostratus101 8y ago

Pretty misleading title. US homicides are up significantly since 2013 (they rose by almost 25% from 2014 to 2016 before leveling off in 2017 and dropping perhaps 7% in 2018).

rhcom2 8y ago
The article is specifically about youth crime in California.

scythe 8y ago

>As he pulled the trigger, Monroe said, he flashed on an image of his alcoholic father beating his mother. Well, I think I found a possible explanation. Domestic violence has always been shameful, but it only became unacceptable with the rise of second-wave feminism. The first generation of kids raised under the new rules hit adolescence in... you guessed it, the late '90s. Unlike other trends, this one was transnational.

DoubleCribble 8y ago

How much of the precipitous drop in SF juvenile crime is simply because there are fewer juveniles in the city? SF used to have a large middle class population that has largely vanished with the rise in the cost of housing combined with a reduction in the number of kids per household. While once pretty common, those big families with 4-5 kids are as rare as 4 leaf clovers these days.

Patrick_Devine 8y ago
That might be the case for SF, but the effect is being seen globally.
refurb 8y ago
As well, it’s more correct to say “reported crimes have decreased”, not “crimes have decreased”. I know in SF a lot of people have stopped reporting petty crimes since the cops don’t care or do anything about it.
- 24gttghh 8y ago
  This is likely not the case as someone else posted: https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artwork/Fact_Sheets/2017NCVRW_CrimeTrends_508.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artw... Reporting rates haven't changed a whole lot according to that. So yes, crime on the whole has decreased nationally since the early 90's.
Gibbon1 8y ago
The arrest rate for violent crimes for juveniles in SF went from 100 per 10,000 to 10.
jahewson 8y ago
The arrest rates at least are given per 10,000 juveniles, not as an absolute number, for exactly the reason you mention. Some of the other numbers aren't adjusted though.
- 8y ago

bjourne 8y ago

The trend is global and not limited to the US. For example, violent crime has dropped dramatically in Sweden since the mid 90s. Of course you would never believe that by only reading the headlines! One of the causes pointed out by criminologists is the decrease in alcohol consumption. Among the general population it has decreased slightly, but enormously among youths. For example, the average alcohol consumption in liters per year for 16 year old boys has decreased from 7.4 l in 2004 to 3.0 l in 2018. When young males aren't drinking there are much fewer incidents of unnecessary violence. Less of these "misunderstandings" in nightclubs and pubs that always caused fights in the decades prior. RE: Clearly, people high on cannabis doesn't get nearly as violent as some people get when they are drunk. However, the Swedish statistics doesn't indicate that young people are switching from alcohol to cannabis. Cannabis use remains fairly low as it has always been. The kids are just partying less it seems.

easymodex 8y ago
Pure speculation but increased marihuana usage and acceptance could have been a contributing factor as well. A lot of young adults switching from binge drinking to chilling out while smoking with friends.
ZeroFries 8y ago
Less drugs, less sex, less rock-and-roll.
- drilldrive 8y ago
  I wonder if the in-house reason for liberating military recruitment protocols is the same reason for liberation of sexual standards: there is a smaller pool of interested applicants/mates, so we make do with what we can.
WillPostForFood 8y ago
This chart suggest Rapes/Sexual assaults are way up, Assaults are up, Murder/Robbery are the same or up a tiny bit. The only number in decline from the 90s looks like burglary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#/media/File:Number_of_crimes_reported_per_100,000_population_in_Sweden,_1993-2013.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden#/media/File:Nu... And if you go back earlier than the 90s, crime looks like it has broadly gotten much worse: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-crime-1976-2016-robbery-sex-murder.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/Sweden-c...

harmful_stereo 8y ago

I wouldn't limit it to smartphones, or the elimination of physical education, or the mainstreaming of online couch potatoing, or any other part of that. But overall, and there is more than one reason, domestic existence has become nearly universally white collar in the way time is spent. Desperate people can resort to using social media instead of taking things into the streets. And if you do go outside, you're in a much smaller minority, and the cops don't have to contend with a whole generation that will be there between you and them. That raises the encounter rate. In fact it's only in extremely wealthy extremely poor neighborhoods that i see children playing outside nowadays. That exacerbates the psychological strain on poor communities, especially black, because of the difference in how and where black communities are located versus the methodology of Hispanic and overseas immigrant population distribution. I think this is a reflection of the shift. Humans have become housepets to a society-changing extent. And housing geography has changed to a new phase of post-suburban internal migration. Police still exist to keep poor people from troubling the rich, but now the distances and physical barriers are greater and have systems built on top of them by the declines in population growth.

ppeetteerr 8y ago

I bet it was due to video games. Kids who play video games don't join IRL gangs.

zackmorris 8y ago
Ya I was just thinking that the arrival of the internet around 1995 should show up as a drop in violence (by increasing connection and reducing angst for young people). Also I wonder if widespread use of marijuana and magic mushrooms in the relatively prosperous late 90s would have led to a drop in violence, like what happened during the free love era of the late 60s. Of course, coming from the Napoleon Dynamite region of southern Idaho, I could very well have no idea what I'm talking about.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  > Of course, coming from the Napoleon Dynamite region of southern Idaho, I could very well have no idea what I'm talking about. Don't be so hard on yourself, in the grand scheme of things, none of us do :)

shambolicfroli 8y ago

What about countries where there is still a lot of violence?

danso 8y ago
What about them? Are you suggesting that the entire world be documented in an article that has this as its subhead? > Serious youth crime has fallen off drastically since the 1990s, leaving juvenile halls emptied. So why is California still spending so much?

