These two charts show crime rates in the United States over the past five years. The estimates for 2022 are the best I could find, but obviously they aren't official numbers yet.
The main takeaway from this is obvious: we've had a surge in homicide, but no surge in crime generally.
Surge in homicide? Maybe it is the forking guns! More guns than people.
there were more guns than people before 2020. our high murder rate relative to other developed countries is the guns. the 2020-2021 surge is the disruption of social life caused by the pandemic.
We are also seeing a change in the composition of guns purchased, as well as differences in who is purchasing. A surge in existing gun owners buying hunting rifles to use for their fall hunting trip would be unlikely to result in much of an increase in deaths. Those are weapons that are inconvenient for criminal purposes and suicides, and are more likely to be stored away safely for much of the year.
But that is not what we've seen over the last decade. We're seeing continued increases in new gun owners and increases in handgun purchases made for "protection." That means a lot of people who are unlikely to own gun safes, people who carry the guns all the time, guns that are easier to steal, and guns that are easy to conceal. That is a recipe for more death (accidental, suicidal, and homicidal). A separate trend toward the purchase of high capacity long guns in order to cosplay Rambo is another issue, but that mostly plays out in public mass shootings, not the shootings that cause most deaths (which are handgun driven).
It looks like we're seeing multiple trends building on each other.
Something similar is happening with drug overdoses, where the pandemic disrupted treatment and created conditions that increased dangerous usage (e.g. using alone), but a pre-existing trend toward incorporating fentanyl joined it to spike deaths.
Sometimes many bad trends happen at one time.
Stats don’t matter on this. It’s how people feel. And they feel like crime is out of control, mainly because our media overlords focus on crime whenever a Dem is in the White House.
If Eurasia ever got its act together, we'd be in real trouble.
I'm curious the extent to which the non-homicides are the result of cameras (either people afraid they will be caught, or the sorts of repeat thieves/muggers who, in the past would commit fifty crimes a year, now being locked up sooner).
I honestly have no strong priors about this either way, but I do find it remarkable that people seem to not want to talk about this; I'm guessing it would be very inconvenient for the privacy hysterics to learn that this was in fact a substantial factor.
Cameras are one way (IMHO) to square all three trends, in that homicides are usually planned a lot more than property thefts or violence, and that planning can include attempting to take cameras into account.
Of course, by itself, that would simply have homicides as flat; the increase is a separate issue about which I have no opinion. But I can think of many possibilities that have not been raised. For example perhaps the legalization of marijuana and/or the arrival of fentanyl has disrupted the drug trade in a way that's led to a whole lot more turf wars and jockeying for power in other drugs?
This seems like something that *could* be known, but I can't find recent statistics as to "drug-related violence" or "drug-related homicides". Older statistics seem to suggest that these have been climbing for years (since 2005 or so) so it doesn't seem impossible.
Crime stats are hugely dependent on what the police feel like going after. Homicides are hard to ignore, but I have zero confidence in the other stats. Locally I actually know that violent crime and property crime are up because I see it, deal with it, and know some of the victims. It is a huge problem that so many people go around armed, escalating many disputes beyond where they would have gone in the past.