I've kind of wondered why overdoses spiked but completed suicides did not.
There was also a claim from the CDC that suicide attempts by teenage girls (not boys) went up. (Cue the people who say that schools need to be open without masks or improved ventilation because it doesn't matter if kids get covid. not many get vasculitis or mis-c. It's only twice as deadly as flu even if it is the leading cause of pediatric death, and the kids aren't going to bring it home to their vulnerable family members. And they will commit suicide if they aren't in school.)
I saw a psychiatrist on twitter who researches suicide say that the cdc lumped self harm that was not suicidal into the suicide attempt statistics.
There was also an interesting graph showing increases every four years in mental health distress, but I can't find that one. For boys who were bullied there may have been some protective effects.
Nice to see Chicago retain its title as the murder capital.
I'm probably wrong, but I'd been guessing the incongruous murder rate was domestic violence related. Families stuck at home, fewer routes to escape or disrupt a bad trend or get help.
If I remember correctly, overdoses are generally a really ineffective route to completed suicide (~25%), so perhaps not enough to really drive the completion numbers higher? Method accounts for a lot of gender disparity in those stats.
There's probably more naloxone around.
How sure are they that violent crime is actually down? I'm wondering if the murder rate isn't going up along with violent crime, per usual, but non-murder violence being less reported.
2: there's also cutting which is done in an attempt to self-soothe. Clearly a distressed individual but not a suicide attempt.
I suspect part of the issue correlates with this.
"U.S. gun sales in January surged 60% to 4,137,480. This makes it the largest single month since figures started to be recorded in 1998. The rise is part of a trend. Gun sales in the United States rose 40% last year to 39,695,315. The figure also represents the high-water mark in gun sales since the current record-keeping system went into effect."
More cars, more wrecks. More guns, more murders.
The guns are at a high-water mark, but the murders are still down quite a bit from peak.
Right. I guess I'm curious whether the murder attempt rate has gone up or if the murder efficiency rate has.
That's part of what I was thinking in 4. Because I have no idea.
overdoses are generally a really ineffective route to completed suicide
I read an article recently about disproportionately high suicide rates among veterinarians and staff and I wasn't sure what to make of that until somebody pointed out that they have ready access to euthanasia drugs and know how to calculate the proper mg/kg dose, so were much more likely to be "successful" on a first attempt.
Plus, they've had to put down lots of puppies. That can't be good.
My guess is that plenty of police officers have responded to BLM by going on strike while still working. Because if crushing the breath out of a man over eight minutes is going to be wrong, they don't want to be right.
When we moved to DC in 1988 the murder rate was really high, and iirc a big part of that was some sort of breakdown between cocaine retailers about what territories they should operate in.
Looking at 2019 data, I see that our local rape and theft rates are twice the national average. My guess is that the first is almost completely about reporting, which has likely changed in the last decade. We're 20% below national average in murder, but the raw number is so low -- 3! -- that huge swings are not only expected but certain.
13: Like ice cream trucks in the U.K., but with tire slashing.
I wonder if the high gun sales is a function of Trumpist political tension, and then the murders come from the guns. I'm stereotyping here, but I would guess that the marginal additional gun is more murderogenic than the average gun, because the person inspired to buy a gun by the current political situation is more of an unstable nutbar than the average gun owner.
Right. It may just be that guns are getting into more households and that matters more than the number of guns since the difference between five and ten guns in a given house is probably nil.
Compared to the difference between zero and one.
It's hard for me to imagine any significant number of Trump supporters recently went from 0 to 1 gun.
I suspect lots of urban and suburban moderates and liberals did.
Anyway, I may be relying too much on the few people I know, but I think the Tree of Life terrorism sold a lot guns.
And I don't know about everybody else, but if I didn't already have them, the militia types with guns standing around in Harrisburg followed by all the attempts to not count my vote would have caused me to buy one.
Also, the people speaking for the police and police unions are very explicitly saying they don't want to protect liberals if liberals are going to want any kind of accountability for the police's behavior. The working definition of "liberal" for most people in Pittsburgh is "white people who live where I do and have professional jobs."
Oh, huh, I'm living in my bubble again. Liberals buying guns as a response to Trump/right wing terror never occurred to me.
