8 ms·

Why Is the U.S. Murder Rate Spiking?

19 points by undefined1 6y ago

ratsmack 6y ago
Just for reference: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/highest-murder-rate-cities-2019 https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/highest-murder-rate-c...
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  That is a poor reference. Basically a lesson in how to not analyze data. What it is doing is taking murders per capita of small areas (10,000 people) and comparing them to big cities with over a million people, thus it is dominated by random noise in the small areas. Do that over the whole nation and you create a noise collector rather than a "reference". This is why the list is led by small populations that have experienced an anomalous number of murders in the last year, rather than larger cities that tend to have more stable murders per capita. A second weakness is the inconsistency in city boundaries. Although many of these neighborhoods are indeed violent, it's not really fair to compare E St. Louis with LA or Chicago. An apples to apples comparison would be to compare E St. Louis with the worst neighborhoods of LA or Chicago, because E St. Louis is a small (and particularly blighted) portion of the overall St Louis MSA. To fix this, what the author should do is normalize the data before performing the division to get a per capita rate. There are two options: * fix the geography and collect data over several years, say a decade for the town with 10,000 people to at least get 100,000 as a minimum sample size. * look at the MSA rather than what are effectively neighborhoods in a given MSA. The second approach is much better because it gives you recency of data which also solves the problem of changing populations, and gives you more of an apple to apple comparison. But that means that rural areas will simply drop out. That's OK, if you want a general rural vs urban comparsion, you can do that by bucketing lots of rural locales into larger ones and then comparing.
Proven 6y ago
Isn't that obvious?
prepend 6y ago
I would like to see better research on this. My immediate instinct makes me think it’s due to less cops doing cop stuff, leading to fewer arrests, leading to more people out and about. Cops seem to be a sort of leviathan suppressing crime by being a tyrant that catches many innocents through false arrests, harassment, police shootings, etc. So if police are reforming and stop their activity the upside is that there’s a bit more justice, but downside is that oppression may result in more homicide. I think it’s a net positive to have more social justice with maybe more homicide. I also irrationally wonder if, like the previous drop in homicide being attributed to removal of atmospheric lead [0], maybe people are staying in their house more and there’s some soon to be discovered building material that’s making us more violent. People didn’t think lead in gasoline was that big of a deal, but I’m sure happy it’s no longer used. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
- nullserver 6y ago
  Article awhile back talked about how about 8% of the population avoids crimes only out of fear of punishment. Remove that fear and a significant segment of the population will go on a rampage.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    I'm not sure I can believe this. This implies that the only punishment available is that of the law enforcement. While society has a variety of methods under the umbrella of punishment such as shunning, 3rd-party intervention and such.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    It's incredibly easy to get away with crimes, as anyone who's been the victim of a crime will attest. The justice system is pretty selective in the crime that it cares to solve. The criteria for pursuit seems to be: is it profitable? did it happen to an important person? or was it perpetrated by a person who doesn't matter? The police will happily spend hours sitting on the side of the road writing traffic tickets, but if a group of guys kick your ass on the street, good luck getting them to do more than fill out some paper work. Even if there's solid evidence, they perps still need to be people the police are willing to go after. Also, in America, it's already the case that ~40% of homicides go unsolved. It's almost a coin toss whether you'd actually get away with it.
grillvogel 6y ago
lol so it was trumps fault and not millions of people collectively experiencing cabin fever for the past year
- undoware 6y ago
  I appreciate the suggestion that cabin fever makes you murderous, but I can't help but think that this is not a widespread psychological feature, and may mark a significant difference between yourself and others. Have you been assessed for psychopathy?
  - swiley 6y ago
    It's probably less "cabin fever" and more "my job is now illegal and I won't be allowed to live inside a few months from now."
  - stevenicr 6y ago
    I was going to chime in with a thought similar to gp(? P?) - I've witnessed a huge increase in all sorts of crime the past bit over a year and I'm sure it's a combination of factors, but I feel the primary factor is extra time on the hands. So very similar to what the initial comment said, not necessarily cabin fever aka all jack nicholson / the shining type.. so I did a G search and it says "Cabin fever refers to the distressing claustrophobic irritability or restlessness experienced when a person, or group, is stuck at an isolated location or in confined ..." - so maybe that's not the best term, of course it could be a factor. I've heard saying like 'idle hands are the devils plaything' and 'if you have a boy you have a full boy, and when you have 2 boys you have half a boy and when you have 3 boys you have not boy at all; - or something like that.. I think these things apply way more to the pandemic shutdowns/lockdowns more than anything else. I've seen some reports that child abuse is up because less school. I imagine that domestic abuse rises when people are at home more. Hundreds more people not at school or work in one apartment complex means many more people staring at packages being delivered, noticing when people come and go from work - more opportunity for ding-and-dash (which also chows lookouts who is not home) add to that people stuck at home in some cases very crowded and uncomfortable home and want to be out, and there is not as much to do out there.. I'm sure tons of crimes have increased immensely and much of it unreported. I'm sure factors like pressure to de-police and stuff like that has influenced some, and all sorts of things are playing a part. I am guessing that a few people having time and choosing to go through cars is a small step towards murder - and it's likely that some of those petty crimes of boredom have only led to some increase in murders, but I would be that that's been a part of the murder increase. It's not necessary that a mental condition has resulted of cabin lockdown to still consider that telling lots of people to stay indoors could certainly be a primary factor in the increase of all sorts of crimes including murder. I would wager there are many couples out there that keep from killing each other because or work / school keeping them apart most hours of the week for another example.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawaysea 6y ago
