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0 pointsdionidium5y ago0 comments

It’s surprisingly hard to find good charts, but I stumbled across this thread today:

https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343955297073770496?...

These charts very clearly show an uptick in the nationwide homicide rate starting in 2014. It then levels off. And then there’s a big jump again this year.

This is entirely consistent with my claim that rates are way up nationwide and that they started going up before 2020.

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npunt5y ago

Thanks for the followup, just seeing this now. I think perhaps we're not on the same page about the central hypothesis.

1. Is nationwide crime up 2019 -> 2020? We agree, yes it is, and quite a bit! This link, as well as previous ones show that. My hunch is covid and its economic fallout is likely the primary factor.

2. Is nationwide crime up in the last 10 years? We agree, they are somewhat.

3. Are local crime rates in St Louis up? Sure, but thats a bit besides the point I was originally making, which was related to nationwide crime and the lead-crime hypothesis, as local factors can add noise to analysis.

4. Do recent nationwide crime trends look anything like the massive bump in nationwide crime the lead-crime hypothesis seeks to explain, thus potentially invalidating the hypothesis? This is the question I was asking. I believe recent crime trends do not invalidate it.

As I stated before, "none of this data at a macro scale looks like the trend we see in the 70s-80s that the lead-crime hypothesis seeks to describe". Later [1] in the tweet thread you just posted, the author shows a chart of murder stats going back to 1960. It shows a massive bump in the 70s-80s (up to 10 murders per 100k) followed by a sharp drop through the 90s (down to fewer than 6 murders per 100k). This has not been replicated since, ergo, current crime trends are not sufficient to refute the hypothesis.

[1] https://twitter.com/Crimealytics/status/1343955297073770496

dionidiumOP5y ago

> I think perhaps we're not on the same page about the central hypothesis.

Yes, I agree. I think your response here shows that we're actually closer in agreement than it first seemed. That's my fault, I think. I don't think the lead hypothesis is bunk. (My initial comment perhaps made it seem like I was saying otherwise.) It has a lot of explanatory power. I also don't think we're in exactly the same position we were in the 90s, for lots of reasons.

But I do think the lead hypothesis lulled a lot of people into repeating the claim about falling crimes rates for so long that many of them have forgotten to check to see if it's still true. And while there are lots of interesting debates to be had about why homicides have been higher recently, the fact is that they have been!

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