11 ms·

More people are getting away with murder

pfannkuchen 3y ago
Why does the lead photo prominently feature a “racism is a sin” sign and the article immediately mentions PoC victims in Oakland? Isn’t the vast majority of PoC victimhood in Oakland intraracial? Not many Klansmen walking around Oakland. Annoying race baiting from NPR.
- msrenee 3y ago
  That's presumably the sign outside the church of the pastor they interviewed. He puts up wooden crosses for each homicide. Makes sense if you've read the article.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Yes, I read the explanation. The actual explanation has no racial component. The sign, and NPR prominently featuring the sign, implies that the explanation does have a racial component, even though it does not. Hence my complaint.
    - msrenee 3y ago
      Oh, you asked why the sign was in the photo as though you thought it wasn't associated with the story in any way. It gives a little background context for the type of Catholic church whose pastor was interviewed. I don't know if you've spent much time in various Catholic congregations, but the sentiment that racism is bad is not echoed in a disturbing number of them. It's unfortunate that you are offended at the sign being used as a framing piece for the article.
- Bran_son 3y ago
  Is "race baiting" really a sufficiently specific description? How often does NPR/NYTimes/Washington Post/CNN/.. highlight the race of white victims, as opposed to PoC?
- tyingq 3y ago
  I would guess they are bringing up racism in the systemic sense. That relatively little resources are used to investigate those murders.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    Isn’t that like relabeling accidental deaths on public property as “systemic murder”, ignoring that the word “murder” connotes intent?
  - Bran_son 3y ago
    Perhaps a graph of police resources used by race, per capita, could substantiate that claim. Because the article doesn't even make the claim (except perhaps implicitly), let alone offer proof of it.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  The caption directly under the lead photo explains why it was chosen.
MattGaiser 3y ago
> But a murder can also be declared cleared through what's known as an "exceptional means." For example, if a suspect is dead, can't be extradited or prosecutors refuse to press charges. I don't see this as gaming the system. The police have done their job as far as it can be done. What do you want the cops to do in any of these cases? Are you accusing them of just stuffing random names into files?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  > Are you accusing them of just stuffing random names into files? Plenty of precedent for that.
0zemp2c 3y ago
Why limit this to unsolved murders? How many police depts ignore property crime? How many police depts have hour long wait times for 911 response? How many 911 systems routinely delay or drop calls? We had a story near here recently where a DUI accident investigation couldn't proceed because it took so long for police to arrive that the suspect sobered up enough Or the woman who was hit by a car and the police took over an hour to respond You can find these stories for every PD now That said, NPR should be more honest an retitle this story to be about Oakland though, because that is what they wrote about
- Benjammer 3y ago
  Just repeat after me: "We don't have the resources for that"
- aristus 3y ago
  It's pretty clear that cops are staging a slowdown strike. They are one of the few industries where they get more money when their KPIs go south.
  - prepend 3y ago
    I think pretty much all essential/monopoly/government industries get more money when kpis go south- health, education, sanitation, etc. Pretty much all essential services get more funding when kpis go south. And I think that’s usually because lack of resources make kpis go south. Take a great teacher with 20 kids in their class. Make the class size 40 and KPIs will go down. Does that teacher become bad?
    - aristus 3y ago
      Usually because of lack of resources, perhaps. But that's not what's happening here with cops. It's deliberate.
      - prepend 3y ago
        How can you tell the cops are deliberate and the teachers aren’t?
samwaltmanjr 3y ago
How about “more murders are being discovered” than before. In old times, you could’ve done killed someone and blame it on anything.
- webkike 3y ago
  That wouldn’t affect the clearance rate
- Zigurd 3y ago
  One reason why murder is a widely cited stat for police effectiveness is that it is harder to falsify the top line number. But as others have pointed out it's not impervious to being gamed.
- arp242 3y ago
  A few thousand or even a few hundred years ago: sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQjT3z0ti6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQjT3z0ti6U But not 20 or 50 years ago.
mynameishere 3y ago
[flagged]
- ehzy 3y ago
  The availability of guns is new starting in 2020? What changed?
  - rhaway84773 3y ago
    The number of guns increased dramatically over the pandemic.
  - Dig1t 3y ago
    I think OP was being sarcastic.
- bbddg 3y ago
  Which cities actually have lowered their police budgets since 2020?
  - kibwen 3y ago
    This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Despite the "defined the police" bogeyman, it seems as though the police budgets of every city have done nothing but increase every year.
- jbullock35 3y ago
  > paragraph #1 would mention the "Defund the police" movement that the entire media has been vigorously pushing The entire media? Vigorously pushing? Citations would help here.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Yeah, that's bullshit unless I guess you're in some very specific filter bubble. I'm pretty left on the spectrum and I didn't see the media "pushing" it. They've reported it because that's what was going on at the time. Maybe people confuse the two.
