4 ms·

Reducing late-night alcohol sales curbed all violent crimes by 23% in Baltimore

49 points by geox 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
whiplash451 3y ago
How much of the « disappeared » criminality simply moved to the next town?
- janalsncm 3y ago
  Apparently none of it? In the control cities there was no change in violent crime after the law went into effect.
  - kazinator 3y ago
    Do you have access to the full text? This summary of the study doesn't detail which neighborhoods were subject to the change and which are control areas. You'd hope they are adjacent.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  Not even the next town as the experiment was conducted on one neighborhood and compared to a 'control' neighborhood. Not too sure how I feel about them using laws to conduct experiments as people supposedly have equal protection under the law. I also wonder how the business owners feel about this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
davidguetta 3y ago
Awesome but it should be divided by 10, not 1.23
janalsncm 3y ago
It would be really interesting if laws worked like this. If violent crime is too high, alcohol sales are shortened by an hour. This continues until violent crime is low. Same thing with drunk driving. In fact, bars need to have some culpability as well if a lot of their patrons are causing destruction. Maybe this will encourage them to self-police and not over-serve.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Most, if not all, bars and/or bartenders already have culpability for “over serving”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop >Within the United States, laws that impose potential liability upon businesses that sell alcohol for injuries caused by their patrons are usually called dram shop laws or dram shop acts
  - ortusdux 3y ago
    It will be interesting if/when they make cheap optical blood alc sensors.
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  This gets me all teary eyed thinking how in olden times it took a literal constitutional amendment to make something illegal.
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    If your point is that back in the day people had more freedom than now, I think this is wrong. The US used to be a lot more strict about what you were allowed to say and do. For example Charles Schenck from the Supreme Court case which gave us the phrase “shouting fire in a crowded theater” had nothing to do with fire or movies. He was convicted for handing out antiwar pamphlets and sentenced to 30 years in prison. It wasn’t until 1969 that speech laws loosened in the US.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  > bars need to have some culpability as well if a lot of their patrons are causing destruction. By your reasoning, I should be able to sue a gas station that sells gas to someone without first checking to make sure their car is well maintained, that they have a valid drivers license and liability insurance, that they are sober, are mot impaired by medical issues, and that they do not have too many points on their license. There outta be a law against registering people to vote if they want nanny-states. I mean, if it saves one child's life then it's worth a little infringement in your "rights." Your vote would not have made a difference. Now you can do something productive instead of standing in line at the polling place, like reading a civics textbook. I hear Ron Paul' Campaign for Liberty sells a good one.
RecycledEle 3y ago
Look at the years involved. Other things changed in those years.
- gravescale 3y ago
  Ok, so we went back and looked at other correlations. The bad news is that reducing the late night alcohol sales between 2018 and 2022 has increased opioid deaths. The good news is that increasing opioid deaths between 2018 and 2022 has lowered the crime rate in those areas (see our earlier paper)! Also we're not too sure but at certain levels of nocturnal alcohol availability nearly everyone stayed at home for weeks on end and made microchips, like, hella expensive. Weird, right? More research required.
apwheele 3y ago
Reading the paper, this is pretty weak sauce findings. Here is the main scatterplot showing the fit lines, https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczOuepTKEj908Wc8GkxaRdaKM_hKkXcxutgOi4MO0yWcmK4thVxY65QTFxFWb7_nGvQrGUnDPkdUX8E10d3mE37dhs_941IoTOFbYFHLHoBfWdwMptnaZS5Y_6c9wRxAjZv_T5BmfAxS_bbGlJuuW_dE=w743-h641-s-no-gm?authuser=0 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczOuepTKEj908Wc8Gkx... The main findings are suggesting a slope change, which when you incorporate standard errors are just below 1 (the yellow line in the above graph). The model to me though is very noisy (should clearly have seasonal monthly terms, this should make estimates somewhat more precise), and is suggestive that the matched areas are not quite the same (they are substantively lower, although to be fair do appear to have similar seasonal patterns). Biased because I have written a bit on this (IMO the pub health literature is biased to only conclude alcohol is bad, a similar paper saying "no effect" would be rejected at JAMA or other health journals). It is an interesting idea, I think it could probably be made stronger though (control for the same area during daytime, or a better synthetic control area). As is the 23% reduction is a bit wishful thinking I believe.
Amorymeltzer 3y ago
Here's a series of quotes from Walt Hickey's You Are What you Watch, citing some similar/related research: >Between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and midnight, for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the number of violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent; for every million people watching a mildly violent movie, the rate declined 1.1 percent... "So, we thought, 'Oh, this is sort of like incapacitation,' if you put someone in a movie theater, they commit less assault because they can't really assault someone while they're in a movie theater." >"What happens instead is that violent crime goes down a lot from midnight to 6:00 a.m. following the movie." For every million people who saw a strongly violent movie at the cinema, the rate of violent crime went down 1.9 percent in the six hours after midnight, and for every million people watching a mildly violent movie, the rate dipped 2.1 percent. That larger decrease after midnight might be puzzling until you remember the risk factors of committing violent acts: young, male, and drunk. The scenario is easy enough to imagine: Two dudes, neither of whom have yet learned how to process strong emotions in a constructive way; one decides to see Murdersuck 4: Buckets of Blood, the other goes to the bar. They meet up after the movie at 11:00 p.m. for drinks. One has a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of 0.00, the other's is around 0.07. They both proceed to have four drinks over the next three hours. It's now 2:00 a.m., and someone walks into the bar and starts getting seriously rude to the people with whom these two guys have been talking. Our moviegoer now has a BAC of about 0.07; his buddy is clocking in at 0.14. Which dude do you think is gonna throw the punch? >All this to say that in a given year, the release of strongly violent movies has a net effect of about 52,000 assaults just not happening. Besides the human impact, that saves about $695 million in averted victimization costs, all because 4 to 8 percent of the US population saw a violent movie instead of getting drunk and committing assaults.
- jollyllama 3y ago
  Does this control for watching a nonviolent movie? You're not going to attack anyone when you're watching the movie.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

