Third Way posted an analysis of murder rates by state a few weeks ago and concluded that red states had more murders than blue states. They used murder rates compiled individually by each state "because we found it’s more comprehensive than FBI data."
That's true, and it's a perfectly defensible choice. However, the FBI data is generally pretty reliable and has the advantage of using the same methodology for every state. So I replicated the analysis using the FBI data to see what it looked like:
The FBI data differs from the Third Way data in some states, but overall it presents pretty much the same picture. The seven most murderous states are all Republican, and of the states above the national average 15 are Republican and only 8 are Democratic
Likewise, among the states below the national average 17 are Democratic and only 10 are Republican.
You may decide for yourself how meaningful this is. Contrary to Fox News, however, it's clear that residents of red states are pretty familiar with homicide and have nothing to fear if they want to visit big blue states like California or New York.
I guess this would be a good place to put a link I saw 2 days ago when Chris Hayes retweeted it. It talks about how places with "old school" "law and order" district attorneys are seeing crime increase just as much as places with reform DAs.
https://twitter.com/kalven/status/1500957650124611584
You would never know this if you listened to the right wing or even mainstream press.
Exactly this.
...You might think there was some concerted effort to misinform the public...
I suppose the DA would point out this:
https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article260131840.html
In my opinion the 10 year sentence was too lenient in the first place and letting this sociopathic person out early was an invitation to disaster. I am all for early release of non-violent criminals and perhaps even some people who committed a single violent act. But when a person commits multiple vicious violent crimes there is no excuse for leniency.
Your argument doesn't make sense. There was no reform DA trying to get this guy out. None are demanding more lenient sentences for repeat violent offenders.
The article doesn't say, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the same DA, or someone who thinks the same way, originally prosecuted the guy and got the 10 year sentence.
The “sense” is that the prosecutor did what they promised, but it was other parts of the system that dropped the ball. A Republican might argue that it is the blue state liberalism that allowed this person, and others like him out to commit more crimes.
I won’t make that argument, but it appears that there is a glitch in the system somewhere, doesn’t it?
I specifically mentioned DAs, and then you specifically mentioned DAs, but yes. If someone wanted make a general argument and cherry pick data then they could point to this case, but it would be very disingenuous. Kevin's original point was was that on average, you're more likely to be murdered in a red state. The only red states with lower murder rates are low density western states.
I am quite certain that red states sometimes have to let prisoners out early and sometimes those ex-prisoners commit violent crime. Obviously I wish the above mentioned criminal hadn't been let out, but the reality is that on average California is safer than most red states.
Your link specifically mentions the Sacramento DA. I read your post right after reading the article I linked.
We, on the liberal side of the street, have statistics (and truth) on our side. The right has anecdotes and perception on its side. It’s my experience that perception is more potent than truth.
I worked in juvenile hall in Los Angeles for about 4 years in the late 70’s. I saw people like the guy in the article I linked getting released. I knew that some innocent person’s life would be drastically changed by crossing paths with them. When I read about the Sacramento shooter I got that feeling again, the helpless feeling that you want to shout out to the innocent person to warn them. It’s really shocking to me that the people who recommended his release didn’t see that.
"It’s really shocking to me that the people who recommended his release didn’t see that."
No doubt. But more shocking would be a legal system that kept people locked up indefinitely based on the suspicion of someone who worked in juvenile hall. On what pretense would you have prevented release for people who had served their time?
Average time spent for murder (at least at the time) for juveniles was 4.5 years.
You know that saying, “when someone shows you who they are believe them”? When someone has committed multiple violent gun crimes what do you think “their time” should be? What do you think such a person could do that would merit early release?
New England really needs to be running the show.
Yep. We even have some sane Republicans here. Some. We're thinking of kicking Connecticut out and sending them to the Mid Atlantic.
Your chart makes it seem as though bordering the Mississippi River tends to boost the murder rate. Illinois is the highest ranked blue state, for instance. Iowa and Minnesota are the exceptions, but they are way north of the Ohio River confluence.
Frankly, Iowa and Minnesota are a lot alike, and it shows here.
You may be on to something. The Mississippi is a massive gutter, it gets worse the further south it goes.
Illinois borders states with very loose gun regulations so you drive into Gary, IN to buy a gun and back into Chicago in no time at all. Maryland has similar issues, it's very easy to smuggle guns into Maryland from neighboring states with looser gun laws. Georgia? It's not a blue state at all so it's gun laws reflect that. If the state government were to flip into Blue control for a cycle or two then maybe we'd see if stricter gun laws would get their murder rate down.
According to a recent headline in the New York Post I myself was shot over 20 times on a subway platform by a mentally ill homeless person who had been released without bail ten times in the previous two hours.
At least I must have been. I was assured by the Post that venturing into NYC these days is a virtual death sentence.
Yes, a complete and total Rag.
I myself was shot and killed twice today when I went downstairs to check the mail. Hey, it's Chicago!
