I think Americans are using “crime” more loosely than is defined it here, maybe “order” would be more appropriate. I can’t speak for other regions, but in the Bay Area I regularly see huge gangs of dirt bikers roaming around, sideshows on major roads and bridges, and of course rampant public drug use/dealing and shoplifting.
So in a real sense I don’t really care what the statistics say, I see people doing bad things all the time and getting away with it and I want them to be punished. And this seems to be mostly the fault of Democrats, and Biden is a Democrat.
I live in CA too. This is a great point. We call it "law and order", but it's the order people crave. Whether it's not dodging homeless people or feces on the streets, not having to get someone to unlock the hairspray in stores, not being accosted by random crazies screaming at the voices in their heads, gangs of wanna-be-thugs taking over streets for sideshows... this is what people want their local government to solve. And it is precisely these things that most blue-state, urban municipalities refuse to solve.
You seem to be in a mood to CONFLATE based on party affiliation, so consider this: Trump the 34 time FELON is a Republican. If Republicans cannot even control criminality by their own LEADER, how are they better suited to enforce law and order in society?
That's true and I agree with that. But when people vote they vote based on the politician's individual characteristics and the characteristics of the party that the politician is a part of. If people are mad at Democrats it's natural—even if it's not logical—that some of that anger would bleed across to Biden.
Much of that anger is due to endless propaganda and misinformation spewed by FOX et al--like the "crime is up due to the evil Dems" meme--that is unthinkingly consumed by those ascribing to the RW mediaverse.
It's tragic that most conservatives believe--or want to believe--that FOX is actually a news channel; instead of mostly opinion with a little news thrown in. That relentlessly carries water for RW special interests and the GOP.
Max is a mild prepper, so people here may not like everything he has to say, but he's talking about exactly what you are, Drew, that crime stats don't capture the reality in this case.
Disregard the conclusion of Noah's piece. The fact that the FBI figures on falling crime are corroborated by six other data sets merely is purely coincidence. Instead, watch a few hours of FOX News, and then trust your gut and your feelings.
Nubby, why do people here keep accusing me of watching FoxNews? I don't even have cable.
This is a trait I find common among many co-called liberals (who usually aren't really) today. They assume their own conclusions are drawn utterly rationally and with good intentions while attributing stupidity and ill-motives to anyone who disagrees with them. There are some strains on the Right that have this as well, but it has become endemic on the Left and it's really tiresome.
FOX is a catch-all for the entire RW media ecosystem, to which 30-40% of Americans exclusively rely on for news, and which is rife with misinformation, disinformation, Kremlin/Beijing agitprop, and what is basically non-journalism. Whenever a GOP talking point has been presented in this discussion--e.g., "There is a crime wave under Biden"--media-savvy viewers infer the influence of FOX and its lesser imitators.
Liberal programming like that of MSNBC also panders to confirmation bias, but at least does so with facts and actual journalistic process. Well, mostly.
Shawn Hannity is a partisan hack but Rachel Maddow is an objective journalist? Give me a break. They're both partisan hacks. You're welcome to look at my substack subscription list and draw your own conclusions.
I don't know what "the RW media ecosystem" means, but I'm pretty sure I don't participate in it. I pretty much disclaim the left-wing media ecosystem too (which is far harder since it's far larger) but there are specific journalists that I respect. I plan on watching the CNN debate tonight; I find it kind of weird that Trump will go on CNN but Biden won't go on Fox, but I'm sure you would say that CNN is "real journalism" and Fox is "part of the RW ecosystem".
Crime, though reported on a nationwide basis, is local. Criminal statutes differ, enforcement differs, and the local experience matters more than what any statistic notes. I can assure you that there are places, my midsized blue city being one of them, that has seen no let up of the violence. In fact, we just had one record year of murders after the other. We have people being shot on the highway, more than once in the last six months, in broad daylight, in what's supposed to be one of the "safer" sections of town, and that is the very tip of the ugly, violent iceberg. All that being said, the office of the President has little or nothing to do with what happens in our city in the realm of crime enforcement. I do not blame one man for this, nor will I give them credit. I can and do blame the policies I think pervade one side of the aisle, and you can bet I, along with a surprising number of my friends on the blue aisle, will be voting accordingly.
I don't doubt the FBI statistics, and I don't think the majority of voters do either. But the reason crime is such a high priority for many voters this election cycle is the subjective experience of most people do not align with the FBI statistics.
This doesn't mean the statistics are wrong, just that the statistics do not 100% align with feeling safe.
NYC is a very safe city (for the US), but here are a few things that got worse and made day-to-day life feel less safe despite crime statistics looking good:
- mentally ill people on public transport
- brazen shoplifting with no apparent consequences
- blatant traffic violations (speeding, running red lights, fake plates)
Thankfully local politicians did notice this, and things have started to reverse the past few months.
My last point is headlines like this undermine the credibility of the media (see the Matthew Yglesias post on Elite Misinformation today). Yes, crime statistics are down, but months of NYT headlines about falling crime doesn't persuade people life is safer, only an improvement in their day-to-day experience will.
Except that NYT reporting things doesn't matter to most people out there. BUT local news coverage (and social media and very biased news sources) does. And it has always been "if it bleeds, it leads". That was bad enough when it was just local TV stations, but social media has blown this pattern up enormously - as it gets "attention" and every social media company is algorithmically geared to seek "attention"...
Most people in the US don't directly encounter much crime (except perhaps in very poor areas) - so their notion of what really occurs and how often is tremendously influenced by their source of news.
And data NEVER makes as big an impact as an inflammatory report or video....
IF simply encountering mentally ill people on the subway is enough for folks to really think crime is rampant, then people have really been trained to fear the homeless and mentally ill (most of whom are just lost and not dangerous to anyone).
And sigh, shoplifting has been around since I was a kid (many decades ago).
IMO, it is ALL about narrative - like so many things in our political culture.
Do you regularly ride transit? Do you actually encountered mentally ill people on the subway regularly? You sound like you don't. A sheltered middle-class person telling you online that "you shouldn't fear the homeless and mentally ill, they're harmless" will not, when next to a guy screaming bloody murder every 30 seconds for no reason at all and menacingly staring down passers-by, make the situation all pleasant and peachy. Or substitute any of the dozen variations of similar behavior I've personally observed on transit systems (e.g. shitting on the platform or grabbing random people and whispering into their ears, both of which I experienced in the past six months). I'm a normal-sized guy, so I don't fear for my life or safety in these situations, but should every lone man, woman, or child just be expected to suck it up and chant to themselves under their breath "that person is harmless" while this is happening to them? And regardless of whether anyone fears them or not, should they be expected to suck it up and tolerate what is, by any objective metric, a highly impactful imposition on their right to use the transit system in peace? I don't hate the homeless and mentally ill because a lot of the time their actions are not the product of a mind in full control. I sympathize with them, donate to local services for them, and vote for societal policy that improves resources and treatment for them. But whether they are cosmically blameworthy or not is entirely separate from the discussion of whether it is okay for normal societal services like public transit to be made unpleasant and unusable without recourse.
Shoplifting has been around forever, and forever until very recently the societal understanding has been that it was taken seriously, and prevented and punished when detected. When you were a kid many decades ago, were shoplifters allowed to fill their bags then leave the store while in full view of employees the whole time? The brazen shoplifting incidents of recent years where apparently nothing is done to stop it breaks down this understanding and emboldens criminals otherwise deterred by the norm to try their luck.
The point being made in much of recent discussion about these is that even if disruptive people are not fully culpable (often they are not, and even when they are we should offer mercy) and if we should help them with resources and treatment (we should), it is not good societal policy to shrug off the fact that they sometimes deny many others the right to go about in public and use public taxpayer services in peace.
Having ridden BART into SF just the day before yesterday, and dealt with a few disruptive people who were pretty clearly high, I endorse Morpho's message here. (I _think_ they were just totally out of their heads on some very THC-intense weed -- they certainly reeked of it -- but nobody wanted to be anywhere near them, because who the hell knows if "crazy and rowdy in a sort of funny way" is going to turn into something else? And that's leaving aside, again, the unpleasant smell.)
Homeless people sleeping - no problem. Stanky man saying he's gonna kill you - big problem.
Shoplifting - eh it happens. Dude sweeping merchandise of the shelf in the middle of the day into a bag threateningly anyone who looks at him - problem.