This article is struggling and stretching to connect historical dots and speculate about potential causes, while ignoring the most likely causes, which are recent societal/political trends. As long as we’re exchanging opinions, to me it seems pretty clear that the increase in murders is coming off the revolving door of restorative justice over the last decade, which removes accountability for criminals, therefore inducing crime instead of deterring it. And of course we just spent an entire year demonizing all police officers and the entire practice for very rare unjust police/involved deaths, and in the process enacted arbitrary budget cuts to police departments. Look at what Mayor London Breed of SF just announced yesterday - redistributing $120m in taxpayers’ hard-earned money away from law enforcement and towards a slush fund for “black communities”, in one of the most crime-ridden and unsafe cities in the US (https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-plan-for-reinvesting-120-million-from-police-into-black-communities https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...). In other news, Minneapolis is re-funding their police department and no one’s talking about it: https://www.allsides.com/blog/minneapolis-voted-fund-police-why-isn-t-getting-more-coverage https://www.allsides.com/blog/minneapolis-voted-fund-police-...
- dmode 6y ago
  "Look at what Mayor London Breed of SF just announced yesterday - redistributing $120m in taxpayers’ hard-earned money away from law enforcement and towards a slush fund for “black communities”, in one of the most crime-ridden and unsafe cities in the US (https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...)." In the context of homicide, SF has one of the lowest homicides in the country, with 2019 being the lowest homicide rate in 60 years, and 2020 (post BLM) being very low. https://sfist.com/2020/01/01/san-francisco-homicide-count-2019/ https://sfist.com/2020/01/01/san-francisco-homicide-count-20...
mywittyname 6y ago
We are also seeing a huge rise in harassment, intimidation and other non-criminal precursors to violence. Especially towards Asian, Afro, and Hispanic people.
- tal8d 6y ago
  This looks like a familiar pattern, so familiar that there is a new vocabulary for it: "micro aggression". Has "manspreading" sufficiently killed that as a useful tool to the aggrieved? Also, if you are going to name all the ethnicities except one, that is going to be read as a pretty pointed statement itself. What up 907, Eskimo nation represent.
- motogpjimbo 6y ago
  By listing every race other than whites as the victims of this "harassment and intimidation", are you making some kind of oblique argument about who might be committing these acts? If so, perhaps you should have the courage to make your claim openly and not hide it behind sly language. In any event, what do you think the breakdown of murders by race looks like? I'm genuinely interested in who you think is committing the most murders in the US and against which groups of victims.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I'm merely referring to articles like this one [1]. The articles don't go into the race of the perpetrators, hence, I never bothered to call that out. I haven't seen one mentioning caucasians as a target for harassment due to COVID or "migrant caravans" in the USA, but if you find one, let me know. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/27/asian-hate-crimes-attacks-fueled-covid-19-racism-threaten-asians/4566376001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/27/asian-...
rufus_foreman 6y ago
>> the spike in our murder rate is more likely the product of something else entirely: political instability. The murder rate was declining both long term and in recent years, here is the annual homicide rate per 100,000 for the Trump years: 2016 5.4 2017 5.3 2018 5.0 2019 5.0 And in 2020, the rate was flat at the beginning of the year, even through the initial Covid lockdown. It only started spiking in June. And not just a spike, likely the largest increase in the homicide rate in US history. The author, by ruling out the protests as a cause of the increase in the number of people murdered, seems to make the implicit claim that protests can't cause political instability, that they can't decrease trust in government or "People’s faith in political institutions". But no evidence is presented for this implicit claim. There was so much focus on police killings last year that it seems to have cause people to be misinformed. In one survey, 44% of liberals and 20% of conservatives estimated the number of unarmed blacks killed each year by police to be over 1,000. That's two orders of magnitude higher than the actual number. How can that not have an effect on people's views of "the legitimacy of political institutions"? In any event, if you are going to make the case that "x" caused the massive recent spike in murder, you need to explain why "x" had an unprecedented spike starting in June of last year.
- elipsey 6y ago
  Six independent scholarly sources are cited within the first several paragraphs, whom the author claims arrived at similar conclusions. Your table doesn't include information prior to the current period of supposed political instability, so it does not contain enough information to identify a trend.
  - rufus_foreman 6y ago
    What period is "the current period of supposed political instability"?
    - elipsey 6y ago
      Good question! It seemed to me that we were discussing something like the last 4-5 years at minimum, because the author identified a prior and continuing decline in surveyed trust of government and institutions, with especially low reported trust during that period. So I would think it helpful to look at homicide rates over the last decade or so for context. If we think 538 is a reputable source, maybe we could try this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-up-but-still-far-below-its-1980-peak/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-... It seems like there was a gradual decline from a ~9.7/100,000 in 1990, to about ~4.8/100,000 in 2014, followed by a smaller but sharp uptick of about %9-%10, to 5.3/100,000 as of 2016. Edit: bad math.
rebelrexx858 6y ago
Didn't read article, can only assume it's because some of y'all won't wear masks.

