> The declines so far in 2024, on top of last year’s drop, mirror the steep declines in homicides of the late 1990s.<p>These sorts of articles (there have been more than a few) usually say "wow, homicide rates are down last year", but don't always connect the dots by noting that homicide rates have been going down since 1991, and now they are returning to that trend after the aberration of the pandemic years. The interesting question—this articles touches on a theory about it—is why they went up for a few years, not why they're going back to doing what we expect them to be doing.
The article doesn't cover how this is concentrated locally (shoving incidents in the NYC subway - to the tracks) vs. state-wide, or how the 2 databases the Federal government maintains and uses, have been redefined, and with unreliable reporting by the states due to the lag in the new reporting format of the federal government, doesn't allow for a like comparison over previous datasets. I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn during the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, and yes, homicides are down. I think it was around almost 3k per year for NY then, and is a factor of 10 less now. But we had things like Son of Sam, FALN bombings in NYC (49 of them in the 70s), hijackings at the NY airports (137 in the US alone in the 60s to 70s), etc...
My intuition is that this trend will continue, there are likely many parameters, but one of largest is the proportion of young males with unfair prospects.<p>The unfairness is not changing much, but demography is, and we have threshold (cascading) effects.
an overworked Emergency Room medic quickly commented here in a major gun violence area in US West Coast -- ER medicine is so much better now, fatality from gunshot wounds has gone down because people are saved in the ER.. secondly lots of thugs shoot to wound not kill.. it happens daily.. most gunshot victims are not listed in the news at all, it is so common.
Any good websites with up-to-date historical USA crime-per-capita graphs?<p>I'm tired of looking at 2-year-old data, or manually stitching together quarterly UCR crime counts [1] with population estimates.<p>[1] <a href="https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/quarterly" rel="nofollow">https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...</a>
Not that murderers are necessarily rational, but it is virtually impossible to not be caught in 2024. Between everything being on video, DNA, license plate tracking, mobile phone geolocation, web search history, tons of other databases, it's pretty rare for a major crime to be a mystery. At some level, the near-certainty of getting caught must have <i>some</i> deterrent effect.
Continuing the 30 year trend in decreasing violent crime that only briefly pushed back up during the start of the pandemic, ref: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Cri...</a> . Nowhere near the highs of the late 1970s/1980s/very early 90s. Unfortunately this WSJ article is behind a paywall.
Credit to WSJ for include some charts and tables in this article, but the whole article could've been replaced with a time-series chart of total homicide rates and some small multiples for cities.
Its lead. <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...</a><p>I remember going to elementary school in the 70's, and teachers were always berating us as the worst class they had ever seen. They said that kids behavior was just getting worse and worse.<p>They were not wrong. Funny thing is that when people tried to ban lead gas, they thought <i>that</i> pc, woke, effort was part of the general decline of western civilization too. Communists trying to weaken the U.S. (there were communists back then).