Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/15/wsj-murder-rate-plummeting-in-u-s-cities.html
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Boomers just don’t understand how much harder it is for today’s murderous youth. Thanks to “live services” keeping up with your violent videogames is basically a fully time job; not like the old days of accessibly priced 10-30 hour murder simulators.
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“But the fear of crime is rising.”
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I don’t read it that way. The article attributes the decrease to several factors:
Now, police are more engaged and departments are working to hire more officers. Community-based crime prevention programs have resumed. And nationwide social unrest has cooled.
“It’s not one single thing that makes that number fall. Here in D.C., and I’m sure it’s like this in most cities, it’s a collaboration of efforts,” said Leslie Parsons, an assistant chief for the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, where homicides have dropped 26% so far this year compared with 2023.
And:
But police officials and researchers cautioned that crime trends aren’t always consistent and future homicide rates are difficult to predict.
Even the police are saying it’s not directly related to policing.
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The thing is, it’s probably not related to policing at all. Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams will use this data to justify the presence of military in the subways, when the reduced crime rate doesn’t have jack shit to do with that because crime in the subways wasn’t that high to begin with. The perception was different because the media loves these crime on the subway stories. Fear sells. If it bleeds, it leads. Fox News will probably completely ignore this WSJ story. They will just continue to run stories about out of control crime in Democratic run cities, and their red audience living in flyover country will keep believing it. But less right wing media will also keep running stories about murders and shoplifting rings because that fear keeps people engaged and watching the news.
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Yup. We have a soaring car homicide rate here, but what leads? Gangsters killing each other which is a much, much rarer event. And the coppers don’t bother with road safety and instead focus on things they are absolutely useless at.
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NYT tomorrow:
How the Nation’s Plummeting Murder Rate is Bad News for Biden
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It’s Gen Z that’s not wanting to join the family business. Millennials are too old for peak murder years.
Boomers are going to have to come out of retirement if we’re going to meet production quotas.
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reëlection
Someone using an Albanian keyboard/text editor?
But yes, I agree that somehow this will be Joe’s fault and somehow bad.
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Perhaps, but they’re still saying that more of them are necessary just in case murder goes back up.
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I listened to a Malcolm Gladwell episode where he spoke with Emergency Room doctors…some of this decline (most?) is because they are able to save more gunshot victims. They used RFK as an example…he would have lived if he had been shot in the present; JFK dies regardless.
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This is really going to hurt him in the people-wanting-to-do-murdering demographic.
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Murder rate may be dropping but what about other crimes, such as robbery, assault, burglary, car theft/jacking?
It isn’t just homicides that have people freaked out about crime.
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You probably don’t want to own a Hyundai/Kia but other than that…
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FWIW, I was actually a victim of car theft last year.
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and yet guns themselves have gotten more accurate, easier to fire, more deadly, have larger clips, are easier to obtain, and are ever more ubiquitous. guns were the leading cause of death for children in 2020. and i’m sure any graph you look at will chart the rise
gladwell is “clever”, and his “facts” are rarely to be taken at face value
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Yeah, not like getting shot and living would ever cause any problems for young people or anyone else… /s
“It’s definitely a bumpy journey,” Yarl said in his first in-depth interview about how the shooting has affected him one year later. “Whenever there’s something that goes on that reminds me of what happened … I just have, like, such a negative wave of emotions, like anger, like disgust. It’s always a mix of good and bad days. And I feel like the good days are when I’m able to be around people that help me build myself up.”
Family members said Yarl — who still bears an uneven scar on his forehead from the bullet that grazed his skull and left him with a traumatic brain injury — has struggled to reckon with what happened to him.
“Ralph minimized it as if nothing happened,” said his mother, Cleo Nagbe. “But the thing with trauma is that the body will process it when it’s ready. I knew it was coming.”
“At times, he wants to disappear,” she said.
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As usual, it’s false media narratives about rising crime that has people freaked out about crime.
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