Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/02/01/explaining-the-great-2020-homicide-spike/

by RickJWagner • 5 years ago

6 17 5 years ago

prepend3• 5 years ago

I’m really interested in analyses like this.

I’d like to compare the rates of policing to murders and shootings in more metro areas to confirm, but if they match the ones shown it seems like the homicides are due to police response to the protests more than the protests themselves.

The fewer pedestrian stops in LA seems to show that there were just fewer cops out and about. So this somehow resulted in more murder. I want to investigate other crime as well.

I think there’s likely some other benefits to having fewer police stops, but it seems, despite the errors and prejudice shown during many stops, that they reduce crime.

I was surprised with the increase murder because I expected it to go down due to everyone being cooped up. I expected domestic violence and suicide to rise, but murders and property crime to drop just due to fewer human interactions.

amanaplanacanal• 5 years ago

The fewer pedestrian stops in LA seems to show that there were just fewer cops out and about. So this somehow resulted in more murder.

I suspect this is one of the cases where “correlation does not equal causation” should be mentioned. It certainly might be causative, but it also might not be.

As the other commenter mentioned, you really need to look at the actual murders themselves. No amount of stop and frisk is going to reduce domestic murders.

prepend3• 5 years ago

Good point. I don’t think this is the likely correlation, but I think that whatever is causing more murders is also causing fewer stops.

The author suggests it’s fewer police out and about policing. It might be that.

This is a really card situation to prove causation since it’s retrospective observational. But maybe more researchers can try to isolate variables and find controls, etc.

For me, it’s trying to find a reasonable story so I can stop wondering. I imagine that police waking and driving around arresting people doesn’t stop murders, but fewer police being around doing stuff might result in more violence.

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

Something else to keep in mind is you can trivially eliminate crime with a sufficiently vast and committed police state. Put an officer on the street per non-officer resident. Allow them to stop and search any person randomly at any moment. Allow them to enter and search any house whenever they feel like it. Ban all encryption and put all communications channels through state MITM proxies that monitor the content.

We don't do this because we have values as a nation other than "minimize crime at any cost." Allowing it to be possible to commit some level of non-state violence is the price we pay for personal freedom from absolute government tyranny.

prepend3• 5 years ago

I actually think this was a price we paid for some of the stop and frisk police work. It did reduce crime, but at a cost to justice for the innocents arrested, killed, and bothered.

So it’s important to plan police not to eliminate crime, but to reduce crime as much as possible given liberties. There’s probably some optimal frontier to it, but I don’t want to trade tyranny for crime.

What will be interesting is whether these higher murders had some trade offs elsewhere. I would like to see some research that all those fewer arrests also did something positive.

I don’t think there’s many accidental/unjustified police shootings of civilians but I would guess those went way down.

JoeAltmaier• 5 years ago

Changes in category would explain it too. E.g. if deaths that used to go reported as accidents, are now verified as murders.

Changes in living conditions make such shifts seem likely - increased observation of everybody in close quarters.

seanc• 5 years ago

IMO the most fascinating skew along those lines is how advances in emergency medicine are actually the primary cause of a drop in murder rates. Police take all the credit, but it's actually paramedics rolling up to the scene with a full trauma center in the back of the ambulance.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/

jinkyu• 5 years ago

this is kinda one of those captain obvious articles.

charlescearl• 5 years ago

"To save lives in 2021, we need urgent action to restore proactive policing to its pre-protest levels."

So we're at stop-and-frisk again. Without a thought of examining the expansion of social services before subjecting communities to police forces which have been infiltrated by white supremacists.[1]

The report also does not address the impact of job losses and mental health deterioration that is no doubt tied to the increase in violent crime. These arguments are so tiring and just plain wrong [2]

[1] https://theconversation.com/capitol-siege-raises-questions-o...

