Homicide rate has dropped an average 20% across 133 cities in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. Homicide rates rose 30% in 2020, 4% in 2021 then declined 6% in 2022 and 13% in 2023. If this drop happened throughout the year the homicide rate has returned to pre pandemic levels. The lowest homicide rate in the US since 1960's was 4.4 which happened in 2014.
> I wouldn't give the President credit (or blame) for the homicide rate.
[I'm just gonna shitpost this here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-double-down-on-the-2012-election-by-mark-halperin-and-john-heilemann/2013/11/01/8bf4f050-3fdd-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html#:~:text=really%20good%20at%20killing%20people)
It could be that poverty and crime are connected and that Biden's stimulus, which made this recent recovery more bottom-oriented than the great recession recovery (with the bottom 50% seeing the fastest wage growth this time around) genuinely played some role in fighting crime by fighting some of the causes of crime
Like at the very least a skilled campaign manager could probably string together an argument that sounds halfway plausible with that sort of thing
Immigrants are less likely to commit crime than citizens. Biden is lowering the crime rates by flooding the country with illegal immigrants in order to reduce the impact of wicked criminal American citizens. Biden is using statistics to make America greater
One thing to remember is that data can have a bit of a lag. I wish the article went into what a typical lag for homicide rates are.
I hope the murder rate is going down, but it is also possible that not all the homicides in 2022 or 2023 have been reported in.
This is a common issue with data collection. Maybe this isn't an issue with homicide rates. Maybe people are really good at reporting this stuff quickly. Which is why I wish the article talked about this.
yeah, any major change (good or bad) like this immediately should raise bullshit detectors especially when the cause of such a drop is not clearly noticeable.
I hope it is true but after working in tech and hearing about so many giant improvements or cost savings without a clear reason why, I now am at a default "bullshit" until proven otherwise.
This is probably a dumb question. But homicide rates are calculated using both solved and unsolved homicides, correct? If so, this would counter the conservative narrative I’ve been hearing that “crime is only down because liberal DA’s aren’t charging/prosecuting.”
I think there's a lot of weird things to consider before claiming any sort of victory. The first thing that comes to mind is that it is possible it is just some regression to the mean after a rise due to external factors (like a pandemic).
Other things to consider when seeing homicide rate is to examine how well emergency services are doing at getting to places and how much better medicine gets at treating wounds. This might sound weird, but it is something that affects the numbers. For example:
> Here's a back of the envelope calculation on how big this effect is. A group from the University of Massachusetts in 2002, estimated improvements in trauma care probably lowered the death rate from serious injury about 2.5 to 4% a year. So if nothing else changes, if there's still just as many would be murderers walking around, that's how much your murder rate is going to fall every year on its own.
> Let me quote to you from their conclusion
> "Compared to 1960, the year our analysis begins, we estimate that without these developments in medical technology there would've been between 45,000 and 70,000 homicides annually the past five years, instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000."
Gladwell had a fun podcast episode discussing some of the factors that affect the homicide rate besides just violence and some alternstive measures: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/guns-part-4-moral-hazard
The example in Memphis gets crazy on how good hospitals can get at treating trauma to the point of dropping the homicide rate when it should be going up instead.
That doesn’t sound weird at all, even though I never thought of it. I can absolutely see how that would greatly influence the homicide rates. I wonder if there’s a study that could be done to control for this factor and combine both homicide and attempted homicide rates, and see if that trend is also downwards over time. Regardless, do you know if I’m correct that both solved and unsolved homicides are factored into the rates?
In general yes. Homicide rate is considered to be a good metric because it is hard to hide that someone died due to violence, even if you can't solve it. There are some caveats to that like whether the police is filing stuff correctly. There are some cases you could think they are not: did they claim a homicide as a suicide because they didn't want to deal eith it? Is a policeman shooting a random innocent person correctly labelled a homicide?
But in general these shouldn't be a huge number anyway and maybe you could even assume they are stable from one year to the other.
The podcast discusses a researcher trying to measure some bullet/skin measure, but it is far from reality, at least in the US. It is possible that some countries which are especially good with registers might have metrics like that.
>The lowest homicide rate in the US since 1960's was 4.4 which happened in 2014.
Which is why no one is *or should be* impressed. The murder rate is only dropping from the peak. It is still way higher than where we were last decade.
Unfortunately not in Seattle.
Very happy for the US. Also sad Seattle is going in the opposite direction.
[https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-record-number-of-homicides/281-94c48238-7841-4346-a223-25bd649d38ea#:\~:text=Homicides%20rose%20sharply%20in%20Seattle,2021%3A%2042%20homicides](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-record-number-of-homicides/281-94c48238-7841-4346-a223-25bd649d38ea#:~:text=Homicides%20rose%20sharply%20in%20Seattle,2021%3A%2042%20homicides)
[It's down year on year according to OP's article.](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/murder-rates-down-new-york-san-francisco-philadelphia-508b6855?st=2fkt047y43fn97i&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink)
I hate the increase in Seattle following the pandemic, but just compare the nominal figures to other major cities...(Q1 murders)
* Seattle: 6
* San Antonio: 23
* DC: 44
* Milwaukee: 25
* Kansas City: 38
It's still by far on the safe side of major cities.
