Homicide Rates Hit Another Historical Low Despite What You May Have Heard Pretty Much Everywhere
from the so-sorry-the-news-isn't-worse dept
The banal will never capture as much attention as the lurid.
I’m sure that this opening sentence will be seized upon by the many critics of my posts criticizing cops. So be it. Just be aware that we expect our public servants to be banal at almost any cost. That’s a sign of competence and restraint. Anything lurid suggests a critical failure.
But back to the point at hand: politicians, the media, and a variety of “think about the children” groups are always insistent the current year is the worst year, in terms of criminal activity. This persistent narrative not only enriches already affluent cop shops, but it allows citizens to see the worst in people at all times, especially if those people are of a different race, religion, socioeconomic status, or don’t appear to be beholden to outdated ideas about the two sexes.
Cops are always eager to portray the current criminal climate to be the worst ever. And that’s really fucking weird. You’d think cops would want to celebrate crime decreases because it might indicate they’re actually doing their jobs. Instead, they act like “tough on crime” politicians, amplifying any blip in crime stats to insist this this why they need more funding/armored vehicles/forfeiture money/surveillance tech.
But the facts speak for themselves. And they speak clearly and coherently because they’re based on facts handed over to the DOJ and compiled/collated by the FBI. There’s no plausible deniability here. The only hitch is that there’s not more participation in the FBI’s crime data program.
So, despite what you may have heard from TikTok and/or your local newscasters, this is not the most dangerous time to be alive. To capitalize on your death wish, you’d need to go back at least 40 years. In some cases, you’d have to hit the “four score and seven years ago” mark. The latest stats show we’re still enjoying historic lows in violent crime rates and it would likely take another pandemic to change that.
Here’s the good news so many self-interested parties don’t want to hear, brought to us by Tim Arango and Campbell Robertson of the New York Times:
Detroit is on track to record the fewest murders since the 1960s. In Philadelphia, where there were more murders in 2021 than in any year on record, the number of homicides this year has fallen more than 20 percent from last year. And in Los Angeles, the number of shooting victims this year is down more than 200 from two years ago.
These major cities aren’t outliers. The NYT points out that, in some cases, rates remain higher than they were pre-pandemic. But in several cities, homicide rates have dipped back down to historic lows, indicating several cities are safer than they’ve been in several decades.
The city of Detroit is on track to record the lowest number of homicides since 1966, a remarkable milestone even given its substantially smaller population today.
Even cities commonly depicted as criminal playgrounds — like New York City and Chicago — are seeing double-digit drops in homicide rates. There are, of course, outliers where crime rates remain unchanged. But overall, the FBI’s latest crime data report says something positive about the state of nation — a message you won’t likely be hearing from police officials and legislators who leverage fear to sell fascism.
[A]s 2023 comes to a close, the country is likely to see one of the largest — if not the largest — yearly declines in homicides, according to recent F.B.I. data and statistics collected by independent criminologists and researchers.
But here’s one thing that hasn’t changed. Crime rates may be dropping but police officers are more violent than ever, according to data collected by Mapping Police Violence:
Those are the facts — facts even some cops are willing to impart to other cops.
The problem with these facts is that they’re always undersold by the people who have the most power or the most market share. As our own Karl Bode pointed out on Bluesky, the problem with truth isn’t that it’s the uncomfortable or not easily understood. It’s that truth can’t compete with well-funded misinformation.
As long as someone can capitalize on the mere fact that violent crime exists, this will always be a problem. But when they come at you, at least you can arm yourselves with facts like these — facts that can’t easily be dismissed because they’re not coming from some activist group, but rather directly from the Justice Department. We are, by no means, almost freed from the scourge of violent crime. But we’re in much better shape than people are being led to believe.
Filed Under: crime, crime rates, homicide, law enforcement, politicians, reporting
Comments on “Homicide Rates Hit Another Historical Low Despite What You May Have Heard Pretty Much Everywhere”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
This is just more anti-police hate speech.
Re:
Statistics doesn’t care about your snowflake mentality, it’ll just grind you to dust.
Re:
Wouldn’t fewer homicides be a goal that the police would be proud of?
Got an answer you ignorant fuckstick?
Re:
ahh yes, the truth is hateful
totally
Re:
Maybe if you guys tried refuting the stats instead of whining that recorded executions make your heroes look bad, you’d get more people on your side.