I don't watch news, I don't use social media. My opinion is based off my daily experience.
I assure you, the severely mentally ill, the homeless, and the drug addicted have far higher rates of violent, property, and sex crime than the average population.
Where you fall on the blame game scale, one thing has become perfectly clear.
Big Cities run by Democrats have changed policing tactics. Of course, the police go where crime happens. Crime happens in the poorer areas. Areas that drug gangs and drug gang violence.
The victims of crime tend to be our poor. The changes in policing in cities run by Democrats no longer ascribe to the broken windows theory of policing. In fact, many big-city DAs no longer prosecute what they consider to be lower-level crimes. States like Illinois and New York eliminated cash bail for arrestees. These criminals are often released and commit new crimes.
Police Departments have been told to stop arresting these lower-level crimes. Like fare jumpers on the subway. Broken Windows says if you restrict the lower-level crimes in an area, the more aggressive types of crimes committed by violent criminals don’t feel safer to do so.
Release juveniles from jail who carjack vehicles and are never charged, and you’ll find they go out and commit more carjackings. There are various studies that show that a large percentage of crimes are committed by the same people. Recidivism is a real issue.
You still should not feel safe in Chicago in areas where police have been told not to police, and drug gangs feel safe in spraying their competitors with guns. You still should not feel safe in big cities where criminals are released over and over again to commit new crimes. Where police are supposed to ignore crimes or, for their own protection, choose not to bother to arrest in fear for their job.
It is good that violent crime is down. That said if you are the victim of a crime and the criminal who attacked you is released with no consequences. Noah’s statistics are of little comfort. The fact of the matter is if you were a black man in a big city and you lived in a poor area, you were more likely to be killed by another black man rather than by police. The other fallacy is that white criminals who come in contact with police are not killed. Crime is bad. All crime is bad. We all must find a store worker to unlock your Claritin or Allegra. Stores are closing due to losses from theft. Most of these stores are in the poorer areas and the residents are the ones who suffer. We still have a crime problem and that is a fact.
Of course Noah did not say we no longer have a crime problem. And we have never had a law and order problem that nationally elected politicians have much effect on.
Or that politicians of either party can justifiably *take credit for*. Crime is way down since the Aughts. And even more down from when I was a kid, living in Philly in the '80's. The reasons why crime--especially violent crime--dropped so dramatically in the last fifty years...are pretty much speculative.
But homelessness is WAY up. Pretty much everywhere. And large homeless populations--who often contain significant percentages of the mentally ill, and/or substance abusers--tends to create social friction.
"if you are the victim of a crime and the criminal who attacked you is released with no consequences" Like the national security and domestic tranquility, and our system of finance is a victim of Trump's criminality in cases now pending and decided? I certainly agree that we can't let criminals get away with their crimes - like how Trump pardoned all those felons who did crimes in his service. Yeah, we can't tolerate that!
You have shown that crime REPORTING is down. It is possible that social networking has shown people that there is no point in calling the police after a property crime. Why bother?
It's funny how conservatives always like to bring this up even when we have an answer to this and it was discussed in the essay Noah wrote. Crime reporting has always been less than actual crime and it is no more or less likely to be reported as in the past.
Crime has simply returned to its decade+ long baseline. It spiked enormously due to Democratic policies in 2020-2022 to abolish police and refuse to prosecute offenders. These had such entirely predictable effects that even the Democrats have now walked them back and are trying to memory hole their role in them.
You claiming that "crime is way down" is a little like Joe Biden saying he's "cut the budget deficit in half since he took office." It's technically true, but a 2020 baseline is obscuring reality in both cases. Trump's final year deficit was driven by COVID. Biden's deficits are still twice the size of the average of 2008-2019.
Violent crime has dropped to it's long-term average, which is great, but it's not some huge accomplishment, especially since most sane people predicted what cutting police departments and not prosecuting thugs would result in. Also, your focus on violent crime obscures the reality of rampant low-grade lawlessness in many urban, blue states. I live in CA. There's a reason I have to ask a store attendant to unlock the hair spray or the cat flea collars. (Who the heck steals flea collars and what do they do with them?)
As others have mentioned, this is not a President thing. It's a policy thing. And there is absolutely no question which party's policies led to the 50% spike in violent crime from 2020-2022.
What Democratic policies were pushed to abolish the police at the party level or as a core position? I'll wait while you provide the policies... The loudest activists online or some local community organizers, do not a policy or legislation make.
The Speaker of the House dawned phony African garb and knelt in the Capitol rotunda with the entire House Democratic leadership in worship of the Black Lives Matter policies and Antifa tactics.
I think we've talked about this before. Many Democrats refuse to accept that their party lost its mind in 2020 over George Floyd, but it did. (To be fair, much of the GOP lost it's mind in November of the same year, so it seems to have been going around.) Many Democrats want to memory hole the entire incident or pretend that they never really said "defund the police". It's easy to say "well, it was just the kooky activists not the actual party", but that's increasingly a distinction without a difference (for both parties).
Let's ignore that BLM turned out to be a bunch of academic, Marxist, grifters who fleeced corporate America to line their own pockets without ever actually doing anything meaningful to improve the lives of black people. (Many people said this in 2020, but they were shouted down.)
Do you really not see the problem with the entire leadership of a political party kneeling in support of an explicitly racial organization and agenda? Politicians shouldn't be supporting white-supremacy or black-supremacy.
If you think that even now we live in a post-racial society, I've got a lovely bridge to sell you. BLM--or the principle it espouses--was rather ingeniously co-opted by FOX News blowing the racial dog whistle by spewing an endless photomontage of scary Black rioters coming to burn down the lily white suburbs. When instead 98% of all the demonstrations were peaceful.
I remember my stepmom--who loves FOX, btw--in horror watching those televised images of arson and looting that summer. Show after show, they'd recycle the clips--even those from weeks before--to create the illusion that it was all happening in real time.
I mean, yes most of the leaders of BLM turned out to be grifters who were obsessed with their own self righteousness. But you could point to some things that actually did improve things for Black Americans and Americans overall.
1 - Highlighting police brutality over the specturm is good and holds people in power accountable. Without those videos, we may never have known about Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, or Philando Castile.
2 - A 2017 Pew study found that 54% of white people viewed officer-involved shootings involving Black people to be signs of a broader problem. The fact that over 50% of white people think that policing has racial issues is a huge achievement. This attitudinal shift created a policy window for local, state, and federal changes to policing and the criminal justice system. Police by themselves may not be racist, but a lot of police training, policies and the criminal justice system is biased against black Americans. The data has shown that time and time again....
3 - The BLM movement did help usher in a series of policy and organizational changes to policing that include implicit bias trainings, body-worn cameras, and bans on no-knock warrants. I believe all of these are big wins...
4 - The BLM movement also helped bring more visibility to the civilian payouts for police brutality and that some bad police bring down the overall good job that police do.
We can say that the main leaders of the original BLM movement are self serving grifters while also saying that some good came out of it. Also the Democrats in Congress weren't kneeling to support BLM, they were kneeling in support of black americans and their quest for equality in the criminal justice system.
> Do you really not see the problem with the entire leadership of a political party kneeling in support of an explicitly racial organization and agenda? Politicians shouldn't be supporting white-supremacy or black-supremacy.
Mate you sound like the exact type of "Moderate" that MLK warned us all about, additionally it sounds like you would've hated the NAACP back in the day.
Almost the entire GOP legislative caucus dismissed clear evidence of Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors in worship of their party leader who is proven a criminal and will likely be convicted of further crimes against this nation if he is ever to stand trial. I think your selective evaluation of the evidence clearly shows your double standard.
As I said above, Michael, "much of the GOP lost it's mind in November of the same year".
However, there is a difference between standing by the elected political leader of your party (either for purely political reasons or because you don't believe the accusations, and I think you're wrong to impute which motive was and/or is dominant in the GOP) and literally bowing to the ground before an explicitly racist and violent organization that was completely unelected and as such legitimately represented absolutely no one.
Civil Rights progress is always two steps forward and one step back. MLK made great progress but was followed by Nixon backlash. BLM made some progress which is followed now by MAGA backlash.
“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” -Martin Luther King
The BLM agenda set American race relations back 30 years. Whites bought into the MLK vision of colorblindness. BLM repudiates that legacy. It's lodestar is not MLK but Malcom X.
