I’ve gone down that rabbit hole, looking over the FBI’s, statista’s, Brookings, and other published crime rates over the 14- years. Over that time the crime type fluctuations weren’t as drastic as the news or police departments would have you believe.
As an example here are the homicide rates for that time period:
Crime rates before George Floyd:
Homicide
Based on the FBI Uniform Crime Reports data provided in the search results, the homicide rates for major U.S. cities from 2010 to 2019 showed the following trends:
The national homicide rate declined from 4.8 per 100,000 people in 2010 to 4.5 per 100,000 in 2014.
After 2014, there was an upward trend in homicide rates, which began in 2015.
edited for lame-o formatting and removed some weird percentages from notes I didn’t finish looking up and therefore the stats weren’t complete and not referenced either.
Hm… I think it’s important to do this, to check all various people’s assumptions against the reality of how it works out, but there are so many confounding factors that I don’t think you can say this proves anything about how defunding police relates to increased crime.
There were so many foundational differences in society during the years of Covid lockdown that I don’t think you can extrapolate from them to assuming something happened (or didn’t happen) because of defunding police (if that is in fact what you’re saying).
You’re limiting it to homicides, which probably behave differently from a lot of other crimes. Looking at all crimes or all violent crimes, and seeing if there’s a consistent pattern, might be a really useful thing.
I don’t think there was enough reform, on a national scale, in the wake of BLM to say that it would have had an impact.
You’re aggregating together all localities, when they had very different types and degrees of reform, if they had any at all.
There’s so much individual difference in reporting that you’re going to get all kinds of artifacts when you aggregate it all together on a global scale.
A lot of the roots of crime exist totally separate from policing. IMO there is sort of a minimum standard of policing you have to meet, so that people will understand that it’s pretty reliable that they’ll get in trouble if they do something wrong, and as long as you’ve met that standard, the amount of crime you have will depend on socioeconomic factors much more than anything the police do “better” or “worse”.
I do think that using the BLM reforms as a way to get at what the impact of reforms was would be a good thing. Maybe limit it to specific localities, see if there’s a pattern between particular types of reform and particular outcomes (both in terms of the police “improving” and in terms of the overall crime level changing). It would be a ton of work. Maybe you could limit to a few specific localities that did big reforms, and a few specific ones that didn’t, in similar cities over a similar time frame, and see if patterns emerge.
I do think it’s an important thing.
Your point about the media freaking out about “crime” in a way that’s totally divorced from any sense in which crime is increasing is absolutely true. That’s kind of a perennial feature of the media, though.
I’ve gone down that rabbit hole, looking over the FBI’s, statista’s, Brookings, and other published crime rates over the 14- years. Over that time the crime type fluctuations weren’t as drastic as the news or police departments would have you believe.
As an example here are the homicide rates for that time period:
Crime rates before George Floyd:
Crime rates after GF:
edited for lame-o formatting and removed some weird percentages from notes I didn’t finish looking up and therefore the stats weren’t complete and not referenced either.
Hm… I think it’s important to do this, to check all various people’s assumptions against the reality of how it works out, but there are so many confounding factors that I don’t think you can say this proves anything about how defunding police relates to increased crime.
I do think that using the BLM reforms as a way to get at what the impact of reforms was would be a good thing. Maybe limit it to specific localities, see if there’s a pattern between particular types of reform and particular outcomes (both in terms of the police “improving” and in terms of the overall crime level changing). It would be a ton of work. Maybe you could limit to a few specific localities that did big reforms, and a few specific ones that didn’t, in similar cities over a similar time frame, and see if patterns emerge.
I do think it’s an important thing.
Your point about the media freaking out about “crime” in a way that’s totally divorced from any sense in which crime is increasing is absolutely true. That’s kind of a perennial feature of the media, though.