Assuming there’s a way to massage the stats to make it look like killing unarmed or innocent people wasn’t bad.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Damned lies and statistics
So, yeah… I call shenanigans on the “murdered by cops” chart. I could go into detail on just how stupid that chart is, but the TL;DR of it is:
The chart expressly shows only one fact: that the absolute number of people killed by police, that they have included in their data set, is 1,213 people for 2023. It implicitly shows that killings are constant per month and have been so historically.
The chart doesn’t tell you by how much that number has increased over last year or the year before (hey, this year’s line was hungry, and ate those lines!). It doesn’t give you historical numbers. It doesn’t tell you how many of those times cops faced suspects with guns, or suspects armed with sharpened mangos.
Are police, on average, more lethal? Are citizens, on average, more deserving of lethal responses? The data doesn’t tell us those things.
I’m having trouble with the cognitive dissonance between “politicians keep harping on violence being worse year after year despite the data” and “OMG police are more violent than ever, here’s this … very narrow statistic”.
Re: Wut?
“The chart doesn’t tell you by how much that number has increased over last year or the year before (hey, this year’s line was hungry, and ate those lines!).”
WTF are you talking about? There are several years represented on that graph and you can see how 2023 is at the top of all of them. What am I missing?
“Are police, on average, more lethal? Are citizens, on average, more deserving of lethal responses? The data doesn’t tell us those things.”
Did you never learn about context clues in school? Homicides are down and police killings are up. And you’re asking if people are more worthy of being killed by police when violent crime is down? WHAT?!?!?!?
Re: Re:
The lines for 2022, 2021, 2020 are in progressive shades of pink that are hard to distinguish on the chart. So hard that only one of those lines is distinctive. Where are the other two? Hidden by 2023? Hidden by each other below 2023? Can’t tell.
Violent crime per N (typically 100,000) citizens is down. As this chart is an example of, statistics are not always relative. As for “worthy of being killed”, I mean generally “armed confrontations” vs “unarmed confrontations”? Are there more armed ones than before, in either a relative (per N) or absolute number? Are police counting “he’s got a knife and he’s 50′ away” as justifying lethal force more/less often? Are police blasting away at motorists who drive away from a traffic stop? There’s “justifiable (by police) use of force”, there’s “justifiable (by even bystanders’ standards) use of force”, and then there’s “I drew my gun because he wasn’t respecting my authority”. Have any of these changed?
Sorry for not being more clear.
Re:
“The chart doesn’t tell you by how much that number has increased over last year or the year before (hey, this year’s line was hungry, and ate those lines!). It doesn’t give you historical numbers. It doesn’t tell you how many of those times cops faced suspects with guns, or suspects armed with sharpened mangos.”
It does actually tell you the first two things. Not with a great deal of fine detail, but definitely enough to give an idea of historical numbers and show that this year is higher than last year. Did you miss the non-red lines on the graph?
Re: Re:
“by how much that number has increased” is what has escaped me. The fact that it is higher (than the non-obscured lines) did not. Nor did the fact that the 2023 line – and possibly some of the other lines – obscure yet other lines.
I don’t consider “an idea of historical numbers” to be the equal of “historical numbers”. Nor yet does the chart provide those numbers. Just, as you say, an approximation that you can guess at. Is the number of killings for 2013 800? 1,000? 1,100? You could maybe get close if you took a ruler to the chart.
Again, the chart was designed to scare you with big, red, angry numbers. It wasn’t intended to actually convey information beyond that.
Re: Re: Re:
While the chart could be better designed if you wanted that data in deeper detail it seems to display it.
I am surprised how consistent the police are, Do they have monthly quotas to fullfill? Ok guys we have our 100 for the month try not to kill anyone till the end of the month.
December/January might be interesting but I don’t believe US has the equivalent of the Aus xmas+summer holiday break where even on Monday the 8th the roads had almost no traffic at 7:30am.
Re:
The chart is poorly designed. But if you go to the source of the chart linked in the article, you find an interactive version which allows you to isolate the line for each year. You could’ve done at least that before accusing the chart of outright lying.
Unfortunately, if you want the numbers and not just the lines, you’ll probably have to download the database spreadsheet on the website
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
And how many cops were shot and killed this year...
… compared to previous years? Pretty important stat completely ignored in this lightweight article.
Also the article totally ignores how crime data practices have changed dramatically over the past decade.
But, anything to obscure the truth is fair game…
Re:
As long as you’re bringing up the issues of cop killings, could you cite a source for those statistics? I disagree that it is as important as number of citizens killed by cops (relative to number of encounters, or similarly scaled to violent crime statistics), but it could have bearing on a discussion of de-escalation.
Similarly, I would also welcome a citation to how crime data practices have changed over the last decade, as you believe they have changed significantly.