There is nothing just about training people that the biggest problem in modern America is "whiteness". MLK would never accept that framing.
“No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro down through the centuries. Not all the wealth in this affluent society could pay the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages,” MLK wrote in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait.
“The payment should be in the form of a massive program of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.”
BLM is an explicitly Marxist organization who fleeced corporate America and millions of well-intentioned liberals to line the pockets of the founders and do nothing for black Americans. In fact, the lie that police are racist, the riots that ensued because of that lie, and the anti-police backlash from cowardly elected officials made life demonstrably worse for urban blacks.
Interesting comparison, since one tried to slaughter the human race and the other saved it. I agree, I think it's a very accurate metaphor.
MLK quoted 2 documents in his March on Washington speech: the Declaration and the Bible. He specifically called on white people to live up to what they claimed they believed. And it worked. White people enacted the Civil Rights Act. Not blacks. Oh, they certainly had the vote, but whites were 85% of the country at the time.
Were there pockets of America where MLK was hated? Absolutely! But the vast majority of white people in America listened to what MLK said about treating people the same regardless of their skin color, decided he was correct, and elected people who reflected that view.
> The Speaker of the House dawned phony African garb and knelt in the Capitol rotunda with the entire House Democratic leadership in worship of the Black Lives Matter policies and Antifa tactics.
Again what legislative / policy position was submitted to abolish or defund the police... You are talking about performative / symbolic gestures. Not actual policy positions like you originally claimed.
> I think we've talked about this before. Many Democrats refuse to accept that their party lost its mind in 2020 over George Floyd, but it did. (To be fair, much of the GOP lost it's mind in November of the same year, so it seems to have been going around.) Many Democrats want to memory hole the entire incident or pretend that they never really said "defund the police". It's easy to say "well, it was just the kooky activists not the actual party", but that's increasingly a distinction without a difference (for both parties).
It wasn't over George Floyd it was about people being upset that unarmed people were getting killed by the police. BLM as an organization did in fact say defund the police, but actual politicians and party leaders didn't say that. BLM is not an arm of the DNC.
Those are performative things. Not legislative policies. You originally said "Democratic Policies". Joe Biden ran against the Defund the Police activists and in fact most police departments in the US have increased funding for policing. You are moving the goal posts. Once again I'm asking which specific Democrat Policies led to defunding the police or abolishing the police?
Look around at police budges in various municipalities in 2021. Do you really not remember Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco.
Heck, in Seattle they didn't just cut the police budget, they literally abandoned part of the city to (mostly) black thugs who started a Left-wing, intersectionalist dictatorship in the middle of downtown Seattle for 3 months. To this day the mayor still says it was "just like the Summer of Love" (except that 2 people died because police were told not to enforce the law.)
This conversation reminded me of intellectual Marxists who say "well, communism would work great, it's just never been tried." Yes it has. it was a complete failure. Similarly, we tried cutting police budgets and turning that money over the social workers and "community organizations" (which were really racist, left-wing political groups most of the time). It was a disaster. We tried treating all cops as racists just waiting to kill black people and tossing them under the bus at the drop of a hat. Hundreds of cops retired and the ones that didn't stopped being proactive... and crime spiked accordingly.
these things were tried. They didn't work. The elected leaders who advocated for them are now trying to memory hole their role in the failure.
> Look around at police budges in various municipalities in 2021. Do you really not remember Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco.
What are the current budgets of those police municipalities? Are any of them defunded? The main issue in some citifies like those is how they've decided to sometimes unsuccessfully deal with non-violent offenders or drug users which is an entirely separate issue.
> Heck, in Seattle they didn't just cut the police budget, they literally abandoned part of the city to (mostly) black thugs who started a Left-wing, intersectionalist dictatorship in the middle of downtown Seattle for 3 months. To this day the mayor still says it was "just like the Summer of Love" (except that 2 people died because police were told not to enforce the law.)
So one police station vs the thousands across the US? Anecdotal and outlier evidence still isn't supported by your original statement of Democratic Policies being the only reason for increased crime. Also way to include "black thugs", classy dog whistle there mate. Be careful your racism is showing. Durkan (Seattle Mayor at the time) walked back that comment immediately after realizing how dumb it sounded. Making it seem like one mayor / city represents all Democrats or left leaning people is entirely bad faith and ignorant. Have you even been to Seattle? It's a pretty safe and amazing city.
> This conversation reminded me of intellectual Marxists who say "well, communism would work great, it's just never been tried." Yes it has. it was a complete failure. Similarly, we tried cutting police budgets and turning that money over the social workers and "community organizations" (which were really racist, left-wing political groups most of the time). It was a disaster. We tried treating all cops as racists just waiting to kill black people and tossing them under the bus at the drop of a hat. Hundreds of cops retired and the ones that didn't stopped being proactive... and crime spiked accordingly.
We literally did not try to cut police budgets around the board. Additionally most community organizations which support police, mentally ill people and even domestic violence victims and social workers have been overall supported by their local police, to say all NGO community organizations are racists is incredibly biased, naive and frankly ridiculous. We also didn't treat all cops as racist killers. I'm happy though that you are at least admitting that some cops decided to abdicate their responsibilities by punishing the public by not policing or quitting though because of social justice warriors and the public wanting bad cops fired or getting held accountable. Also I'm a pretty strong supporter of the capitalism, I'd just like to see it be done a little more ethically. No one in this thread is supporting communism / Marxism, but again keep going off on tangents.
You keep moving goal posts mate. No where at the national level or from a real party level did the DNC support a legislative push to defund or abolish the police. Some loud, and dumb activists did and some leaders tried to walk a political tight rope to appeal to the loud mouths, but basically all that it has done is result in hopefully more resources for emergency service responders and better policing long term.
Philly, this is absurd. In 2020, the Democratic Party collectively lost its mind in a fit of white racial guilt, and their electeds turned over the agenda of many municipalities they controlled to a bunch of racist, activist hacks who proceeded to wreck parts of those cities by demanding that cops be removed from black areas.
I'm not going to waste my time finding a bunch of budget figures to buttress that case. I lived through it. So did you. I remember it. I remember city councils denouncing their own cops as systemically racist. I remember mayors marching with BLM protestors chanting ACAB and Defund the Police. If you disbelieve this, you find the budget figures that show there was no drop in police funding in 2020 or 2021. (You keep referencing today, but that's a false comparison since spiking crime caused those same electeds to backtrack last year and this year.)
So crime spiked EVERYWHERE in 2020 because of COViD, not because of policies. And crime has steadily dropped pretty much EVERYWHERE since. So why do you put this on liberal policy? Look at conservative cities like Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, Fresno or Little Rock. Same pattern (and higher crime rates than most liberal cities). Same pattern. Your thesis about this being a liberal problem does not hold.
Is urban code for something? Compare blue states with red states. Compare liberal cities with conservative cities. Crime is worse where conservatives are in charge. Same for economies. The only thing the right is good at is propaganda.
How about comparing the same cities over time? Since that's what Noah's claiming here: crime has gone down. What happened to crime in Portland vs Houston, for example. (I really did just grab those two out of my head as the first two I could think of.) Houston is much larger, but they are both coastal cities located in states with polar-opposite political cultures.
The crime rate in Houston is higher, but there's no spike. Portland's baseline is safer, but it has a very noticeable spike in 2020-2022. The difference is policy. Portland has been run by Leftists for decades who decided, in response to crime in 2020, that police were racist and should be significantly cut. Houston resisted the American racialist convulsion of 2020 and thus did not make the same choice, with predictable results.
Scott, I'm looking at the top line chart right under the map. If you want to dig into the type of crime numbers, we can though.
2019 vs 2022-
Murder: Portland +211% vs Houston +60%
Rapes: -5% vs -16%
Robbery: +37% vs -22%
Assault: +41% vs +23%
Burglary: +20% vs -10%
Elsewhere you suggest looking at a bunch of other cities. I guess I could, but I just don't have the interest or the time. I had never looked at this data before responding to you. I just picked 2 cities, man, the first two that came to mind as stereotypical hard blue vs hard red (pot-smoking Oregon vs oil-drilling Texas.) Houston is generally a far more violent place, but it's also a far larger city so that's somewhat expected. However, in terms of change, there is no crime data point in which Portland beats Houston from 2019 to 2022. Blue Portland went all-in on policies that were self-destructive; Red Houston did not.