I was disemboweled then choked to death with my own guts, then Pizza Rat gave me the kiss of life. Thank god for Pizza Rat, though I do wish he hadn't eaten my eyeball.
Yew must be from one 'o those big Yankee cities, in which case, I'm not surprised.
One might think Gun control saves lives. Imagine how good NY could be if guns weren’t able to be “imported” from legal states.
But mah nahrahtive!
It would be interesting to include other demographics (racial, economic) besides "red" or "blue".
I also wonder about the "Red v Blue" classification. Georgia and Arizona both show as "Blue" even though both have Republican Governors and Legislatures as well as mainly Republican state officials like Attorney Generals. I assume the reason is that both voted for Biden and have Democratic Senators but if the underlying point is supposed to have something to do with policies related to crime it is far more important who controls the State policy making process.
The odds of a state having crossed the line from red to blue or vice versa isn't enough to shift these stats from red=bad.
I agree: For this purpose a "red" state should have a "red" legislature and governor. "Mixed" states (legislature blue, gov red or the other way round) should be a third category (purple?).
BTW the top seven states are all members of the confederacy and North Carolina is not far behind. This I think is no coincidence.
I'm pretty sure that the strongest correlation would not be between party affiliation and murder rate, but between race and murder rate.
Hah! New York has a lower murder rate than Wisconsin. As I suspected.
And what is Louisiana's brain damage?
Kissing cousins?
Chemical exposure from all the plants that are poorly regulated and very unsafe.
And what is Louisiana's brain damage?
Rampant poverty and ludicrously lax gun laws are a potent mix.
Race is a key factor in murder data.
When you look at the chart, with southern states being the tragic leaders in murders, there are clear racial implications. For example, more than 70% of the people murdered in Louisiana (number one on the chart) are black. One finds the same pattern in Missouri (number two on the list).
Within the south, voting patterns have a strong racial bias: black voters in the south are strongly Democratic. So this chart basically finds that black Democrats are the primary victims of murder....
https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/crime_police/article_2e36b93a-5b2f-5d0b-a3b4-a804789baa73.html
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/government-politics-issues/2018-04-23/missouri-tops-the-nation-for-high-black-homicide-rate-again
Without justifying Fox News, this is not exactly a refutation.
One could argue that what most people are worried about is being murdered by strangers. Dead is dead, but people seem to care an awful lot about the details. Driving risk vs flying risk is one version of this ("I'm in control"), and being killed by your family / opposing gang / jilted lover is a different version.
I assume the statistics are unavailable, but it would be interesting to know what fraction of these murders are by strangers. The fear that's really in play here is the idea that if I'm walking through downtown LA or San Francisco I may be mugged. Is this more likely than if I'm walking through downtown Atlanta or St Louis? I don't know.
Ultimately making fun of people's fears of this sort is probably not a crowd pleaser... Who are you to say that a woman's fear of being raped (regardless of what the numbers says) is reasonable because the environment she has to walk through feels hostile to her, but a person's fear of being mugged (regardless of what the numbers says) is unreasonable, because for that person to perceive the environment as hostile is about that person's false consciousness?
These sorts of arguments are less about numbers, and more about "perceived hostile spaces", and that's not an argument that can be settled, especially when both sides won't even agree on what counts as a "legitimately hostile perception"...
I've lived and worked in St. Louis city for 40 years. I've never been mugged or shot at. The closest I've come to being killed is when a car traveling over 90 mph against a red light sliced off the front end of my Honda at an intersection in North St. Louis city. It was being chased by a police cruiser.
As far as I can tell, most of the homicides in St. Louis are related to drugs and gangs. If you are going to be killed by a stranger in St. Louis, the perp will most likely be wielding a steering wheel.
Of course, the same is true for Oakland or Los Angeles.
But also... red states have more road user deaths.
It's interesting to consider the rural/urban distribution within states. There are a lot of states that have highly Democratic big cities, surrounded by masses of red rural counties. Think Maryland (Baltimore), Michigan (Detroit), Illinois (Chicago), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). In these states, the vast majority of murders occur in the Democratic big cities. But is this true on a per capita basis? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Well why don't you find out and come back and tell us instead of asking others to do your homework. As it is, you can't even be bothered to cite evidence for the claims you did make.
I guess there's just NOT enough "good guys" with guns ????
Or as MTG said about the latest school shooting the reason why kids get shot is that they NEED to carry...................
Good grief
The states with the most pro gun laws have the highest murder rates?
And the sun still rises in the East.
Also looks like most of the death penalty states are in the top half. The death penalty does not deter murder - period. If it did, Europe would have a murder rate four times higher than ours instead of the other way around.
Things that do not reduce murders:
The death penalty
Gun ownership
"Lock 'em up" DAs
Things that do reduce murder:
High average levels of education
High median wages
No history of slavery
Strict national gun laws
People who do not want to reduce murder rates:
conservatives.
Fundamentally, for most supporters of the death penalty it's never been about deterrence, but vengeance.