No, I’m not trolling you. You see these as important, I want to see what you base those opinions on, so I can decide for myself.
Re:
And how many cops were shot and killed this year…
STILL not enough to classify their jobs as ‘dangerous.’
https://www.statista.com/chart/26595/number-of-deaths-on-the-job-per-100000-full-time-equivalent-workers-in-the-us/
Does this include homicide rates BY police?
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
From worst to not quite so bad
While I am delighted that the murder rate in some cities has declined it is disingenuous to use Detroit as an example. The population of Detroit in 1966 was 1.58 million, whereas today its population is 630,376. Nearly 950,00 fewer people to match the same number of homicides. That’s not good.
Do you think this means walking around Baltimore or Washington DC is now safe?
New York City’s, population also declined in 2023. Chicago’s murder rate peaked in 2021 to 29.66 per 100,000 and has declined slightly in 2022 and 2023.
I’m happy the murder rate is edging lower, but we know how to reverse that trend. Defund the police, decriminalize drug use and property crime and amazingly violent crime (including murder) goes up.
Re:
You got out of your way to mention Detroit’s numbers, but glance over New York’s. Likely because the population decrease in that state over the past few years has been incredibly minuscule. Not to mention its population grew by 3% back in 2020.
https://www.macrotrends.net/states/new-york/population#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20New%20York,a%203.3%25%20increase%20from%202019.
I don’t know why I’m arguing with you considering its obvious you have a bad case of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too, but “defunding the police” was never something that was put into practice. And, indeed, police budgets continue to grow:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/defunding-claims-police-funding-increased-us-cities/story?id=91511971
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures#:~:text=From%201977%20to%202020%2C%20in,an%20increase%20of%20189%20percent.
But, of course, I’m willing to learn about how crime rates skyrocketed in cities where police were defunded, drug use decriminalized and “property crimes” were permitted. Please indulge me.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
I didn’t go out of my way to mention Detroit, Tim did. You would think that using Detroit to compare murder rates, you’d look at the population changes.
As an ex-cop, Eric Adams knows a lot more about crime and how to attack it than most mayors.
Policies were put into effect that drove many out of policing. This resulted in fewer cops, but higher costs due to overtime pay. Proposition 47 in California decriminalized drug use and allowed people to steal up to $950 per day without any real consequences. The effects of Prop 47 were immediately apparent. It created an army of drug addicted homeless zombies that could stay high until they died. People in cities like San Francisco were expected to endure stepping over human feces and the homeless. Businesses were expected to tolerate being robbed and their employees endangered. It was so bad that one of the most liberal cities in America recalled its liberal DA for allowing crime to run rampant.
Rather than reverse course, the politicians in California labeled the problem too complex to be fixed, that is unless some foreign dignitary was coming to town, then they found a way to fix the problem overnight, at least temporarily. After the dignitaries left, San Francisco and California’s quality of life returned to the shit show. That is why the population of California is also declining.
Re: Re: Re:
Trump’s not going to kiss it better for you, davec.
Re: Re: Re:
Not that crusty old chestnut again.
We’ve already been over this: Prop 47 was never an approval of the usage of heroin and related substances. Under current Californian law, crack is still very much illegal.
Same thing for the claim that the police aren’t arresting people for petty theft. It’s the same tired claim you keep making, time after time, to make the police look more victimized and the general public look more obnoxious.
As it is, davec, we can’t even trust an army of policemen to handle one school shooter, you think they’re going to handle a shoplifter?
Re: Re: Re:2
Small amounts of any illegal drug, crack, heroin, opioid is treated as a misdemeanor and not prosecuted. This meant that people would get their drugs in small allotments. In homeless encampments, drugs are readily available so there is no need to purchase any more than a days’ worth.
Prop 47 the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act– What a sad terrible joke.
Prop 47 eliminated the felony treatment of serial shoplifters, and the ability to prosecute offenders based on previous convictions. After Prop 47, you could steal tens of thousands of dollars, and just as long as each of those shoplifting offenses were less than $950 you will be charged with a misdemeanor.
DIVERSION DRUG SYSTEM IN CALIFORNIA AND PROP 47
Drug addicts themselves even admit Prop 47’s new laws permit troubled individual to steal and injure themselves with little if any consequence. One of the concerns is that people who are now issued misdemeanor citations instead of felony citations are missing the opportunity to treat their drug addictions in order to turn their lives around. Prior to Prop 47 there was the possibility of redemption for drug addicts through California’s Drug Diversion System, which is administered by what is known as “Drug Courts.”
