Crime is going down in California:
Through May 20, L.A. experienced a drop of more than 10% in violent crime this year compared with the same period in 2022. Property crime fell by slightly more than 1%, and arrests were up 4.4%, according to Police Department data....The Police Department posted additional positive numbers in a tweet Tuesday: Hate crimes dropped nearly 6%, homicides declined more than 27%, and the number of shooting victims decreased 17%.
....Los Angeles is not the only California city to report a drop in crime. San Francisco...has experienced an overall drop of nearly 7% in crime in the first five months of the year, according to police statistics. San Jose reported a drop of about 8% in violent and property crimes in the first three months of 2023.
Nobody knows for sure why crime—especially homicide—surged so strongly in 2020. Was it the pandemic? The George Floyd protests? Some coincidental outbreak of drug gang violence? Record-setting summer temperatures in places like Chicago, New York, and Washington DC?
We don't know. But whatever the reason, it's clear that crime is now settling back to its pre-2020 normal. It's happening slowly and haltingly, but it's happening.
“Nobody knows for sure why crime—especially homicide—surged so strongly in 2020.“
Maybe because marginally poor people had extra money?
The most crime ridden places in my city. Robberies, murder, property crimes, violent assaults. Are in the areas that are marginal. The poorest parts of town are relatively safe as there is nothing to steal.
The marginal areas saw a significant increase in disposable income during the pandemic. And crime too.
That, and also: the cohort with the greatest propensity to engage in violent crime—young men—suddenly had more time on their hands due to school closings and workplace furloughs.
Yes. Crime can only be committed during non-business hours. (Criminals can’t crime on work/school nights… they’ve got housework and homework to do instead.)
Wtf. This claim is right up there with the urban myth that criminals take the bus or train to commit crimes in transit accessible locations, despite nobody ever managing to snap a pic of a guy holding an obviously-stolen TV with cords still dangling standing at a bus stop or train platform. Or the other one that public schools have litter boxes despite nobody ever producing a pic of that either. (I mean seriously, nobody has even tried to fake such pics to prove the myths are true, even though it wouldn’t be hard to stage either photo scene. The peddlers of fake news can be so lazy!)
"Wtf. This claim is right up there with the urban myth . . ."
That's harsh and inaccurate. There's a stochastic aspect to crime (just as there is to any other human set of behaviors). It's pretty reasonable that if you furlough/fire a bunch of people from work and school, remove social/recreational/occupational outlets via lockdowns, and amp up the stress and uncertainty via say a big pandemic, crime rates would go up.
Particularly since crime is so very, very rare, nudging even a tiny fraction of the otherwise non-crime-doing populace into the do-a-crime category can cause a big spike in crime rates. And then that spike would recede once the conditions that enabled it also recede. Which is sorta what we are seeing.
Not saying that _is_ the explanation, but just pointing out that it's one that makes a decent amount of sense and is not worthy of dismissal as an "urban myth." I mean, FWIW, we readly acknowledge that much if not all of the reason for so many gun deaths in America is because there are so many guns and thus so many more *opportunities* for gun violence here than in, say, Japan or Germany, not because there's something endogenously bloodthirsty about Americans.
The fact that there are so many guns strongly suggests that there IS something endogenously bloodthirsty about Americans. No other country has anything like the 2nd amendment, and if you were to suggest to a German or Japanese that their constitutions should have some equivalent, they would correctly regard you as crazy. They are not endogenously bloodthirsty and so can't see a need for lethal weapons to be readily available.
Particularly since crime is so very, very rare, nudging even a tiny fraction of the otherwise non-crime-doing populace into the do-a-crime category can cause a big spike in crime rates
Exactly. In March, 2020, what was the US population of males between the ages of (say) 16-30 who were either in school that would cancel on site classes or in jobs that would soon vanish? Has to be in the 20 million range. The number of such (suddenly) idle persons who used their new free time to engage in illegal activities would certainly not be zero. And, given the size of the denominator, even if this describes only a very small fraction, the absolute number is going to be in the many thousands.
It had to have been a factor.
Yes. Crime can only be committed during non-business hours.
Your capacity to reason isn't very developed, is it?
Idle hands are the devil's workshop.
All I know for sure is that we had a momentary optick from an all-time low, and some folk used it to arm themselves to the teeth.
And that feels like a very dangerous situation, now. Gun proliferation has become a problem.
"“Nobody knows for sure why crime—especially homicide—surged so strongly in 2020.“
Here's a hypothesis that will frustrate many people: Irrespective of the cause of the uptick, the settling back is a statistical sure thing--regression to the mean.
THIS, THIS, and of course, THIS. Too many people assume statistics is like that infinite zoom camera you see in so many crime dramas that should know better. No. All you can do is draw an extremely scoped set of inferences preferenced within a rigorous set of hedges.
I wish this drop in crime and murder would spread to Albuquerque...
This isn’t true! Crime is going up and up. Worse than it’s ever been, ever ever,ever. I know this because I get NextDoor. Also, homeless people are all violent criminals who should be jailed before they harm you.
Such a squishy liberal. Everyone knows the homeless are like zombies: you gotta kill them or they keep coming back for more harm.
Everyone knows that if they ain't homed they're less human than an embryo, amirite? And thus a corresponding lack of rights ...
(heh, heh) I know a neighborhood watch captain who gives the same description of NextDoor. It's just marginally useful, at least in theory, but nearly all the traffic comes from karens and trolls.
Even the local nightly news broadcasts are better .... at least you get weather and sports.
Yep and even if crime is doing down, per NextDoor that doesn't matter because I FEEL UNSAFE!!!! Good god Nextdoor is a flaming cesspool where MAGA types push the our Neighborhood is a hellhole because of the socialists commie softie Commonwealth Attorneys.
I can see the headline now: "Crime wave continues! Arrests up 4.4%!!!!"
That just an overall was reported for San Francisco stood out. Following the links shows why. It was a very mixed bag: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crime-dashboard
I tried to archive it, but it didn’t work well, so following the link a month from now will bring-up different data.
...And you won't hear a word of this on the news or from Republicans, the only people allowed by the news to set narratives.
When the pandemic hit in Feb 2020 and epidemiologists were telling us what was coming, I told my friend Dave that "we are going to see an explosion of civil unrest like you can't imagine." Why did I think that? Because our society is so finely tuned and balanced that anything this disruptive was bound to cause a lot of people to just go wack.
It's pointless to try and suss out the precise mechanisms. It's a systems problem.
Mr. Drum needs to stop writing about crime rates because every time he does, there’s a triple murder… or worse.
“Two Pennsylvania boys were fatally shot while playing with their kittens outside their home when a gunman opened fire on a teenager who was also killed in the triple homicide. Jesus Perez-Salome, 8, was pronounced dead on the back porch of his home on Tuesday and 9-year-old Sebastian Perez-Salome was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries in a “truly heartbreaking” shooting in Lebanon, according to Mayor Sherry Capello.”
Too much killing.