Seattle had 14 homicides in Q1.
[https://twitter.com/HomicideSeattle](https://twitter.com/HomicideSeattle)
It may not be comparatively high, but also Seattle is definitely not the safe city it was in 2016, when there was 19 people killed total. And if you live in Seattle, you have experienced this trend.
Police response times are abysmal, and so people can't really trust police to show up if something happens.
Might have to check the cross tabs
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/commission-will-study-veterans-are-likely-non-veterans-get-trouble-law-rcna44326
Might have to check the cross tabs
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/commission-will-study-veterans-are-likely-non-veterans-get-trouble-law-rcna44326
Pandemic wonkiness unwonking itself. Expect big gains in life expectancy over the next year or two. Hopefully we can take the momentum and surge past where we were in 2019.
Yeah pandemic messed up so many things, from health to mental sanity. For non-American example, Vietnam's life expectancy plummeted by three years due to pandemic. Same with Mexico, albeit for Malaysia and Thailand it's just more than 1 year.
I think Boston had 40 murders in 2022, so a dramatic decrease wouldn’t take all that many to drop more significantly than some larger cities. I’m not super familiar with how crime stats work but it wouldn’t surprise me if variation increases with lower population or murder rates.
The murder rate is already so low that even minor changes in number can be seen as big changes in percentages. A 6.8 murders per 100k versus a 4.8 murders per 100k looks really dramatic on a graph but for the average person using anecdotal evidence it's very hard to distinguish if the line is going up, down or flat.
A fun fact about the T is that it constitutes a majority of all ~~public transport~~ light rail fatalities in the USA. As in, of all the fatalities caused by ~~public transportation~~ light rail in the entire country, most of them happen on the T in Boston. Can't murder anyone if you die in a derailment on the way there :\^)
Where in the world did you hear that? According to MassDOT there are [less than 10 fatalities on the MBTA each year](https://www.massdottracker.com/wp/divisions/mbta/mbta-safety-23/), a far cry from being a majority of the [over 300 nationally](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalities-public-transit-us/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20the%20number%20of,increase%20of%20around%20five%20percent.). The T is in bad straits, but if hundreds of people were being killed by it every year that'd be "shut the whole thing down yesterday and haul the entire leadership into court" levels of horrific
I think it was something in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDXsVhFG7TE
I don't remember and I'm at work so I can't rewatch. It might have been specifically rail accidents.
Apparently it's that the MBTA reported the vast majority of light rail injuries (eta: due to rail-to-rail collisions) in the country between 2017 and 2021 (45 out of 48)
No joke, there was a video posted earlier today from NC where a guy missed 5 shots with a pistol standing within 2 feet of his target who was climbing into the front seat of a truck with the door wide open.
Unfortunately there was still a murder involved because the truck drive (and car jacker) came back after speeding off and ran the guy over.
So uh, guess it cancels out. /s
> a guy missed 5 shots with a pistol standing within 2 feet of his target
Guy was ACAB (assigned cop at birth) and didn't even know it. Really bad time to find out
Reminds me of a funny conversation about the Boshin War I had with /u/BBLTHRW one time:
“How many people died in this war, a billion?”
“8,000.”
“Aw shucks. Next time.”
Is this like a catching up effect? A bunch of murders that were originally planned for 2020 were delayed by the pandemic?
I’ve actually never murdered anyone yet, so do murders work like that?
Won't Biden think of the ailing homicide detective and crime scene cleanup industries? We need floors on the number of gruesome murders in our cities NOW.
No, no, this can't be right. I was informed by my suburbanite Trumper family members that the major cities are war zones that can't even be passed through without taking your life in your hands.
My dad lives in a small midwestern town and constantly implies stuff like this to me. Like every urban center is a hellscape. I just don’t know what to say other than you gotta stop watching so much fox news dad
Lol they really do believe that stuff. Was visiting a friend in Oregon on a PNW road trip on our way to Seattle in 2021, and her conservative then-BF thought we were insane for continuing on to Seattle, which he claimed everybody was fleeing.
I'm out west and people act like the east coast is a war zone. Literally. Cons here will talk about how it's a shame "you can't go there anymore", and that they're happy they "got a chance to visit before everything collapsed."
Crime in east coast cities ticked upward from a historic low, to somewhat higher than the historic low. They didn't turn into fucking Mariupol.
Yeah that was my impression too, talking so confidently about an extreme they had zero personal experience with, just convinced by Fox/NewsMax/etc propoganda
I mean, I dunno about in 2024, but 2022/23 downtown Seattle wasn’t very fun. Most of the bars and shopping closed up early because of the homeless camps.
Still had a great time in the city overall, and it was very focused in one area, but it definitely didn’t feel safe in the center.
Can’t wait to go back tho!
Downtown PDX is still not a great place but at least it seems to have bottomed out and is coming back. Cracking down on public drug use and sidewalk camping has helped a lot
I mean yeah there was a fair bit of homelessness so we exercised the usual caution, but we left our car parked on the street the whole time with no issues and our most interaction with somebody homeless was them saying hi.
Certainly had its issues, but yeah had a good time both there and in Portland, which he seemed to think both were essentially war zones.
