Another reason is that the opioid epidemic died out.
Like the earlier crack epidemic eventually some combination of those vulnerable to it dying off and new measures to control it being implemented.
I think the reason that right-wingers don't accept this is that murder was never really something that bothered them. Two black gangbangers killing each other over drugs doesn't really involve them. It was only that murder was correlated with other things.
What bothers right wingers is something like "civil disorder". It's whether there are going to be needles in the park or some schitzo shouting at you on the subway. These interactions don't always turn violent, but they are the opposite of civilziation. They are also harder to get hard data on.
There's something to the quality of life argument. And there are a lot of cities that experience way more petty crime than they did a decade ago. But it's harder to convey we live in a hellhole when the problem is more shoplifting versus more murders.
The primary complaint about public spaces is not that they're more dangerous but that their filled with foreigners and it alienates people. That's a problem, yet it's harder to convince normies to be upset with it if it's not accompanied by violent crime.
The universal sign of civilization seems to be whether everything at the local CVS is locked up.
I personally use the chick-fil-a sauce test. Are the sauces out in public for anyone to take as much as they want, or are they behind the counter and you have to request them.
Maybe people are conflating crime with quality of life? Your shooting or stabbing is typically late at night in shitty areas, so most people still don't see those. The shoplifting, trash everywhere, weed clouds, etc. are inescapable so maybe in people's heads it all just equals "crime"?
When you read the travel reports of people who have visited the US, they very often comment on how disorderly our public spaces are. You are correct that these things don't translate into crime statistics. We really need to fix this as it's a terrible problem. Can "broken windows" policing and "stop & frisk" policies help?
This is why I like a Rudy Giuliani IQ Supplement. His broken windows policing and stop & frisk seemed like genius policies and sorely needed now in big cities. More broadly the 1994 Crime Bill signed by Bill Clinton could tie into it all. I still think of that as a good bill.
"Another reason is that thanks to smartphones and social media, we’re more aware of individual crimes than we were 30 years ago."
This, I think, is the single biggest factor causing people to overestimate the crime problem. Nearly every altercation is caught on video and shared. Interestingly, smartphones are probably a potent crime deterrent. It's very hard to commit a crime without some identifiable information being captured on video. Of course you have those people who don't care about being caught, but that's a different story.
In many places it is a staggeringly small number of people responsible for most crimes. The evidence from BART installing proper fare gates is telling "Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year" - that from an Atlantic article of all places.
In terms of the violence question it is still the seemingly random nature of the violence that is causing RWers online to continue to be disturbed by it. There are also plenty of stories emerging now of lenient Judges who are retreating from the tough-on-crime approach. The RW media and ecosystem would do well to make a big deal about these judges and that because that will erode many of the gains made.
I wonder if despite the media and social medias portraying of it, race relations are better now too. NBA's are being replaced by African migrants. They have a different mentality than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson do. Hopefully it makes for less headaches in the future.
When my native St. Louis hit 262 homicides in the annus horribilis of 2020, which was its second highest numerical total ever (267 in 1993), and the record for the highest per 100k rate ever, it was a fashionable prediction to make that it was only getting started and that the worst was yet to come. While it was not an unreasonable prediction to make, and I don't berate anyone who did at the time, I also know that even at that time I thought that that was as bad as it would get and it would go downhill from there. My reasoning is that 2020 for St. Louis City was the result of a black homicide rate in the 170-180 per 100k range, which is anomalously high even for Bell Curve City. I figured regression to the mean would kick in. And, at least as far as St. Louis, that's precisely what happened. And regression to the mean is most of the explanation. Aside from the restoration of real law enforcement and criminal justice.
What Scott Greer is also saying here is that what fills out the screens of devices doesn’t necessarily fill out reality. That’s something else I learned in a St. Louis-centric way, namely, Ferguson. Ferguson’s damage was so micro-localized that even St. Louisans would have never had a clue that this major daily international news was taking place right under their noses if they themselves didn’t pay attention to the news. Yet, I had to read smart people in our own sector make the outrageous claim that everything in a 30 mile radius around Ground Zero of the Fergaza Strip was leveled.