This isn't rocket science. When elected ledares start throwing cops under the bus at the drop of a hat, cops are less aggressive in fighting crime. And they should be. Elected leaders have a right to set policy, and if they say police should step away from minority neighborhoods because they're seen as a hostile and racist occupying force... that city's police officers need to respect those orders. But those leaders also need to be accountable if it becomes clear that those policies led to huge losses in lives and property. They wanted the kudos from their wacked-out, limousine-Leftist friends, but now that the bill is come due they are backpedaling as hard as possible.
Scott asked for cities in red states. Houston came to mind.
I just ran the same query for Miami, Florida (another costal city in a red state) and the differences were even more dramatic. Miami's crime rank has been halved since 2018.
I really think this kind of post misses the boat on quality of life type crimes that really drive the perception that things are out of control, even if the data says violence is down. Other posters have already mentioned things like unusable public transportation, unenforced laws against certain populations, brazen lawbreaking in broad daylight, etc, and it feels insulting to be told that this is all some figment of the right wing imagination.
Everyone pays for it, so watching it get trashed because progressive policies make enforcing the laws against trashing it impossible has a bit of an impact.
"An unfortunate lesson from the past few years is that if Americans don’t want to believe a plain and simple fact, they simply won’t. No amount of data, careful studies, or reasoned argument will convince them."
Remember Newt in 2016 telling a pundit feelings matter more than facts? Looks like he was right after all.
Your article seems to be about the divergence between the perception of crime vs actual crime statistics. Your argument about actual crime is solid as are arguments about the economy doing well. Reality and perception are related, but not connected. There is third factor and this the information frontier for perception. Today, this is expanding rapidly. What does this mean ?
Let's say I am in a medium sized city and crime is going down. However, as an individual, I hear about more real crime incidents from the news (some effect) and in my social network (very powerful effect). If I did the statistics, crime went down, but if you ask me how I feel, crime went up. Of course, all of this is amplified by the fact that humans naturally over emphasize the negative high impact situations (like crime or job loss).
My sense is that we need to go through a recalibration of how we handle the information side before this issue between perception/reality is closed somewhat.
The official statistics--FBI, etc.--are simply not believed by viewers high on FOX, who believe the Deep State controlled by the Biden Crime Family has co-opted the entirety of federal law enforcement reportage.
It is a cognitive dissonance issue: if you get all/most of your news from sources that endlessly say that crime--including violent crime--are WAY up; and then you're told that the FBI data shows crime is down...you conclude that FBI is either wrong or has been co-opted by the forces of evil.
I think this ties in a bit with Matt’s post today: the media was so invested in pushing the “crime isn’t going up, don’t believe your own eyes” narrative in 2020-2021 that it’s not totally unreasonable to be skeptical here. However that doesn’t mean you should trust right wing sources either.
It would be a an untruth that they are responsible, but why isn't the Biden administration crowing about falling crime? After all, they are not responsible for the good economy, either. Or energy production? For that they are at least a little bit responsible. Hammer and tong for Republicans sinking their border control bill?
Would really like to see Noah dive deeper into the crime data and focus specifically on black homicide figures and the driving forces behind their meteoric rise in mid 2020. The George Floyd murder and the resulting Defund The Police platform seem to be the only rational causal link to the spike in black homicides. The motor vehicle death rate amongst blacks spiked similarly to the black homicide rate in mid 2020. What do these linkages tell us and are we ready as a country to have an honest conversation on the subject?
There is one crime statistic I pay more attention to any other: how many partisans of one candidate attack and target our own government? In that respect, only Trump presided over an unprecendented wave of crimes attacking our government and government personnel. Only Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol resulting in multiple deaths. Only Trump supporters issued a wave of threats, intimidation and SWATtings targeting local elections officials across the country. Only Trump supporters regularly attend or disrupt public events carrying weapons of war, sometimes killing people. Only Trump has personally been convicted of felonies, adding to the crime rate in America. Biden is the best candidate for every non-criminal in America. Trump is himself a scofflaw and a felon and a lifelong grifter and con man, not to mention an adjudicated sexual predator. That decides the whole issue of who is better at combatting criminality for me!
Murder stats are always the most accurate because there is a body so policing and reporting effects don’t change the body count. The county coroners roll up the totals. It’s the reason excess deaths is the best way to refute the COViD truthers.
Violent crime is often between acquaintances and family. Covid forced more of these encounters and crime went up. Crime is also influenced by economic hardship. This increased with Covid (much worse in other countries) and so crime went up. As we get back to normal the long term trajectory of falling crime rates driven by aging and yes more immigrants(who commit less crimes) will continue to drive the long term trend of falling crime rates due to these demographic factors. Still my 83 year old mother has been driven to fear going out due to the constant drumbeat of news about crime. Why are we not up in arms about the increases in pedestrian fatalities?
The claim that economics causes crime has never been born out in any data I've seen.
Culture causes crime. Lack of enforcement causes crime. But there are lots of very poor but very orderly societies.
What caused the crime wave was not finances or family members being throw together. What caused it was a societal convulsion over the death of a 2-bit thug in Minneapolis who was canonized as saint and a condensed symbol by our media class within hours. A few weeks of media malpractice and political opportunism (combined with the stress of COVID, as you suggested) gave us a 50% rise in violent crime.
That rise in violent crime wasn't just focused in certain areas though, it was across the nation and also happened in non urban environments. There was most certainly an increase in domestic violence and suicides as well... Whether or not someone is a thug or not, doesn't mean they deserve to be killed by the police if they are unarmed.
If you also want to talk about culture, how come tax evasion or drug use by the middle class or small business owners get policed the same way that property theft or damage does. A lot of people committing crimes and theft during protests or Covid weren't even from the areas the protests happened. I do agree that lack of enforcement increases certain crimes like you said, and I also agree that culture does drive a lot of crime. Compared to a lot of other Western societies, the US is just very violent and doesn't have a sense of propriety or togetherness...
In my Florida city crime is essentially concentrated in two parts of town: one where the poor white people live and one where the poor black people live. That is why real estate prices per square foot are 4 times higher in a “good” neighborhood vs a bad one. My realtor wife would tell you that safety especially for children is the number one concern of new transplants. This is not a study but just an observation. I agree that there are plenty poor orderly societies with much less crime than the USA but there are many reasons for that and I do believe that increased policing can make a huge difference; just see what they have done in Colombia where you can essentially see a cop from wherever you stand in a busy urban area.
Oddly enough, children in suburban areas are more likely to die early of traffic accidents than children in urban areas are to die of violence. Overall, it is safer to raise your children in a city, but no one thinks of it that way.
Agreed, but let us hope America crime never descends to the level a Columbia or an El Salvador (another recent success story.) those countries had to get REALLY bad before their population was willing to adopt what amounts to a police-state.
Thanks for the article Noah. One caveat. All of this can be true and average citizen can still be right in being peeved by crime, for 2 reasons:
1. A lot of street level crime doesnt get reported and that seems to be increasing (or is captured more on camera and distributed on social media).
2. The levels of impunity for street level crimes (shoplifting, attacks, carjacking and car break-ins, dangerous driving or driving without license plates) definitely seems to be rising.
Basic job of the state is to keep the citizens adequately safe and i dont think you can say that on the street level American cities feel or are safer than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I think thats what animates citizens more than whether Chicago had 400 or 500 murders last year.
I think Americans are using “crime” more loosely than is defined it here, maybe “order” would be more appropriate. I can’t speak for other regions, but in the Bay Area I regularly see huge gangs of dirt bikers roaming around, sideshows on major roads and bridges, and of course rampant public drug use/dealing and shoplifting.
So in a real sense I don’t really care what the statistics say, I see people doing bad things all the time and getting away with it and I want them to be punished. And this seems to be mostly the fault of Democrats, and Biden is a Democrat.
I live in CA too. This is a great point. We call it "law and order", but it's the order people crave. Whether it's not dodging homeless people or feces on the streets, not having to get someone to unlock the hairspray in stores, not being accosted by random crazies screaming at the voices in their heads, gangs of wanna-be-thugs taking over streets for sideshows... this is what people want their local government to solve. And it is precisely these things that most blue-state, urban municipalities refuse to solve.
Is it any better in Red State cities? I am genuinely curious. Do they not have sideshows in Houston or shoplifting in Miami?
Have not solved.