angarg12 3y ago
It always struck me as ironic that "the perfect murder" is such a big trope in fiction, while in real life an astonishing number of them go unsolved.
- hawski 3y ago
  I think most (or at least significant portion of) perfect murders from fiction are murders of someone significant or the motive seems to be evident.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I agree. And in real life, when the deceased is at least somewhat known, and there is a clear motive, a suspect is usually identified. When a nobody is gunned down on a dark street corner in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason, and nobody in the area will talk to the cops, there isn't much that will lead to any suspects.
privatedan 3y ago
Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational conclusions, biases, logical fallacies. We ended up as a hung jury. I was in the minority opinion and we let the offending party ( again in my opinion ) walk.
- version_five 3y ago
  Your anecdote sounds like an example of the system working to me. I'm absolutely sure your assessment is correct: I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide People as a rule are horrible at logical thinking. But that's absolutely the right side to err on. Much better for twelve people to have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Put another way, it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives, so I'm happy to hear anecdotes where it's seemingly biased this way.
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    People "not being logical" renders their decisions random. Or biased in case, some common cause for such biased thinking is present. Like prejudice towards skin colors, poverty or whatever. The former case results in GP's tie, the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for. People are horrible at logical thinking.
    - nostrademons 3y ago
      Not necessarily. People "not being logical" might simply mean that their decisions are emotional. Emotions are not logical, but that does not make them random or wrong. There are still reasons for emotions, and frequently there's a large degree of truth to them as well. They often do exemplify bias, but that's why there's more than 1 person on the jury, and why attorneys are allowed to disqualify jurors, and why a good attorney will try to get a jury panel that is at least representative of the population if not favorably inclined to her client.
everdrive 3y ago
The comment section here is in poor shape. Violent crime is up all over the united states, and at least from what I've seen, there is not a single easy explanation for why. ie, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that "de-fund the police" has had very negative effects, however we're seeing violent crime rise in districts which were not de-funded. The whole red vs. blue states / cities thing doesn't seem to stack up either, as violent crime appears to be up just about everywhere.
- suncherta 3y ago
  Does it rise less or the same in the districts that were not de-funded?
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Not according to stats: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c... Totals are not up, and "red states" are much more violent. As you observe, police funding has about zero effect on crime.
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  As NPR is the source of this story and I’m too lazy to look up actual statistics… They had a story a week or so ago about how all crime is up and speculated that the police are less likely to interact with the public because they’re afraid the encounter will escalate and they will end up getting prosecuted for doing their job. Think they even had an “expert” to back their claim. So what you get is police who won’t do their job out of fear of retaliation and people seeing there are no consequences for their actions just doing whatever they want. And, of course, the current narrative is the police are “silent quitting” in protest because who else are they going to blame?
  - Zigurd 3y ago
    Low solution rates are nothing new. So is the lack of causality between police funding, crime, and police effectiveness. TBF another poster pointed out that hiring more detectives is effective, and that's plausible. It's too bad nobody has the political will to get rid of and rebuild whole PDs. That's what it will take to get rid of bad cops.
misiti3780 3y ago
If you want to solve more violent crimes, you need to hire more detectives. Here is an article that references all of the data: https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-really-boring-way-to-solve-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-really-boring-way-to-solve-mo...
aborsy 3y ago
You should take care of yourself. If you are in a vehicle or crime accident, good luck with justice. How do you want to prove anything? I have seen it in the case of accidents. If there is no well portioned camera, you can’t say much. Even if there is one, it can still be difficult to prove someone’s fault. In most cases the evidence is weak. And if you succeed, there could be some hurdles for the other side but nothing will replace your health.
bertil 3y ago
That article doesn’t mention any number, and I was curious how that compared to suicides and road deaths. There are 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people, so about 26k per year. That’s staggering. There were 46,412 suicides among adults in 2021. 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016. Finally, in 2021, a record 106,699 lives were lost to overdoses.
- gregraygun 3y ago
  Thanks, makes you really think. No, I don't want to have people getting away with murder, but these numbers tell a lot. I wonder what the 'more getting away with murder' numbers look like if we start comparing to population increases rather than just last years numbers?