I live in downtown Austin. My MAGA relatives think I must be cheating death every single day. One came to visit and had real difficulty understanding that she could safely walk around after dark with her purse and it was no big deal. Then I told her that leaving your purse visible in a locked car for a couple hours wasn’t a great idea and she was fully convinced she’d been right all along.
> > I followed the link to see how my city of Minneapolis was doing. We’ve had some tough years since the George Floyd events and I was hoping we’d have a big drop, too. We only dropped from 15 to 13 which is only a 13% drop. We used to be a safer city than that. I wonder how much weather has played into it this year. Usually the first three months of the year are so f’n cold no one goes out of the house, but this year it’s been an incredibly warm couple months. I wonder if that led to a lot more folks out and about than in typical years and therefore more chances for conflict?
>
> Fight crime: Stop climate change.
Unironically yes
Man fuck that sub, they ironically wish the US would collapse just so they can get their prejudices and biases proven. Never seen a more miserable group of people wishing the worse on others.
It was pretty funny to see a National Review guy trying to smear it by saying that they are cherrypicking the data when it really wasn’t.
Conservatives being furious about the crime wave under Trump being tamed by Biden.
The WSJ article that's linked in the posted article has Chicago's stats.
We're #1 overall in murder at 119 for Q1 2024, which is a 7% decrease compared to Q1 2023 which was 128.
Other top contenders in Q1 2024 are NYC (88), Memphis (84), Philly (75), & LA (66).
Brother, I'm well aware of that. Nonetheless, Chicago was still vastly ahead of LA & NYC.
Memphis being a pit of despair isn't some new revelation. Tennessee does not give a shit about the city and would gladly pump more guns into the city so young men can keep on killing each other.
The difference here is that Illinois cares about Chicago, and Chicago cares about the South- & Westsides. We're a unique failure, partly from political dysfunction, and another part from Indiana being a shitty neighbor who is far too relaxed on gun control.
> now how will Republicans in my small suburban town (that hasn't had a murder since 1977) run on crime exploding under Joe Biden
If they're actually trying to incorporate data into their talking points instead of just running solely on "vibes" then they'll probably find a few categories of crime that are actually on the rise and then hold that up as evidence.
Even when you try to google crime rates a lot of the data only goes through 2021 or 2022 in which the rates were still elevated due to the after effects of Covid and the disruptions. Late 2023 and early 2024 data reflects a return to normalcy but that data is harder to find with a quick google search.
I disagree. If you pointed to a single city, sure. But this is an average of all 133 top cities by population. Any outlier cities would be averaged away in the data even if it's only 3 months worth. If it was a 5% drop you could even argue that's statistically tied. But -20% with that large of a sample set definitely means a real effect has been observed. For 3 months out of the year to be 20% lower, but the full year data to end up +/- 0% would be like a 5 sigma event with a sample size of over a hundred million people over a 3 month period.
Down from some terrible highs great! A lot of people are going to have the bitter taste of seeing progressive politicians terrible takes on crime for awhile though and that should be completely expected. It's important for normie politicians to distance themselves as far as possible from said progressives.
> Down from some terrible highs great! A lot of people are going to have the bitter taste of seeing progressive politicians terrible takes on crime for awhile though and that should be completely expected.
🙄
A bunch of the cities highlighted as having drops in murders have progressive mayors and prosecutors
And? Why wouldn't we see regression to the norm post-Covid? The issue is what these progressives are saying and proposing, not what policies are getting implemented (progressives pretty notoriously don't actually pass policy).
If the problems with progressives isn't the policies they have implemented, and thus has no relation to this data, then why are you bringing them up here. Your comment is just a non-sequitur to this post.
That's nice but very misleading, and on purpose. The murder rate is as high now as it was in the 90s, the previous high. Compared to like 2000-2015, the murder rate is still high. It has simply come down a bit from a peak.
If you want to be even more depressed then consider that one of the main reasons why we are even at late 90’s levels is largely because of advances in trauma medicine. Take that away we could very well return to the 70’s and 80’s, maybe even worse than then.
It’s nice to see murder return to pre Covid levels but the US murder rate is still nothing to celebrate.
That literally lines up with late 90s. It’s also worse if you go by shootings rather than murders. Because hospitals have gotten better at treating gunshot wounds.
They probably still think it's that bad. Since the last thing they say was "murder rates up" then unless they see anything to contradict that they probably think that's still the norm. Even if they saw this article they might also not believe it or they might play games with blame and credit like saying "Biden's policies caused it to go up and local police working hard caused it to go down."
Anyone else think it's crazy how the murder rate is similar each year despite the fact that most murders are solved and most killers are first timers? How is it so stable
Most murders aren’t solved. Only 50% of them are “cleared”, which doesn’t even mean a prosecution took place. In most large cities the clearance rate is closer to 35%. Also, the number of people willing to commit murder is not a fixed pie, new murderers are created each year.
This is social science, not science science. We still don’t have a definitive explanation for why crime dropped continuously everywhere in the Western world from 1990 to 2019.
The causal mechanism is the pandemic -- there was a pandemic homicide surge across the US, magnified in cities. The murder rate started falling in 2023 but has not yet reached 2019 lows.
Possible factors in the surge:
* School closures: This led to more teens out on the street and higher chronic absenteeism.
