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>will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long. Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad fo

>will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long. Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV. Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-... >Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)

floydnoel 1y ago
[flagged]
- const_cast 1y ago
  If you're insinuating that crime is not actually down and statistics are merely lying, then you are mistaken. Crime, pretty much everywhere in the US and by many different metrics, has been falling for over 3 decades. It makes sense. Crime is getting harder and harder to committ with the advent of the Internet and new surveillance technology. Crime is, like all things in life, a risk-reward calculus. Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime. With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime. You're often better off just... not... And getting help through provided channels. And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
  - bearl 1y ago
    “With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime.” Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance. Rather, crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics, policing or lack there of, surely not by aggregate health care spending lol.
    - Arainach 1y ago
      Medical debt is one of the most common kinds of debt in America. Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. So is anxiety over bills. Untreated mental or physical health issues can come into play as well.
      - gottorf 1y ago
        > Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. Correlation is not causation. In this case, the same factors that make one more prone to criminal activity also make them more prone to poverty; therefore, you cannot solve criminality by solving poverty, because the confounding factor is still present afterwards. A man was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned to great fanfare by the Innocence Project. He received $4.1m for his troubles. A few years later, he killed another man over a $1200 drug deal gone bad[0]. Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/philadelphia-shaurn-thomas-wrongful-conviction-murder https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/philadelphia...
        const_cast 1y ago
        > Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction. I think the vast, vast majority of people are committing crime to make money, and I think your singular counter example, which isn't really a counter example, is worthless. Yes, SOME people are just bad and will always commit crime. Some. However, most criminals do it for monetary gain. Why do people even sell drugs? Surely, if their goal is to be evil and just make a lot of people hooked on heroin, they'd just give it away for free right? Well, that isn't their goal. Their goal is to make money.
      - bearl 1y ago
        I’ve known criminals, and a lot of people with huge debts, even known a few people who have had to declare bankruptcy. I assure you nobody is robbing or stealing or raping or killing people over medical debt. Student loans on the other hand…
  - gottorf 1y ago
    > Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime. This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help. > And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes. Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim. [0]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates
    - monocasa 1y ago
      Or, in a police state, the point isn't solving crimes. In my city, any protest over a half dozen people gets a police response. However they may show up a couple hours late to you being robbed, but will probably tell you to go to their website and file a report they won't follow up on. Paradoxically, as you reach more and more of a police state, the point of the police isn't to solve or prevent crimes. It's to use violence against threats to the police state.
dkiebd 1y ago
Of course: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander-suspended-crime-statistics/3959566/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
- Arainach 1y ago
  If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise. The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
JeremyNT 1y ago
Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda. HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
- Tainnor 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - Tainnor 1y ago
      It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - rayiner 1y ago
        I’m very moderate by world standards. For example I think we should give gang members trials before we put them all in jail forever. In my home country we don’t have a gang problem, but we have an Islamist problem. Our former PM handled that by having military special forces just kill islamists. She had a 70% approval rating before a bizarre coalition of leftist students and islamists overthrew the government. Western liberals are just outside the Overton window in terms of their toxic sympathy for criminals and disorder.
potato3732842 1y ago
> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture? Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
- sokka_h2otribe 1y ago
  You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics. One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown. ^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed. Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
  - octopoc 1y ago
    > The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint. > Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1] [1] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander-suspended-crime-statistics/3959566/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
- cindyllm 1y ago
mrangle 1y ago
There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.
- sokka_h2otribe 1y ago
  I'm starting to understand the "touch grass" meme. Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
  - mrangle 1y ago
    Born and raised, and still living in an area that you likely wouldn't. You have no idea. To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets. However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does. If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime. The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime? Or will they continue to deny the tipping point? At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets? No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
    - Arainach 1y ago
      There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes. In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
rayiner 1y ago
> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tracker/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
ineedasername 1y ago
This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.
- jrs235 1y ago
  If they're aren't any records of the crime, in their minds then the crime never occurred, including the crime perpetuated by government agents against civilians.

