5 ms·

How happy should we be if people in-mass give up on the police and light property crime increases by 1000%, reports of such are eliminated, but car theft stays

How happy should we be if people in-mass give up on the police and light property crime increases by 1000%, reports of such are eliminated, but car theft stays constant and the overall numbers decrease? That is the direction we are headed.

gavinray 3y ago
This is wholly irrelevant and I don't want to "uhm, ackshually" here but just fyi it's "en masse" though everyone knows what you mean
Retric 3y ago
Car theft, arson, etc are down dramatically not just flat. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-vehicle-theft-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-ve... Motor vehicle theft per 100k people 1990: 657 vs 2021: 268. That’s a 60% drop, even with the recent spike. Which is why you always hear crime rates compared across short periods, they wouldn’t seem bad by historic standards. Your proposal around light property crime is simply wrong. You don’t need to trust police statistics for validation pickpockets used to be endemic in NYC to the point where people chained their wallets to their pants. Things have fallen so far we see cultural norms changing. That isn’t to say every city or every year sees an improvement but the long term trends are really clear. Granted the existence of cellphones means they get stolen, but that’s more than offset by car radio theft practically disappearing.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Beware of cherry picked data. It's not statista doing it, but whoever they sourced their data from choosing to start at 1990. Here [1] are the same data (from the FBI) from 1960, instead of 1990. 1990 was not a historical rate, but the result of an exceptionally sharp spike in crime that began in 1960. In 1960 motor vehicle theft rates were 183. The statista table (which goes until 2021 instead of 2019 from my source) shows today they're at 268 and trending upwards. I really wish I could find data prior to 1960, but I guess you probably end up with a poor signal:noise ratio at some point. Those data are all from the same source, so have meaningful comparability. In any case, the long term trends are anything but clear. Crime rates currently look something like an eccentric sine wave. People in 200 years sure will have it easier, data wise. [1] - https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
  - Retric 3y ago
    Obviously the rate was 0 in 1850 because cars didn’t exist. You need a steady state of car ownership for theft comparisons by population to make sense. More recently the number of cellphone thefts spiked as more people owned cellphones, its true but not an accurate reflection of overall crime. Historically you can do numbers of thefts vs numbers of cars but that’s not a great. There was 61.7m passenger cars + 12.7m commercials vehicles in the 1960’s vs 140.7m passenger cars + 42.8m commercials vehicles by 1988. An increase dramatically faster than population. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246890/vehicles-use-united-states-historical/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246890/vehicles-use-uni... From 1990, the numbers increase roughly with population which is why many comparisons start in 1990: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... 328,200 / (61.7m + 12.7m) = 0.44% of vehicles stolen in 1960. 1,635,900 / 193.1m = 0.85% in 1990 is a big jump. But that then falls all the way to 2019’s 721,885 / 276.5m = 0.26% in 2019 sitting just over half of 1960’s rates. PS: It’s perfectly reasonably to argue that what matters is rate over the population, but including non owners in the population is IMO misleading.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      By 1960 the overwhelming majority of households in America already had cars. Increasing number of cars beyond that (to modern times where many households have 2 or even more cars) is unlikely to have played a significant role. This is indirectly corroborated by the fact that near to every other form of crime was much lower in 1960 than modern times, as well. The two exceptions being burglary, whose levels we fell below and have stayed below since 2014 (well at least as of 2019 data), and murder which was just statistical noise. Historically what happened is that crime started rising in the mid 60s and then reached catastrophic levels in 80s-90s to the point that many were predicting the complete collapse of society. This is what drove all of the 'tough on crime' rhetoric and legislation of that era, or a certain politician's choice of referring to a certain demographic group as 'super-predators.' Crime rates then began plummeting over the next 30 years into modern times. And now we're back to seeing a rise in many forms of crime. What remains to be seen is whether it's noise, or whether we're headed 'into the 80s' again. Or maybe 30 years from now we'll learn that we've all poisoned ourselves inadvertently, again.. The lead-crime hypothesis [1] is one explanation for the absurdly high rates of crime in the 80s-90s, and then it's subsequent collapse. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
ncallaway 3y ago
If you asked me if I would prefer a decrease in violent crime and major property theft if it came with an increase in non-violent light property crime, then I'd say "yes, sounds great".