Eliezer 8y ago

I claim not that it is the whole effect size, but certainly the massive drop in testosterone must account for some of it. Would be interesting to see the state-by-state, year-by-year correlation.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Going off topic, but: Does anyone know what's causing the drop in testosterone?
- ummonk 8y ago
  Sedentary lifestyle and pthalates seem to be at least a part of the story.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  Possibly the fact that we've locked up everyone who has high testosterone.
  - krapp 8y ago
    > Possibly the fact that we've locked up everyone who has high testosterone. Do you know what a "fact" is? Because this isn't one.
- zackmorris 8y ago
  After working out for 20 years, here's what I've learned anecdotally: * Testosterone is proportional to lean mass and inversely proportional to fat mass. * Cholesterol is a precursor to testosterone, so gen x being raised with the "eggs are bad" mentality lowered testosterone. * Sugar and carbs cause body fat increase, not fat/saturated fat/cholesterol. * High weight, low reps like the 5x5 workout seem to raise testosterone and strength better than 3x8-12, but power lifting fell out of fashion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s due to injury concerns which were unjustified. Luckily, this is reversing due to the instruction available on YouTube. * Lower and misallocated funding for public education has resulted in poor school lunch programs and no money available for extracurricular activities like strength training during adolescence when testosterone is highest. * Phytoestrogens in factory farm foods like soy antagonize testosterone in boys and cause early puberty in girls. * Our economy moved from industry to information, so gen x and millennials are far more sedentary than baby boomers and previous generations. I'll let other commenters expand on that!

kenneth 8y ago

There is still way too much crime in California and in the Bay Area in particular. Perhaps violent crime from juveniles is down; but my observation as a decade-long SF resident is that crime overall is certainly not getting better, and it certainly seems to be getting worse. Muggings, break-ins, theft, etc. are absolutely rampant. The authorities couldn't give two shits about preventing, investigating, or prosecuting it. Some anecdotes: I've personally been mugged at gunpoint in Oakland. I luckily managed to hold on to my cellphone and called 911 right away. The police showed up right away, but only cared to take a statement and left without going after the perpetrators, or even giving us a ride to somewhere safe. The only other time I called 911 because a woman collapsed on the street in front of me. She was bleeding from the head and making a scary-looking pool of blood. It took 45min for an ambulance to show up, in downtown San Francisco, around noon on a weekend day (no traffic). The authorities are entirely useless and unreliable. It's almost as if the article is equating less crime being prosecuted as less crime existing. There's a big issue with that. I feel like we need much tougher police that actually prevents and prosecutes all types of crime, including rampant petty theft, car break-ins, muggings, shootings (which are common), harassment by deranged drug-addicts all over the streets, etc. etc.

ams6110 8y ago
Preventing that kind of street crime requires Guilani-style "stop and frisk" police work that I would guess most people in San Francisco would not tolerate for a day.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  When NYPD did a "work slowdown" and stopped "proactive policing" because they were mad about Eric Garner protests, major crimes went down: https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proactive-policing-crime-20170925-story.html https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - 8y ago

nickelcitymario 8y ago

In a different HN thread, people were discussing how racially diverse California has become, largely due to the tech industry. I wonder if that could have anything to do with it? As youth see more and more people who look like them find success, maybe they're less inclined to turn to a career in crime? (Pure speculation here. I'm not from the area.)

KorematsuFred 8y ago

That presentation has ended with a question that ends most of the discussion on anything related to California. "Why does California spend so much ?"

rusabd 8y ago

this quote caught my eyes: ``In San Francisco, said Gascón, prosecutors moved away from incarcerating children for low-level offenses like truancy or petty theft as research showed that even one stint in juvenile hall led to a higher likelihood of recidivism.`` This effect was known from the beginning of the traditional prison system. Here is the quote from "Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault: ``. And, just as the project of a corrective technique accompanied the principle of punitive detention, the critique of the prison and its methods appeared very early on, in those same years 1820-45; indeed, it was embodied in a number of formulation which - figures apart - are today repeated almost unchanged: ... - Detention causes recidivism; those leaving prison have more chance than before of going back to itl convicts are, in a very high proportion, former inmates 38 per cent of those who left the maisons centrales were convicted again and 33 per cent of those sent to con-vict-ships (a figure given by G. de Rochefoucauld during the debate on the reform of the penal code, 2 December 1831 Archives parle-mentaires, LXXII, 209-10); between 1828 and 1834, out of almost 30,000 convicted of crime, about 7,400 were recidivists (that is,1 out of 4.7 of those convicted); out of over 200,000 correctionels, or petty offenders, almost 35,000 were also recidivists (1 out of 6);in all, one recidivist out of 5.8 of those convicted (Ducpdtiaux, 1837,276ff);in 1831, out of 2,174 of those condemned for recidivism, 350 had been in convict-ships, 1,682 in maisons cenffales, 142 in four maisons de correction that followed the same regime as the centrales (Ducp6tiaux, 1837, 276ff). And the diagnosis became even more severe during the July monarchy: in 1835, out of 7,223 convicted criminals, 1,486 were recidivists; in 1839, 1749 out of 7,858 '' Keep in mind, "Discipline and Punish" was published in 1975 which is whooping 44 years ago. P.S sorry for typos, scanned version of the book is not very good quality