- George83728 3y ago
  > 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016. Fatal collisions are more likely to disable the perpetrator and/or their vehicle, rendering them unable to hit-and-run even if they were so inclined. If this is true then I expect hit-and-run to be more common in fatal car-vs-pedestrian crashes than for fatal car-vs-car crashes.
rileymat2 3y ago
One thing is kind of unclear to me, are we segregating by murder type? For example (not sure if true): It would seem a drop in easier to identity domestic violence murders would throw stats off for the others that were always hard to solve. My googling is failing on getting the mix of murders by type by year.
- George83728 3y ago
  https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/relationship-murder-victims-alleged-offenders-2021 https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/relationship-murder... > Relationship of Murder Victims to Alleged Offenders, 2021 > Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that one-third (34%) were killed by an intimate partner (figure 1). By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide. > Overall, three-quarters (76%) of female murders and more than half (56%) of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim. About 16% of female murder victims were killed by a nonintimate family member—parent, grandparent, sibling, in-law, and other family member—compared to 10% of male murder victims. > A larger percentage of males (21%) than females (12%) were murdered by a stranger. For 1 out of every 3 male murder victims and 1 out of every 5 female murder victims, the relationship between the victim and the offender was unknown.
  - rileymat2 3y ago
    Oh yes, I can find them for a snapshot, was looking for a graph of the mix of the types of homicide over years. A change in this mix could drastically affect clearance rates.
  - George83728 3y ago
    Incidentally you can play some interesting games with these numbers to present different narratives. For instance, the percentage of murdered men killed by their intimate partner was 6% while for women it was 34%, that's a huge difference. That's basically 5x as many! And that "five times higher" interpretation is emphasized at the top of the PDF as the alternate title. But if you instead ask, of the people who were murdered by an intimate partner, how many were women and how many were men? That breaks down to 61% vs 39%, still a substantial difference but far short of that evident "5x" from the other framing. Viewed that way, it's more like 1.5x. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
jdkee 3y ago
"While reasons behind the drop are multi-faceted, Cook and other experts warn that more people getting away with murder in the the U.S. is driving a kind of doom loop of mutual mistrust: low murder clearance rates impede future investigations which in turn potentially drive up killings in some communities where a lack of arrests undermines deterrence and sends a message that the police will not or cannot protect them." Interesting that the article mentions the sizable drop in clearance rates in 2020 yet does not offer up any explanation for why that may be the case.
- owyn 3y ago
  Police didn't like the "defund the police" movement (which was most active in 2020, so there's your temporal coincidence). The theory is that they are deliberately doing a bad job to make crime worse. Just be bad at your job and you'll get paid more because the low morale and understaffing means it's harder to hire and your overtime pay goes up so that's a win-win. In general no defunding actually happened anywhere. If you google around you'll find plenty of articles about that [0]. From the article: "local spending on police increased in 90 percent of locations since 2019." Anecdote, I've only talked to one former Oakland cop in person, but when he talked about his experience literally ALL he talked about was overtime and how to get more of it, and this was years before the pandemic. So it seems to be part of the institutional culture now. In Oakland, the police department is like 25% of the total city budget. Depending on the year and what you count as "budget" it can be closer to 40% of the general fund [1]. Either way, as a percentage their budget has actually gone UP significantly since 2019, mostly due to excessive overtime. It works "kind of" like a protection racket. Some back of the napkin math and the OPD budget is something like $500k per officer and $3.5 million per murder, which they don't prevent and barely bother trying to solve. I think a few million redirected to better mental health and homeless services would probably pay off. They have lots of new SUV's which they like to drive through residential neighborhoods really fast though. [0] https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12311750/ https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12... [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3Ou1LrUcAE67SZ?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3Ou1LrUcAE67SZ?format=jpg&name=...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
etempleton 3y ago
There are a number of factors at play here, one is certainly, as others have pointed out, that police are taking less initiative on the job due to low morale and their own form of quiet quitting. However another major issue is that people are not talking to police like the used to. People do not trust police with information and more so they do not trust police to protect them. Volunteering information on a murderer is dangerous you have to trust the system can protect you. And finally, murder clearance rates were focused on in the 90s and sometimes that led to closing cases early or other bad practices to increase superficial metrics.

