Still 200+ murders too many. Life is too cheap in this country.

It's better, sure, but 200 is still way too high. 2019's count was 166, it was as low as 116 in 2017, and the average in the 2010s was 127.

Source

Things can be less safe AND less deadly at the same time. Lots of countries in the world have much lower homicide rates (lower rates of gun ownership being one factor) but MUCH higher rates of crimes like car theft, mugging, etc. Just saying, one metric isn't the whole picture of safety.

We can do better. Still, it was nice to not have to listen to so much pearl clutching this year.

Hm if only there was some way to explain this, perhaps a mass death event that negatively impacted the material conditions and mental health of people across the country.

Seriously, people are reading too much into a statistical outlier when crime is overall trending down. We've got to get some distance from the pandemic and get people the economic and mental health they need as opposed to the "cops on every street corner, tough on crime" narrative you see parroted endlessly.

This is a bad take. Regardless of the cause (and I don’t buy “Covid” as a cause for everything), people can still be upset and worried that crime is up and want it to be lower.

yep that's why I suggested some things that need to be addressed going forward rather than "post 10 fearmongering crime articles on the DC subreddit every week" which seems to be the strategy right now

Nobody is forcing you to read the articles. To me, it’s just information to consider and absorb. Ignoring it won’t make the problem go away, but you can if you choose.

Not sure if you can make the case that crime is trending down when murders increased 6 out of the last 10 years pre pandemic.

A professional, trustworthy police force is just as valuable, and there's research that shows more visible cops reduce crime.

>adding a new police officer to a city prevents between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides, which means that the average city would need to hire between 10 and 17 new police officers to save one life a year.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/04/20/988769793/when-you-add-more-police-to-a-city-what-happens

Mental health and economic opportunities are important, but there's no shortage of jobs in the DC area. And, I would speculate that DC dovotes more resources towards mental health than a lot of cities.

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How does this track with population growth? I would guess that DC gains more residents year over year. Would be better to compare total murders as a ratio to total population

Planning on buying a house soon near national harbor and security was a big concern. Still unsure but hopefully will get some info on visit to dc.

I love when people cite this study because I get to gush over how notoriously flimsy it is! They estimate cops reduce between 0.06 and 0.1 homicides which is a huge variance that they just handwave away and hope no one notices, but everyone rolls with the 0.1 figure because it sounds better. The lower end of this figure means you have to spend over $1.1 million plus benefits and pensions to stop 1 homicide, which is absurd. The lower estimate of spending is only $664,000. Meanwhile they ignore the other finding of the working paper which says that adding more cops just leads to a bunch of bullshit arrests of minorities on low-level offenses.

Also it makes the mistake of assuming correlation = causation and ignores that murder rates have gone down as cities became more prosperous. It's a baaaaad study that people only trot out because it fits their narrative.

This passage

> the results imply that larger police forces are unlikely to be an important driver of lengthy prison sentences or mass incarceration, for both Black and white civilians

Should really disqualify the paper from ever being taken seriously. The authors even recognize that they didn't really find anything statistically significant, but second-hand reporting makes the data seem much more solid than it actually is:

> While we find that investments in law enforcement save Black lives, the number of averted homicides (1 per 10-17 officers hired) is modest and might even be zero in cities with large Black populations.

Yeah but 2021 was bad

To go even further back from 2017, in 2012 and 2013 (discounting the Navy Yard mass shooting) we had under 100 homicides. So in the last decade we've increased by over 100% from the city's low.

While it being lower than last year is good, 2022 was the highest in 2 decades. And going further back then two decades puts us into the 90s, when DC was one of the most violent cities in the country.

If you aren’t actively involved in the drug trade, congrats you are almost definitely not going to be murdered.

Pretty ironic considering you’re ignoring the impact of a multi-year global health crisis on the mental wellness and economic stability of a whole lot of people as if those two factors aren’t significant drivers of violent crime.

I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but when crimes like a motor vehicle theft where the owner of the vehicle gets run over and killed in the process, is filed as property theft, not a violent crime, I'm not sure I believe these numbers. Maybe my understanding of some of these criminology terms is off, but some of these crimes and how they are filed doesn't pass the smell test for me.

Crime was already on the upswing in DC before the pandemic. I’m sure it’s a contributing factor concerning the increase in some types of crime, but to attribute everything to Covid is convenient and naive. I’m not ignoring it … I’m just not buying it as an explanation.