ucaetano 8y ago

Damn millennials, ruining juvenile crime!

alanh 8y ago

Working in San Francisco and living in Oakland, I have to imagine that to a significant degree, it is not (just) that there is less crime, but that there are fewer arrests. I see crime every day — literally every day. My co-workers have been sent to the hospital by random street violence. I have not heard of any resulting arrests.

baby 8y ago
Oakland is pretty different from San Francisco though, it's on the list of highest number of crimes in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
- alanh 8y ago
  To be clear, I am saying that personally I see crime daily, whether I am in San Francisco or Oakland, and my co-workers have been sent to the hospital via attacks right in front of our offices on Market Street in San Francisco. I will also add that I rarely report crime. This is somewhat learned helplessness as I do not expect any results. For example, calling Oakland's non-emergency number has resulted in me eventually giving up after getting nothing but a busy signal over and over. I was attacked by one of San Francisco's street addicts, but as I did not suffer any serious injuries, I did not waste my time reporting it. (I regret this on principle as surely that person has attacked others and will continue to do so.) I also do not report the obvious dealers hanging out on corners by our offices because I know from following the local (Tenderloin) police force's Twitter account that even if they make the arrest, the dealer will be released within weeks (possibly hours or days; not sure) back onto the streets. It is common for them to arrest the same dealers three times in two-month periods. (And no, they aren’t pot dealers; they are arrested with meth, crack, heroin, and other hard drugs ready for sale.)
- alanh 8y ago
  Taking a look at the table in that Wikipedia page, you can notice that while Oakland has more violent crime per capital than SF, SF has more property crime per capita than Oakland. No wonder it can seem that the streets are paved with shattered auto glass.

chrisbrandow 8y ago

This trend is very real. My wife works with juvenile delinquents and a couple years ago remarked how surprising the change in occupancy in central juvenile hall in LA is. Entire units are just closed off now. This is happening all across the country. I still don’t see anything as compelling as the elemental lead hypothesis that Kevin Drum has been pushing for the last couple of years.

tropdrop 8y ago
Given that this trend is global, doesn't increased access to safe abortion make more sense than claims about lead specifically in the United States? In the US, the sharp reduction in crime happened 18-24 years after the legalization of Roe v. Wade. Unwanted children who would have been juvenile delinquents were simply never born. This would fit in nicely with the claims other commenters have made about some places that have had an increase in sexually violent crimes, since again, the children who would have been products of those encounters are never born, so the overall trend is still a decrease in violent crime. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...
- chrisbrandow 8y ago
  It’s not precisely global. Throughout the world it correlates best by far with the year that a given country, state, or region phased out leaded gasoline. I.e. declines did not start in same year in every country. They almost entirely began 18-30 years after phase-out of leaded gasoline.

mirimir 8y ago

Another GDPR hater, so: https://web.archive.org/web20190322023033/http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/vanishing-violence/ https://web.archive.org/web20190322023033/http://projects.sf... Edit: Except that all of the images are extremely low resolution. Maybe an archiving artifact?

mirimir 8y ago

TFA mentions some interesting possibilities. Reduced lead exposures. Increased prosecution of drug dealers who use minors as soldiers. And non-punitive management of nonviolent crime, leading to reduced recidivism. [Except maybe more broken vehicle windows :(] But maybe it's also the availability of recreational drugs from online dark markets. That'd be quite the trip, no?

DrScump 8y ago

Fewer arrests != Fewer crimes. When no arrest is made, the crime is not counted as committed by a juvenile.

tropdrop 8y ago

What about Steven Levitt's proposal that legalized abortion is the cause of suddenly vanishing juvenile crime, 20 years after Roe v. Wade? "Data indicates that crime in the United States started to decline in 1992. Donohue and Levitt suggest that the absence of unwanted children, following legalization in 1973, led to a reduction in crime 18 years later, starting in 1992 and dropping sharply in 1995. These would have been the peak crime-committing years of the unborn children... states that had abortion legalized earlier should have the earliest reductions in crime. Donohue and Levitt's study indicates that this indeed has happened: Alaska, California, Hawaii, New York, Oregon and Washington experienced steeper drops in crime, and had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_e...

DarkWiiPlayer 8y ago

"451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons" Annoying as that may be, it's nice to see that it was implemented using the proper HTTP Status code.