Why does the lead photo prominently feature a “racism is a sin” sign and the article immediately mentions PoC victims in Oakland? Isn’t the vast majority of PoC victimhood in Oakland intraracial? Not many Klansmen walking around Oakland. Annoying race baiting from NPR.

msrenee 3y ago
That's presumably the sign outside the church of the pastor they interviewed. He puts up wooden crosses for each homicide. Makes sense if you've read the article.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Yes, I read the explanation. The actual explanation has no racial component. The sign, and NPR prominently featuring the sign, implies that the explanation does have a racial component, even though it does not. Hence my complaint.
  - msrenee 3y ago
    Oh, you asked why the sign was in the photo as though you thought it wasn't associated with the story in any way. It gives a little background context for the type of Catholic church whose pastor was interviewed. I don't know if you've spent much time in various Catholic congregations, but the sentiment that racism is bad is not echoed in a disturbing number of them. It's unfortunate that you are offended at the sign being used as a framing piece for the article.
Bran_son 3y ago
Is "race baiting" really a sufficiently specific description? How often does NPR/NYTimes/Washington Post/CNN/.. highlight the race of white victims, as opposed to PoC?
tyingq 3y ago
I would guess they are bringing up racism in the systemic sense. That relatively little resources are used to investigate those murders.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Isn’t that like relabeling accidental deaths on public property as “systemic murder”, ignoring that the word “murder” connotes intent?
- Bran_son 3y ago
  Perhaps a graph of police resources used by race, per capita, could substantiate that claim. Because the article doesn't even make the claim (except perhaps implicitly), let alone offer proof of it.
woodruffw 3y ago
The caption directly under the lead photo explains why it was chosen.

MattGaiser 3y ago

> But a murder can also be declared cleared through what's known as an "exceptional means." For example, if a suspect is dead, can't be extradited or prosecutors refuse to press charges. I don't see this as gaming the system. The police have done their job as far as it can be done. What do you want the cops to do in any of these cases? Are you accusing them of just stuffing random names into files?

ceejayoz 3y ago
> Are you accusing them of just stuffing random names into files? Plenty of precedent for that.