Mark Furhman passed away a week ago. I only see the relation to this article being he was a cop during the worst of crime waves in Los Angeles in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. It obviously wore him out, and made him dislike the trash he was dealing with.
High crime is also a sign of the vitality of a population. Surely I'm stupid and dishonest here, right? But a society of Nietzschean last men also has very low crime. Why go out, fight and murder another man over a woman if your passions are barely inflamed to begin with? You have porn, video games and no reason to leave the comfort of your basement.
This is in the context of why there's no excitement over America 250th compared to the bicentennial. There was much higher crime in 1976, so that can't be an explanation for why people would rather stay home this time. But why care about America 250th anyway if you'd never be motivated by abstract ideals to lay your life on the line for your country because the civilization has fizzled out into mostly being last men devoid of vitality? And how many men have wives and children they'd sacrifice their lives for in 2026 compared to 1976? Checked out men don't commit crime but they don't go to war for their country either.
I would rather have higher crime as a tradeoff for having a less checked out, demotivated population, rather than a record low murder rate in an ageing population where no one cares about anything besides self numbing hedonism and staring at a smartphone. "B-b-but you can have both!" Yeah, but we don't.
The high crime rates in our country have always been driven by wild untamed black youths and drunk rednecks, not Nietzschean supermen. The fact that they're going down is almost unequivocally a good thing.
Another reason is that the opioid epidemic died out.
Like the earlier crack epidemic eventually some combination of those vulnerable to it dying off and new measures to control it being implemented.
I think the reason that right-wingers don't accept this is that murder was never really something that bothered them. Two black gangbangers killing each other over drugs doesn't really involve them. It was only that murder was correlated with other things.
What bothers right wingers is something like "civil disorder". It's whether there are going to be needles in the park or some schitzo shouting at you on the subway. These interactions don't always turn violent, but they are the opposite of civilziation. They are also harder to get hard data on.
There's something to the quality of life argument. And there are a lot of cities that experience way more petty crime than they did a decade ago. But it's harder to convey we live in a hellhole when the problem is more shoplifting versus more murders.
The primary complaint about public spaces is not that they're more dangerous but that their filled with foreigners and it alienates people. That's a problem, yet it's harder to convince normies to be upset with it if it's not accompanied by violent crime.
The universal sign of civilization seems to be whether everything at the local CVS is locked up.
I personally use the chick-fil-a sauce test. Are the sauces out in public for anyone to take as much as they want, or are they behind the counter and you have to request them.
Maybe people are conflating crime with quality of life? Your shooting or stabbing is typically late at night in shitty areas, so most people still don't see those. The shoplifting, trash everywhere, weed clouds, etc. are inescapable so maybe in people's heads it all just equals "crime"?
When you read the travel reports of people who have visited the US, they very often comment on how disorderly our public spaces are. You are correct that these things don't translate into crime statistics. We really need to fix this as it's a terrible problem. Can "broken windows" policing and "stop & frisk" policies help?
This is why I like a Rudy Giuliani IQ Supplement. His broken windows policing and stop & frisk seemed like genius policies and sorely needed now in big cities. More broadly the 1994 Crime Bill signed by Bill Clinton could tie into it all. I still think of that as a good bill.
When I walk around Tampa, FL I don't see any dangerous vagrants downtown. I think that this is all a policy choice.
"Another reason is that thanks to smartphones and social media, we’re more aware of individual crimes than we were 30 years ago."
This, I think, is the single biggest factor causing people to overestimate the crime problem. Nearly every altercation is caught on video and shared. Interestingly, smartphones are probably a potent crime deterrent. It's very hard to commit a crime without some identifiable information being captured on video. Of course you have those people who don't care about being caught, but that's a different story.