Not saying it didn't happen, just that it's a new thought.
It doesn't happen often, but I used to tell people if they are on the fence or unwilling to get lessons, they shouldn't buy a gun. Now I tell them to get a 12 gauge.
I am worried enough about future insurrection that I do occasionally think about getting gun training. But I imagine the trumpistas are stocking up and making the market ridiculous again just like they did under Obama.
19 My parents did (they bought a 12-gauge shotgun), and my dad is currently working on getting his pistol permit.
26 Are you talking to my dad, Moby?
I don't believe I have ever talked to someone on Long Island, except you.
The kids were at a really REALLY small scale horse camp last week - like this woman on a farm just sort of puts them to work and then they watch movies inside, to get some AC, in the afternoon.
Hawaii told me afterwards that the 16 year old invited a couple kids to her bedroom, and there was a gun sitting on the floor, and one kid was like, "Uh, that's a gun." The 16 year old sort of gaily twirled it and showed them the empty chamber and was like, "Oh, that. That's supposed to go behind this book on this bookshelf." She apparently has it for self-protection.
The whole thing is unnerving. I've already come around to the idea that we should get our kids to a gun safety course (h/t E. Messily) but this might prompt me to actually put it in motion.
26: what changed your mind? You really think it's a good idea for more houses to have guns?
I got taught to shoot a .22 rifle at school, aged about ten. It's still not clear to me whether this was to training us to shoot Germans, striking miners, or incoming fascists. Old boys had done all these things* with the skills they acquired there.
I don't think I could ever shoot at another human being, but I could quite easily get into hunting small game and I still get pleasure out of hitting a target even in funfairs.
* Probably not miners.
The idea that people can just buy guns without any sort of lesson or licensing is of course horrendous, especially when you remember that the guns they buy have no real use but killing other humans.
What about the part where you don't need a license or training anymore to carry? That goes into effect here on September 1st.
That, heebs, is just flat out fucking terrifying. But I don't think having a gun of your own makes you safer in those circumstances.
Me neither. I have no desire for a gun. I believe very strongly that if you have a gun and it lives anywhere besides a locked cabinet, then the most likely person to get shot by it already lives with you.
32: All the figures on gun safety/who is likely to get hurt with your gun/etc are based on a society where the police are expected to arrive quickly. This summer, it was pretty clear that the some police officers were willing to use the threat of not doing their jobs as a way to achieve policy goals. Obviously, at many other times and places, there have been areas where the police were not willing to go. I always figured that people in those places should have guns or at least that I should shut up about it if I think they shouldn't. I feel the same way about telling older Jewish people in the neighborhood how they should weight their risks of violence vs shooting their own toe/family member.
39.1: How do you figure? When someone is menaced with a gun, how often have police, at their best, typically intervened before it was over?
I wasn't thinking of that. If someone has a gun on you already, you've got issues that are not going to be easily fixed. But, if you can't say, "I'm calling the cops" and have the person doing whatever leave because they know the cops will be there soon-ish, you are not in the kind of setting that is implicit in the "guns are more dangerous to people in your house than others."
And that comment, I think, is the clearest answer we'll get as to why "Defund the police" was a fucking stupid slogan.
35. Presumably the sort of people who think this is a good idea also feel that you shouldn't have to be taught to drive before you're turned loose on the public highway in charge of an SUV. What next?
Firearm deaths are about 60% suicides and 37% homicides. (The rest are accidents or police shootings, basically.) There are about 3X as many injuries as fatalities. Anyone who thinks they're not significantly more likely to have a household tragedy with an unsecured gun is kidding themselves. And anyone who secures their gun properly isn't expecting to need it for personal protection.
Second link is a study about shootings in residences with guns.
During the study interval (12 months in Memphis, 18 months in Seattle, and Galveston) 626 shootings occurred in or around a residence. This total included 54 unintentional shootings, 118 attempted or completed suicides, and 438 assaults/homicides. Thirteen shootings were legally justifiable or an act of self-defense, including three that involved law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides
https://health.ucdavis.edu/what-you-can-do/facts.html
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9715182/
I spent a while in the rabbit hole of smart guns. It seems amazing that we've had iPhones that unlock with fingerprint recognition for what, a decade? But not guns, because what if the lock doesn't unlock properly in a real emergency? And there have been protests and boycott threats and all sorts of ridiculousness over various technologies.