0zemp2c 3y ago

Why limit this to unsolved murders? How many police depts ignore property crime? How many police depts have hour long wait times for 911 response? How many 911 systems routinely delay or drop calls? We had a story near here recently where a DUI accident investigation couldn't proceed because it took so long for police to arrive that the suspect sobered up enough Or the woman who was hit by a car and the police took over an hour to respond You can find these stories for every PD now That said, NPR should be more honest an retitle this story to be about Oakland though, because that is what they wrote about

Benjammer 3y ago
Just repeat after me: "We don't have the resources for that"
aristus 3y ago
It's pretty clear that cops are staging a slowdown strike. They are one of the few industries where they get more money when their KPIs go south.
- prepend 3y ago
  I think pretty much all essential/monopoly/government industries get more money when kpis go south- health, education, sanitation, etc. Pretty much all essential services get more funding when kpis go south. And I think that’s usually because lack of resources make kpis go south. Take a great teacher with 20 kids in their class. Make the class size 40 and KPIs will go down. Does that teacher become bad?
  - aristus 3y ago
    Usually because of lack of resources, perhaps. But that's not what's happening here with cops. It's deliberate.
    - prepend 3y ago
      How can you tell the cops are deliberate and the teachers aren’t?

samwaltmanjr 3y ago

How about “more murders are being discovered” than before. In old times, you could’ve done killed someone and blame it on anything.

webkike 3y ago
That wouldn’t affect the clearance rate
Zigurd 3y ago
One reason why murder is a widely cited stat for police effectiveness is that it is harder to falsify the top line number. But as others have pointed out it's not impervious to being gamed.
arp242 3y ago
A few thousand or even a few hundred years ago: sure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQjT3z0ti6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQjT3z0ti6U But not 20 or 50 years ago.

mynameishere 3y ago

[flagged]

ehzy 3y ago
The availability of guns is new starting in 2020? What changed?
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  The number of guns increased dramatically over the pandemic.
- Dig1t 3y ago
  I think OP was being sarcastic.
bbddg 3y ago
Which cities actually have lowered their police budgets since 2020?
- kibwen 3y ago
  This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Despite the "defined the police" bogeyman, it seems as though the police budgets of every city have done nothing but increase every year.
jbullock35 3y ago
> paragraph #1 would mention the "Defund the police" movement that the entire media has been vigorously pushing The entire media? Vigorously pushing? Citations would help here.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  Yeah, that's bullshit unless I guess you're in some very specific filter bubble. I'm pretty left on the spectrum and I didn't see the media "pushing" it. They've reported it because that's what was going on at the time. Maybe people confuse the two.

angarg12 3y ago

It always struck me as ironic that "the perfect murder" is such a big trope in fiction, while in real life an astonishing number of them go unsolved.

hawski 3y ago
I think most (or at least significant portion of) perfect murders from fiction are murders of someone significant or the motive seems to be evident.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I agree. And in real life, when the deceased is at least somewhat known, and there is a clear motive, a suspect is usually identified. When a nobody is gunned down on a dark street corner in the middle of the night, for no apparent reason, and nobody in the area will talk to the cops, there isn't much that will lead to any suspects.

privatedan 3y ago

Was on a jury for a murder trial dec 2021. The trial gave me a new found respect for how trials are conducted, what evidence is allowed in, how defendants are protected, and the general thought and reasoning behind it all. Then, the jury deliberated and I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide. It was an absolute shit show in false pretenses, irrational conclusions, biases, logical fallacies. We ended up as a hung jury. I was in the minority opinion and we let the offending party ( again in my opinion ) walk.

version_five 3y ago
Your anecdote sounds like an example of the system working to me. I'm absolutely sure your assessment is correct: I lost a ton of respect for the ability of a jury of my peers to logically reason and responsibly decide People as a rule are horrible at logical thinking. But that's absolutely the right side to err on. Much better for twelve people to have to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt. Put another way, it's way more important for the justice system to minimize false positives (wrongful convictions) than false negatives, so I'm happy to hear anecdotes where it's seemingly biased this way.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  People "not being logical" renders their decisions random. Or biased in case, some common cause for such biased thinking is present. Like prejudice towards skin colors, poverty or whatever. The former case results in GP's tie, the latter in the absurdly skewed prison population the US is known for. People are horrible at logical thinking.
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    Not necessarily. People "not being logical" might simply mean that their decisions are emotional. Emotions are not logical, but that does not make them random or wrong. There are still reasons for emotions, and frequently there's a large degree of truth to them as well. They often do exemplify bias, but that's why there's more than 1 person on the jury, and why attorneys are allowed to disqualify jurors, and why a good attorney will try to get a jury panel that is at least representative of the population if not favorably inclined to her client.