In many places it is a staggeringly small number of people responsible for most crimes. The evidence from BART installing proper fare gates is telling "Workers spent nearly 1,000 fewer hours cleaning up after unruly passengers in the six months following the gates’ installation, compared with the six months before. Crime on BART fell by 41 percent last year" - that from an Atlantic article of all places.
In terms of the violence question it is still the seemingly random nature of the violence that is causing RWers online to continue to be disturbed by it. There are also plenty of stories emerging now of lenient Judges who are retreating from the tough-on-crime approach. The RW media and ecosystem would do well to make a big deal about these judges and that because that will erode many of the gains made.
I wonder if despite the media and social medias portraying of it, race relations are better now too. NBA's are being replaced by African migrants. They have a different mentality than Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson do. Hopefully it makes for less headaches in the future.
Younger NBA’s also care less about race or Jim Crow than their grandparents
100%
Any good news like this should result in us dunking on the Democrats, not wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Seeing any statistic and having the same reaction to it as the left should be a wake up call to some people...
When my native St. Louis hit 262 homicides in the annus horribilis of 2020, which was its second highest numerical total ever (267 in 1993), and the record for the highest per 100k rate ever, it was a fashionable prediction to make that it was only getting started and that the worst was yet to come. While it was not an unreasonable prediction to make, and I don't berate anyone who did at the time, I also know that even at that time I thought that that was as bad as it would get and it would go downhill from there. My reasoning is that 2020 for St. Louis City was the result of a black homicide rate in the 170-180 per 100k range, which is anomalously high even for Bell Curve City. I figured regression to the mean would kick in. And, at least as far as St. Louis, that's precisely what happened. And regression to the mean is most of the explanation. Aside from the restoration of real law enforcement and criminal justice.
What Scott Greer is also saying here is that what fills out the screens of devices doesn’t necessarily fill out reality. That’s something else I learned in a St. Louis-centric way, namely, Ferguson. Ferguson’s damage was so micro-localized that even St. Louisans would have never had a clue that this major daily international news was taking place right under their noses if they themselves didn’t pay attention to the news. Yet, I had to read smart people in our own sector make the outrageous claim that everything in a 30 mile radius around Ground Zero of the Fergaza Strip was leveled.
I think what it is. These old people want faux radical politics without rejecting tabula rasa or being "racist".
Scott you kind of saw it was old people who seriously think the reason people stopped going to Blockbuster was out of control crime.
Mark Furhman passed away a week ago. I only see the relation to this article being he was a cop during the worst of crime waves in Los Angeles in the 70's, 80's, and 90's. It obviously wore him out, and made him dislike the trash he was dealing with.
https://people.com/mark-fuhrman-former-lapd-detective-in-o-j-simpson-case-dies-at-74-11978204
High crime is also a sign of the vitality of a population. Surely I'm stupid and dishonest here, right? But a society of Nietzschean last men also has very low crime. Why go out, fight and murder another man over a woman if your passions are barely inflamed to begin with? You have porn, video games and no reason to leave the comfort of your basement.
This is in the context of why there's no excitement over America 250th compared to the bicentennial. There was much higher crime in 1976, so that can't be an explanation for why people would rather stay home this time. But why care about America 250th anyway if you'd never be motivated by abstract ideals to lay your life on the line for your country because the civilization has fizzled out into mostly being last men devoid of vitality? And how many men have wives and children they'd sacrifice their lives for in 2026 compared to 1976? Checked out men don't commit crime but they don't go to war for their country either.
I would rather have higher crime as a tradeoff for having a less checked out, demotivated population, rather than a record low murder rate in an ageing population where no one cares about anything besides self numbing hedonism and staring at a smartphone. "B-b-but you can have both!" Yeah, but we don't.
The high crime rates in our country have always been driven by wild untamed black youths and drunk rednecks, not Nietzschean supermen. The fact that they're going down is almost unequivocally a good thing.
Have you watched many of these murderers in bodycam footage? The murderers are the checked out, demotivated hedonists in this country.