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aidansean OP t1_is84qjd wrote

This post is a variation of the post that u/academiaadvice made, with some tweaks.

I added the "baseline" rate. This is the mean +/- one standard deviation in the period January 1999 to April 2020. This excludes September 2001, which is considered an outlier. The choice to exclude the period after April 2020 is based on the comments left on the other post.

The values also take the population of the USA and days per month into account. The y-axis is given in units per day per 100,000,000 people. As a rough guide, you can multiply the values by about 100 to get the number of homicide deaths for a given month. (For example, in September 2001, there were approximately 5,000 homicides.)

Sources: Homicide: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D76/D309F401 Population: https://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table/by-month

Tools: Python (pandas+matplotlib)

Thanks to u/academiaadvice for the inspiration and data source!

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SirJelly t1_is8hry2 wrote

Its worth noting this data starts right at the start of a relatively stable crime period. It hasn't always been this way. one article with a graph.

There are a few points of interest recently.

  1. The 9-11 spike was a few thousand murders on the same day. easy explanation.
  2. the dip in the 2008-2015 years.
  3. the spike in the COVID era.

Studying violent crime in a global context reveals nearly all aspects of societal health matter in determining crime rates averaged over large areas. Governance, education access, inequality, economic conditions, cultural inertia, all of it matters. The emerging strategies for combating crime however are hyper localized, individual streets and blocks which have a particularly poor mix of attributes. brookings has decent work on this subject, the linked article starts off by dismissing several of the bad-faith arguments that popped up quickly in the other thread.

While national murder rates remain stable, those murders shifted dramatically from some cities to others, so explaining why the national rate went up or down is really an exercise in summing up studies in many of the largest cities.

It is not particularly surprising through this lens why crime rates spiked during COVID. Small businesses nestled throughout distressed communities went under during the shutdowns. Once lively blocks, storefronts, even single street corners turned from happy places to desolate in an instant. Social connections, a critical violence mitigator, was effectively forbidden.

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FailOsprey t1_isash70 wrote

>It is not particularly surprising through this lens why crime rates spiked during COVID. Small businesses nestled throughout distressed communities went under during the shutdowns. Once lively blocks, storefronts, even single street corners turned from happy places to desolate in an instant. Social connections, a critical violence mitigator, was effectively forbidden.

...I feel as though the increase in murders during covid is better explained by all the people out of work and school and the fact that a ton of stimulus money was flowing through the drug trade (every drug addict got access to a few thousand dollars that immediately went to drugs). Alot of social avenues we're shut down, but people were still socializing; bars stayed open where I'm at, and people spent alot of time getting drunk with each other at home.

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BSP9000 t1_isc72m0 wrote

Covid had little to do with it. The 2020 crime spike didn't happen in any country besides the US, despite covid being everywhere.

It was a result of the George Floyd protests and the subsequent changes to policing:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-homicide-spike

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FailOsprey t1_isf30l4 wrote

...one can argue that the George Floyd protests were the result of people not working, which was made possible through a combination of unemployment, government stimulus, and shutdown of schools and workplaces.

It seems that the protests are correlated with the increase in the homicide rate, but not it's cause.

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sukkibds t1_isliiq2 wrote

> It seems that the protests are correlated with the increase in the homicide rate, but not it's cause.

No the protests themselves aren't the cause. The argument is that the subsequent pulling back/ lack of policing following the protests is the proximate cause. Of course, all those things you mentioned were big factors in causing the intensity and scale of the protests so it's really a question of where you draw the line.

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BSP9000 t1_isq2drs wrote

Except that the pandemic was worldwide. Pretty much every country saw unemployment and school shutdowns. Most of the developed world had government stimulus.

Only the United States saw a 30% increase in murder. And that was mostly in black communities in the US.

So it was an effect of depolicing black communities, not an effect of unemployment.

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