Tag: rising crime

What’s your definition of “rose”? Leaving aside the one that “would smell as sweet,” mine is “goes up.” I ask because the headlinein the New York Times says: “Murder Rates Rose in a Quarter of the Nation’s 100 Largest Cities.”

When you say homicides “rose” in 25 of 100 cities, you might think it didn’t rise in 75 cities.

Since crime rates fluctuate from year to year, we used a statistical technique to determine places where we can definitely say rates were rising.

A “statistical technique”? What might that be? Praytell, Times, praytell. My advanced quantitative methods are rusty (and were never good), but I’d love to know what you do.

If the data were presented in some kind of useful fashion (they’re not) you’d see something similar to Prof. Richard Rosenfeld’s solid research (pdf link). Rosenfeld looked at 56 cities and found an increase in 40.

You can’t really tell from the Times’ crappy graphic, but in the 70 cities “Where murder rates…,” I count 27 cities where murder rates “fell slightly.” Combined with the 5 with significant decreases, that leaves 68 of the nation’s 100 largest cities where the murder rate — what’s the word? — rose. (Which is consistent with Rosenfeld’s 40 of 56.) [It’s worth mentioning that those who write the story don’t write the headlines. In the story it’s clear that murders rose “significantly” in 25 cities.]

Now of course as a PhD, I’m supposed to use five-dollar words when fifty-cent words will do:

Cities are obviously heterogeneous. There is tremendous variation across the largest cities in basic features such as demographic composition, the concentration of poverty, and segregation that relate to city-level differences in rates of violence.

O.K.

As an academic, I’m expected to endorse platitudes like:

There is no consensus on what caused the recent spike.

And

Many crime experts warn against reading too much into recent statistics.

And I should urge restraint, lest we get carried away with caring about murder. (My fear: restraint will lead to a right-wing law-and-order backlash). Also, apparently, I’m not supposed to worry about murder until more murder is up in every damn city in America. Nor should I worry about homicide because it’s been worse in the past. (An interesting argument, I note, should one apply it to poverty, racism, lead, infectious disease, or police-involved shootings. But I digress.)

In terms of numbers (in what I would call burying the lede):

Nationwide, nearly 6,700 homicides were reported in the 100 largest cities in 2015, about 950 more than the year before.

That’s a 16.5 percent increase. In one year? That, my friends, is huge. Now the nationwide percentage increase will almost certainly be smaller, but the last time there was even a double-digit percentage increase in homicide was 1968. That last time the homicide numbers increased by more than 1,000 was 1991.

Back in January, based on less data, I guessed that 2015 would see about 1,500 more murders than 2014. Gosh, am I a swamy? No, just somebody who can remove the ideological blinders long enough to use a calculator. I even offered an open $100 bet to anybody who said, “We don’t know if homicides are up.” Nobody put their money where their mouth was. Odd. It’s like they didn’t even believe what they were saying.

If we focused on the carnage instead of arguing about reality and methodology, you see, we’d have to consider the why? And then, perhaps, we’d notice that increased violence isn’t really linked to any change in poverty or gun laws or even legitimacy. Perhaps we’d take note, as have Professor Rosenfeld and myself, that the cities where violence is most up are the cities where police have been, to put it mildly, in the news (or even charged criminally for no good reason). Perhaps crime is up because police are doing exactly what we’re asking them to do: be less proactive and have fewer interactions with the public.

This shouldn’t be news to any reader here. I’ve been harping on this since at least last October. But now reality is official real because it’s in the papers: homicides are up.

Now maybe we can focus on the how and why instead of denying reality? I wonder if all those so ideologically eager to call out “the myth of the widely debunked “Ferguson effect” will have any second thoughts. I kinda doubt it.

And kudos to Richard Rosenfeld who now has major second thoughts about his overly cited initial report denying any “Ferguson Effect.” (That’s the why science is supposed to work: you get new data, you reach new conclusions.)

It’s worth quoting Rosenfeld a bit, from the Guardian:

For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. Now, the St Louis criminologist says, a deeper analysis of the increase in homicides in 2015 has convinced him that “some version” of the Ferguson effect may be real.