You seem to be in a mood to CONFLATE based on party affiliation, so consider this: Trump the 34 time FELON is a Republican. If Republicans cannot even control criminality by their own LEADER, how are they better suited to enforce law and order in society?
I'd say it is the fault of a relatively small number of elected Democrats and Biden is not one of them.
That's true and I agree with that. But when people vote they vote based on the politician's individual characteristics and the characteristics of the party that the politician is a part of. If people are mad at Democrats it's natural—even if it's not logical—that some of that anger would bleed across to Biden.
Much of that anger is due to endless propaganda and misinformation spewed by FOX et al--like the "crime is up due to the evil Dems" meme--that is unthinkingly consumed by those ascribing to the RW mediaverse.
It's tragic that most conservatives believe--or want to believe--that FOX is actually a news channel; instead of mostly opinion with a little news thrown in. That relentlessly carries water for RW special interests and the GOP.
Max Remington has a column on the subject of crime stats today.
https://agentmax.substack.com/p/figures-dont-lie-but-liars-figure
Max is a mild prepper, so people here may not like everything he has to say, but he's talking about exactly what you are, Drew, that crime stats don't capture the reality in this case.
Disregard the conclusion of Noah's piece. The fact that the FBI figures on falling crime are corroborated by six other data sets merely is purely coincidence. Instead, watch a few hours of FOX News, and then trust your gut and your feelings.
Nubby, why do people here keep accusing me of watching FoxNews? I don't even have cable.
This is a trait I find common among many co-called liberals (who usually aren't really) today. They assume their own conclusions are drawn utterly rationally and with good intentions while attributing stupidity and ill-motives to anyone who disagrees with them. There are some strains on the Right that have this as well, but it has become endemic on the Left and it's really tiresome.
FOX is a catch-all for the entire RW media ecosystem, to which 30-40% of Americans exclusively rely on for news, and which is rife with misinformation, disinformation, Kremlin/Beijing agitprop, and what is basically non-journalism. Whenever a GOP talking point has been presented in this discussion--e.g., "There is a crime wave under Biden"--media-savvy viewers infer the influence of FOX and its lesser imitators.
Liberal programming like that of MSNBC also panders to confirmation bias, but at least does so with facts and actual journalistic process. Well, mostly.
Shawn Hannity is a partisan hack but Rachel Maddow is an objective journalist? Give me a break. They're both partisan hacks. You're welcome to look at my substack subscription list and draw your own conclusions.
I don't know what "the RW media ecosystem" means, but I'm pretty sure I don't participate in it. I pretty much disclaim the left-wing media ecosystem too (which is far harder since it's far larger) but there are specific journalists that I respect. I plan on watching the CNN debate tonight; I find it kind of weird that Trump will go on CNN but Biden won't go on Fox, but I'm sure you would say that CNN is "real journalism" and Fox is "part of the RW ecosystem".
They are both "opinion" journalists equivalent to a columnist. Nether are reporters.
Of course, one of them has an employer that lost nearly $800M in court for lying to their audience. They aren't remotely equivalent.
Crime, though reported on a nationwide basis, is local. Criminal statutes differ, enforcement differs, and the local experience matters more than what any statistic notes. I can assure you that there are places, my midsized blue city being one of them, that has seen no let up of the violence. In fact, we just had one record year of murders after the other. We have people being shot on the highway, more than once in the last six months, in broad daylight, in what's supposed to be one of the "safer" sections of town, and that is the very tip of the ugly, violent iceberg. All that being said, the office of the President has little or nothing to do with what happens in our city in the realm of crime enforcement. I do not blame one man for this, nor will I give them credit. I can and do blame the policies I think pervade one side of the aisle, and you can bet I, along with a surprising number of my friends on the blue aisle, will be voting accordingly.
I don't doubt the FBI statistics, and I don't think the majority of voters do either. But the reason crime is such a high priority for many voters this election cycle is the subjective experience of most people do not align with the FBI statistics.
This doesn't mean the statistics are wrong, just that the statistics do not 100% align with feeling safe.
NYC is a very safe city (for the US), but here are a few things that got worse and made day-to-day life feel less safe despite crime statistics looking good:
- mentally ill people on public transport
- brazen shoplifting with no apparent consequences
- blatant traffic violations (speeding, running red lights, fake plates)
Thankfully local politicians did notice this, and things have started to reverse the past few months.
My last point is headlines like this undermine the credibility of the media (see the Matthew Yglesias post on Elite Misinformation today). Yes, crime statistics are down, but months of NYT headlines about falling crime doesn't persuade people life is safer, only an improvement in their day-to-day experience will.
Except that NYT reporting things doesn't matter to most people out there. BUT local news coverage (and social media and very biased news sources) does. And it has always been "if it bleeds, it leads". That was bad enough when it was just local TV stations, but social media has blown this pattern up enormously - as it gets "attention" and every social media company is algorithmically geared to seek "attention"...
Most people in the US don't directly encounter much crime (except perhaps in very poor areas) - so their notion of what really occurs and how often is tremendously influenced by their source of news.
And data NEVER makes as big an impact as an inflammatory report or video....
IF simply encountering mentally ill people on the subway is enough for folks to really think crime is rampant, then people have really been trained to fear the homeless and mentally ill (most of whom are just lost and not dangerous to anyone).
And sigh, shoplifting has been around since I was a kid (many decades ago).
IMO, it is ALL about narrative - like so many things in our political culture.
Do you regularly ride transit? Do you actually encountered mentally ill people on the subway regularly? You sound like you don't. A sheltered middle-class person telling you online that "you shouldn't fear the homeless and mentally ill, they're harmless" will not, when next to a guy screaming bloody murder every 30 seconds for no reason at all and menacingly staring down passers-by, make the situation all pleasant and peachy. Or substitute any of the dozen variations of similar behavior I've personally observed on transit systems (e.g. shitting on the platform or grabbing random people and whispering into their ears, both of which I experienced in the past six months). I'm a normal-sized guy, so I don't fear for my life or safety in these situations, but should every lone man, woman, or child just be expected to suck it up and chant to themselves under their breath "that person is harmless" while this is happening to them? And regardless of whether anyone fears them or not, should they be expected to suck it up and tolerate what is, by any objective metric, a highly impactful imposition on their right to use the transit system in peace? I don't hate the homeless and mentally ill because a lot of the time their actions are not the product of a mind in full control. I sympathize with them, donate to local services for them, and vote for societal policy that improves resources and treatment for them. But whether they are cosmically blameworthy or not is entirely separate from the discussion of whether it is okay for normal societal services like public transit to be made unpleasant and unusable without recourse.
Shoplifting has been around forever, and forever until very recently the societal understanding has been that it was taken seriously, and prevented and punished when detected. When you were a kid many decades ago, were shoplifters allowed to fill their bags then leave the store while in full view of employees the whole time? The brazen shoplifting incidents of recent years where apparently nothing is done to stop it breaks down this understanding and emboldens criminals otherwise deterred by the norm to try their luck.
The point being made in much of recent discussion about these is that even if disruptive people are not fully culpable (often they are not, and even when they are we should offer mercy) and if we should help them with resources and treatment (we should), it is not good societal policy to shrug off the fact that they sometimes deny many others the right to go about in public and use public taxpayer services in peace.
Having ridden BART into SF just the day before yesterday, and dealt with a few disruptive people who were pretty clearly high, I endorse Morpho's message here. (I _think_ they were just totally out of their heads on some very THC-intense weed -- they certainly reeked of it -- but nobody wanted to be anywhere near them, because who the hell knows if "crazy and rowdy in a sort of funny way" is going to turn into something else? And that's leaving aside, again, the unpleasant smell.)
Homeless people sleeping - no problem. Stanky man saying he's gonna kill you - big problem.
Shoplifting - eh it happens. Dude sweeping merchandise of the shelf in the middle of the day into a bag threateningly anyone who looks at him - problem.
I don't watch news, I don't use social media. My opinion is based off my daily experience.
I assure you, the severely mentally ill, the homeless, and the drug addicted have far higher rates of violent, property, and sex crime than the average population.
Where you fall on the blame game scale, one thing has become perfectly clear.
Big Cities run by Democrats have changed policing tactics. Of course, the police go where crime happens. Crime happens in the poorer areas. Areas that drug gangs and drug gang violence.
