The Morning Briefing at The New York Times starts out with a look at crime statistics and explores possible causes for recent trends. Republicans have been making much of a rise in murders with their usual “It’s all the liberals fault for not being tough on crime” and all the other garbage they throw out to see what sticks. The actual picture is more… nuanced, according to the write-up by German Lopez.
After rising, murder rates seem to be declining again — but other forms of crime are starting to rise. To hit the highlights from the article:
...First, the good news: Murders in major cities have fallen by 4 percent so far in 2022, compared with the same period in 2021. Shootings nationwide have fallen 2 percent. The decreases are not enough to undo the large increases in 2020 and 2021; the murder rate is still 30 percent above its 2019 level. But the spike appears to have peaked last year.
...But there’s also bad news in the recent trends: Many other types of crime, particularly property offenses, are rising. Thefts and robberies in major cities increased by around 20 percent in the first half of 2022, after falling or plateauing the previous two years, the Council on Criminal Justice found.
Theories about why murder rates rose include:
- Covid interfered with safety measures, like police patrols
- School closings left more youths with free time
- The police killing of George Floyd left people reluctant to call on police and more ready to take the law into their own hands
The decline of the pandemic is relieving some of those tensions, as is the passage of time since Floyd’s death.
As for why other crimes are rising, here’s some of the possible causes suggested by The NY Times:
- Inflation — people are resorting to stealing because of higher prices, and are more likely to buy stolen goods because they are cheaper
- Stress from inflation pressures makes people more likely to act badly as they lose faith in the institutions that don’t seem to be working for them.
- Escalation — minor crimes can blow up into violence
- Opportunity — with Covid restrictions easing, more people are out and about which creates more chances for criminal events
- Policing shifts — as police concentrated on rising murder rates, that drew resources away from dealing with other crimes
The bottom line
Crime is complicated and multifaceted. A lot of the public discussion and reporting around crime focuses on what the police and the criminal justice system can do. But while law enforcement can play an important role in reducing crime, there are also often deeper problems that the police can’t address — like Covid, social discord and inflation.
“Crime is complicated and multifaceted” is an understatement if anything. Let me add a couple of things that are relevant to this discussion.
The murder rate shows a decline starting in the 1990s, and that trend has been seen in other violent crimes. For those who remember those times, there was a lot of political chatter about rising crime rates, violent super criminals, etc. and draconian laws passed because of what had been rising crime rates up to that point. Then they started coming down. Why?
A Deeper Look
Kevin Drum writing at Mother Jones offered up a hypothesis that seems to have a lot hard data behind it as well as examples from around the world that seem to support it. It’s the lead-crime hypothesis, and he spelled it out in:
The hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic.
The hypothesis is this:
- Exposure to lead is toxic at all levels of exposure — and especially damaging to the development of the brain and nervous system in children.
- This damage has known effects on cognitive development and on impulse control.
- As these children mature, they are more likely to commit violent crimes, and the effect can be life-long because the damage is permanent.
- The primary source of the lead exposure was from leaded gasoline.
- When the EPA phased out the use of lead in gasoline starting in 1973, exposure began to drop — which began manifesting as a drop in violent crime about 20 years later as the new cohort of children who had not had the same lead exposure growing up began to reach maturity.
- A similar phenomenon has been seen in other countries depending on when they banned the use of lead in gasoline.
Drum has since cited further research that continues to validate this hypothesis. Does it explain all criminal behavior? No — of course not; but it does provide a compelling explanation for why the wave of super criminals that was expected in the 1990s failed to arrive.
An alternative explanation is that the Roe V. Wade decision led to a reduction in crime because many potential violent criminals were aborted. Note that the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive — both could be possible. In my opinion the lead-crime hypothesis has far stronger evidence to back it.
The abortion explanation is back in the news because of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe V. Wade and Republican efforts to ban abortion, including plans to make the ban national. We are about to embark on an experiment to see if the abortion-crime link is anything but a hypothesis — although it will take roughly 20 years to manifest. So, is “pro-life” also “pro-crime”?
It’s also still the economy, stupid.
It’s not possible to look at crime without looking at other quality of life measures, although violent crime certainly gets a lot of attention. One of the consequences of the pandemic is a great deal of economic stress. People were out of work and supply chain issues made things even harder — but corporate profits have soared and the rich have gotten even richer.
If there’s an increase in crime (and other problems), the work of Wilkinson and Pickett suggests it should not be a surprise it’s happening just when inequality continues to get worse. In their book “The Spirit Level” they amassed a huge amount of data that makes a strong case that a developed society with increasing inequality will see a decline in nearly all quality of life measures for everyone — those at the top, those at the bottom, and those in between.