everdrive 3y ago

The comment section here is in poor shape. Violent crime is up all over the united states, and at least from what I've seen, there is not a single easy explanation for why. ie, I'm very sympathetic to the argument that "de-fund the police" has had very negative effects, however we're seeing violent crime rise in districts which were not de-funded. The whole red vs. blue states / cities thing doesn't seem to stack up either, as violent crime appears to be up just about everywhere.

suncherta 3y ago
Does it rise less or the same in the districts that were not de-funded?
Zigurd 3y ago
Not according to stats: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-crime-is-a-key-midterm-voting-issue-but-what-does-the-data-say/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/31/violent-c... Totals are not up, and "red states" are much more violent. As you observe, police funding has about zero effect on crime.
UncleEntity 3y ago
As NPR is the source of this story and I’m too lazy to look up actual statistics… They had a story a week or so ago about how all crime is up and speculated that the police are less likely to interact with the public because they’re afraid the encounter will escalate and they will end up getting prosecuted for doing their job. Think they even had an “expert” to back their claim. So what you get is police who won’t do their job out of fear of retaliation and people seeing there are no consequences for their actions just doing whatever they want. And, of course, the current narrative is the police are “silent quitting” in protest because who else are they going to blame?
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Low solution rates are nothing new. So is the lack of causality between police funding, crime, and police effectiveness. TBF another poster pointed out that hiring more detectives is effective, and that's plausible. It's too bad nobody has the political will to get rid of and rebuild whole PDs. That's what it will take to get rid of bad cops.

misiti3780 3y ago

If you want to solve more violent crimes, you need to hire more detectives. Here is an article that references all of the data: https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-really-boring-way-to-solve-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-really-boring-way-to-solve-mo...

aborsy 3y ago

You should take care of yourself. If you are in a vehicle or crime accident, good luck with justice. How do you want to prove anything? I have seen it in the case of accidents. If there is no well portioned camera, you can’t say much. Even if there is one, it can still be difficult to prove someone’s fault. In most cases the evidence is weak. And if you succeed, there could be some hurdles for the other side but nothing will replace your health.

bertil 3y ago

That article doesn’t mention any number, and I was curious how that compared to suicides and road deaths. There are 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people, so about 26k per year. That’s staggering. There were 46,412 suicides among adults in 2021. 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016. Finally, in 2021, a record 106,699 lives were lost to overdoses.

gregraygun 3y ago
Thanks, makes you really think. No, I don't want to have people getting away with murder, but these numbers tell a lot. I wonder what the 'more getting away with murder' numbers look like if we start comparing to population increases rather than just last years numbers?
George83728 3y ago
> 37,461 people were killed on the roads. Given how frequent are hit-and-runs with accidents, I expected it to be more common in deadly situations, but it seems to be the opposite: 2,049 fatalities that resulted from hit-and-run crashes in 2016. Fatal collisions are more likely to disable the perpetrator and/or their vehicle, rendering them unable to hit-and-run even if they were so inclined. If this is true then I expect hit-and-run to be more common in fatal car-vs-pedestrian crashes than for fatal car-vs-car crashes.

rileymat2 3y ago

One thing is kind of unclear to me, are we segregating by murder type? For example (not sure if true): It would seem a drop in easier to identity domestic violence murders would throw stats off for the others that were always hard to solve. My googling is failing on getting the mix of murders by type by year.