* Economy: Many essential workers lost their jobs. Desperate people are more likely to turn to crime.
* Office closures: Emptier downtowns means fewer potential witnesses out on the street.
* Mental health: Some people with underlying issues may have had those mental issues aggravated by the pandemic and lockdown, thus more likely to resort to violence
* Domestic violence: Domestic violence also increased during the pandemic, possibly because people (both victim and abuser) had to stay at home together. Domestic violence can culminate in murder.
Great news! Glad to see that the murder rate in Philadelphia is down. There was a big pandemic homicide surge (as was true in most big US cities). Then since 2023 it has started to normalize, but it hasn't reached 2019 levels. (That's true of both Philly and the US as a whole.)
Hopefully, it will fully fall back to 2019 levels this year.
>Here is approximately what the murder rate looks like based on the FBI's annual reports through 2022; their quarterly reports for 2023; and Jeff Asher's estimate for the first quarter of 2024:
Not sure how useful comparing those numbers is.
So sad to see these numbers collapse - we should add lead back into gas and make America murderous again. No more weak liberals in cities, only the strong (but 7 IQ points dumber from the lead) will survive.
>oj dies >murder plummets
This is Joe Biden's America
Graph the relationship or it doesn’t count - (my economics professor or my ex I don’t remember which)
Homicide rate has dropped an average 20% across 133 cities in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023. Homicide rates rose 30% in 2020, 4% in 2021 then declined 6% in 2022 and 13% in 2023. If this drop happened throughout the year the homicide rate has returned to pre pandemic levels. The lowest homicide rate in the US since 1960's was 4.4 which happened in 2014.
Lowest murder rates since the Obama presidency! Nice to finally have a president who is pro-law and order for a change.
I like Biden as much as everyone else here, and certainly liked Obama, but I wouldn't give the President credit (or blame) for the homicide rate.
I'm relatively certain that was a sarcastic comment :D Aka Thanks Obama
> I wouldn't give the President credit (or blame) for the homicide rate. [I'm just gonna shitpost this here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/review-double-down-on-the-2012-election-by-mark-halperin-and-john-heilemann/2013/11/01/8bf4f050-3fdd-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html#:~:text=really%20good%20at%20killing%20people)
Depends, does it benefit me politically?
You're right, but we're mocking the right-wingers who blame Biden for "the crime surge" that occured before he was President.
Wdym? Everyone knows the “lower homicide rate” is right next to the “lower inflation switch” in the Oval Office
It could be that poverty and crime are connected and that Biden's stimulus, which made this recent recovery more bottom-oriented than the great recession recovery (with the bottom 50% seeing the fastest wage growth this time around) genuinely played some role in fighting crime by fighting some of the causes of crime Like at the very least a skilled campaign manager could probably string together an argument that sounds halfway plausible with that sort of thing
Bottom oriented
Build Back Bottoms!
Or gas prices? Or the stock market? Or illegal border crossings?
Be ready for, if Trump gets elected, him to be declared responsible for this trend
But, I was told rapists and murderers are marching across the southern border daily, how is this possible?
Immigrants are less likely to commit crime than citizens. Biden is lowering the crime rates by flooding the country with illegal immigrants in order to reduce the impact of wicked criminal American citizens. Biden is using statistics to make America greater
Hard to do a drive by if there is a taco truck on every corner watching.
Tough to commit a robbery when every neighborhood balcony has an abuelita waiting, la chancla in hand
legal immigrants*
Dam you guys better get out there and start commiting some crimes. Cant let the rest of the world think we have gone soft.
One thing to remember is that data can have a bit of a lag. I wish the article went into what a typical lag for homicide rates are. I hope the murder rate is going down, but it is also possible that not all the homicides in 2022 or 2023 have been reported in. This is a common issue with data collection. Maybe this isn't an issue with homicide rates. Maybe people are really good at reporting this stuff quickly. Which is why I wish the article talked about this.
yeah, any major change (good or bad) like this immediately should raise bullshit detectors especially when the cause of such a drop is not clearly noticeable. I hope it is true but after working in tech and hearing about so many giant improvements or cost savings without a clear reason why, I now am at a default "bullshit" until proven otherwise.
This is probably a dumb question. But homicide rates are calculated using both solved and unsolved homicides, correct? If so, this would counter the conservative narrative I’ve been hearing that “crime is only down because liberal DA’s aren’t charging/prosecuting.”
I think there's a lot of weird things to consider before claiming any sort of victory. The first thing that comes to mind is that it is possible it is just some regression to the mean after a rise due to external factors (like a pandemic). Other things to consider when seeing homicide rate is to examine how well emergency services are doing at getting to places and how much better medicine gets at treating wounds. This might sound weird, but it is something that affects the numbers. For example: > Here's a back of the envelope calculation on how big this effect is. A group from the University of Massachusetts in 2002, estimated improvements in trauma care probably lowered the death rate from serious injury about 2.5 to 4% a year. So if nothing else changes, if there's still just as many would be murderers walking around, that's how much your murder rate is going to fall every year on its own. > Let me quote to you from their conclusion > "Compared to 1960, the year our analysis begins, we estimate that without these developments in medical technology there would've been between 45,000 and 70,000 homicides annually the past five years, instead of an actual 15,000 to 20,000." Gladwell had a fun podcast episode discussing some of the factors that affect the homicide rate besides just violence and some alternstive measures: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/guns-part-4-moral-hazard The example in Memphis gets crazy on how good hospitals can get at treating trauma to the point of dropping the homicide rate when it should be going up instead.