They documented this in developed countries around the world. When two societies are compared, the one with lower inequality will be doing better — even if the economic base level is not as high as the other. The same effect can be seen between the 50 states in America for that matter.
This has some serious policy implications. Humans are driven by status, whether we are conscious of it or not. Personal perception that other people are doing better at your expense can be corrosive — as can the perception that all the people under you represent a threat. Everyone is damaged by the perception that the society they are living in is fundamentally unjust — even if they benefit from that injustice.
In practice, this means a lot of social problems will get better simply by reducing inequality — the distance between the top and the bottom. Child poverty in the US actually declined thanks to pandemic aid to families, and studies show that aid (now discontinued) made a huge difference in quality of life for millions. We could do much more — but “that would be socialism.”
The Party of Organized Crime
Any thorough examination of crime in America must confront the grim reality that the Republican Party is the special sauce that makes everything worse.
The elephant in the room is the way they have embraced openly criminal behavior by Trump and the people around him, attacked the integrity of elections, our law enforcement agencies (where they haven’t corrupted them), and openly threatened more violence along the lines of January 6 if anyone dares hold them to account. It builds on what they have been doing for decades.
- Republicans assert they are ‘tough’ on crime while exaggerating crime to make themselves seem like saviors to the people they are scaring.
- Republicans are pushing guns everywhere as the universal solution to preventing crime — while fighting other measures that might actually reduce root causes of crime.
- Republicans are using violent rhetoric and threat exaggeration which incites violence.
- Republicans — to get even more specific — are promoting racism, xenophobia, white nationalism, theocracy, homophobia, misogyny, and pretty much any other division they can exploit for political gain.
- Republican economic policies have been making inequality in America worse for decades, with all the consequences that has for quality of life measures across the board.
- Republican media pushes disinformation and demonization that primes people to — expect — react with — and incite — bad behavior.
- Republicans have adopted a ‘war’ mentality to justify the actions they are taking, up to and including violence.
- Republicans have developed a paranoid, exclusionary world view — if you’re not with them, you’re against them.
- The rule of law is being replaced by the rule of force and “because I say so” authoritarianism.
In New York State, Republican Lee Zeldin is running for governor, and his campaign had been running an ad on TV that is a prime example of the tactics the party is using. It’s a montage of violent criminal acts — people being attacked, windows being smashed, people being shot. The narration blames it all on current governor Democrat Kathy Hochul and it depicts New York State as under siege from violent criminals. The linked article has the video in question with the warning that it is pretty graphic.
It’s also been revealed that it’s not quite accurate — but that doesn’t matter to Zeldin (or Republicans in general).
The Republican candidate for governor, Long Island Rep. Lee Zeldin, is defending a campaign ad which addresses violence on the streets of New York, but includes a clip from California.
“You are looking at actual violent crimes caught on camera in Kathy Hochul’s New York. And it’s getting much worse,” the announcer says.
But Zeldin confirmed published reports that half the clips are from before Hochul became governor, and one of them isn’t even footage of New York, but instead Oakland, Calif.
emphasis added
From a Zeldin tweet announcing the ad:
It's time our families feel safe again! Just released our 1st general election TV ad, “Take Back Our Streets”, airing statewide with a seven figure buy. In Kathy Hochul’s New York, crime is out of control. We must FIRE Hochul, TAKE BACK our streets, and SAVE our state.
Here’s the tweet — warning: extreme violence. This video had been running on local broadcast TV stations — and it’s typical of the kind of rhetoric Republicans have been running on in New York State.
The ad would sound better in the original German… /s
Where Zeldin is coming from:
A Republican, he has represented New York's 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives since 2015. He represents the eastern two-thirds of Suffolk County, including most of Smithtown, the entirety of Brookhaven, Riverhead, Southold, Southampton, East Hampton, Shelter Island, and a small portion of Islip. From 2011 to 2014, Zeldin served as a member of the New York State Senate from the 3rd Senate district.
During Donald Trump's presidency, Zeldin was a staunch Trump ally. He prominently defended Trump during his first impeachment hearings in relation to the Trump–Ukraine scandal. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and made false claims of fraud, Zeldin voted against certification of Arizona's and Pennsylvania's electoral votes.[2][3][4][5]
To get back to the start of this post, The NY Times article on crime is good as far as it goes — but the real crime problem in America is increasingly the rise of inequality and the Republican descent into fascism.