49 points by geox 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whiplash451 3y ago

How much of the « disappeared » criminality simply moved to the next town?

janalsncm 3y ago
Apparently none of it? In the control cities there was no change in violent crime after the law went into effect.
- kazinator 3y ago
  Do you have access to the full text? This summary of the study doesn't detail which neighborhoods were subject to the change and which are control areas. You'd hope they are adjacent.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
UncleEntity 3y ago
Not even the next town as the experiment was conducted on one neighborhood and compared to a 'control' neighborhood. Not too sure how I feel about them using laws to conduct experiments as people supposedly have equal protection under the law. I also wonder how the business owners feel about this.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

davidguetta 3y ago

Awesome but it should be divided by 10, not 1.23

janalsncm 3y ago

It would be really interesting if laws worked like this. If violent crime is too high, alcohol sales are shortened by an hour. This continues until violent crime is low. Same thing with drunk driving. In fact, bars need to have some culpability as well if a lot of their patrons are causing destruction. Maybe this will encourage them to self-police and not over-serve.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Most, if not all, bars and/or bartenders already have culpability for “over serving”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dram_shop >Within the United States, laws that impose potential liability upon businesses that sell alcohol for injuries caused by their patrons are usually called dram shop laws or dram shop acts
- ortusdux 3y ago
  It will be interesting if/when they make cheap optical blood alc sensors.
UncleEntity 3y ago
This gets me all teary eyed thinking how in olden times it took a literal constitutional amendment to make something illegal.
- janalsncm 3y ago
  If your point is that back in the day people had more freedom than now, I think this is wrong. The US used to be a lot more strict about what you were allowed to say and do. For example Charles Schenck from the Supreme Court case which gave us the phrase “shouting fire in a crowded theater” had nothing to do with fire or movies. He was convicted for handing out antiwar pamphlets and sentenced to 30 years in prison. It wasn’t until 1969 that speech laws loosened in the US.
RecycledEle 3y ago
> bars need to have some culpability as well if a lot of their patrons are causing destruction. By your reasoning, I should be able to sue a gas station that sells gas to someone without first checking to make sure their car is well maintained, that they have a valid drivers license and liability insurance, that they are sober, are mot impaired by medical issues, and that they do not have too many points on their license. There outta be a law against registering people to vote if they want nanny-states. I mean, if it saves one child's life then it's worth a little infringement in your "rights." Your vote would not have made a difference. Now you can do something productive instead of standing in line at the polling place, like reading a civics textbook. I hear Ron Paul' Campaign for Liberty sells a good one.

