Something peculiar occurred to me recently about the pandemic year of 2020. Obviously a lot of things changed: businesses shut down, office towers emptied out, product shortages were endemic, and so forth. But there were also a number of sharp changes that had no obvious connection to the pandemic. For example:
- Pedestrian deaths were up 5% even though driving was down 10%.
- The murder rate soared 27% even though overall violent crime was down.
.
- New business formation skyrocketed even as existing businesses struggled or were shut down.
- Transit fatalities were up by a quarter even though transit use was down by half.
- Auto theft was up even though we were driving less.
You can come up with individual explanations for some of these. Maybe auto thefts were up because new cars were in short supply. Overall, though, there are a whole bunch of these oddities that don't have any straightforward connection to COVID and lockdowns and working from home. Is there a common thread?
Disruption of life's routines
That's what I was going to say. The changes to our normal routines were large enough to have all sorts of secondary effects. You'd have to look at each independently to figure out what exactly happened.
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Transit, violence, and violence on transit (let's not forget people on airplanes going nuts).
I'm not sure either, but there seems to be something there.
Pandemic-related economic upheaval combined with people realizing that police do not care at all about traffic enforcement and had drastically cut back on patrolling traffic during the pandemic. There is a minority of drivers who only bother to drive safely because of the possibility of getting hit with a huge fine, and once it becomes clear that that's a minimal risk they will go hog-wild on the roads.
There have been studies about this: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2022/02/28/study-explains-why-road-violence-increased-during-the-pandemic
I'm thinking of a nuclear reactor where carbon rods are moved in and out to absorb neutrons to regulate the reaction.
Maybe society has a mix of people: some who take risks and violate norms, the plutonium; others who don't, the carbon rods. In 2020 the people who stayed home were the carbon rods no longer dampening the risk-taking/norm-violating part of the population.
We are, after all, animals who tend to imitate what others do, so changes in the visible population can change behavior.
Perhaps the problem is Trump sold our boron control rods and replaced them with carbon.
+1 for the physics correction
The original nuclear pile was graphite bricks with some containing uranium. In that case, control rods were coated with cadmium.
from:
https://www.anl.gov/article/chicago-pile-1-a-bold-nuclear-physics-experiment-with-enduring-impact
Yes, for the first test, they set it up in the morning--then waited until after lunch to do the test. In case of emergency, there was a man with an axe ready to cut the rope holding the control rods so they'd fall back into the pile and shut things down. I don't think that was ever needed.
The American pile was designed by Enrico Fermi, who was both a brilliant theoretical and experimental physicist. The German pile was designed by Walter Heisenberg who was a great theoretical physicist but not so great with experimental physics. The Germans never got enough uranium to take their pile critical. This was fortunate, as it had NO control rods. Fermi exclaimed after reviewing their design: “they built a car with no brakes!”
Because people aren't working they're drinking more and wandering in front of cars whose drivers are also drinking more. And who then leave their cars with the keys in the ignition where they should not do that. And then wigging out and murdering someone, but if no one dies they tearfully make up with great drunken sobbing and decide to start a new business together.
So, what do alcohol sales look like during this period?
Love in the Time of Cholera and Pale Horse, Pale Rider have a few things to say on the subject. The title story of the Porter book is specifically set in the 1918 influenza epidemic (the other two novellas don't apply.) Look to history, my friends.
Disruption of many pro-social norms and structures.
Here's my WAG. People were going "stir-crazy."
As for pedestrians, In 2020 I saw a lot more people walking around the neighborhood during weekdays (especially with their dogs), presumably because they weren't working and were staying at home They wanted to get out of the house. I propose that this pedestrian activity increased their vulnerability to being struck by automobiles (i.e., compared to being at work), even though there were clearly less cars on the road.
As for murders, all the staying at home may have cause people to get on each other's nerves even more than usual. If the data exist, we might see a disproportionate increase in murders by people who knew each other.
Ok, here are some suggestions:
*Pedestrian deaths were up 5% even though driving was down 10%.
There were probably a lot more people walking all over the place. Since no one was allowed any indoor gatherings, everyone went outside. And the remaining drivers on the road were unaccustomed to having so many pedestrians to deal with.
*The murder rate soared 27% even though overall violent crime was down:
This is a hard one. But I’m just brainstorming here: maybe it’s really, really important to keep people busy. Perhaps even more important than we thought? Just telling everyone to go home, and telling a whole lot of other people to go home and stop working is a terrible idea. This is dark view of humanity, but there may be a lot of potential murderers out there who are kept otherwise preoccupied by being busy with life. But why murder instead of other crimes? Well, for one thing, too many people stuffed all together in the same home for too long with nowhere else to go and little else to do: that inevitably leads to some serious friction.
*New business formation skyrocketed even as existing businesses struggled or were shut down.
Lots of people fired from old jobs en masse at the start of the pandemic had time to go start new businesses.