Or cost-savings.
Except that is has been calculated that the cost of an execution (including all of the legal maneuvers involved) exceeds that of life imprisonment.
Except that is has been calculated that the cost of execution (including all of the legal maneuvers involved) exceeds that of life imprisonment.
Of course, certainly, the case in modern times, say post-1960s.
But the average person hears about 40K a year to incarcerate someone, and can roughly do the math on a life sentence. Tell them about legal costs, etc, and hear them snort...
And some sense, they are correct to roll their eyes. We have arguably among the slowest, most clumsy current legal system among Western countries - and hardly the fairest.
Personally, my objection to the death penalty is a mistrust of the State to excerise that power properly.
Uh oh.
1. District of Columbia 343,213 572,059 60.00%
2. Mississippi 1,033,437 2,844,658 36.33%
3. Louisiana 1,444,566 4,468,976 32.32%
4. South Carolina 1,182,727 4,012,012 29.48%
5. Georgia 2,342,110 8,186,453 28.61%
6. Maryland 1,468,243 5,296,486 27.72%
7. Alabama 1,153,044 4,447,100 25.93%
8. North Carolina 1,734,154 8,049,313 21.54%
9. Virginia 1,384,008 7,078,515 19.55%
10. Delaware 148,823 783,600 18.99%
https://www.censusscope.org/us/rank_race_blackafricanamerican.html
Those charts are incorrect.
Those numbers are not per million residents. They are per 100,000 residents.
I'm surprised nobody has noticed the error. Anybody who has followed this topic knows that the rate got close to 10 per 100,000 three decades ago but for the last two decades, around 5.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate
To put that into long term prespective:
"To appreciate how violent the West was, we need to consider not only the annual homicide rate, but the risk of being murdered over time. For instance, the adult residents of Dodge City faced a homicide rate of at least 165 per 100,000 adults per year, meaning that 0.165 percent of the population was murdered each year—between a fifth and a tenth of a percent. That may sound small, but it is large to a criminologist or epidemiologist, because it means that an adult who lived in Dodge City from 1876 to 1885 faced at least a 1 in 61 chance of being murdered—1.65 percent of the population was murdered in those 10 years. An adult who lived in San Francisco, 1850-1865, faced at least a 1 in 203 chance of being murdered, and in the eight other counties in California that have been studied to date, at least a 1 in 72 chance. Even in Oregon, 1850-1865, which had the lowest minimum rate yet discovered in the American West (30 per 100,000 adults per year), an adult faced at least a 1 in 208 chance of being murdered."
Ascuse me. Georgia is not Democratic. I know. I am doing time here.
Kevin, if you do the same analysis by county in California you will find the murder rate is high in blue places (LA and surroundings, Bay Area) and lower in red areas. D.C. is missing from the graph. Why? One ought to be able to separate out the influence of cities vs. rural environments to get a clearer picture.
State by state comparison suffers from misrepresentation (over-representation of tiny states in this case); I don't think that this thing really teaches us anything.
So there's going to be heavy correlation on this, but I ran my own analysis. I'm using the FBI numbers as well.
Death Penalty
13 states have executed someone since 2016. 10 of them are in the top 25 states for murder. I totally get that causation here could be tricky. Does having the death penalty come from being a state with a murder problem or does having the death penalty act as a cause for a higher murder rate. I personally expect that both play a role.
Presidential Vote
Looking at the original proposition, the net is that states in the top half of murders or bottom half, it comes down to a 7% swing in the vote between Trump and Biden. As in Trump beat Biden by > 7% on average in states in the top half of murders, and Biden beat Trump by > 7% in states in the bottom half of murders.
(Average vote)
Top 25 Murder States: 45.36% Biden / 52.82% Trump
Bottom 25 Murder States: 50.17% Biden / 47.36% Trump
Senators
Top 25 Murder States: 19 D/ 31 R - 38%/62%
Bottom 25 Murder States: 31 D / 19 R - 62%/38%
House
Top 25 Murder States: 100 D/156 R - 39%/61%
Bottom 25 Murder States: 121 D/55 R - 69%/31%
Governor
Top 25 Murder States: 8 D/17 R - 32%/68%
Bottom 25 Murder States: 14 D/11 R - 56%/44%
So obviously the same question politically applies. Does high crime cause people to become conservative? Or does conservative governance create a social environment that creates more murder. I would again assert that likely both are true.
Here's the source spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vl2IEgX00XdP7pmj3LCF4mffsjjb2E-ddg7cvVhvMGI/edit?usp=sharing
Oh, interesting
so I also decided to look at total single party control. Governor, both senators, all congresspeople from the same party, and voted for that party for president
this one did not come out how I expected
Top 25 Murder States, total control by one party: 1 D/3 R
Bottom 25 Murder States, total control by one party: 3 D/5 R
Single party control states are purely small states, so that almost certainly plays a role here.
Small Correction 3 D/6 R for bottom states