The safety feature that blew my mind when I heard there was industry opposition is the automatic stopping table saw. The cost is a couple hundred bucks more per table saw, and the power tool industry lobbied against it because safety isn't manly or something, and then Republicans included a restriction in a spending bill preventing CPSC from requiring them. So not surprising that there's plenty of technology that could prevent deaths but industries oppose it because it goes against the marketed image of their products.
It would prevent use of table saws in murders too.
It does mean you can't use your table saw to cut deli meats.
At least the demo my dad was at, the safety was triggered by a hot dog and the hot dog was undamaged except for a small nick.
The videos online all use a hot dog to simulate a finger. Haven't seen a sausage demo but you know that's relevant to some poor guy somewhere in the world.
45: A relative (who nearly lost a finger last summer in a table saw incident) was telling us about that! He was pretty enthusiastic. Apparently, the safer ones need special blades as well, but he thought it would be a deal at twice the price compared to the medical bills.
I know a guy who lost a finger to a saw. And two guys who accidentally shoot themselves in the foot.
42: I'm sympathetic to that view, but as time goes on, I get less and less confident that I know what works -- that I have a useful and workable theory of change. I know what doesn't work: police "reform." One way or another, the current system in the US needs to be rethought from the ground up -- and it's impossible to do that, or even say it, without offending police officers, who are overwhelmingly committed to a fascist view of policing.
The conversation about policing is now starting from the position: No more police. That seems like the right place to start. Police administrators need to become as fearful of politics as they are of the rank-and-file. And the police themselves need to be persuaded that the public is willing to make basic standards of decency stick.
I have questions about that last one.
Hopelessness, as a heuristic, has undeniable explanatory power.
Do you want a fascist takeover of the US? Because that's how you get a fascist takeover of the US.
I'm not hopeless. It's just that we're very clearly in the middle of a social conflict where one side is attempting to destroy social order as a tactic. I think they won't win, but it's not impossible they do.
I have no meaningful knowledge about what is going on with crime statistics nationally, but I do some volunteering on related issues locally. In Philadelphia, gun violence in general and homicides in particular are spiking in a horrifying way. ("Still not quite as bad as the '80s" is not anything I want to aspire to.) From what I'm hearing, the incident profiles are very similar to what they always are -- overwhelmingly male, disproportionately poor and working-class, disproportionately Black, arguments over money, turf, and "honor."
There is some speculation that the closure of locations for healthy activities (pools, rec centers, libraries, schools) and decrease in access to mental health and other support services due to Covid and/or budget cuts has increased people's vulnerability and ramped up tensions. Seems pretty plausible to me.
I have no meaningful knowledge about what is going on with crime statistics nationally, but I do some volunteering on related issues locally. In Philadelphia, gun violence in general and homicides in particular are spiking in a horrifying way. ("Still not quite as bad as the '80s" is not anything I want to aspire to.) From what I'm hearing, the incident profiles are very similar to what they always are -- overwhelmingly male, disproportionately poor and working-class, disproportionately Black, arguments over money, turf, and "honor."
There is some speculation that the closure of locations for healthy activities (pools, rec centers, libraries, schools) and decrease in access to mental health and other support services due to Covid and/or budget cuts has increased people's vulnerability and ramped up tensions. Seems pretty plausible to me.
This short thread has some actual numbers from my city.
This short thread has some actual numbers from my city.
This short thread has some actual numbers from my city.
54: With your apparent certainty, can you advise what we would do to forestall the ongoing devolution into fascism? Far as I can tell, the folk angry about "defund" or, heaven forbid "abolish" the police have, like the beatnik Flanders, tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
It's not Covid, it's the Baltimore/Freddie Gray effect taken nationwide to other big cities. The spike isn't across all demographics, it's overwhelming poor black and brown people, mostly men as usual. Baltimore didn't experience the same spike recently because they had their huge spike in 2015 and it never went away.
