One of the standard acceptable explanations for high crime rates is "inequality."
The most realistic implication is that the poor are driven mad by the sight of the rich, and thus engage in crime. This is not wholly unreasonable, prima facie, yet it's hard to think of persuasive American examples these days.
For instance, inequality has grown enormously in New York City since Wall Street turned up in 1982. Yet, crime is quite low in NYC these days. Perhaps, in contrast to the theory, rich people can afford to hire a lot of cops and private security, driving crime rates down for everybody?
The murder rate in Newark is about four or five times higher than in New York, but there has to be fewer rich people in Newark than in New York, right?
The murder rate in Newark is about four or five times higher than in New York, but there has to be fewer rich people in Newark than in New York, right?
In contrast, there are few rich people left in Detroit, but the number of murders there in 2012 is the highest since the crack year of 1994.
Here is the FBI's table of murders per 100,000 in 2009 (city only, not metro area). At the top of the list, New Orleans and Washington DC have some rich people (maybe Oakland), but most of these murder capitals are pretty bereft of The One Percent these days.
Another respectable theory is that "homogeneous" cities are, uh, easier to police. But Honolulu has a low murder rate.
The last popular theory is that heavily armed rednecks are murdering everybody, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence for that idea in this table, either.
Here is the FBI's table of murders per 100,000 in 2009 (city only, not metro area). At the top of the list, New Orleans and Washington DC have some rich people (maybe Oakland), but most of these murder capitals are pretty bereft of The One Percent these days.
Another respectable theory is that "homogeneous" cities are, uh, easier to police. But Honolulu has a low murder rate.
The last popular theory is that heavily armed rednecks are murdering everybody, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence for that idea in this table, either.
| New Orleans, LO | 52 |
| St. Louis, MO | 40 |
| Detroit, MI | 40 |
| Baltimore, MD | 37 |
| Baton Rouge, LA | 34 |
| Newark, NJ | 29 |
| Birmingham, AL | 29 |
| Oakland, CA | 26 |
| Washington, DC | 24 |
| Buffalo, NY | 22 |
| Kansas City, MO | 21 |
| Memphis, TN | 20 |
| Philadelphia, PA | 20 |
| Cleveland, OH | 19 |
| Richmond, VA | 19 |
| Norfolk, VA | 18 |
| Tulsa, OK | 18 |
| Cincinnati, OH | 16 |
| Chicago, IL | 16 |
| Montgomery, AL | 15 |
| Atlanta, GA | 14 |
| Savannah-Chatham Metro, GA | 14 |
| Miami, FL | 14 |
| Rochester, NY | 14 |
| Nashville, TN | 13 |
| Dallas, TX | 13 |
| Houston, TX | 13 |
| Pittsburgh, PA | 12 |
| Jacksonville, FL | 12 |
| Indianapolis, IN | 12 |
| Orlando, FL | 12 |
| Milwaukee, WI | 12 |
| Oklahoma City, OK | 12 |
| Jersey City, NJ | 12 |
| Toledo, OH | 11 |
| Stockton, CA | 11 |
| Columbus, OH | 11 |
| Albuquerque, NM | 11 |
| Modesto, CA | 10 |
| Louisville Metro, KY | 10 |
| Mobile, AL \3 | 10 |
| Akron, OH | 10 |
| Greensboro, NC | 9 |
| Durham, NC | 9 |
| Fresno, CA | 9 |
| Long Beach, CA | 9 |
| Bakersfield, CA | 8 |
| Los Angeles, CA | 8 |
| Las Vegas MPD, NV | 8 |
| Boston, MA | 8 |
| Phoenix, AZ | 8 |
| Laredo, TX | 7 |
| Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC | 7 |
| Santa Ana, CA | 7 |
| North Las Vegas, NV | 7 |
| San Antonio, TX | 7 |
| Fort Wayne, IN | 7 |
| Glendale, AZ | 7 |
| Wichita, KS | 7 |
| Omaha, NE | 7 |
| Winston-Salem, NC | 6 |
| Tucson, AZ | 6 |