19 points by undefined1 6y ago

Just for reference: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/highest-murder-rate-cities-2019 https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/highest-murder-rate-c...

rsj_hn 6y ago
That is a poor reference. Basically a lesson in how to not analyze data. What it is doing is taking murders per capita of small areas (10,000 people) and comparing them to big cities with over a million people, thus it is dominated by random noise in the small areas. Do that over the whole nation and you create a noise collector rather than a "reference". This is why the list is led by small populations that have experienced an anomalous number of murders in the last year, rather than larger cities that tend to have more stable murders per capita. A second weakness is the inconsistency in city boundaries. Although many of these neighborhoods are indeed violent, it's not really fair to compare E St. Louis with LA or Chicago. An apples to apples comparison would be to compare E St. Louis with the worst neighborhoods of LA or Chicago, because E St. Louis is a small (and particularly blighted) portion of the overall St Louis MSA. To fix this, what the author should do is normalize the data before performing the division to get a per capita rate. There are two options: * fix the geography and collect data over several years, say a decade for the town with 10,000 people to at least get 100,000 as a minimum sample size. * look at the MSA rather than what are effectively neighborhoods in a given MSA. The second approach is much better because it gives you recency of data which also solves the problem of changing populations, and gives you more of an apple to apple comparison. But that means that rural areas will simply drop out. That's OK, if you want a general rural vs urban comparsion, you can do that by bucketing lots of rural locales into larger ones and then comparing.

Proven 6y ago

Isn't that obvious?