floydnoel 1y ago

[flagged]

const_cast 1y ago
If you're insinuating that crime is not actually down and statistics are merely lying, then you are mistaken. Crime, pretty much everywhere in the US and by many different metrics, has been falling for over 3 decades. It makes sense. Crime is getting harder and harder to committ with the advent of the Internet and new surveillance technology. Crime is, like all things in life, a risk-reward calculus. Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime. With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime. You're often better off just... not... And getting help through provided channels. And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
- bearl 1y ago
  “With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime.” Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance. Rather, crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics, policing or lack there of, surely not by aggregate health care spending lol.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    Medical debt is one of the most common kinds of debt in America. Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. So is anxiety over bills. Untreated mental or physical health issues can come into play as well.
    - gottorf 1y ago
      > Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. Correlation is not causation. In this case, the same factors that make one more prone to criminal activity also make them more prone to poverty; therefore, you cannot solve criminality by solving poverty, because the confounding factor is still present afterwards. A man was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned to great fanfare by the Innocence Project. He received $4.1m for his troubles. A few years later, he killed another man over a $1200 drug deal gone bad[0]. Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/philadelphia-shaurn-thomas-wrongful-conviction-murder https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/06/philadelphia...
      - const_cast 1y ago
        > Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction. I think the vast, vast majority of people are committing crime to make money, and I think your singular counter example, which isn't really a counter example, is worthless. Yes, SOME people are just bad and will always commit crime. Some. However, most criminals do it for monetary gain. Why do people even sell drugs? Surely, if their goal is to be evil and just make a lot of people hooked on heroin, they'd just give it away for free right? Well, that isn't their goal. Their goal is to make money.
    - bearl 1y ago
      I’ve known criminals, and a lot of people with huge debts, even known a few people who have had to declare bankruptcy. I assure you nobody is robbing or stealing or raping or killing people over medical debt. Student loans on the other hand…
- gottorf 1y ago
  > Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime. This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help. > And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes. Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim. [0]: https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates
  - monocasa 1y ago
    Or, in a police state, the point isn't solving crimes. In my city, any protest over a half dozen people gets a police response. However they may show up a couple hours late to you being robbed, but will probably tell you to go to their website and file a report they won't follow up on. Paradoxically, as you reach more and more of a police state, the point of the police isn't to solve or prevent crimes. It's to use violence against threats to the police state.

dkiebd 1y ago

Of course: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander-suspended-crime-statistics/3959566/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...

Arainach 1y ago
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise. The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.

JeremyNT 1y ago

Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda. HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.

Tainnor 1y ago
[flagged]
- jacquesm 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Tainnor 1y ago
    It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.
- rayiner 1y ago
  Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - rayiner 1y ago
      I’m very moderate by world standards. For example I think we should give gang members trials before we put them all in jail forever. In my home country we don’t have a gang problem, but we have an Islamist problem. Our former PM handled that by having military special forces just kill islamists. She had a 70% approval rating before a bizarre coalition of leftist students and islamists overthrew the government. Western liberals are just outside the Overton window in terms of their toxic sympathy for criminals and disorder.

potato3732842 1y ago

> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture? Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.

sokka_h2otribe 1y ago
You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics. One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown. ^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed. Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
- octopoc 1y ago
  > The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint. > Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1] [1] https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander-suspended-crime-statistics/3959566/ https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...
cindyllm 1y ago

mrangle 1y ago

There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.

sokka_h2otribe 1y ago
I'm starting to understand the "touch grass" meme. Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
- mrangle 1y ago
  Born and raised, and still living in an area that you likely wouldn't. You have no idea. To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets. However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does. If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime. The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime? Or will they continue to deny the tipping point? At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets? No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes. In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.

rayiner 1y ago

> Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tracker/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.

ineedasername 1y ago

This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.

jrs235 1y ago
If they're aren't any records of the crime, in their minds then the crime never occurred, including the crime perpetuated by government agents against civilians.