George83728 3y ago
https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/relationship-murder-victims-alleged-offenders-2021 https://www.ojp.gov/library/publications/relationship-murder... > Relationship of Murder Victims to Alleged Offenders, 2021 > Of the estimated 4,970 female victims of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2021, data reported by law enforcement agencies indicate that one-third (34%) were killed by an intimate partner (figure 1). By comparison, about 6% of the 17,970 males murdered that year were victims of intimate partner homicide. > Overall, three-quarters (76%) of female murders and more than half (56%) of male murders were perpetrated by someone known to the victim. About 16% of female murder victims were killed by a nonintimate family member—parent, grandparent, sibling, in-law, and other family member—compared to 10% of male murder victims. > A larger percentage of males (21%) than females (12%) were murdered by a stranger. For 1 out of every 3 male murder victims and 1 out of every 5 female murder victims, the relationship between the victim and the offender was unknown.
- rileymat2 3y ago
  Oh yes, I can find them for a snapshot, was looking for a graph of the mix of the types of homicide over years. A change in this mix could drastically affect clearance rates.
- George83728 3y ago
  Incidentally you can play some interesting games with these numbers to present different narratives. For instance, the percentage of murdered men killed by their intimate partner was 6% while for women it was 34%, that's a huge difference. That's basically 5x as many! And that "five times higher" interpretation is emphasized at the top of the PDF as the alternate title. But if you instead ask, of the people who were murdered by an intimate partner, how many were women and how many were men? That breaks down to 61% vs 39%, still a substantial difference but far short of that evident "5x" from the other framing. Viewed that way, it's more like 1.5x. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

jdkee 3y ago

"While reasons behind the drop are multi-faceted, Cook and other experts warn that more people getting away with murder in the the U.S. is driving a kind of doom loop of mutual mistrust: low murder clearance rates impede future investigations which in turn potentially drive up killings in some communities where a lack of arrests undermines deterrence and sends a message that the police will not or cannot protect them." Interesting that the article mentions the sizable drop in clearance rates in 2020 yet does not offer up any explanation for why that may be the case.

owyn 3y ago
Police didn't like the "defund the police" movement (which was most active in 2020, so there's your temporal coincidence). The theory is that they are deliberately doing a bad job to make crime worse. Just be bad at your job and you'll get paid more because the low morale and understaffing means it's harder to hire and your overtime pay goes up so that's a win-win. In general no defunding actually happened anywhere. If you google around you'll find plenty of articles about that [0]. From the article: "local spending on police increased in 90 percent of locations since 2019." Anecdote, I've only talked to one former Oakland cop in person, but when he talked about his experience literally ALL he talked about was overtime and how to get more of it, and this was years before the pandemic. So it seems to be part of the institutional culture now. In Oakland, the police department is like 25% of the total city budget. Depending on the year and what you count as "budget" it can be closer to 40% of the general fund [1]. Either way, as a percentage their budget has actually gone UP significantly since 2019, mostly due to excessive overtime. It works "kind of" like a protection racket. Some back of the napkin math and the OPD budget is something like $500k per officer and $3.5 million per murder, which they don't prevent and barely bother trying to solve. I think a few million redirected to better mental health and homeless services would probably pay off. They have lots of new SUV's which they like to drive through residential neighborhoods really fast though. [0] https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12311750/ https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12... [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3Ou1LrUcAE67SZ?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3Ou1LrUcAE67SZ?format=jpg&name=...

deleted 3y ago

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etempleton 3y ago

There are a number of factors at play here, one is certainly, as others have pointed out, that police are taking less initiative on the job due to low morale and their own form of quiet quitting. However another major issue is that people are not talking to police like the used to. People do not trust police with information and more so they do not trust police to protect them. Volunteering information on a murderer is dangerous you have to trust the system can protect you. And finally, murder clearance rates were focused on in the 90s and sometimes that led to closing cases early or other bad practices to increase superficial metrics.