gavinray 3y ago

This is wholly irrelevant and I don't want to "uhm, ackshually" here but just fyi it's "en masse" though everyone knows what you mean

Retric 3y ago

Car theft, arson, etc are down dramatically not just flat. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-vehicle-theft-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-ve... Motor vehicle theft per 100k people 1990: 657 vs 2021: 268. That’s a 60% drop, even with the recent spike. Which is why you always hear crime rates compared across short periods, they wouldn’t seem bad by historic standards. Your proposal around light property crime is simply wrong. You don’t need to trust police statistics for validation pickpockets used to be endemic in NYC to the point where people chained their wallets to their pants. Things have fallen so far we see cultural norms changing. That isn’t to say every city or every year sees an improvement but the long term trends are really clear. Granted the existence of cellphones means they get stolen, but that’s more than offset by car radio theft practically disappearing.

somenameforme 3y ago
Beware of cherry picked data. It's not statista doing it, but whoever they sourced their data from choosing to start at 1990. Here [1] are the same data (from the FBI) from 1960, instead of 1990. 1990 was not a historical rate, but the result of an exceptionally sharp spike in crime that began in 1960. In 1960 motor vehicle theft rates were 183. The statista table (which goes until 2021 instead of 2019 from my source) shows today they're at 268 and trending upwards. I really wish I could find data prior to 1960, but I guess you probably end up with a poor signal:noise ratio at some point. Those data are all from the same source, so have meaningful comparability. In any case, the long term trends are anything but clear. Crime rates currently look something like an eccentric sine wave. People in 200 years sure will have it easier, data wise. [1] - https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
- Retric 3y ago
  Obviously the rate was 0 in 1850 because cars didn’t exist. You need a steady state of car ownership for theft comparisons by population to make sense. More recently the number of cellphone thefts spiked as more people owned cellphones, its true but not an accurate reflection of overall crime. Historically you can do numbers of thefts vs numbers of cars but that’s not a great. There was 61.7m passenger cars + 12.7m commercials vehicles in the 1960’s vs 140.7m passenger cars + 42.8m commercials vehicles by 1988. An increase dramatically faster than population. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246890/vehicles-use-united-states-historical/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1246890/vehicles-use-uni... From 1990, the numbers increase roughly with population which is why many comparisons start in 1990: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicles-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183505/number-of-vehicle... 328,200 / (61.7m + 12.7m) = 0.44% of vehicles stolen in 1960. 1,635,900 / 193.1m = 0.85% in 1990 is a big jump. But that then falls all the way to 2019’s 721,885 / 276.5m = 0.26% in 2019 sitting just over half of 1960’s rates. PS: It’s perfectly reasonably to argue that what matters is rate over the population, but including non owners in the population is IMO misleading.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    By 1960 the overwhelming majority of households in America already had cars. Increasing number of cars beyond that (to modern times where many households have 2 or even more cars) is unlikely to have played a significant role. This is indirectly corroborated by the fact that near to every other form of crime was much lower in 1960 than modern times, as well. The two exceptions being burglary, whose levels we fell below and have stayed below since 2014 (well at least as of 2019 data), and murder which was just statistical noise. Historically what happened is that crime started rising in the mid 60s and then reached catastrophic levels in 80s-90s to the point that many were predicting the complete collapse of society. This is what drove all of the 'tough on crime' rhetoric and legislation of that era, or a certain politician's choice of referring to a certain demographic group as 'super-predators.' Crime rates then began plummeting over the next 30 years into modern times. And now we're back to seeing a rise in many forms of crime. What remains to be seen is whether it's noise, or whether we're headed 'into the 80s' again. Or maybe 30 years from now we'll learn that we've all poisoned ourselves inadvertently, again.. The lead-crime hypothesis [1] is one explanation for the absurdly high rates of crime in the 80s-90s, and then it's subsequent collapse. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis

ncallaway 3y ago

If you asked me if I would prefer a decrease in violent crime and major property theft if it came with an increase in non-violent light property crime, then I'd say "yes, sounds great".