The victims of crime tend to be our poor. The changes in policing in cities run by Democrats no longer ascribe to the broken windows theory of policing. In fact, many big-city DAs no longer prosecute what they consider to be lower-level crimes. States like Illinois and New York eliminated cash bail for arrestees. These criminals are often released and commit new crimes.
Police Departments have been told to stop arresting these lower-level crimes. Like fare jumpers on the subway. Broken Windows says if you restrict the lower-level crimes in an area, the more aggressive types of crimes committed by violent criminals don’t feel safer to do so.
Release juveniles from jail who carjack vehicles and are never charged, and you’ll find they go out and commit more carjackings. There are various studies that show that a large percentage of crimes are committed by the same people. Recidivism is a real issue.
You still should not feel safe in Chicago in areas where police have been told not to police, and drug gangs feel safe in spraying their competitors with guns. You still should not feel safe in big cities where criminals are released over and over again to commit new crimes. Where police are supposed to ignore crimes or, for their own protection, choose not to bother to arrest in fear for their job.
It is good that violent crime is down. That said if you are the victim of a crime and the criminal who attacked you is released with no consequences. Noah’s statistics are of little comfort. The fact of the matter is if you were a black man in a big city and you lived in a poor area, you were more likely to be killed by another black man rather than by police. The other fallacy is that white criminals who come in contact with police are not killed. Crime is bad. All crime is bad. We all must find a store worker to unlock your Claritin or Allegra. Stores are closing due to losses from theft. Most of these stores are in the poorer areas and the residents are the ones who suffer. We still have a crime problem and that is a fact.
Of course Noah did not say we no longer have a crime problem. And we have never had a law and order problem that nationally elected politicians have much effect on.
Or that politicians of either party can justifiably *take credit for*. Crime is way down since the Aughts. And even more down from when I was a kid, living in Philly in the '80's. The reasons why crime--especially violent crime--dropped so dramatically in the last fifty years...are pretty much speculative.
But homelessness is WAY up. Pretty much everywhere. And large homeless populations--who often contain significant percentages of the mentally ill, and/or substance abusers--tends to create social friction.
I think better policing is at lest part of it.
"if you are the victim of a crime and the criminal who attacked you is released with no consequences" Like the national security and domestic tranquility, and our system of finance is a victim of Trump's criminality in cases now pending and decided? I certainly agree that we can't let criminals get away with their crimes - like how Trump pardoned all those felons who did crimes in his service. Yeah, we can't tolerate that!
You have shown that crime REPORTING is down. It is possible that social networking has shown people that there is no point in calling the police after a property crime. Why bother?
Murder rates aren’t dependent on reporting and they are down.
It's funny how conservatives always like to bring this up even when we have an answer to this and it was discussed in the essay Noah wrote. Crime reporting has always been less than actual crime and it is no more or less likely to be reported as in the past.
Crime has simply returned to its decade+ long baseline. It spiked enormously due to Democratic policies in 2020-2022 to abolish police and refuse to prosecute offenders. These had such entirely predictable effects that even the Democrats have now walked them back and are trying to memory hole their role in them.
You claiming that "crime is way down" is a little like Joe Biden saying he's "cut the budget deficit in half since he took office." It's technically true, but a 2020 baseline is obscuring reality in both cases. Trump's final year deficit was driven by COVID. Biden's deficits are still twice the size of the average of 2008-2019.
Violent crime has dropped to it's long-term average, which is great, but it's not some huge accomplishment, especially since most sane people predicted what cutting police departments and not prosecuting thugs would result in. Also, your focus on violent crime obscures the reality of rampant low-grade lawlessness in many urban, blue states. I live in CA. There's a reason I have to ask a store attendant to unlock the hair spray or the cat flea collars. (Who the heck steals flea collars and what do they do with them?)
As others have mentioned, this is not a President thing. It's a policy thing. And there is absolutely no question which party's policies led to the 50% spike in violent crime from 2020-2022.
What Democratic policies were pushed to abolish the police at the party level or as a core position? I'll wait while you provide the policies... The loudest activists online or some local community organizers, do not a policy or legislation make.
The Speaker of the House dawned phony African garb and knelt in the Capitol rotunda with the entire House Democratic leadership in worship of the Black Lives Matter policies and Antifa tactics.
I think we've talked about this before. Many Democrats refuse to accept that their party lost its mind in 2020 over George Floyd, but it did. (To be fair, much of the GOP lost it's mind in November of the same year, so it seems to have been going around.) Many Democrats want to memory hole the entire incident or pretend that they never really said "defund the police". It's easy to say "well, it was just the kooky activists not the actual party", but that's increasingly a distinction without a difference (for both parties).
The George Floyd murder DID highlight the need for better policing. What's wrong with kneeling for it?
Let's ignore that BLM turned out to be a bunch of academic, Marxist, grifters who fleeced corporate America to line their own pockets without ever actually doing anything meaningful to improve the lives of black people. (Many people said this in 2020, but they were shouted down.)
Do you really not see the problem with the entire leadership of a political party kneeling in support of an explicitly racial organization and agenda? Politicians shouldn't be supporting white-supremacy or black-supremacy.
If you think that even now we live in a post-racial society, I've got a lovely bridge to sell you. BLM--or the principle it espouses--was rather ingeniously co-opted by FOX News blowing the racial dog whistle by spewing an endless photomontage of scary Black rioters coming to burn down the lily white suburbs. When instead 98% of all the demonstrations were peaceful.
I remember my stepmom--who loves FOX, btw--in horror watching those televised images of arson and looting that summer. Show after show, they'd recycle the clips--even those from weeks before--to create the illusion that it was all happening in real time.
I see them keeling in support of a darn good slogan. :)
I don't know why some folks get tetchy about kneeling. It happened before by that football player.
I mean, yes most of the leaders of BLM turned out to be grifters who were obsessed with their own self righteousness. But you could point to some things that actually did improve things for Black Americans and Americans overall.
1 - Highlighting police brutality over the specturm is good and holds people in power accountable. Without those videos, we may never have known about Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, or Philando Castile.
2 - A 2017 Pew study found that 54% of white people viewed officer-involved shootings involving Black people to be signs of a broader problem. The fact that over 50% of white people think that policing has racial issues is a huge achievement. This attitudinal shift created a policy window for local, state, and federal changes to policing and the criminal justice system. Police by themselves may not be racist, but a lot of police training, policies and the criminal justice system is biased against black Americans. The data has shown that time and time again....
3 - The BLM movement did help usher in a series of policy and organizational changes to policing that include implicit bias trainings, body-worn cameras, and bans on no-knock warrants. I believe all of these are big wins...
4 - The BLM movement also helped bring more visibility to the civilian payouts for police brutality and that some bad police bring down the overall good job that police do.
We can say that the main leaders of the original BLM movement are self serving grifters while also saying that some good came out of it. Also the Democrats in Congress weren't kneeling to support BLM, they were kneeling in support of black americans and their quest for equality in the criminal justice system.
> Do you really not see the problem with the entire leadership of a political party kneeling in support of an explicitly racial organization and agenda? Politicians shouldn't be supporting white-supremacy or black-supremacy.
Mate you sound like the exact type of "Moderate" that MLK warned us all about, additionally it sounds like you would've hated the NAACP back in the day.
Almost the entire GOP legislative caucus dismissed clear evidence of Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors in worship of their party leader who is proven a criminal and will likely be convicted of further crimes against this nation if he is ever to stand trial. I think your selective evaluation of the evidence clearly shows your double standard.
As I said above, Michael, "much of the GOP lost it's mind in November of the same year".
However, there is a difference between standing by the elected political leader of your party (either for purely political reasons or because you don't believe the accusations, and I think you're wrong to impute which motive was and/or is dominant in the GOP) and literally bowing to the ground before an explicitly racist and violent organization that was completely unelected and as such legitimately represented absolutely no one.
Civil Rights progress is always two steps forward and one step back. MLK made great progress but was followed by Nixon backlash. BLM made some progress which is followed now by MAGA backlash.
“the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” -Martin Luther King
The BLM agenda set American race relations back 30 years. Whites bought into the MLK vision of colorblindness. BLM repudiates that legacy. It's lodestar is not MLK but Malcom X.
There is nothing just about training people that the biggest problem in modern America is "whiteness". MLK would never accept that framing.
“No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro down through the centuries. Not all the wealth in this affluent society could pay the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages,” MLK wrote in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait.
“The payment should be in the form of a massive program of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.”