[2] https://longreads.com/2017/04/06/the-bitter-history-of-law-a...

rangoon6262• 5 years ago

You bring up a good point. How do we ensure that social services doesn’t also get infiltrated by white supremacists, though?

jfengel• 5 years ago

I suppose it's not impossible, but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would attract them. The kinds of white supremacists under discussion here are thought to want to exert force, especially with weapons. We don't arm social services.

That said, there is a dangerous undercurrent of white supremacy in social services. It's of the nominally benevolent kind, where social workers bring biases and don't understand the communities they're serving. One example, it may seem that a white family is helping a black child by adopting it away from a much poorer black family with issues, but there are a lot of things a white family doesn't know how to prepare black children for, from their hair to dealing with police.

This is an incredibly difficult and thorny subject. I bring up one example that I happen to have a very distant and passing familiarity with, but don't intend it to give more than a vague hint of the complexity.

I bring it up only because, while it's not likely to be infiltrated by hate groups, white supremacy is a systemic problem in the US, including social work. Dealing with that requires constant feedback and self-inquiry, and ensuring that minority voices are genuinely listened to in the process.

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

This is a woefully incomplete analysis. This is likely largely the fault of poor reporting of homicide details or at least no uniform data structure that makes it easy to aggregate categories between cities, but most homicide is domestic. The obvious hypothesis as to why homicides increased while burglary decreased is people were home more and under a lot of stress. Thus, they're less likely to be burglarized because their houses aren't empty all day, but they're also more likely to murder each other. Proactive policing can't stop this unless the police are randomly going into people's houses.

This isn't necessarily the actual explanation, but you can't decide between this and competing hypotheses without analyzing the nature of the homicides that happened. Were the increases mostly due to gangs and ruffians shooting each other on the street? Or were they mostly due to people at home shooting their spouses and kids?

Don't forget the huge jump in unemployment as well. Unemployed people tend to commit more crimes. So why not burglary? Well again, if people are home, it's a lot harder to burglarize them. Why not drug crime? A whole lot of drug use was legalized in the past year, so you don't want to look at drug crime, you want to look at drug usage.

There's also hospital overcrowding. An increase in murder can just mean the same number of people shooting each other as normal, but more of them died. Did attempted murder also increase? I don't even see that question asked.

I obviously don't have any answers because I haven't done the analysis either, and I'm not going to because I'm not a journalist or analyst and already have a job, but the people whose job is to do this kind of analysis should at least do it correctly.

lom888• 5 years ago

The obvious hypothesis as to why homicides increased while burglary decreased is people were home more and under a lot of stress.

In places like Toronto and London homicides decreased in 2020 while they increased in major US cities.

enoch_r2• 5 years ago

most homicide is domestic

This doesn't seem to be true. According to Wikipedia, there were 2340 domestic homicides in 2007.[1] There were 18,361 homicides that year.[2] So <13% of homicides were domestic. You may have read a statistic that most women killed in homicides are killed by romantic partners - but this is not true of men, who are the overwhelming majority of homicide victims.

Even if the rate of domestic homicides doubled it would mean only a 13% increase in the overall homicide rate, far less than what we've actually observed.

people were home more and under a lot of stress.

This explanation does not seem to fit with the social mobility data presented. The pandemic struck in March, people were staying home far more in March/April/May than in June - but homicides did not rise until June. Why?

An increase in murder can just mean the same number of people shooting each other as normal, but more of them died.

It could mean that. But no: shootings and shooting victims increased dramatically right along with murders:

- in Chicago: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shootings-2020-shooting-crim...

- in NYC: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-homicides-and-sho...

- in Portland: https://www.koin.com/news/crime/shootings-in-portland-more-t...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_Unite...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6203a28.htm?s_ci...

nonameiguess3• 5 years ago

First off, thank you for posting this, but it should be clear that I was never trying to make the opposite argument that I personally have any special insight into why the murder rate changed. I just want an investigative article looking into this to address these questions and present more than just temporal correlation. It presumably didn't take you more than a few minutes to look this stuff up, so why didn't the original author of the headline article bother to do it?

Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike

Related Stories