Proactive policing is drastically down in the big cities and simultaneously police are leaving the cities in droves for smaller suburban and rural agencies or just quitting the profession outright. Staffing is so far down we couldn't restart proactive work even if we wanted to. We're down about 20 percent and many if not most of the big city agencies are similarly short if not worse. Number of applicants is down 40-80 percent depending on the city. Our wash out rate in the last few classes is atrocious. Our current class started at around thirty and we've already washed around 10. And we're not even into FTO yet.
Progressive DA's and "bail reform" have compounded the problem turning many jurisdictions into revolving doors for felons. When you book a guy with priors on multiple felonies and he's back in the neighborhood in less than 24 hours out on recognizance it gets very difficult to justify the risk of apprehending such people. It gets even more difficult with Vanita Gupta, architect of the disastrous Baltimore consent decree, now supervising the litigation of consent decrees at DOJ. She's been quite open out her support of the defund movement.
Tanaya Devi and Roland Fryer released a paper on the results of rushing in with consent decrees based on viral incidents. The results were not good.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w27324.pdf
This paper provides the first empirical examination of the impact of federal and state "Pattern-orPractice" investigations on crime and policing. For investigations that were not preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force, investigations, on average, led to a statistically significant reduction in homicides and total crime. In stark contrast, all investigations that were preceded by "viral" incidents of deadly force have led to a large and statistically significant increase in homicides and total crime. We estimate that these investigations caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these investigations increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%. Other theories we test such as changes in community trust or the aggressiveness of consent decrees associated with investigations -- all contradict the data in important ways.
If it's a broad policing issue, how come non-homicide crime is level or down?
64: It's probably not. Pretty common for people and businesses to just get frustrated with long response times and to not report a lot of thefts because they think, not without reason, that it's a waste of time and nothing will be done. I'd routinely recover stolen cars with property from multiple victims and none of them would have filed a report. I did a patrol rotation the first four months this year and a bunch of businesses told me they were calling in far less thefts than were occurring. Only major ones or ones where their insurance was requiring a case number.
This also leads to shady claims of "overall crime is down" because they lump in gross numbers of all the "serious crime" categories which includes thefts. It's one of the reasons that I went to the schools. I was a regular at our weekly dept Compstats. Our end of 2016 year had multiple violent person crime categories in the red. Homicide, agg assault, robbery, etc. Property crimes were much lower though, so command staff then announced total crime was down 5 percent or whatever and then they all applauded. I was in a school assignment like three months later.
The most accurate property crime stat to watch is probably auto theft. Nobody ignores their car getting stolen. (Googles) Yep, looks like auto theft is up both 2020 and this year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/18/with-car-prices-surging-yours-is-a-prime-target-for-thieves-.html
62: For one thing, recognise that people want, and need, order almost as much as law. By "order" I mean a socially recognised hierarchy of power such that it doesn't have to be established by brute force at every turn. It is, though, founded on the assumption that when push comes to shove the state has the resources to defeat all competing powers. If the cops don't provide it, the biggest criminal gang will.
Relevant here, perhaps, is a short memoir of a Colombian slum in a period of anarchy. That, not the contemporary US, is what happens when you get a police force genuinely out of control.
None of this is to defend bad cops, or to say that the US police forces are not, like the surrounding society, over-militarised. But until the US Left realises -- and internalises -- that bad cops are better, for most people, than no cops, it will continue to throw votes away and both by its own actions and, by letting in even worse parties, to make the situation worse for everyone.
I'd add to 65 the observation that a lot of property crime has gone online now and doesn't, in this country, show up in the statistics the same way. But every successful fish or scam is some victim robbed just as surely as if they had been marched to a cashpoint and forced at knifepoint to input their pin. A lot less traumatic, I know. But still robbery.
62: For the police, there are two problems we have to solve. One is that the police engage is biased conducted. (And arguably, they have an excessive force problem that racism makes worse The police shoot a bunch of white guys every year, too.)