No one attributed everything to Covid; that’s you creating strawmen to defend your position. You are hand waving very real factors in the rise of violent crime, and ignoring other factors like police refusing to do their damn job as a result of nationwide movement toward more accountability.

Lol that’s literally the opposite of the correct interpretation. 2021 was an outlier and crime is trending up. There’s a one year drop from 2021->2022, but that’s not the trend.

So this is all a question of comparison, right? Most things, most of the time, are "better" than some things and "worse" than some other things -- it just depends which things you choose to examine. I took this poster as using a shorter comparison window and trying to spread some potential cheer. You, on the other hand, seem like a glass half empty person -- which is fine, too! Neither of you are wrong, but for myself, I'm going to enjoy the small win. 😊

The other guy was attributing everything (or most) of the increase in crime to Covid … that’s who I was responding to. When did I say I was ignoring other factors? I’m just saying I don’t believe Covid is a significant factor.

>when crimes like a motor vehicle theft where the owner of the vehicle gets run over and killed in the process, is filed as property theft, not a violent crime

Does this actually happen? In this situation the carjacking is guilty of murder, the death would be recorded as homicide, and I'm pretty confident this would be counted as a murder in our crime statistics.

crime is trending up!!! when you only look at the last 2 years and not the previous 4 decades of data

That's in reference to the incident on Vernon Street NW in March, CCN 22032803.

Both can be true dude … crime can be trending down over 40 years and up over 10. That can still be cause for concern. Nobody wants to go back to the early 00s or 90s.

The nadir was 10 years ago. Up since then

I get what you're saying, but reddit, especially this subreddit, nor twitter, nor facebook are real life. And its a huge problem in the 21st century that we mistake these spaces as being representative of real life.

we use homicide rate cause its much harder to "juke" the stats. You can't really rely on those other stats cause we know they're lied about in the US (and probably elsewhere).

Since we're providing context here...

Prior to 2012/2013, the last time DC had less than 100 murders was 1963. I think it's slightly misleading to set the lowest homicide rate in over half a century as the point of comparison, don't you?

As a further point of context, as of June 24th of this year the murder rate was up 16% over 2021.

So the entirety of the drop in killings has come in the last two months of the year. Hell, when I first started pointing this out on December 13th, the murder rate was "only" down 9%, so it's dropped an additional 2% year-over-year in just the last half of this month.

Nationwide, homicides are down 5% this year. And guess what? Nationwide, they ALSO surged during the pandemic. It's odd to me to see so much of the discussion center around DC-specific policies when we're talking about something that happened across the country.

All of this info strongly indicates to me that, while homicides are still relatively high in comparison to the lowest number of homicides in the past fifty years, the surge that started in 2020 seems to be due to macro effects that seem to be lessening. I plan to check back in halfway through the year in 2023. I would expect to see a pretty dramatic drop in year-over-year homicides.

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$1.1 M doesn't sound like that much to prevent a homicide, to me.

Both morally and economically, that feels like a worthwhile investment.

Oh hmm that is strange. Wonder what's up with that.

It sets a pretty low bar for other solutions to be more efficient

What other solutions? Comprehensive economic and sociol transformation?

If there were an easy, efficient answer to this problem, it would have been implemented by now.

We should be ok with all-of-above strategies and be prepared to stop doing things that have low evidence of efficacy (including shrinking police budgets if it's proven that they aren't helpful).

Well we're all going to die. But we can all agree that nobody should be killed.

How near National Harbor will matter here. The harbor area itself is just fine. But the further east you go, the bigger your security concern might get.

But as noted, unless you're a drug dealer or involved in a local crew or set, you won't be murdered. Carjacked? Maybe...

Police do not stop crimes nor is their such a thing as a trustworthy police force in America. It never has been especially for 40%+ of the population of DC.

You almost get it which says alot in this subreddit

Nobody should be murdered

Whoa, let's not pretend like posting fearmongering crime articles is all people here are doing.

Many of them are making completely unnecessary posts about their personal life every time something remotely bad happens to them, or even when they think something remotely bad might have possibly been about to happen to them!

Someone looked a little aggressive while I was walking home at night, this is why the city is declining and I'm moving to Arlington!

Unless you're hiring cops as temps that $1.1MM would be per year, for 20+ years, then like 60% of that forever.

Yeah great location but a litttle cautious

Lmao nice

Shootings in this city are bad man. Even with your positivity OP. It feels out of pace or the real 2022 vibe.

Yeah, I've been here since around that time and everyday feels like it's a lot more chaotic than it ever was in 2018-2019. Even taxi and uber/lyft drivers have been commenting on that.