Even our far-left politicians have seen Prop 47 as a huge mistake.
“We should be locking up criminals, not laundry detergent,” Gloria said.
San Diego mayor joins Prop. 47 fight in State of the City speech (msn.com)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/san-diego-mayor-joins-prop-47-fight-in-state-of-the-city-speech/ar-AA1mMAjO?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=0f816ee7ded94008b2bd4f1c5338ab30&ei=98
Re: Re: Re:3
You do realize that for months – years now – you’ve been bitching about how cops are fleeing and there’s a sharp manpower crunch, right? Like that’s been one of your major theses since you arrived?
And now you want your overstretched forces to go after end users with a donut’s sprinkling worth of powder? Considering how your field tests have claimed that everything vaguely white and powdery was crack cocaine – from bird poop to, yes, goddamn donut sugar – I don’t think your plan to shoot randos in the street for shaker salt is the “gotcha!” you think it is.
Again, if your cops can’t even handle a single shooter, you really think they’re the solution to your alleged crime wave? What’s your grand plan, davec? Have them nuke the whole city from orbit?
Re:
As someone who has recently spent time in both of those cities and will be back in both of them in February, I would just note that, um, yes, I feel extremely safe walking around both Baltimore and DC.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re:
Your naiveté is cute, Mike.
Hope you don’t become one of the statistics b/c of your overconfidence!
Re: Re: Re:
Since I actually understand statistics, that’s WHY I’m not worried.
You should educate yourself, so you don’t come off as an idiot.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
We are letting millions of people walk into our country because they “don’t feel safe” in theirs, yet the worst country, El Salvador has a murder rate of 52 per 100k and Baltimore has a murder rate of 57 per 100k and it isn’t even the most dangerous city in the US.
Tim goes on and on about “trigger happy cops” yet in a land of more than 400 million guns, the killed by police rate is less than 3 per 100k.
There is some bullshit going on here and you guys are helping to spread it.
Re: Re: Re:3
I feel like someone needs to inform you that El Salvador is a country and Baltimore is a City, you cant in any way compare those numbers directly. Also, El Salvador’s murder rate isn’t 52 per 100,000k. It’s currently 2.4.
For someone who is bitching about disingenuous arguments, you obviously wouldn’t have made these lies on purposed. Instead I must assume you are a moron.
Re: Re: Re:4
I don’t know where you got your information but I got mine from the website below. Whether it is a country, a state, or a city, the calculation is still the same—murders per 100,000 people.
Topping the list with an alarming homicide rate of 52.02 per 100,000 people is El Salvador.
https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/murder-rate-by-country#top
Re: Re: Re:5
So the police in Baltimore are less competent than the ones in El Salvador, got it.
For someone who rushes to defend the police at every turn you sure don’t do a very good job of it. But then again, you’ve always held the position of everyone who’s not your son can always go unalive themselves.
Re: Re: Re:3
Tim goes on and on about “trigger happy cops” yet in a land of more than 400 million guns, the killed by police rate is less than 3 per 100k.
The number of cops killed in the same time period with presumably the same number of guns is about 1/4th of that.
So congratulations on your assertion that ‘killed by police’ is a problem that’s 4 magnitudes higher than ‘police killed by.’
Dumbass.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:4
Police are put in dangerous situations, but they are armed and trained to deal with it. There are a lot of dangerous jobs that don’t have high death rates; submarine sailors, fire fighters, military during peace time, powerline workers, professional fighters and athletes, etc.
Dipshit
Re: Re: Re:5
Uvalde.
Is this supposed to be a chest-thumping defense of the police? If other jobs of similar danger levels don’t have the crippling death rates that you keep claiming exist in order to push your narrative of victimization, sounds like maybe we shouldn’t be sending in trigger-happy “I feared for my life!” cosplayers to do actual work, no?
Re: Re: Re:6
davec firing his gun into his own old man foot, news at 11.
Remember, he said that if his wife dies, there’s a 34% chance that he was responsible.
Re: Re: Re:6
Maybe they should send you? Oh that’s right, you’re an Anonymous Chickenshit.
Re: Re: Re:7
Nah, maybe they should send you. You’re just as anonymous as most of the posters here, and you’re actually dedicated to shooting people.
Re: Re: Re:7
Maybe they should send you? Oh that’s right, you’re an Anonymous Chickenshit.
Maybe they should send your son…Oh, that’s right, he’s hiding with the helpdesk people because he couldn’t cut it.