The other problem, and it surprises me that I have to mention this one, is crime. Crime is bad. People don't like it. They don't like being victims of it. They don't like hearing about it. A spike in crime makes people start fantasizing about authoritarian solutions. If you are a right-wing politician, a spike in crime is a gift, because using force to combat crime just makes intuitive sense to people. Crime goes up, and people flock to see movies like Death Wish or the Dirty Harry movies. I think this exact dynamic is going to play out in San Francisco, where Chesa Boudin is going to be recalled over a nationwide spike in crime.
There's a rhetorical move that I sometimes see people make on the left (maybe they do it on the right as well -- I don't know enough about them as well). It's when an argument doesn't get traction, then the only response is to make the same argument again, but this time with more self-righteousness. A normal person who's not a committed liberal hears "No more police", and they picture something like Escape from New York. And antidote to that image is not "No more police" with more self-righteousness. It's doing what Shor suggests, which is do what you think is the right policy, but talk about something else. And that right policy has to not only prevent bias, but keep crime under control as well.
I'm hoping that the current spike in murders is entirely coronavirus driven, because if it's not the window to reform the police is rapidly closing. If you predicted that crime wouldn't go up from changing police procedure, and gswift predicted crime would go up (and he did), then who are they going to listen to in 2024? It's not you.
I'd add to 65 the observation that a lot of property crime has gone online now and doesn't, in this country, show up in the statistics the same way. But every successful fish or scam is some victim robbed just as surely as if they had been marched to a cashpoint and forced at knifepoint to input their pin. A lot less traumatic, I know. But still robbery.
Which makes the way England & Wales deals with this crime very frustrating. Almost everything gets funnelled into the Action Fraud system, almost nothing gets investigated by the police, and some reports aren't even looked at by a human.
Progressive DA's and "bail reform" have compounded the problem turning many jurisdictions into revolving doors for felons.
And yet there is absolutely no statistical relationship between the current rise in murders and jurisdictions with progressive DAs and bail reform.
We're supposed to believe in an invisible crime wave that doesn't show up in statistics but is for real happening nationwide and that's the fault of progressives and the police abolition movement despite the murder rate having no connection with progressive jurisdictions. I'm not buying it.
Property crime is being underreported, while probably true in general, is a nonsense explanation for something that's supposed to be concealing a crime wave happening right now -- we're postulating a sudden increase in the degree to which property crime doesn't get reported, of almost exactly the same magnitude and timing as the invisible crime wave? People reported property crime much much more in 2018 than they do now?
until the US Left realises -- and internalises -- that bad cops are better, for most people, than no cops
The "US Left" in this context, is the people being policed -- that's who is voting in anti-cop politicians. Mississippi has always been pissed off about crime in New York, but even Eric Adams isn't a Mississippi sheriff.
This argument made more sense before US police asserted, en masse, the absolute right to brutalize people on camera. The public isn't objecting -- more than in the past -- to cops being criminals. People are enraged by cops -- and prosecutors -- asserting the right to public criminality as a matter of principle. That was never going to be sustainable.
Crime is bad. People don't like it. They don't like being victims of it. They don't like hearing about it. A spike in crime makes people start fantasizing about authoritarian solutions.
Like gswift, I am skeptical of claims of non-murder crime decreasing. Murder is the most accurately tabulated violent crime. It's relatively easy to count bodies. The other statistics are swayed by all kinds of noise.
Still, I think this misunderstands the problem. The search for authoritarian solutions did not abate when crime did -- it increased. The existence of fascist cops has encouraged resistance -- but it has also encouraged open fascism. It might be a better country if the police could once again act with near-universal impunity -- that's a theory, anyway -- but given the ubiquity of cell phones, we're not going back. If police don't want to be regarded with contempt, then they are going to have to adjust and at least find better ways to hide their contemptible behavior. They are going to have to learn to at least pretend, for PR reasons, that they don't endorse impunity for police crime.
Is police fascism an immutable fact of American life? Maybe, but the pushback against it is also an irresistible force.
Who has agency here? I don't think the public can react in any other way. I sympathize with gswift's concerns about recruiting and retention, but that problem is created by open police criminality. Mitigate that problem -- even by hiding it better -- and you can make policing a respectable occupation again.
Gswift, as I understand him, isn't just being skeptical about a drop in non-murder crime, he's asking us to believe in a spike in non-murder crime which matches the spike in murders but doesn't show up in statistics. I agree that crime stats are bad, so it's possible, but that really is a big claim.
