{"id":83367,"date":"2015-12-26T19:06:11","date_gmt":"2015-12-27T03:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83367"},"modified":"2015-12-26T19:06:11","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T03:06:11","slug":"trying-to-hide-the-rise-of-violent-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=83367","title":{"rendered":"Trying to Hide the Rise of Violent Crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heather Mac Donald writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Murders and shootings have spiked in many American cities\u2014and so have efforts to ignore or deny the crime increase. The see-no-evil campaign eagerly embraced a report last month by the Brennan Center for Justice called \u201cCrime in 2015: A Preliminary Analysis.\u201d Many progressives and their media allies hailed the report as a refutation of what I and others have dubbed the \u201cFerguson effect\u201d\u2014 cops backing off from proactive policing, demoralized by the ugly vitriol directed at them since a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., last year. Americans are being asked to disbelieve both the Ferguson effect and its result: violent crime flourishing in the ensuing vacuum.<\/p>\n

In fact, the Brennan Center\u2019s report confirms the Ferguson effect, while also showing how clueless the media are about crime and policing.<\/p>\n

The Brennan researchers gathered homicide data from 25 of the nation\u2019s 30 largest cities for the period Jan. 1, 2015, to Oct. 1, 2015. (Not included were San Francisco, Indianapolis, Columbus, El Paso and Nashville.) The researchers then tried to estimate what 2015\u2019s full-year homicide numbers for those 25 cities would be, based on the extent to which homicides were up from January to October this year compared with the similar period in 2014.<\/p>\n

The resulting projected increase for homicides in 2015 in those 25 cities is 11%. (By point of comparison, the FiveThirtyEight data blog looked at the 60 largest cities and found a 16% increase in homicides by September 2015.) An 11% one-year increase in any crime category is massive; an equivalent decrease in homicides would be greeted with high-fives by politicians and police chiefs. Yet the media have tried to repackage that 11% homicide increase as trivial.<\/p>\n

Several strategies are employed to play down the jump in homicides. The simplest is to hide the actual figure. An Atlantic magazine article in November, \u201cDebunking the Ferguson Effect,\u201d reports: \u201cBased on their data, the Brennan Center projects that homicides will rise slightly overall from 2014 to 2015.\u201d A reader could be forgiven for thinking that \u201cslightly\u201d means an increase of, say, 2%. Nothing in the Atlantic write-up disabuses the reader of that mistaken impression. The website Vox, declaring the crime increase \u201cbunk,\u201d is similarly discreet about the actual homicide rate, leaving it to the reader\u2019s imagination. Crime & Justice News, published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, coyly admits that \u201cmurder is up moderately in some places\u201d without disclosing what that \u201cmoderate\u201d increase may be.<\/p>\n

A second strategy for brushing off the homicide surge is to contextualize it over a long period. Because homicides haven\u2019t returned to their appalling early 1990s or early 2000s levels, the current crime increase is insignificant, the Brennan Center and its media supporters suggest, echoing an argument that arose immediately after I first documented the Ferguson effect nationally.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday\u2019s murder rates are still at all-time historic lows,\u201d write the Brennan researchers. \u201cIn 1990 there were 29.3 murders per 100,000 residents in these cities. In 2000, there were 13.8 murders per 100,000. Now, there are 9.9 murders per 100,000 residents. Averaged across the cities, we find that while Americans in urban areas have experienced more murders this year than last year, they are safer than they were five years ago and much safer than they were 25 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Atlantic is similarly reassuring about today\u2019s homicide rate: \u201cThe relative uptick\u201d\u2014which, again, the magazine never specifies\u2014\u201cis still small compared with the massive two-decade drop that preceded it.\u201d True enough, though irrelevant\u2014good policing over the past two decades produced an extraordinary 50% drop in crime. America isn\u2019t going to give all that back in one year. The relevant question: What is the current trend? If this year\u2019s homicide and shooting outbreak continues, those 1990s violent crime levels will return sooner than anyone could have imagined.<\/p>\n

The most desperate tactic for discounting the homicide increase is to disaggregate the average. \u201cFears of \u2018a new nationwide crime wave\u2019 are premature at best and wildly misleading at worst,\u201d asserts the Atlantic, because the \u201cnumbers make clear that violent crime is up in some major U.S. cities and down in others.\u201d<\/p>\n

But such variance is inherent in any average. If there weren\u2019t variation across the members of a set, no average would be needed. Any national crime increase or decrease will have counterexamples of the dominant trend within it, yet policy makers and analysts rightly find the average meaningful. The Ferguson effect\u2019s existence does not require that every city experience depolicing and a resulting crime increase. Enough cities\u2014in particular, those with significant black populations and where antipolice agitation has been most strident\u2014are experiencing murder increases that cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n

Baltimore\u2019s per capita homicide rate, for example, is now the highest in its history, according to the Baltimore Sun: 54 homicides per 100,000 residents, beating its 1993 rate of 48.8 per 100,000 residents. Shootings in Cincinnati, lethal and not, were up 30% by mid-September 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. Homicides in St. Louis were up 60% by the end of August. In Los Angeles, the police department reports that violent crime has increased 20% as of Dec. 5; there were 16% more shooting victims in the city, while arrests were down 9.5%. Shooting incidents in Chicago are up 17% through Dec. 13.<\/p>\n

The Brennan Center report also tries to underplay the homicide increase by folding it into crime overall. The report projects that in 19 cities the 2015 average for all seven of the FBI\u2019s index crimes\u2014murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and car theft\u2014will be 1.5% less than in 2014. The FBI\u2019s crime index is dominated by property crimes, which outnumber offenses committed against persons by a magnitude of nearly 8 to 1. The Ferguson effect is about violent crime, not theft. Proactive police stops and low-level misdemeanor enforcement deter young men from carrying guns, thus heading off violent felonies before they can erupt.<\/p>\n

Career burglars are less affected by whether a cop is likely to get out of his car and question someone hitching up his waistband on a known drug corner at 1 a.m. If property crimes haven\u2019t increased as much as homicides, that\u2019s good news for homeowners but no disproof of depolicing\u2019s role in the violent-crime spike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heather Mac Donald writes: Murders and shootings have spiked in many American cities\u2014and so have efforts to ignore or deny the crime increase. The see-no-evil campaign eagerly embraced a report last month by the Brennan Center for Justice called \u201cCrime … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blacks","category-crime"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=83367"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83368,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83367\/revisions\/83368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=83367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=83367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=83367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}