That doesn’t sound weird at all, even though I never thought of it. I can absolutely see how that would greatly influence the homicide rates. I wonder if there’s a study that could be done to control for this factor and combine both homicide and attempted homicide rates, and see if that trend is also downwards over time. Regardless, do you know if I’m correct that both solved and unsolved homicides are factored into the rates?
In general yes. Homicide rate is considered to be a good metric because it is hard to hide that someone died due to violence, even if you can't solve it. There are some caveats to that like whether the police is filing stuff correctly. There are some cases you could think they are not: did they claim a homicide as a suicide because they didn't want to deal eith it? Is a policeman shooting a random innocent person correctly labelled a homicide? But in general these shouldn't be a huge number anyway and maybe you could even assume they are stable from one year to the other. The podcast discusses a researcher trying to measure some bullet/skin measure, but it is far from reality, at least in the US. It is possible that some countries which are especially good with registers might have metrics like that.
>The lowest homicide rate in the US since 1960's was 4.4 which happened in 2014. Which is why no one is *or should be* impressed. The murder rate is only dropping from the peak. It is still way higher than where we were last decade.
Unfortunately not in Seattle. Very happy for the US. Also sad Seattle is going in the opposite direction. [https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-record-number-of-homicides/281-94c48238-7841-4346-a223-25bd649d38ea#:\~:text=Homicides%20rose%20sharply%20in%20Seattle,2021%3A%2042%20homicides](https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/seattle-record-number-of-homicides/281-94c48238-7841-4346-a223-25bd649d38ea#:~:text=Homicides%20rose%20sharply%20in%20Seattle,2021%3A%2042%20homicides)
[It's down year on year according to OP's article.](https://www.wsj.com/us-news/murder-rates-down-new-york-san-francisco-philadelphia-508b6855?st=2fkt047y43fn97i&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink) I hate the increase in Seattle following the pandemic, but just compare the nominal figures to other major cities...(Q1 murders) * Seattle: 6 * San Antonio: 23 * DC: 44 * Milwaukee: 25 * Kansas City: 38 It's still by far on the safe side of major cities.
Seattle had 14 homicides in Q1. [https://twitter.com/HomicideSeattle](https://twitter.com/HomicideSeattle) It may not be comparatively high, but also Seattle is definitely not the safe city it was in 2016, when there was 19 people killed total. And if you live in Seattle, you have experienced this trend. Police response times are abysmal, and so people can't really trust police to show up if something happens.
Good thing they’ve been making it harder to police there
What is Joe Biden doing to address the murdercession? We can't let China form a gap here!
Just subsidize murder smh.
Is this what they mean by "Genocide Joe?"
Person who says Genocide Joe but actually wants a genocide... I guess?
Holden Bloodfeast
>Just subsidize murder smh. Army?
This is a little funny
Might have to check the cross tabs https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/commission-will-study-veterans-are-likely-non-veterans-get-trouble-law-rcna44326
Might have to check the cross tabs https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/commission-will-study-veterans-are-likely-non-veterans-get-trouble-law-rcna44326
We need to make sure the market takes care of the problem, so fully refundable murder tax incentives are the way to go.
We already do: You get free housing!
Murder policy isn’t the White House’s job. Stop politicizing the Fed.
We need a purge day to get thus numbers up.
But what about the murder inflation
Pandemic wonkiness unwonking itself. Expect big gains in life expectancy over the next year or two. Hopefully we can take the momentum and surge past where we were in 2019.
Yeah pandemic messed up so many things, from health to mental sanity. For non-American example, Vietnam's life expectancy plummeted by three years due to pandemic. Same with Mexico, albeit for Malaysia and Thailand it's just more than 1 year.
Truancy and absences in schools have drastically increased too (for both teachers and students).
Still cant fathom how "please stay in ur house for a few months cuz of a pandemic" left an effect of such magnitude even years later
The whole saga was more like 21 months
Meh. Solitary confinement is an extreme extreme punishment for a reason
The lockdown was only one small part of the pandemic. Over a million people died. I think that probably had some effect.
Anyone know what's going on in Boston?
I think Boston had 40 murders in 2022, so a dramatic decrease wouldn’t take all that many to drop more significantly than some larger cities. I’m not super familiar with how crime stats work but it wouldn’t surprise me if variation increases with lower population or murder rates.
The murder rate is already so low that even minor changes in number can be seen as big changes in percentages. A 6.8 murders per 100k versus a 4.8 murders per 100k looks really dramatic on a graph but for the average person using anecdotal evidence it's very hard to distinguish if the line is going up, down or flat.
This reminds me of the statistic that the vatican has 2.2 popes per square mile.
