I noted the 2023 violent crime rate from the NCVS survey back when it was released, but here it is again:
To recap: violent crime didn't go up during the pandemic. Only homicide did. In fact, overall violent crime rates haven't changed more than slightly for over a decade. But just to show how hard crime analysis is, here's a breakdown by race:
A couple of days ago I noted that Black victimization was much higher than white victimization. That was based on FBI summaries of local police reporting. But in the NCVS survey data there's virtually no difference.
So which is it? I personally find the FBI numbers more plausible, but who knows? Both of these sources are fairly reliable and they flatly disagree. We just don't know.
"violent crime didn't go up during the pandemic. Only homicide did"
Hate to break it to you KD, but for most people, an increase in the murder rate is far, far, more unsettling than other crimes described as violent crime. When innocent people are randomly killed (not gang members) in the street and in the Subway, it scares the shit out of the population and can dramatically change behavior and the perception of personal safety.
I don't see anything in these statistics that breaks out "innocent people" vs "non-innocent people." I don't see anything in these statistics that break out homicides committed in streets or subways vs all the other places homicides take place (houses, workplaces, schools, rural settings, etc).
The fact is that if you're going to be injured or killed by a stranger (particularly in the street), that stranger is more likely to be wielding a steering wheel than a knife or firearm. If you're really concerned about personal safety, drive less and more carefully.
I was somewhat disturbed by KD's quote, that only the murder rate went up during the pandemic. My worldview on this stuff is mostly related to that big city about 50 miles to south of me, and this seems to be consistent with other stats I have seen:
https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/the-state-of-crime-in-new-york-city-at-midyear-2024
That in NYC, violent crime went up through the pandemic, with only murder and shootings backing down in the last year+. Unless you have stats that says this is primarily criminal on criminal acts (like the 5 Families "going to the mattresses") or domestic violence, I would guess that the majority of the murders are of innocent people by people they don't know. Of course the first 15 minutes of local news highlighting these events every night does not help, and that statistically, NYC is still safer than most large cities in the US, it has an impact of the quality of life in NYC and the rest of NY Metro area.
"I would guess that the majority of the murders are of innocent people by people they don't know."
Why would you guess that? Most victims knew their assailant, from what I've read.
I don't see any breakout of "innocent" vs "non-innocent" or "stranger" vs "someone known to the victim."
There was no rise in stranger on stranger crime in the pandemic. The opposite, actually.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9582712/
Thanks. Color me unsurprised.
Would be interesting would be to see is the trend of "local TV minutes/day per violent crime", by market. Adjusted for inflation, of course.
During the 90's crime wave there was a huge difference in both perpetrator and victimization rates between blacks and whites according to FBI data:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/aus8009.pdf
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/homicide-trends-united-states-1980-2008
It's hard to see how the NCVS word-of-mouth results could be valid in the face of this reporting of actual crimes.
The crime wave in homicide in particular seems to have been almost entirely a black phenomenon (Homicide Trends, Figures 17 and 18). This is among the many things that are not consistent with the lead hypothesis - did only blacks get the excess lead? Was the peak in blood lead about 1970 due only to blacks? Who exactly was measured in the study on blood lead which the lead hypothesis seems to rely on?
Of course there is a strong correlation between race and economic status - which is not reported in the FBI data - so there is no reason to assign a genetic or "racial" rather than economic or cultural cause to this disparity. Also there is probably a disparity in crime enforcement according to race (but probably not in the case of murder).
The crime wave in homicide was also almost entirely a matter of hand guns (Homicide Trends, Figure 42). Why wouldn't lead-crazed people, whatever their race, just pick up a blunt object or knife?
If you're counting deaths, the deadlier things would go up the most.
A handgun is super deadly compared to a pipe.
There's obviously more going on with black people than lead. My guess is the real problem is manliness, and social conservatism --where the least imagined slight is an existential threat.
I would prefer an income or wealth breakdown rather than race. Crime victimization is more common for poor people. That would allow comparisons with of counties with different racial compositions more meaningful.
A few comments:
People in cities, no matter the ethnicity, did get exposed to more lead than rural people. (Maybe it helps to explain trump.) However, black people in cities tended to get a lot more exposure because huge highways were routed thru the middle of their neighborhoods from the 1950s on, if not earlier.
Are homicide rates actually higher in cities than in rural areas? I'm dubious that they are. While black people suffer a homicide rate that is 8 or 10 times that of whites, Southern whites seem to have a rate that is higher than that of non-Southern whites. I think this is a consequence of a history of having to rely on yourself for protection because you lived in a rural area where law enforcement was sparse, hard to contact, and untrustworthy. As a friend of mine says, "There are very few situations that are so bad that the police can't make it worse." For black people this is all on steroids and the untrustworthy component did not change that much when they went North.
In such circumstances, it helps if potential attackers believe that someone attacked will respond with violence themselves. This gets ingrained into popular culture: a culture of honor. I have my own story about my wife being threatened by a man while picking up a pizza in the 1980s. She called us from a pay-phone. My father-in-law and I responded by grabbing a revolver and driving to the restaurant with the plan of confronting the man. When we arrived, he and his friends left; they believed we would be violent. Only decades later did I ask myself why none of us considered calling the police.
Anyway, it is easy to see how this kind of ingrained belief system can lead to more homicides.