| Sacramento, CA | 6 |
| Fort Worth, TX | 6 |
| Aurora, CO | 6 |
| Lubbock, TX | 6 |
| Tampa, FL | 6 |
| Denver, CO | 6 |
| New York, NY | 6 |
| San Francisco, CA | 6 |
| Chesapeake, VA | 5 |
| Riverside, CA | 5 |
| Anchorage, AK | 5 |
| Minneapolis, MN \1 | 5 |
| St. Paul, MN | 5 |
| St. Petersburg, FL | 4 |
| Lexington, KY | 4 |
| Virginia Beach, VA | 4 |
| Scottsdale, AZ | 4 |
| Corpus Christi, TX | 4 |
| Reno, NV | 4 |
| Yonkers, NY | 4 |
| Hialeah, FL | 4 |
| Colorado Springs, CO | 4 |
| Seattle, WA | 4 |
| Spokane, WA | 3 |
| Raleigh, NC | 3 |
| Portland, OR | 3 |
| Garland, TX | 3 |
| Arlington, TX | 3 |
| San Diego, CA | 3 |
| Mesa, AZ | 3 |
| San Jose, CA | 3 |
| Boise, ID | 3 |
| Austin, TX | 3 |
| Anaheim, CA | 3 |
| Irving, TX | 2 |
| Lincoln, NE | 2 |
| Chandler, AZ | 2 |
| El Paso, TX | 2 |
| Chula Vista, CA | 2 |
| Gilbert, AZ | 2 |
| Madison, WI | 2 |
| Honolulu, HI | 2 |
| Henderson, NV | 2 |
| Plano, TX | 1 |
| Irvine, CA | 1 |
| Fremont, CA | 1 |
Here's part of the abstract from a recent paper on inequality and homicide rates:
ReplyDeleteA significant positive relationship between income inequality and homicide rates has been found in a large number of cross-sectional studies and a few longitudinal analyses ... ur analyses reveal that the income inequality-homicide relationship is remarkably robust in cross-sectional analyses. Regardless of the quality of income-distribution data, we observe significant positive effects of the Gini coefficient on homicide rates in cross-sectional multivariate models.
Though I'm surprised many on the left haven't take note of this paper -- it certainly makes a case for reducing homicides much better than any "gun control" measures that have been studied.
I was just writing about this yesterday myself.
ReplyDeleteProgressives blaming inequality for ever fever in the world is simply grabbing at straws on their behalf. Rhetorically powerful straws they may be...
http://alexeisadeski.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/inequality-statistics-are-irrelevant/
From international perspective, New Delhi is one of the poorest places in the world with just a handful of very rich ones who live in seperate encaves, yet it doesn't stop it from being the "Rape Capital of the World", on par with SA.
ReplyDeleteMurder rates and crime rates in general don't necessarily move in the same direction. In NYC, for example, although the murder rate is near a half-century low for 2012 so far, crime overall is up this year. Bloomberg blames the uptick on thefts of Apple devices.
ReplyDeleteRe murder rates specifically, a Twitter correspondent of mine is in Capetown, South Africa now, which prompted me to look up the murder rate there. I found this, which hasn't been updated in a few years, apparently, but shows a worse rate than New Orleans.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteFrom that study,
"The results of longitudinal analyses differ; we observe a significant positive effect of changes in inequality on changes in homicide rates only when income-distribution measures of low quality are used."
Also note that the study seems to assume the GINI coefficient is a decent metric of income inequality - on my own blog I've gone into a small bit of detail regarding GINI's seemingly strange "adjustments" which have massive impacts on reported income inequality levels within the OECD.
For example, before adjustment, France and the US have the same GINI coefficients. Germany and Italy both have higher GINI's than does the US.
In summation, it appears that GINI is something of a farce...