prepend 6y ago

I would like to see better research on this. My immediate instinct makes me think it’s due to less cops doing cop stuff, leading to fewer arrests, leading to more people out and about. Cops seem to be a sort of leviathan suppressing crime by being a tyrant that catches many innocents through false arrests, harassment, police shootings, etc. So if police are reforming and stop their activity the upside is that there’s a bit more justice, but downside is that oppression may result in more homicide. I think it’s a net positive to have more social justice with maybe more homicide. I also irrationally wonder if, like the previous drop in homicide being attributed to removal of atmospheric lead [0], maybe people are staying in their house more and there’s some soon to be discovered building material that’s making us more violent. People didn’t think lead in gasoline was that big of a deal, but I’m sure happy it’s no longer used. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

nullserver 6y ago
Article awhile back talked about how about 8% of the population avoids crimes only out of fear of punishment. Remove that fear and a significant segment of the population will go on a rampage.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  I'm not sure I can believe this. This implies that the only punishment available is that of the law enforcement. While society has a variety of methods under the umbrella of punishment such as shunning, 3rd-party intervention and such.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  It's incredibly easy to get away with crimes, as anyone who's been the victim of a crime will attest. The justice system is pretty selective in the crime that it cares to solve. The criteria for pursuit seems to be: is it profitable? did it happen to an important person? or was it perpetrated by a person who doesn't matter? The police will happily spend hours sitting on the side of the road writing traffic tickets, but if a group of guys kick your ass on the street, good luck getting them to do more than fill out some paper work. Even if there's solid evidence, they perps still need to be people the police are willing to go after. Also, in America, it's already the case that ~40% of homicides go unsolved. It's almost a coin toss whether you'd actually get away with it.

grillvogel 6y ago

lol so it was trumps fault and not millions of people collectively experiencing cabin fever for the past year

undoware 6y ago
I appreciate the suggestion that cabin fever makes you murderous, but I can't help but think that this is not a widespread psychological feature, and may mark a significant difference between yourself and others. Have you been assessed for psychopathy?
- swiley 6y ago
  It's probably less "cabin fever" and more "my job is now illegal and I won't be allowed to live inside a few months from now."
- stevenicr 6y ago
  I was going to chime in with a thought similar to gp(? P?) - I've witnessed a huge increase in all sorts of crime the past bit over a year and I'm sure it's a combination of factors, but I feel the primary factor is extra time on the hands. So very similar to what the initial comment said, not necessarily cabin fever aka all jack nicholson / the shining type.. so I did a G search and it says "Cabin fever refers to the distressing claustrophobic irritability or restlessness experienced when a person, or group, is stuck at an isolated location or in confined ..." - so maybe that's not the best term, of course it could be a factor. I've heard saying like 'idle hands are the devils plaything' and 'if you have a boy you have a full boy, and when you have 2 boys you have half a boy and when you have 3 boys you have not boy at all; - or something like that.. I think these things apply way more to the pandemic shutdowns/lockdowns more than anything else. I've seen some reports that child abuse is up because less school. I imagine that domestic abuse rises when people are at home more. Hundreds more people not at school or work in one apartment complex means many more people staring at packages being delivered, noticing when people come and go from work - more opportunity for ding-and-dash (which also chows lookouts who is not home) add to that people stuck at home in some cases very crowded and uncomfortable home and want to be out, and there is not as much to do out there.. I'm sure tons of crimes have increased immensely and much of it unreported. I'm sure factors like pressure to de-police and stuff like that has influenced some, and all sorts of things are playing a part. I am guessing that a few people having time and choosing to go through cars is a small step towards murder - and it's likely that some of those petty crimes of boredom have only led to some increase in murders, but I would be that that's been a part of the murder increase. It's not necessary that a mental condition has resulted of cabin lockdown to still consider that telling lots of people to stay indoors could certainly be a primary factor in the increase of all sorts of crimes including murder. I would wager there are many couples out there that keep from killing each other because or work / school keeping them apart most hours of the week for another example.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawaysea 6y ago

This article is struggling and stretching to connect historical dots and speculate about potential causes, while ignoring the most likely causes, which are recent societal/political trends. As long as we’re exchanging opinions, to me it seems pretty clear that the increase in murders is coming off the revolving door of restorative justice over the last decade, which removes accountability for criminals, therefore inducing crime instead of deterring it. And of course we just spent an entire year demonizing all police officers and the entire practice for very rare unjust police/involved deaths, and in the process enacted arbitrary budget cuts to police departments. Look at what Mayor London Breed of SF just announced yesterday - redistributing $120m in taxpayers’ hard-earned money away from law enforcement and towards a slush fund for “black communities”, in one of the most crime-ridden and unsafe cities in the US (https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-plan-for-reinvesting-120-million-from-police-into-black-communities https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...). In other news, Minneapolis is re-funding their police department and no one’s talking about it: https://www.allsides.com/blog/minneapolis-voted-fund-police-why-isn-t-getting-more-coverage https://www.allsides.com/blog/minneapolis-voted-fund-police-...

