In case we don’t have enough to blame social media for, we can now blame it for young American men killing each other. It kind of makes sense. If the main cause of murder in this country is simply young men fighting, and guns simply make that fighting much more deadly, then it just makes sense that social media is a channel fueling that cycle of retaliation and revenge among young men left out of the formal economy.
Pew has a nice “state of the city” report, including interesting crime statistics over multiple decades. One thing that is clear is that homicide and overall crime do not move in tandem, although the media tends to use the terms interchangeably. While homicide is way up, and homicide is the most horrible crime because, well, people don’t come back from being dead, “major crime” and “violent crime” are still low by historical standards, and this has happened as the jail population has decreased significantly.
A couple other things I found interesting, though far from uplifting:
Pew does a good job of reporting stats on a population-normalized basis, which the press does not do. I would like to see a bit more and a bit clearer reporting on metro areas vs. municipalities, and putting the latter in the context of the former. I don’t fund county-level data helpful at all when comparing across metropolitan and state lines. It would be particularly useful to understand how regional poverty is concentrated (or not) within the largest political jurisdiction of a metro area, and how that plays into these statistics. In other words, a metro area as a whole may not be poor or have low tax revenues compared to peer metro areas, but the central municipality where economic and cultural activity are concentrated (at least historically) may have its hands tied by a narrow tax base and high expenses (underfunded pensions for example) that make providing quality services to its poor and working classes difficult. Although this conundrum might have a fairly obvious logical solution of sharing resources across the metro area, it is politically intractable. I don’t have great solutions to offer other than my half-joking one of metro areas applying for statehood.
The horrible war in Ukraine is obviously the most frightening and depressing thing going on as of early March 2022, both in terms of human suffering and the risk of nuclear war. But I prefer to avoid commenting too much on fast moving current events. I’ll just say that if the world can get past the acute crisis and maybe start talking seriously about arms control again, that could be a possible silver lining. But it seems like we are months or years away from that point. So I’ll pick something else below.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: Philadelphia police are making an arrest in less than 40% of murders in our city, not to mention other violent crimes. Convictions of those arrested are also down. Some of this could be Covid-era dysfunction. But there is a word for this: lawlessness.
Most hopeful story: “Green ammonia” offers some help on the energy and environmental front.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I found a 1992 Saturday Night Live skit about the Olympics more entertaining than the actual Olympics. May Phil Hartman rest in peace. I checked on Dana Carvey and he is 66 and doing okay.
A report commissioned by the Philadelphia has some facts and figures on shootings, both fatal (the layman might refer to these as “murders”) and non-fatal. Here are just a few that caught my eye:
The book Ghettoside referred to a 40% clearance rate in Los Angeles during the height of the 1990s murder surge there. It is remarkable how similar the 37% number above is. Doing the math, the chances of a murderer being caught and convicted is something like 1 in 3. Again, in a surprising echo of what that book discussed, the recommendations of this report mostly talk about crime prevention and suppression strategies. They specifically talk about dedicating more resources to investigation of non-fatal shootings, but they do not recommend increasing the number of homicide detectives or improving their training.
I’m reading Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, a book about homicide in Los Angeles between the late 1980s and early 2000s. The word “ghetto”, by the way, might seem loaded but it is how residents and police referred to the neighborhood that is the focus of the book. It’s a very interesting and also disturbing book. It tells a little bit different story than what I have been reading in books and the media elsewhere. In the view of this book, a central factor in high homicide rates, at least in Los Angeles at the time covered in the book, is that police departments don’t solve murders of black men and boys at the same high rates that they solve murders of other groups. This leads to a situation of lawlessness where a sort of “law of the street” develops. In this view, people would actually like more help from the authorities if they felt it was fair and professional, but they don’t believe they can get it so they take matters into their own hands.
The book talks about disputes and arguments among men and boys getting out of hand and leading to cycles of revenge and retaliation. Homicide detectives do their best, but even the best homicide detectives have limited capacity, and training new ones is difficult. When there is a spike in homicides, the supply of good homicide detectives does not increase in kind. Cases get rushed and a smaller fraction of the total get solved. People correctly learn that they are likely to get away with murder, and that contributes to the feedback loop. In Los Angeles at the time, the situation escalated to the point that total strangers were murdering each other simply for being in the wrong neighborhood or wearing the wrong color clothing.
The book argues that Los Angeles at the time was diverting resources from investigating and solving homicides to “violence prevention” and “predictive policing” programs, which were politically popular but less effective than simply solving more cases would have been. It also argues that people can feel harassed and overpoliced at the same time they might support more investigation and solving of violent crime cases if they felt it was fair and effective. I hear echoes of this in the media during the current homicide wave we are experiencing in many U.S. cities. Maybe the violence prevention approaches have improved and have more evidence behind them, but we do hear both that homicide is way up and that the clearance rate is down. And we perpetually hear about the idea of a lack of trust and respect between police and residents of primarily black neighborhoods.
It’s interesting that the crimes discussed in the book are almost all gun crimes, but this is not a book that focuses on guns. Nor does it focus on the drug trade. It focuses on the people involved and their motivations on all sides, from victims to perpetrators to police. It mentions a few police shootings of suspects in passing, but this is also not a focus of the book.