The goal of the Black Lives Matter movement is to secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for ALL Americans.
BLM is an explicitly Marxist organization who fleeced corporate America and millions of well-intentioned liberals to line the pockets of the founders and do nothing for black Americans. In fact, the lie that police are racist, the riots that ensued because of that lie, and the anti-police backlash from cowardly elected officials made life demonstrably worse for urban blacks.
Did they? MLK was the most hated man of his generation. Both MLK and X had some things right and some things wrong. Thing Magneto vs Xavier...
Interesting comparison, since one tried to slaughter the human race and the other saved it. I agree, I think it's a very accurate metaphor.
MLK quoted 2 documents in his March on Washington speech: the Declaration and the Bible. He specifically called on white people to live up to what they claimed they believed. And it worked. White people enacted the Civil Rights Act. Not blacks. Oh, they certainly had the vote, but whites were 85% of the country at the time.
Were there pockets of America where MLK was hated? Absolutely! But the vast majority of white people in America listened to what MLK said about treating people the same regardless of their skin color, decided he was correct, and elected people who reflected that view.
> The Speaker of the House dawned phony African garb and knelt in the Capitol rotunda with the entire House Democratic leadership in worship of the Black Lives Matter policies and Antifa tactics.
Again what legislative / policy position was submitted to abolish or defund the police... You are talking about performative / symbolic gestures. Not actual policy positions like you originally claimed.
> I think we've talked about this before. Many Democrats refuse to accept that their party lost its mind in 2020 over George Floyd, but it did. (To be fair, much of the GOP lost it's mind in November of the same year, so it seems to have been going around.) Many Democrats want to memory hole the entire incident or pretend that they never really said "defund the police". It's easy to say "well, it was just the kooky activists not the actual party", but that's increasingly a distinction without a difference (for both parties).
It wasn't over George Floyd it was about people being upset that unarmed people were getting killed by the police. BLM as an organization did in fact say defund the police, but actual politicians and party leaders didn't say that. BLM is not an arm of the DNC.
Those are performative things. Not legislative policies. You originally said "Democratic Policies". Joe Biden ran against the Defund the Police activists and in fact most police departments in the US have increased funding for policing. You are moving the goal posts. Once again I'm asking which specific Democrat Policies led to defunding the police or abolishing the police?
Look around at police budges in various municipalities in 2021. Do you really not remember Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco.
Heck, in Seattle they didn't just cut the police budget, they literally abandoned part of the city to (mostly) black thugs who started a Left-wing, intersectionalist dictatorship in the middle of downtown Seattle for 3 months. To this day the mayor still says it was "just like the Summer of Love" (except that 2 people died because police were told not to enforce the law.)
This conversation reminded me of intellectual Marxists who say "well, communism would work great, it's just never been tried." Yes it has. it was a complete failure. Similarly, we tried cutting police budgets and turning that money over the social workers and "community organizations" (which were really racist, left-wing political groups most of the time). It was a disaster. We tried treating all cops as racists just waiting to kill black people and tossing them under the bus at the drop of a hat. Hundreds of cops retired and the ones that didn't stopped being proactive... and crime spiked accordingly.
these things were tried. They didn't work. The elected leaders who advocated for them are now trying to memory hole their role in the failure.
> Look around at police budges in various municipalities in 2021. Do you really not remember Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco.
What are the current budgets of those police municipalities? Are any of them defunded? The main issue in some citifies like those is how they've decided to sometimes unsuccessfully deal with non-violent offenders or drug users which is an entirely separate issue.
> Heck, in Seattle they didn't just cut the police budget, they literally abandoned part of the city to (mostly) black thugs who started a Left-wing, intersectionalist dictatorship in the middle of downtown Seattle for 3 months. To this day the mayor still says it was "just like the Summer of Love" (except that 2 people died because police were told not to enforce the law.)
So one police station vs the thousands across the US? Anecdotal and outlier evidence still isn't supported by your original statement of Democratic Policies being the only reason for increased crime. Also way to include "black thugs", classy dog whistle there mate. Be careful your racism is showing. Durkan (Seattle Mayor at the time) walked back that comment immediately after realizing how dumb it sounded. Making it seem like one mayor / city represents all Democrats or left leaning people is entirely bad faith and ignorant. Have you even been to Seattle? It's a pretty safe and amazing city.
> This conversation reminded me of intellectual Marxists who say "well, communism would work great, it's just never been tried." Yes it has. it was a complete failure. Similarly, we tried cutting police budgets and turning that money over the social workers and "community organizations" (which were really racist, left-wing political groups most of the time). It was a disaster. We tried treating all cops as racists just waiting to kill black people and tossing them under the bus at the drop of a hat. Hundreds of cops retired and the ones that didn't stopped being proactive... and crime spiked accordingly.
We literally did not try to cut police budgets around the board. Additionally most community organizations which support police, mentally ill people and even domestic violence victims and social workers have been overall supported by their local police, to say all NGO community organizations are racists is incredibly biased, naive and frankly ridiculous. We also didn't treat all cops as racist killers. I'm happy though that you are at least admitting that some cops decided to abdicate their responsibilities by punishing the public by not policing or quitting though because of social justice warriors and the public wanting bad cops fired or getting held accountable. Also I'm a pretty strong supporter of the capitalism, I'd just like to see it be done a little more ethically. No one in this thread is supporting communism / Marxism, but again keep going off on tangents.
You keep moving goal posts mate. No where at the national level or from a real party level did the DNC support a legislative push to defund or abolish the police. Some loud, and dumb activists did and some leaders tried to walk a political tight rope to appeal to the loud mouths, but basically all that it has done is result in hopefully more resources for emergency service responders and better policing long term.
Philly, this is absurd. In 2020, the Democratic Party collectively lost its mind in a fit of white racial guilt, and their electeds turned over the agenda of many municipalities they controlled to a bunch of racist, activist hacks who proceeded to wreck parts of those cities by demanding that cops be removed from black areas.
I'm not going to waste my time finding a bunch of budget figures to buttress that case. I lived through it. So did you. I remember it. I remember city councils denouncing their own cops as systemically racist. I remember mayors marching with BLM protestors chanting ACAB and Defund the Police. If you disbelieve this, you find the budget figures that show there was no drop in police funding in 2020 or 2021. (You keep referencing today, but that's a false comparison since spiking crime caused those same electeds to backtrack last year and this year.)
It wasn’t policy, it was COViD. And which party was in charge when the spike started in 2020?
Crime is local. Which party is in charge of essentially every urban environment in America?
So crime spiked EVERYWHERE in 2020 because of COViD, not because of policies. And crime has steadily dropped pretty much EVERYWHERE since. So why do you put this on liberal policy? Look at conservative cities like Oklahoma City, Jacksonville, Fresno or Little Rock. Same pattern (and higher crime rates than most liberal cities). Same pattern. Your thesis about this being a liberal problem does not hold.
Funny how conservatives can't quite seem to understand that crime is higher in GOP-run cities.
Is urban code for something? Compare blue states with red states. Compare liberal cities with conservative cities. Crime is worse where conservatives are in charge. Same for economies. The only thing the right is good at is propaganda.
I don't know what you mean by "code'.
How about comparing the same cities over time? Since that's what Noah's claiming here: crime has gone down. What happened to crime in Portland vs Houston, for example. (I really did just grab those two out of my head as the first two I could think of.) Houston is much larger, but they are both coastal cities located in states with polar-opposite political cultures.
Portland: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Portland-Oregon.html
Houston: https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html
The crime rate in Houston is higher, but there's no spike. Portland's baseline is safer, but it has a very noticeable spike in 2020-2022. The difference is policy. Portland has been run by Leftists for decades who decided, in response to crime in 2020, that police were racist and should be significantly cut. Houston resisted the American racialist convulsion of 2020 and thus did not make the same choice, with predictable results.
Did you look at your own chart. Houston’s murders spiked in 2020-2022 and then dropped in 2023 (not in your chart).
Scott, I'm looking at the top line chart right under the map. If you want to dig into the type of crime numbers, we can though.