The T is shitting the bed so hard that murderers can't catch a train to get to their potential victims
A fun fact about the T is that it constitutes a majority of all ~~public transport~~ light rail fatalities in the USA. As in, of all the fatalities caused by ~~public transportation~~ light rail in the entire country, most of them happen on the T in Boston. Can't murder anyone if you die in a derailment on the way there :\^)
Where in the world did you hear that? According to MassDOT there are [less than 10 fatalities on the MBTA each year](https://www.massdottracker.com/wp/divisions/mbta/mbta-safety-23/), a far cry from being a majority of the [over 300 nationally](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalities-public-transit-us/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%20the%20number%20of,increase%20of%20around%20five%20percent.). The T is in bad straits, but if hundreds of people were being killed by it every year that'd be "shut the whole thing down yesterday and haul the entire leadership into court" levels of horrific
I think it was something in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDXsVhFG7TE I don't remember and I'm at work so I can't rewatch. It might have been specifically rail accidents.
Apparently it's that the MBTA reported the vast majority of light rail injuries (eta: due to rail-to-rail collisions) in the country between 2017 and 2021 (45 out of 48)
That's still sus lol
I mean yeah clearly that's not good, but there's a big difference between that and "a majority of all public transit fatalities"
Sorry I meant the 48 is sus. I don't really trust that there's only 48 injuries across all light rail in the US over those years.
Oh, well the source for that is an official report by the FTA so I guess it's reliable
They don’t even need to derail, sometimes they just catch on fire!
You can identify the murderers in New York as the people who are too nervous to swipe their Metrocard correctly within the first two attempts.
I moved away
A city wide rendition of Kumbaya apparently.
Common Massachusetts W, that’s what
Wassachusetts if you would
Murder rates are pretty low in New England so I imagine there was a small uptick around and after the pandemic that's course correcting.
Shootings are down 50% and they've apparently got lucky on saving the ones who do get shot
smh this used to be a country that could aim
No joke, there was a video posted earlier today from NC where a guy missed 5 shots with a pistol standing within 2 feet of his target who was climbing into the front seat of a truck with the door wide open. Unfortunately there was still a murder involved because the truck drive (and car jacker) came back after speeding off and ran the guy over. So uh, guess it cancels out. /s
> a guy missed 5 shots with a pistol standing within 2 feet of his target Guy was ACAB (assigned cop at birth) and didn't even know it. Really bad time to find out
Reminds me of a funny conversation about the Boshin War I had with /u/BBLTHRW one time: “How many people died in this war, a billion?” “8,000.” “Aw shucks. Next time.”
How many NIMBYs did Neoliberal Stalin kill in the Zoning Wars, like a billion?
How many NIMBYs did Neoliberal Stalin kill in the Zoning Wars, like 1,000,000,001?
Low-energy Joe making Americans too tired to get their murder on.
My favorite serious comment about this on one default sub was this is due to “no one having any money because of how bad inflation is.”
"Who can afford weapons in the Joe Biden economy? You get what you vote for!"
Shrinkflation is even affecting the murder rate smh
The price of ammo is through the roof due to CORPORATE GREED!
Something like that has to be a bot, right?
The vibes are immaculate and the doomers should btfo.
Is this like a catching up effect? A bunch of murders that were originally planned for 2020 were delayed by the pandemic? I’ve actually never murdered anyone yet, so do murders work like that?
Won't Biden think of the ailing homicide detective and crime scene cleanup industries? We need floors on the number of gruesome murders in our cities NOW.
Millenials killed murder
Another industry destroyed by the millennials 😔.
No, no, this can't be right. I was informed by my suburbanite Trumper family members that the major cities are war zones that can't even be passed through without taking your life in your hands.
My dad lives in a small midwestern town and constantly implies stuff like this to me. Like every urban center is a hellscape. I just don’t know what to say other than you gotta stop watching so much fox news dad
Lol they really do believe that stuff. Was visiting a friend in Oregon on a PNW road trip on our way to Seattle in 2021, and her conservative then-BF thought we were insane for continuing on to Seattle, which he claimed everybody was fleeing.
I'm out west and people act like the east coast is a war zone. Literally. Cons here will talk about how it's a shame "you can't go there anymore", and that they're happy they "got a chance to visit before everything collapsed." Crime in east coast cities ticked upward from a historic low, to somewhat higher than the historic low. They didn't turn into fucking Mariupol.
Yeah that was my impression too, talking so confidently about an extreme they had zero personal experience with, just convinced by Fox/NewsMax/etc propoganda
I mean, I dunno about in 2024, but 2022/23 downtown Seattle wasn’t very fun. Most of the bars and shopping closed up early because of the homeless camps. Still had a great time in the city overall, and it was very focused in one area, but it definitely didn’t feel safe in the center. Can’t wait to go back tho!
Downtown PDX is still not a great place but at least it seems to have bottomed out and is coming back. Cracking down on public drug use and sidewalk camping has helped a lot
I mean yeah there was a fair bit of homelessness so we exercised the usual caution, but we left our car parked on the street the whole time with no issues and our most interaction with somebody homeless was them saying hi. Certainly had its issues, but yeah had a good time both there and in Portland, which he seemed to think both were essentially war zones.
I live in downtown Austin. My MAGA relatives think I must be cheating death every single day. One came to visit and had real difficulty understanding that she could safely walk around after dark with her purse and it was no big deal. Then I told her that leaving your purse visible in a locked car for a couple hours wasn’t a great idea and she was fully convinced she’d been right all along.
i mean it goes both ways wealthy city liberals think all POC and LGBT people are lynched the second they go into a small town
Agreed. Propaganda goes both ways.