Looking at data from 56 large cities across the country, Rosenfeld found a 17% increase in homicide in 2015. Much of that increase came from only 10 cities, which saw an average 33% increase in homicide.

“These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”

…

“The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.

…

Rosenfeld said that the version of the Ferguson effect he now found plausible was very different from the one Mac Donald had described.

“She thinks the solution is to stop criticizing the police; I think the criticism is understandable, rooted in a history of grievance, and serves as a reminder that the police must serve and protect our most vulnerable communities.”

…

“The conclusion one draws from the Brennan Center’s report is, ‘Not much changed,’ and that is simply not true. In the case of homicide, a lot did change, in a very short period of time,” he said.

Honestly, I don’t think MacDonald is saying the solution is to “stop criticizing police.” (Though, short of murder, it’s hard to imagine MacDonald ever actually finding fault in anything police do…. But I’ll let her speak for herself.)

The problem isn’t criticism of police, the problem is an effort to reign-in what some people see as out-of-control racist policing. This is being accomplished by concerted lawsuits, paperwork requirements, public accusations of racism, and, in Baltimore’s case, straight up criminal prosecution of police officers who arrested a man who later died.

And anybody who even attempts to discuss these issues, even in a thoughtful and nuanced manner, such as FBI director Comey, could be slapped down by none other than President Obama himself!

And no, I don’t like the term “Ferguson Effect” either, but enough with the semantics. Lives are being lost. Maybe “viral video effect” will catch on, but the “Ferguson Effect” is the term most people are using to describe a very real phenomenon of less proactive policing leading to more crime. So be it.

And now be en guard for specious arguments about “declining legitimacy” from the police-are-the-problem brigade. The problem isn’t legitimacy. The problem isn’t even poverty (that is a separate problem). The problem is violence linked to public drug dealing and people who believe that policing has no effect on preventing violence. Too many people criticize even effective policing and really do want police to do less. They’re not evil people. They’re just wrong.

It’s also ironic that the same people who refuse to give police credit for any crime decline are now reflexively blaming police for “not doing their job.” Which is it? Do police matter or not? I think they do. Either police are irrelevant to crime prevention (see: “root-causes”) or they’re not. First let’s admit that police matter and then we can get on with the tougher job of figuring out what exactly we do want police to do.

It’s not that police “aren’t doing their job,” it’s that we, society, #BlackLivesMatter, many academics, and ideological “progressives” (going right up to the President), are redefining police work by insisting (quite loudly at times) that the main criminal and social justice issue of our time is racial bias, police misconduct, and the overuse of lethal force against black men.

It’s not that police suddenly and collectively decided not to “do their job.” It’s that police have gotten the message we’re sending them: we want less racially biased policing, less use of lethal force, and nothing controversial on YouTube. Call it what you will, this “is a chill wind blowing through American law enforcement over the last year. And that wind is surely changing behavior.” That’s not crazy speculation; that’s the stated objective of police “reformers.” The fact that this shift in policing seems to be having lethal consequences — through less police discretion and less proactive policing — is tough pill for many to swallow.

I can’t say this enough, but if you think criminally charging six Baltimore police officers for doing their job — at least five of whom are guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time — if you think that doesn’t have an impact on police discretion? Well, you’re living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

More recently police in Baltimore have been under the gun for A) killing two very armed suspects and B) killing an armed robber holing up a cop. It’s like we’ve moved from “police didn’t have to kill that innocent man!” to “why did police have to shoot that man armed with a gun?!”

Consider this: Baltimore police killed fewer people last year than probably ever before. Chicago police stopped fewer people, blacks in particular, than they have in many years. In both cases it’s not that police decided to stop working. For police officers, the “juice” is no longer worth “the squeeze.” Police are responding, as they should, to public (and ACLU) pressure to do less bad, particularly to people of color.

Homicides in both Baltimore and Chicago, particularly among people of color, are way up. Maybe decreasing abuse at the hands of the state is more important that preventing homicides among our citizens. Reasonable people can disagree, but I don’t think so. But maybe — and this is the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about — maybe there is a very real trade off between violent crime and aggressive policing.

Community policing, nice though it is, does little to address the criminal class, the rubber-hits-the-road moment when police engage violent people in the street even though at that very moment they might be doing nothing wrong.