Re: Re: Re:8
He patrolled for over 20 years. I doubt you would make it 20 days. Your first obstacle would be finding a department with low enough standards and desperate enough to hire you. Then you’d have to survive the training without shooting yourself or your trainer—20 days max!
Re: Re: Re:8
You would think that criminals in Baltimore would be afraid of blood thirsty, trigger-happy cops, but they’re not. They are not even afraid when they get arrested. Baltimore’s DA Marilyn Mosby didn’t want to “mass” incarcerate, so she didn’t incarcerate. Unfortunately for her, the Federal Government did incarcerate and she is now facing 5 years in prison. I wonder if she would have committed her crimes if she’d known they would land her in jail. Jail is a deterrent.
The City of Baltimore is bragging about fewer murders, but like Detroit, their population has declined.
Re: Re: Re:9
And based on your own testimony, apparently saw absolutely no hints that his colleagues were racist, doing anything unseemly, or quietly filtering out the cops who disagreed with manhandling unarmed suspects.
It’s a pretty good guess that your son is anomalous.
Hasn’t your point been that standards are at an all-time low and they’ll take just about anyone? In that event, doesn’t that make this taunt pretty useless?
Considering that the training that you’ve been bending your back for is what let you justify cops shooting the unarmed, this is not the mockery you want to think it is.
I’m not sure what the point of this structured narrative is supposed to be. A quick search tells me that Mosby was indicted for “falsely claiming COVID-19-related financial hardship in requesting one-time withdrawals of $40,000 and $50,000 of her deferred compensation funds under the CARES Act”. The way you wrote the above seems to suggest that you believe she got jailed for refusing to jail criminals.
Also the same search informs me that the cops she tried to charge were found not guilty of said charges, so… again, you keep trying to make it sound like every cop is one step away from being charged, jailed and executed, as if there isn’t a wealth of resources and a system that sticks its neck out to protect them. You literally found an example for me of a system that, indeed, protects cops when they’re not guilty of the charges they’ve been given. Hasn’t one of the great mantras of you pro-police people been “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”?
Has jail been a deterrent for cops boasting about how many people of color they’ve shot that week?
Re: Re: Re:5
So congratulations on your assertion that ‘killed by police’ is a problem that’s 4 magnitudes higher than ‘police killed by.’
No rebuttal, huh? Dumbass.
Re: Re: Re:6
Unhide my post Dipshit and you’ll see I did respond.
Re: Re: Re:5
“but they are armed and trained to deal with it”
Ah, right, cops are trained to deal with it… under the same training that you keep blaming whenever cops shoot the unarmed, naked and fleeing, in order to say that the cops aren’t at fault.
We’re supposed to start trusting the training now, when you choose to trust that training when it’s convenient for your narrative?
Re: Re: Re:3
If you keep abusing your privileges and toys, don’t be surprised when people get angry and ask for them to be taken away.
This sort of thing happens in every job. Military folk know this. Hell, even kindergarteners know this. They get their toys taken away and are asked to stand in the quiet corner for five minutes to think about what they’ve done.
You think you’re portraying the cops as misunderstood, grizzled, John Rambo-type protagonists. What they end up looking like is toddlers who can’t stand being told “no” and throw a tantrum every single time.
Re: Re: Re:
Funny how you knuckle draggers now are experts on statistics while when COVID were rampaging across the world you couldn’t even be bothered to understand statistics and would rather die because of it instead of taking the vaccine.
A better number is the murders per 100k inhabitants and not the absolute value. According to Statista Germany has a value of 0.3 and America has 6.8 in 2021. I wouldn’t call that number good by any means.
Re: Gun violence in the US
Of course, The US is very diverse country in terms of culture. NYC isn’t like Texas, which isn’t like Southern California, all of which aren’t like Miami or Seattle. Take a look at this politico article on the geography of gun violence in the US to see what I mean.
Times did not provide proper context on Detroit homicides
Their population was larger in 1966, 1.6 million vs 620,000 now. So when you use a homicide rate per 100,000 people, it doesn’t really compare as less, 13.4 then vs 40.6 now. Still good news, but horrible example by the Times.
Actually, it looks like homicide rates are up. After all, just because a certain amount of said murders were committed by individuals in uniform, doesn’t mean they’re not homicides.
Misconsidered
Yes? Violent crime as a whole is down.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/
But localised crime is way up. Detroit shows a per capita rise. Chicago shows a per capita rise. New York, Miami, etc. murders per populace Are relatively close. And other crimes have increased. The populations have decreased.
Re:
An increase in the murder rate would tend to cause a decrease in population, wouldn’t it?