*Transit fatalities were up by a quarter even though transit use was down by half.
Lots and lots of transit workers kept getting sick and tragically dying. The turnover rate must’ve been high, and the number of new transit drivers led to more deaths.
*Auto theft was up even though we were driving less:
Cars that just sat there all the time (instead of taking people to school, jobs, and vacations) must have made easy targets.
Plus, see the above point: it’s really important to keep people busy. Not only will they use extra time to kill each other, they’ll also rob cars.
*So the common thread is massive disruption to the everyday cycles of normal life. And, in fact, all of that disruption helped lead to another highly unusual event in 2020 that kevin doesn’t mention:
*An incumbent president lost re-election and was denied a second term.
So, there’s a silver lining!
Re: "maybe it’s really, really important to keep people busy."
Maybe it's really, really important to keep people thinking that they matter to society, which is to say that society cares about them and values their contribution.
Good parents make a child feel that way about their family. Likewise, a good society makes its citizens feel that way about their society.
The alternative is to be cynical, but don't play checkers. A person that can think a couple of moves ahead will realize that the cynic is inescapably naïve. Cynicism and naivete are the two sides of the "closeminded" coin.
On the contrary, they all have a straightforward connection to COVID lockdowns, but the connections all look different. The common thread is COVID lockdowns. It just appears disparate because the connections all look different even though they're all tied to the COVID lockdowns.
I would be wary of the illusion of non-violent crime stats. A lot of them go unreported on account that police often will discourage the reporting of such crimes that suck time away from serious crimes.
It depends if the crime needs a police report for insurance purposes. Pretty much any major theft does. And even if you don't have loss coverage on a car you still need to report a theft because A) the vehicle may be found and you would like to get it back B) if it isn't found you need to cancel the registration and liability insurance and also make sure if the car is used in commission of a crime the police don;t come looking for you.
Easy.
New business formation soared because being stuck at home with government money meant a lot of folks decided to open up side hustles.
Transit deaths up because with roads so empty people drove wild so anyone who was out was hit.
Finally if we are driving less that means there are more parked cars sitting on the side of the road and people not checking them because everything is closed. Target rich environment.
All of this. And more.
With people at home all the time, it's hard to break into homes. Businesses are doing far less cash sales, so they are poor targets. Cars are the best option (also bored teens joyriding).
The roads ended up almost empty, except for the most necessary workers and...the risk-takers. Those risk-takers suddenly had open streets where they could race, and they did.
As for murders, there are probably several factors: people less able to leave abusive partners, more teens with nothing to do, people going generally stir-crazy, so many guns purchased by gun newbies, interruptions to normal criminal networks as patterns of human behavior changed how criminals made money.
Assaults and muggings rely on people being out and about, and public drunkenness often plays a role. No bars open makes those drop. Same for a lot of rape. Assault and rape inside homes probably just went unreported, because victims had fewer places to go for help. Also, people switched to Zoom dating, which will limit date rape.
People with little to do and removed from social situations that kept them anchored.
my working theory for the weird crime stats is that people developed antisocial behaviors from being alone so much AND opportunistic criminal activity because there were fewer witnesses on the streets
As someone who rides public transportation daily, I can tell you my perspective on why transit deaths are up- during the pandemic two things happened: most people with means ended up working from home or switching back to their car, and the transit system stopped either collecting fares or stopped enforcing fare collection. Currently, "post-pandemic", there is still virtually no fare enforcement on the LA metro transit system. The MTA system has now become, by default, the go-to shelter of choice for large numbers of the area's un-housed population, which are much more likely to have some combination of physical and/or mental health issues and substance abuse problems- all which add up to a higher fatality rate and/or incidents of violent altercations. Unfortunately, because of the prevalence of the homeless population on public transportation, I think that it is unlikely that ridership will return to pre-pandemic levels or demographics anytime in the near future.
“New business formation skyrocketed even as existing businesses struggled or were shut down.”
The only way to get free PPP money was to be a business with payroll. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of small businesses formed solely to take PPP “loans” that conveniently didn’t need paying back.
Don't forget....
videos showing how easy it is to steal certain makes of cars
BLM protests--and backlash to them
Spike in gun sales
Cars and parts of cars. Catalytic converter theft went way up around this time.
Re: Pedestrian deaths were up 5% even though driving was down 10%.
With so little traffic on normally congested roads the people who were driving could go like bats out of hell-- on roads not meant for that, and where they were not used to driving fast. I saw a lot of that in Baltimore while out biking. Roads that would be gridlocked at rush hour normally had fewer than ten cars on them, and most of those cars were being driven pedal-to-metal.
Re: Auto theft was up even though we were driving less.
Do you mean car jackings? A likely reason for that is the fact over the last decade newer cars use chip technology so you can't hot wire them-- the key has to be present. So the only way to steal newer cars is to do so when the driver with the key is in them.