It’s not like we don’t know who is likely to be killed and who is likely to be the killer. We do. Not with 100 percent certainly, but we can certain vastly narrow down the pool of suspects. Then what? Effective policing will not always be pretty (or harass only the guilty). Do we want police to engage drug dealers standing around or are they “innocent” except at the very moment when they’re slinging crack or pulling out a gun to shoot somebody?

If we do focus on violence, and we should, policing will be racially disproportionate because violence in our country is racially disproportionate. And focusing on violence means focusing on those who commit violence, ideally before they commit the violence. That’s the civil liberties part of this. And no, it’s not all or nothing, liberty or repression, but perhaps we need to accept we can’t have it all.

Instead of only looking at fault, why not look at good policing? The NYPD has shown you can keep crime down and shoot very few people. In New York we’ve seen fewer innocent people stopped and — to the great surprise of Heather MacDonald and almost every cop in New York City — have not see an increase in homicides. (The key variable, I think, is that New York City has seen the virtual elimination of public drug dealing.) But who in the police-are-the-problem brigade will admit that the NYPD, warts and all, does a pretty good job? That would be start.

[Posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

The FBI Director Comey says in the New York Times that:

A “viral video effect” — with officers wary of confronting suspects for fear of ending up on a video — “could well be at the heart” of a spike in violent crime in some cities.

“There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime — the getting out of your car at two in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” he told reporters.

There are a few interesting things here. This time Comey is being criticized from the Right. From the head of the FOP:

“He’s basically saying that police officers are afraid to do their jobs with absolutely no proof.”

Actually, no. He’s not.

Previously Comey was criticized only from the Left:

He first raised the idea in October that a “chill wind” had deterred aggressive policing. But Obama administration officials distanced themselves from Mr. Comey at the time. They said they had seen no evidence to support the idea of a “Ferguson effect.”

…

Asked about his past views on the “Ferguson effect” as a possible explanation, Mr. Comey said he rejected that particular term, but added that he continued to hear from police officials in private conversations that “lots and lots of police officers” are pulling back from aggressive confrontations with the public because of viral videos.

Comey continues:

“I don’t know what the answer is, but holy cow, do we have a problem,” he said.

“It’s a complicated, hard issue, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. A whole lot of people are dying,” he said.

He said that the spike in violent crime deserves more national attention from scholars, the media, and the public.

“Something is happening,” he said. “A whole lot more people are dying this year than last year, and last year than the year before and I don’t know why for sure.”

We need more leaders like Comey.

It is time we started caring and stopped asking if violence is up (or working hard to deny it) and figure out why it’s up and what we can do about it. More people are dying. Like global warming, we don’t have to wait till we have 100 percent proof and understanding of every causal mechanism before saying it’s time for action. We do not have — and given the nature of society, social science, and statistics, we will never have — “undeniable statistical proof.” Put we do have evidence.

This is a good as time as any to reprint an email I received a short while back (reprinted with permission, anonymously):

My first week on the street, a guy in my squad told me to ask myself “if the juice is worth the squeeze” when making a stop. What he means, of course, is to ask whether some stop is worth my life and or job. Every stop means you are exercising legal authority, which means you have to use force if people refuse, which means any stop can turn into a use of force. If I stop this guy, for jaywalking or driving suspended or no tabs, and he fights me and I die, was it worth it?

And since I don’t plan on dying today, if he fights me and he dies, what will the media say? “Man killed by cops over expired tabs”.

What will my department say? They’ll dig into the books and beef me for swearing or not using team tactics or not waiting for backup or whatever they can find. Am I gonna be suspended for months and risk indictment?

Every cop makes this calculation every time they consider a proactive stop. It used to be, if you had a good lawful reason for the stop, you could count on the community and the brass blaming the suspect for fighting with you if it turned into a use of force. Nowadays, that’s an open question.

Meanwhile, a few guys a while back tackled a dude for selling weed and caught him with a loaded Mac 10. Probably a homicide prevented. But on the other hand, if he’d hit his head falling and died, what would the storyline be? “Cops Kill Black Man Over Weed”

I still do proactive work. But I find it hard to blame the guys who don’t.