RecycledEle 3y ago

Look at the years involved. Other things changed in those years.

gravescale 3y ago
Ok, so we went back and looked at other correlations. The bad news is that reducing the late night alcohol sales between 2018 and 2022 has increased opioid deaths. The good news is that increasing opioid deaths between 2018 and 2022 has lowered the crime rate in those areas (see our earlier paper)! Also we're not too sure but at certain levels of nocturnal alcohol availability nearly everyone stayed at home for weeks on end and made microchips, like, hella expensive. Weird, right? More research required.

apwheele 3y ago

Reading the paper, this is pretty weak sauce findings. Here is the main scatterplot showing the fit lines, https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczOuepTKEj908Wc8GkxaRdaKM_hKkXcxutgOi4MO0yWcmK4thVxY65QTFxFWb7_nGvQrGUnDPkdUX8E10d3mE37dhs_941IoTOFbYFHLHoBfWdwMptnaZS5Y_6c9wRxAjZv_T5BmfAxS_bbGlJuuW_dE=w743-h641-s-no-gm?authuser=0 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/AP1GczOuepTKEj908Wc8Gkx... The main findings are suggesting a slope change, which when you incorporate standard errors are just below 1 (the yellow line in the above graph). The model to me though is very noisy (should clearly have seasonal monthly terms, this should make estimates somewhat more precise), and is suggestive that the matched areas are not quite the same (they are substantively lower, although to be fair do appear to have similar seasonal patterns). Biased because I have written a bit on this (IMO the pub health literature is biased to only conclude alcohol is bad, a similar paper saying "no effect" would be rejected at JAMA or other health journals). It is an interesting idea, I think it could probably be made stronger though (control for the same area during daytime, or a better synthetic control area). As is the 23% reduction is a bit wishful thinking I believe.

Amorymeltzer 3y ago

Here's a series of quotes from Walt Hickey's You Are What you Watch, citing some similar/related research: >Between the hours of 6:00 p.m. and midnight, for every million people watching a strongly violent movie, the number of violent crimes decreased 1.3 percent; for every million people watching a mildly violent movie, the rate declined 1.1 percent... "So, we thought, 'Oh, this is sort of like incapacitation,' if you put someone in a movie theater, they commit less assault because they can't really assault someone while they're in a movie theater." >"What happens instead is that violent crime goes down a lot from midnight to 6:00 a.m. following the movie." For every million people who saw a strongly violent movie at the cinema, the rate of violent crime went down 1.9 percent in the six hours after midnight, and for every million people watching a mildly violent movie, the rate dipped 2.1 percent. That larger decrease after midnight might be puzzling until you remember the risk factors of committing violent acts: young, male, and drunk. The scenario is easy enough to imagine: Two dudes, neither of whom have yet learned how to process strong emotions in a constructive way; one decides to see Murdersuck 4: Buckets of Blood, the other goes to the bar. They meet up after the movie at 11:00 p.m. for drinks. One has a blood-alcohol content (BAC) of 0.00, the other's is around 0.07. They both proceed to have four drinks over the next three hours. It's now 2:00 a.m., and someone walks into the bar and starts getting seriously rude to the people with whom these two guys have been talking. Our moviegoer now has a BAC of about 0.07; his buddy is clocking in at 0.14. Which dude do you think is gonna throw the punch? >All this to say that in a given year, the release of strongly violent movies has a net effect of about 52,000 assaults just not happening. Besides the human impact, that saves about $695 million in averted victimization costs, all because 4 to 8 percent of the US population saw a violent movie instead of getting drunk and committing assaults.

jollyllama 3y ago
Does this control for watching a nonviolent movie? You're not going to attack anyone when you're watching the movie.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]