2019 vs 2022-
Murder: Portland +211% vs Houston +60%
Rapes: -5% vs -16%
Robbery: +37% vs -22%
Assault: +41% vs +23%
Burglary: +20% vs -10%
Elsewhere you suggest looking at a bunch of other cities. I guess I could, but I just don't have the interest or the time. I had never looked at this data before responding to you. I just picked 2 cities, man, the first two that came to mind as stereotypical hard blue vs hard red (pot-smoking Oregon vs oil-drilling Texas.) Houston is generally a far more violent place, but it's also a far larger city so that's somewhat expected. However, in terms of change, there is no crime data point in which Portland beats Houston from 2019 to 2022. Blue Portland went all-in on policies that were self-destructive; Red Houston did not.
This isn't rocket science. When elected ledares start throwing cops under the bus at the drop of a hat, cops are less aggressive in fighting crime. And they should be. Elected leaders have a right to set policy, and if they say police should step away from minority neighborhoods because they're seen as a hostile and racist occupying force... that city's police officers need to respect those orders. But those leaders also need to be accountable if it becomes clear that those policies led to huge losses in lives and property. They wanted the kudos from their wacked-out, limousine-Leftist friends, but now that the bill is come due they are backpedaling as hard as possible.
Houston is a Red City, run by a Republican Mayor and city council? That is news to me.
Scott asked for cities in red states. Houston came to mind.
I just ran the same query for Miami, Florida (another costal city in a red state) and the differences were even more dramatic. Miami's crime rank has been halved since 2018.
I really think this kind of post misses the boat on quality of life type crimes that really drive the perception that things are out of control, even if the data says violence is down. Other posters have already mentioned things like unusable public transportation, unenforced laws against certain populations, brazen lawbreaking in broad daylight, etc, and it feels insulting to be told that this is all some figment of the right wing imagination.
What percentage of the population uses public transit? I would be astonished if it was more than low single digits.
What bearing would that have?
It should have an insignificant impact on overall public opinion.
Everyone pays for it, so watching it get trashed because progressive policies make enforcing the laws against trashing it impossible has a bit of an impact.
Man does this ever ring true:
"An unfortunate lesson from the past few years is that if Americans don’t want to believe a plain and simple fact, they simply won’t. No amount of data, careful studies, or reasoned argument will convince them."
Remember Newt in 2016 telling a pundit feelings matter more than facts? Looks like he was right after all.
Your article seems to be about the divergence between the perception of crime vs actual crime statistics. Your argument about actual crime is solid as are arguments about the economy doing well. Reality and perception are related, but not connected. There is third factor and this the information frontier for perception. Today, this is expanding rapidly. What does this mean ?
Let's say I am in a medium sized city and crime is going down. However, as an individual, I hear about more real crime incidents from the news (some effect) and in my social network (very powerful effect). If I did the statistics, crime went down, but if you ask me how I feel, crime went up. Of course, all of this is amplified by the fact that humans naturally over emphasize the negative high impact situations (like crime or job loss).
My sense is that we need to go through a recalibration of how we handle the information side before this issue between perception/reality is closed somewhat.
I guess insurance claims for theft, criminal damage, burglaries etc will also be down?
Are they up or down? This is a very interesting point. Do you have any good data on this?
None at all, I'm afraid (and am not US based) - but it seems like an obvious proxy to triangulate the idea that crime is down.
The official statistics--FBI, etc.--are simply not believed by viewers high on FOX, who believe the Deep State controlled by the Biden Crime Family has co-opted the entirety of federal law enforcement reportage.
It is a cognitive dissonance issue: if you get all/most of your news from sources that endlessly say that crime--including violent crime--are WAY up; and then you're told that the FBI data shows crime is down...you conclude that FBI is either wrong or has been co-opted by the forces of evil.
I think this ties in a bit with Matt’s post today: the media was so invested in pushing the “crime isn’t going up, don’t believe your own eyes” narrative in 2020-2021 that it’s not totally unreasonable to be skeptical here. However that doesn’t mean you should trust right wing sources either.
It would be a an untruth that they are responsible, but why isn't the Biden administration crowing about falling crime? After all, they are not responsible for the good economy, either. Or energy production? For that they are at least a little bit responsible. Hammer and tong for Republicans sinking their border control bill?
The have missed so many boats by running a Warren-Sanders Administration!
Would really like to see Noah dive deeper into the crime data and focus specifically on black homicide figures and the driving forces behind their meteoric rise in mid 2020. The George Floyd murder and the resulting Defund The Police platform seem to be the only rational causal link to the spike in black homicides. The motor vehicle death rate amongst blacks spiked similarly to the black homicide rate in mid 2020. What do these linkages tell us and are we ready as a country to have an honest conversation on the subject?
Have you come to any conclusions?
There is one crime statistic I pay more attention to any other: how many partisans of one candidate attack and target our own government? In that respect, only Trump presided over an unprecendented wave of crimes attacking our government and government personnel. Only Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol resulting in multiple deaths. Only Trump supporters issued a wave of threats, intimidation and SWATtings targeting local elections officials across the country. Only Trump supporters regularly attend or disrupt public events carrying weapons of war, sometimes killing people. Only Trump has personally been convicted of felonies, adding to the crime rate in America. Biden is the best candidate for every non-criminal in America. Trump is himself a scofflaw and a felon and a lifelong grifter and con man, not to mention an adjudicated sexual predator. That decides the whole issue of who is better at combatting criminality for me!
Murder stats are always the most accurate because there is a body so policing and reporting effects don’t change the body count. The county coroners roll up the totals. It’s the reason excess deaths is the best way to refute the COViD truthers.
Violent crime is often between acquaintances and family. Covid forced more of these encounters and crime went up. Crime is also influenced by economic hardship. This increased with Covid (much worse in other countries) and so crime went up. As we get back to normal the long term trajectory of falling crime rates driven by aging and yes more immigrants(who commit less crimes) will continue to drive the long term trend of falling crime rates due to these demographic factors. Still my 83 year old mother has been driven to fear going out due to the constant drumbeat of news about crime. Why are we not up in arms about the increases in pedestrian fatalities?
The claim that economics causes crime has never been born out in any data I've seen.
Culture causes crime. Lack of enforcement causes crime. But there are lots of very poor but very orderly societies.
What caused the crime wave was not finances or family members being throw together. What caused it was a societal convulsion over the death of a 2-bit thug in Minneapolis who was canonized as saint and a condensed symbol by our media class within hours. A few weeks of media malpractice and political opportunism (combined with the stress of COVID, as you suggested) gave us a 50% rise in violent crime.
That rise in violent crime wasn't just focused in certain areas though, it was across the nation and also happened in non urban environments. There was most certainly an increase in domestic violence and suicides as well... Whether or not someone is a thug or not, doesn't mean they deserve to be killed by the police if they are unarmed.
If you also want to talk about culture, how come tax evasion or drug use by the middle class or small business owners get policed the same way that property theft or damage does. A lot of people committing crimes and theft during protests or Covid weren't even from the areas the protests happened. I do agree that lack of enforcement increases certain crimes like you said, and I also agree that culture does drive a lot of crime. Compared to a lot of other Western societies, the US is just very violent and doesn't have a sense of propriety or togetherness...
In my Florida city crime is essentially concentrated in two parts of town: one where the poor white people live and one where the poor black people live. That is why real estate prices per square foot are 4 times higher in a “good” neighborhood vs a bad one. My realtor wife would tell you that safety especially for children is the number one concern of new transplants. This is not a study but just an observation. I agree that there are plenty poor orderly societies with much less crime than the USA but there are many reasons for that and I do believe that increased policing can make a huge difference; just see what they have done in Colombia where you can essentially see a cop from wherever you stand in a busy urban area.
Oddly enough, children in suburban areas are more likely to die early of traffic accidents than children in urban areas are to die of violence. Overall, it is safer to raise your children in a city, but no one thinks of it that way.
Agreed, but let us hope America crime never descends to the level a Columbia or an El Salvador (another recent success story.) those countries had to get REALLY bad before their population was willing to adopt what amounts to a police-state.
Thanks for the article Noah. One caveat. All of this can be true and average citizen can still be right in being peeved by crime, for 2 reasons:
1. A lot of street level crime doesnt get reported and that seems to be increasing (or is captured more on camera and distributed on social media).
2. The levels of impunity for street level crimes (shoplifting, attacks, carjacking and car break-ins, dangerous driving or driving without license plates) definitely seems to be rising.
Basic job of the state is to keep the citizens adequately safe and i dont think you can say that on the street level American cities feel or are safer than they were 10 or 20 years ago. I think thats what animates citizens more than whether Chicago had 400 or 500 murders last year.