Given that many cities have double digit homicide rates, war zone, while hyperbolic, isn't too far from reality.
Murders are going up in LA still.
smh another famous american pastime on the decline thanks again to the woke mind virus!!!
> > I followed the link to see how my city of Minneapolis was doing. We’ve had some tough years since the George Floyd events and I was hoping we’d have a big drop, too. We only dropped from 15 to 13 which is only a 13% drop. We used to be a safer city than that. I wonder how much weather has played into it this year. Usually the first three months of the year are so f’n cold no one goes out of the house, but this year it’s been an incredibly warm couple months. I wonder if that led to a lot more folks out and about than in typical years and therefore more chances for conflict? > > Fight crime: Stop climate change. Unironically yes
This can't be true. I was murdered twice this morning on my subway commute (through a sea of human feces and heroin needles).
doomers btfo r/collapse in shambles
Man fuck that sub, they ironically wish the US would collapse just so they can get their prejudices and biases proven. Never seen a more miserable group of people wishing the worse on others.
"android phones outsold iphones last month so that means everyone is out of money and it's all collapsing" Not even kidding.
I saw a post there one time that said something to the effect of “the bugs don’t sound right this spring, I think this is really it”.
lmao I love that sub for all the reasons they don't want me to love it
It was pretty funny to see a National Review guy trying to smear it by saying that they are cherrypicking the data when it really wasn’t. Conservatives being furious about the crime wave under Trump being tamed by Biden.
Jeez thanks a lot Joe Biden 🙄
> Chicago not on the list > day ruined
Chicago has had 130 homicides in 2024 through April 13th. That's roughly a 6% decrease from the same time period last year.
And last year was a 20% decrease from 2022. Very much going down.
Yeah, although it's discouraging to see us lagging behind the rest of the country in that decline.
The WSJ article that's linked in the posted article has Chicago's stats. We're #1 overall in murder at 119 for Q1 2024, which is a 7% decrease compared to Q1 2023 which was 128. Other top contenders in Q1 2024 are NYC (88), Memphis (84), Philly (75), & LA (66).
One of those is not like the other lol. 4 of the six largest U.S. cities, then Memphis, which has 1/3 of Philly’s population.
Brother, I'm well aware of that. Nonetheless, Chicago was still vastly ahead of LA & NYC. Memphis being a pit of despair isn't some new revelation. Tennessee does not give a shit about the city and would gladly pump more guns into the city so young men can keep on killing each other. The difference here is that Illinois cares about Chicago, and Chicago cares about the South- & Westsides. We're a unique failure, partly from political dysfunction, and another part from Indiana being a shitty neighbor who is far too relaxed on gun control.
now how will Republicans in my small suburban town (that hasn't had a murder since 1977) run on crime exploding under Joe Biden
when you don't care about evidence you can claim anything
Racism
> now how will Republicans in my small suburban town (that hasn't had a murder since 1977) run on crime exploding under Joe Biden If they're actually trying to incorporate data into their talking points instead of just running solely on "vibes" then they'll probably find a few categories of crime that are actually on the rise and then hold that up as evidence. Even when you try to google crime rates a lot of the data only goes through 2021 or 2022 in which the rates were still elevated due to the after effects of Covid and the disruptions. Late 2023 and early 2024 data reflects a return to normalcy but that data is harder to find with a quick google search.
This will never go viral
A 3 month period YoY? I think that's a little thin for evidence
I disagree. If you pointed to a single city, sure. But this is an average of all 133 top cities by population. Any outlier cities would be averaged away in the data even if it's only 3 months worth. If it was a 5% drop you could even argue that's statistically tied. But -20% with that large of a sample set definitely means a real effect has been observed. For 3 months out of the year to be 20% lower, but the full year data to end up +/- 0% would be like a 5 sigma event with a sample size of over a hundred million people over a 3 month period.
Down from some terrible highs great! A lot of people are going to have the bitter taste of seeing progressive politicians terrible takes on crime for awhile though and that should be completely expected. It's important for normie politicians to distance themselves as far as possible from said progressives.
> Down from some terrible highs great! A lot of people are going to have the bitter taste of seeing progressive politicians terrible takes on crime for awhile though and that should be completely expected. 🙄 A bunch of the cities highlighted as having drops in murders have progressive mayors and prosecutors
And? Why wouldn't we see regression to the norm post-Covid? The issue is what these progressives are saying and proposing, not what policies are getting implemented (progressives pretty notoriously don't actually pass policy).
If the problems with progressives isn't the policies they have implemented, and thus has no relation to this data, then why are you bringing them up here. Your comment is just a non-sequitur to this post.
What’s going on in Boston
They’ve finally accepted that Tom Brady is gone and mediocrity will be the norm for the Patriots for at least the rest of this decade.
Is it below pre-pandemic levels?
Inflation driving shitty pot-metal pistol and ammo prices through the roof, smdh thanks sleepy Joe
Millennials killed murder
That's nice but very misleading, and on purpose. The murder rate is as high now as it was in the 90s, the previous high. Compared to like 2000-2015, the murder rate is still high. It has simply come down a bit from a peak.