Other than Buffalo, Rochester, and Boston, not real close to the Canadian border.
ReplyDeleteOff topic: what do you think of this, Steve?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.indianexpress.com/news/lesson-learnt-schools-to-be-chosen-for-pisa--15/1038340/
Am I mistaken that India is busy at gaming the system of PISA’15? But isn’t random sampling the whole point of PISA selection in a country or region?
all the crime stats are falsified by the cities
ReplyDeleteGee, could it be the that same IQ that makes you less than employable also tend to make you volatile?
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of something else:
ReplyDeleteI was recently thinking about racial profiling, and then asked myself if it actually works.
Mathematically speaking, it should work, since, if a group is over represented ( in relation to a certain characteristic) in proportion to their population size, the probability of a random member of this group possessing the characteristic will be higher than the probability of a member of a different group that is underrepresented, even if this underrepresented group is the majority.
I was surprised that many websites against racial profiling did not understand this basic logic.
But apparently there have been studies done which show that racial profiling does not work.
And as far as I can tell, no one has refuted these studies.
The inequality-homicide connection works more on a national level--compare us with Japan or Sweden on one side, or Pakistan or Brazil on the other.
ReplyDeleteAnd Pakistan doesn't have much diversity.
I don't like NAMs either, but they're not the whole story.
I should have read it more carefully. I saw the list first and assumed it was a listing of cities with the highest percentages of African American residents. Then I saw Buffalo fairly high on the list. Or are there a lot of African Americans in Buffalo?
ReplyDeleteNote that the overwhelmingly Mexican monoculture of El Paso has very low murder rates. That's good news considering that the country as a whole is looking more and more like El Paso.
ReplyDeleteLeave it to your Commentariat to furnish the real story:
ReplyDeleteCity %Black %Hisp
New Orleans, LO 60.2 5.3
St. Louis, MO 49.2 3.5
Detroit, MI 82.7 6.8
Baltimore, MD 63.7 4.2
Baton Rouge, LA 50.0 1.7
Newark, NJ 52.3 33.8
Birmingham, AL 73.4 3.6
Oakland, CA 28.0 25.4 (+16 Native American)
Washington, DC 50.7 9.1
Buffalo, NY 37.2 7.5
I looked up the figures for each on wikipedia, which gets the data from the 2010 census.
I note that another article has provided another top ten list and also the demographics:
http://voices.yahoo.com/most-dangerous-cities-america-murder-rates-7293190.html
Well, we certainly thought it isn't white/asian Irvine is near the bottom. Alq New Mexico seems to have the highest among hispanic/white towns.
ReplyDeleteOakland does have a nice section. Oakland's black population has been dropping its now under 30 percent and hispanic and asian have been increasing.
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe we can say that the same factors that cause social inequality cause crime. Or we could say that IQ/testosterone inequality causes crime.
ReplyDeleteI live near Prescott, AZ, and I know plenty of people who own firearms. I even see civilians who carry handguns openly. Yet we don't seem to have the murder problem that the anti-gun propaganda claims about our "gun culture."
ReplyDeleteNew York New York with over a 20 precent black population is very low.
ReplyDelete"But he's naked!!!!".
ReplyDeleteSteve is dropping some mega hints - but alas refrains from playing the part of the innocent young boy, and relies on his readership, through the artifice of statistical tables, to 'mock the imperial genitalia'.
The fact that rich people in wayne county live outside the city limits while rich people who work on wall street often live in Manhattan doesn't really seem to cast doubt on the inequality theory. (especially considering half of them live in westchester or connecticut anyway)
ReplyDeleteAs far as the extra private security theory, I'm unsure how security guards on wall street (many buildings have security, but they don't patrol streets) would reduce crime in bed-stuy or east new york, and Detroit has a similar cop to person ratio to NYC (2770 out of 700,000 in Detroit, 34500 out of 8,175,000 in NYC).
Anyway crime in New York isn't just low compared to what it was in 1990 it is the lowest its been in recorded history, far lower than what it was in 1970, when the city was vastly whiter than it is today.