We should do what Sweden does and send a depressed middle-aged divorced man to fight crime.
But, yes to 73.2.
74: I don't know about property crime, but I think there's a good reason for assuming that violent crime is rising with the murder rate.
I sympathize with gswift's concerns about recruiting and retention, but that problem is created by open police criminality. Mitigate that problem -- even by hiding it better -- and you can make policing a respectable occupation again.
This is an excellent point. I've seen people (Yglesias is who comes to mind) speculating that to get better police we need to pay better. And while that's possible, I think the fact that the public impression of police is of people who are often on violent power trips and who uniformly support their colleagues when they commit crimes against the public, and who are very dangerous and hostile to police who attempt to push back against this bad behavior, is a much bigger recruiting problem.
I'll add that there is a death spiral implicit in my logic here. Under current circumstances, you don't lose the bad cops, who are just fine with the way things are. You lose the good cops, the ones who can't stomach the justified public disdain for their profession.
In the end, it's a political problem, and it has to be resolved with political measures. To start, openly corrupt cops have to be prosecuted. There has to be outside pressure. The rank-and-file police aren't interested in fixing this.
74: Gswift makes an interesting point about auto thefts that I hadn't thought about before, but that makes sense to me.
Based on Nextdoor, the crime in my neighborhood is mostly porch piracy, illegal fireworks, stealing from unlocked cars, and comically obvious phone scams that the elderly ask about.
Stealing change from parked cars sounds like trying to level up enough to leave the beginner area of a MMORPG.
In Chicago at least, the spike in shootings all seems to be gang-related. It's been out of control for years, it feels like, but Covid has hollowed out downtown and LSD traffic, and we've been having drive-bys in those places instead of just along the margins of gang territories, so it feels really crazy and random now. I live in the University of Chicago neighborhood, and while it feels much safer than 30 years ago as far as muggings and home invasions, etc., we had a student die just last week, shot by a stray bullet as he was sitting a Green Line train at the 51st St stop (a place and time I would not hesitate to be myself, and still wouldn't, really.)
I thinks it's probably mostly because of Covid because the patterns feel so weird, but who knows? Changes in policing can have paradoxical effects, I've always thought drug seizures that force the price of drugs up temporarily tend to lead to more gang shootings, and a couple of years ago people were speculating that some successes in prosecuting gang leaders in Chicago had led to uncertainties in gang hierarchies which led to more shootings as people jockeyed for position (or maybe just having stupider,. less experienced gangsters in charge did that). I think it's probably too soon to tell what effects Defund the Police etc. have had on it all.
Given what we know about police overtime abuse and the fact that they're basically the only blue collar profession left where you can work for 20-30 and retire with a guaranteed pension, there is no way on god's green earth that the correct intervention is to pay police more. That's an abhorrent fantasy. If we paid police more, the only outcome would be that police unions would be more powerful; everything else would be the same, perhaps even worse.
I think Saiselgy's argument is pay them more but weaken the unions, make it easier to fire bad cops. Make it more like a white collar profession in that way.
If that were to come to pass, I predict their net pay would increase, bad behavior would continue, and it would merely become easier to fire whistleblower and minority cops.
Apparently the police in 1917 Russia were extraordinarily poorly paid (on a par with laborers). Probably not a mistake any polity will make again.
Covid has hollowed out downtown and LSD traffic
I didn't know that acid had made a comeback.
Data point: enrollment in Cala U's criminal justice program (which is not a police-only program, but many graduates are interested in law enforcement) has fallen off a cliff in the past three years. Lots of potential explanations: the last of the CSI boom is done, it isn't called CJ Tech so obviously it's not a Tech degree (accounting is crashing, too, for similar reasons -- we should probably just tag 'data science' onto the end of all of them), but legit worries that Gen Z doesn't want to be cops because Gen Z doesn't like cops. Not good, on the assumption that cops who at least have to take classes in sociology and similar wind up being better cops.
I don't even know what data science is, but a guy I used to supervise now calls himself that and I think he's making bank.
Pretty sure these property crimes aren't gonna show up in the crime states: https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1412428330792542209?s=20