dmode 6y ago
"Look at what Mayor London Breed of SF just announced yesterday - redistributing $120m in taxpayers’ hard-earned money away from law enforcement and towards a slush fund for “black communities”, in one of the most crime-ridden and unsafe cities in the US (https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl https://www.kqed.org/news/11862094/sf-mayor-breed-unveils-pl...)." In the context of homicide, SF has one of the lowest homicides in the country, with 2019 being the lowest homicide rate in 60 years, and 2020 (post BLM) being very low. https://sfist.com/2020/01/01/san-francisco-homicide-count-2019/ https://sfist.com/2020/01/01/san-francisco-homicide-count-20...

mywittyname 6y ago

We are also seeing a huge rise in harassment, intimidation and other non-criminal precursors to violence. Especially towards Asian, Afro, and Hispanic people.

tal8d 6y ago
This looks like a familiar pattern, so familiar that there is a new vocabulary for it: "micro aggression". Has "manspreading" sufficiently killed that as a useful tool to the aggrieved? Also, if you are going to name all the ethnicities except one, that is going to be read as a pretty pointed statement itself. What up 907, Eskimo nation represent.
motogpjimbo 6y ago
By listing every race other than whites as the victims of this "harassment and intimidation", are you making some kind of oblique argument about who might be committing these acts? If so, perhaps you should have the courage to make your claim openly and not hide it behind sly language. In any event, what do you think the breakdown of murders by race looks like? I'm genuinely interested in who you think is committing the most murders in the US and against which groups of victims.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I'm merely referring to articles like this one [1]. The articles don't go into the race of the perpetrators, hence, I never bothered to call that out. I haven't seen one mentioning caucasians as a target for harassment due to COVID or "migrant caravans" in the USA, but if you find one, let me know. [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/27/asian-hate-crimes-attacks-fueled-covid-19-racism-threaten-asians/4566376001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/27/asian-...

rufus_foreman 6y ago

>> the spike in our murder rate is more likely the product of something else entirely: political instability. The murder rate was declining both long term and in recent years, here is the annual homicide rate per 100,000 for the Trump years: 2016 5.4 2017 5.3 2018 5.0 2019 5.0 And in 2020, the rate was flat at the beginning of the year, even through the initial Covid lockdown. It only started spiking in June. And not just a spike, likely the largest increase in the homicide rate in US history. The author, by ruling out the protests as a cause of the increase in the number of people murdered, seems to make the implicit claim that protests can't cause political instability, that they can't decrease trust in government or "People’s faith in political institutions". But no evidence is presented for this implicit claim. There was so much focus on police killings last year that it seems to have cause people to be misinformed. In one survey, 44% of liberals and 20% of conservatives estimated the number of unarmed blacks killed each year by police to be over 1,000. That's two orders of magnitude higher than the actual number. How can that not have an effect on people's views of "the legitimacy of political institutions"? In any event, if you are going to make the case that "x" caused the massive recent spike in murder, you need to explain why "x" had an unprecedented spike starting in June of last year.

elipsey 6y ago
Six independent scholarly sources are cited within the first several paragraphs, whom the author claims arrived at similar conclusions. Your table doesn't include information prior to the current period of supposed political instability, so it does not contain enough information to identify a trend.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  What period is "the current period of supposed political instability"?
  - elipsey 6y ago
    Good question! It seemed to me that we were discussing something like the last 4-5 years at minimum, because the author identified a prior and continuing decline in surveyed trust of government and institutions, with especially low reported trust during that period. So I would think it helpful to look at homicide rates over the last decade or so for context. If we think 538 is a reputable source, maybe we could try this: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-up-but-still-far-below-its-1980-peak/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-u-s-murder-rate-is-... It seems like there was a gradual decline from a ~9.7/100,000 in 1990, to about ~4.8/100,000 in 2014, followed by a smaller but sharp uptick of about %9-%10, to 5.3/100,000 as of 2016. Edit: bad math.

rebelrexx858 6y ago

Didn't read article, can only assume it's because some of y'all won't wear masks.