Here is the figures for the state as a whole http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm, which shows new york state has a murder rate half of what it was in 1970, when the population has gone from being 80% non-hispanic white, 12% black and 8% hispanic to 58% non-hispanic white, 17.5% hispanic and 16% black.
Not really off topic: Steve how about revisiting the NFL qb race drama? RG3 is the most hyped ever. They told us he was a bonafide thrower with a big brain analysis of the field. Fact is he's another running qb with his first serious leg injury of his career already. Without mobility he's ineffective and just like Vick --and all the rest of the run first passers-- his career is going to be much shorter than a pocket passer due to lower body injuries.
ReplyDeleteThey are desperate to get super bowl winning quarterbacks who are not white. But it's a tough nut to crack. Look for rule changes in the future that are designed to achieve the Primary Directive.
It's a huge insult to have white guys as captain of the ship. It must stop. Must must must.
Well, take Joel Konklin that stated that Anaheim is losing kids while Austin is gaining, in 15 years will Anaheim remain at the 3 and Austin goes up since killing is more of a young man's thing.
ReplyDeleteAs of the census[2] of 2010, there were 259,841 people. in the 2000 census there were 80,875 households, and 60,575 families in Plano. The population density was 3,102.4 people per square mile (1,197.8/km2). There were 86,078 housing units at an average density of 1,202.8 per square mile (464.4/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 66.9% White, (58.4% non-Hispanic White) 7.6% Black, 0.36% Native American, 16.9% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 3.86% from other races, and 3.0% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 14.7% of the population.
ReplyDeleteOf the 80,875 households, 42.0% had children under the age of 18. Married couples accounted for 64.3%; 7.5% had a female householder with no husband present, and 25.1% were non-families. Approximately 20.2% of all households were individuals, and 2.9% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.73, and the average family size was 3.18.
Data indicates that 28.7% of Plano's population is under the age of 18, 7.0% is 18 to 24, 36.5% is 25 to 44, 22.9% is 45 to 64, and 4.9% who is 65 years of age or older. The median age is 34 years. For every 100 females, there are 99.3 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 97.2 males.
According to a 2007 estimate, the median
The FBI list reveals the white culture bias, and that bias is pervasive. The Ten Commandments is white noise. The cities ranking high on that list are simply places where black culture has overthrown the tyranny of white culture. Murder, and other forms of extreme violence, is the relative norm in black culture worldwide, with few exceptions.
ReplyDeleteThe 2010 United States Census[4] reported that Fremont had a population of 214,089. The population density was 2,443.7 people per square mile (943.5/km²). The racial makeup of Fremont was 70,320 (32.8%) White, 7,103 (3.3%) African American, 976 (0.5%) Native American, 108,332 (50.6%) Asian (18.1% Indian, 17.8% Chinese, 6.7% Filipino, 2.5% Vietnamese, 1.8% Korean, 1.0% Pakistani, 0.8% Japanese, 0.6% Burmese, 0.1% Thai, 1,169 (0.5%) Pacific Islander, 13,605 (6.4%) from other races, and 12,584 (5.9%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 31,698 persons (14.8%). Among the Hispanic population, 11.0% are Mexican, 0.6% Puerto Rican, and 0.5% Salvadoran. Non-Hispanic Whites were 26.5% of the population in 2010,[5] down from 85.4% in 1970.[6]
ReplyDeleteThe Census reported that 212,438 people (99.2% of the population) lived in households, 969 (0.5%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 682 (0.3%) were institutionalized.