This officer makes another a points worth highlighting. If we take away police discretion and punish proactive policing, the result won’t be less racism:

I know proactive policing isn’t racist. In fact, I think it’s anti-racist. Going to reactive 911 calls about “suspicious” characters based on nothing, that’s way more racist.

[my previous posts on Comey: one and two.]

Who are you gonna believe: The Brennan Center for Justiceor your lying eyes?

Crime is up. They and I have written about this before. Their conclusion:

Americans continue to experience low crime rates. The average person in a large urban area is safer walking down the street today than he or she would have been at almost any time in the past 30 years.

Nobody is doubting America is safer now than 30 years ago. The point is that America is becoming less safe, and we don’t want to go back to the crime rates of 30 years ago! We want 2014 to be the normal, not 1986.

And:

Although headlines suggesting a coming crime wave make good copy, a look at the available data shows there is no evidence to support that claim.

But… but… What about their data (looking at 25 of the top 30 cities) that shows a 14.5 percent increase in the number of murders? (13.2 percent by rate.)

How weird.

And also intellectually dishonest:

Final data confirm that three cities (Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.) account for more than half of the national increase in murders…. These serious increases seem to be localized, rather than part of a national pandemic, suggesting that community conditions remain the major factor.

Nobody suggests the cause of more murders is some national criminogenic miasma “pandemic.” Of course the reasons are local. But they can still be part of a greater national trend. That’s why they call it a “trend.”

Now if the increase were only in three cities, then yes, we could say the problem is localized only in those three cities. But you can’t just remove the data points with the largest increases and then say the increase isn’t so large!

But, hell, let’s remove the three cities most responsible for the increase — even though that makes no statistical sense — and see what is going on without Chicago, Baltimore, and DC.

[Computer calculating sounds circa 1985. Flashing lights. Wait for punch card to spit out…. Wheeze:] An 8.8 percent increase. The Brennan Center is basically saying, “nothing to see here, move on.” But even an 8.8 percent increase in murder would still be the largest increase in 30 years.

Does ideology really trump the tragedy of more dead (disproportionately black) men?

The Brennan Center puts on its investigative cap and posits: “It is possible that the weak economies of these cities are a contributing factor to their high murder rates.” Yeah, no sh*t, Sherlock. We’re informed that Baltimore has a high poverty rate and has lost 35 percent of its population since 1950.

Is that the best you can do? Perhaps it’s not just the economy. The economy in Baltimore was just as bad on April 26, 2015, as it was on April 28, 2015.

Violence in Baltimore doubled overnight, on April 27, 2015. How can you talk about the increase in violence in Baltimore and not mention the riots, police, or the Gray Effect?

Let me put on my thinking cap. Perhaps the increase in crime has something to do with — I don’t know, just spitballing here — the interactions between police and criminals? Or maybe not. It’s not like anything has happened with public perception and police in the past couple years. So that can’t be it. (Sarcasm doesn’t travel well through the written word, so let me be clear: I’m dripping with it.)

Now reported violent crime isn’t up as much as homicide. That is interesting. But violent crime and homicide are always correlated. So if homicide data says up and violence data says not-so-up, my good money is on the homicide data being more correct. (It’s why my preference is to look just at homicide or shooting data when examining trends in violence, at least when the n is high enough, which it is in this case.) Perhaps homicide is up and violent crime is down. But if so, that would be the first time, ever.

My guess is that the apparent disparity reflects less reporting of crime, particularly in cities where crime is going up. Bodies get counted. Bruises less so. Also, just as proactive police can prevent crime, it can simultaneously increase the reporting of crimes. Fewer arrests mean less crime. Not in reality, of course, but in terms of crimes being counted. Some crimes are only recorded because police took the initiative and made an arrest.

I expect better from the left-leaning but usually respectable Brennan Institute for Justice. This is like Heritage Foundation bullshit, but coming from the Left.

Why deny an increase in violence? The point is to have a rational discussion as to why murder is up and what can be done to keep it down. Like global warming, we shouldn’t be wasting time arguing about whether or not what the data show is really happening.

[Many of these concepts were thought of while talking to Stephen Loiaconi, for his excellent article on the subject.]