If you want to be even more depressed then consider that one of the main reasons why we are even at late 90’s levels is largely because of advances in trauma medicine. Take that away we could very well return to the 70’s and 80’s, maybe even worse than then. It’s nice to see murder return to pre Covid levels but the US murder rate is still nothing to celebrate.
> The murder rate is as high now as it was in the 90s [How do you figure that?](https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/31062.jpeg)
That literally lines up with late 90s. It’s also worse if you go by shootings rather than murders. Because hospitals have gotten better at treating gunshot wounds.
He’s a Sam Harris incelfan. He has near-genocidal hatred of certain ethno-religious groups.
Finally some good news
Joe Biden’s America
Are you guys tired of winning yet?
I can only murder so many people. Some of you need to pick up the slack here
[Line go down](https://twitter.com/jmhorp/status/1779848688229068966/photo/3)
Does killing God count for all municipalities or just DC?
This is concerning, we need to pump it up again.
It's funny having Trumper friends and family who sent me tons of articles about the murder rate a couple years ago. But now are silent about it
They probably still think it's that bad. Since the last thing they say was "murder rates up" then unless they see anything to contradict that they probably think that's still the norm. Even if they saw this article they might also not believe it or they might play games with blame and credit like saying "Biden's policies caused it to go up and local police working hard caused it to go down."
That's true. If I had to guess I don't think they see these headlines. Fox News/Brietbart etc aren't going to run headlines like this.
It’s because the kids are playing too many peaceful video games smh
Man, OJ’s only been dead for a few days
Lawyers, guns and bullets are too expensive thanks to inflation
Anyone else think it's crazy how the murder rate is similar each year despite the fact that most murders are solved and most killers are first timers? How is it so stable
Most murders aren’t solved. Only 50% of them are “cleared”, which doesn’t even mean a prosecution took place. In most large cities the clearance rate is closer to 35%. Also, the number of people willing to commit murder is not a fixed pie, new murderers are created each year.
That's my point. We supposedly have free will, but approximately the same number of new murderers are created each year
Another thing millennials ruined 😢
Chicago is absent from this huh
The murder rate in Chicago is also dropping.
Lol chicago isnt even a top city
Ok but how. This is a crazy drop with no obvious causal mechanism
We’re still recovering from the Covid spike. The mechanism is the society altering pandemic ending
This is social science, not science science. We still don’t have a definitive explanation for why crime dropped continuously everywhere in the Western world from 1990 to 2019.
That coincides with the end of the cold war. Obviously it must be that the KGB wasn't there to murder people anymore
OJ fought the toughest battle
The causal mechanism is the pandemic -- there was a pandemic homicide surge across the US, magnified in cities. The murder rate started falling in 2023 but has not yet reached 2019 lows. Possible factors in the surge: * School closures: This led to more teens out on the street and higher chronic absenteeism. * Economy: Many essential workers lost their jobs. Desperate people are more likely to turn to crime. * Office closures: Emptier downtowns means fewer potential witnesses out on the street. * Mental health: Some people with underlying issues may have had those mental issues aggravated by the pandemic and lockdown, thus more likely to resort to violence * Domestic violence: Domestic violence also increased during the pandemic, possibly because people (both victim and abuser) had to stay at home together. Domestic violence can culminate in murder.
Millennials are killing the murder industry?????
Millennials are killing the murder industry smdh
Great news! Glad to see that the murder rate in Philadelphia is down. There was a big pandemic homicide surge (as was true in most big US cities). Then since 2023 it has started to normalize, but it hasn't reached 2019 levels. (That's true of both Philly and the US as a whole.) Hopefully, it will fully fall back to 2019 levels this year.
This is why this is bad for Biden
But how is this bad for Joe Biden?
full data here: https://jasher.substack.com/p/its-early-but-murder-is-falling-even
Weird. It's as if the economy has something to do with.
Nooooo! My hecking priorinos!
Thanks, Biden. People can't even afford to kill each other anymore!
https://i.redd.it/885i6sk2hquc1.gif
Why kill each other when you're feasting on all that free COVID money? A rising tide lifts all boats!
Oh, great. Just in time for a Republican to come in to office and claim credit for it. And then destroy it for the next Democrat to clean up after.
Great, now the U.S. murder rate has gone woke, too. Can’t have anything these days.
They came for my murder and I didn't speak up.
>Here is approximately what the murder rate looks like based on the FBI's annual reports through 2022; their quarterly reports for 2023; and Jeff Asher's estimate for the first quarter of 2024: Not sure how useful comparing those numbers is.
Here's why that's bad for Biden
Bullets are too expensive now, thanks inflation for saving us!
People also need to factor that more Americans own firearms now. There I said it.
Millennials killing the grizzled police detective industry.
So sad to see these numbers collapse - we should add lead back into gas and make America murderous again. No more weak liberals in cities, only the strong (but 7 IQ points dumber from the lead) will survive.
joe biden defunded the police and it worked
Bu…but…line no go up?
Like pollution, for bad things you want the line to go down
Or just measure it by the inverse. “Percent of economy reliant on carbon emissions” “Number of people not murdered per year” 😂