There were 71,004 households, out of which 31,070 (43.8%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 45,121 (63.5%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 7,070 (10.0%) had a female householder with no husband present, 3,382 (4.8%) had a male householder with no wife present. There were 2,779 (3.9%) unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, and 444 (0.6%) same-sex married couples or partnerships. 11,576 households (16.3%) were
The 2010 United States Census[22] reported that Irvine had a population of 212,375. The population density was 3,195.8 people per square mile (1,233.9/km²). The racial makeup of Irvine was 107,215 (50.5%) White, 3,718 (1.8%) African American, 355 (0.2%) Native American, 83,176 (39.2%) Asian, 334 (0.2%) Pacific Islander, 5,867 (2.8%) from other races, and 11,710 (5.5%) from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 19,621 persons (9.2%). Non-Hispanic Whites were 45.1% of the population in 2010,[23] compared to 83.8% in 1980.[24]
ReplyDeleteThe Census reported that 205,819 people (96.9% of the population) lived in households, 5,968 (2.8%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 588 (0.3%) were institutionalized.
There were 78,978 households, out of which 26,693 (33.8%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 40,930 (51.8%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 7,545 (9.6%) had a female householder with no husband present, 2,978 (3.8%) had a male householder with no wife present. There were 3,218 (4.1%) unmarried opposite-sex partnerships, and 463 (0.6%) same-sex married couples or partnerships. 18,
A significant positive relationship between income inequality and homicide rates has been found in a large number of cross-sectional studies and a few longitudinal analyses
ReplyDeleteWell gosh, then it MUST be "inequality" that causes the crime. I mean, it COULDN'T be that the kind of people who like to kill other people might also be the kind of people that aren't very good at going to school or keeping a job.
> Perhaps, in contrast to the theory, rich people can afford to hire a lot of cops and private security, driving crime rates down for everybody?
ReplyDeleteof course there's times when i WANT to perpetrate a little crime of sorts..... i mean as a high schooler in [affluent suburban megalopolis] in the 90s, it was pretty hard to find someplace to park and squeeze my girl..... popo ... guards ..... always some damn person or other to get a look at you, what are you up to
whole county was a vast, humming, busy, populous make-out desert, demoralizing as any saharan vista... a sprawling Biosphere II panopticon directed against teen pregnancy... there was like one new-construction subdivision near her house we could park at. .. and one single little utility terminal near my house with just a bit of a gravel pull-off
humane & immemorial institutions for feeling up your girl were rigorously excluded in this tiger mother milieu... so called lovers lanes .... 'sites' of folkic tradition where, de facto, .... --no, all three daughters must attend ivies... strait is the gate and narrow the way....... there will be no parturition and no KISSING....
yeah and we wouldn't have even gave a damn about cameras, heck with em -- this was all solely about live eyes. so try bringing your big heist off or assaulting some people where i grew up.
Look at Santa Ana one of George W Bush's favorite cities since its 53 percent foreign born. People from Bush's agrument state more foreign less crime but cities with less foreign born do better. Santa Ana isn't high there not that many blacks.
ReplyDeleteWell, this would also disappoint the left, most of the lowest murder towns have more feel of the suburbs or are suburbs. San Jose, San Diego, Plano, Irvine.
ReplyDeleteI looked at homicide rates and income inequality in America back to the 1910s or 1920s -- no relationship in either direction.
ReplyDeleteThere was only one other paper on it in the literature, and they only used data going back to the '80s or '90s.
Cross-sectional comparisons conflate all sorts of things, whereas comparisons over time should clearly show a cause-and-effect relationship.
The hardcore leftists want there to be a positive relationship, using crime as their wedge for their agenda of taking more money from the rich. The hardcore libertarians want there to be a negative relationship, so they can glibly gloat that more inequality = less crime, a-har har har!
But there's no relationship whatsoever. Sometimes they move together -- rising inequality and rising crime during the 1970s and '80s -- but just as often they move apart -- rising inequality and falling crime for the past 20 years, and falling inequality yet rising crime during the 1960s and early '70s.
When it comes to individual-vs.-individual, opportunistic crime, being hard-up does not influence the decision to stick somebody up, get into a bar fight, rape a lady passerby, or gun down the guy you got into a bar fight with earlier on.
Peter Turchin, over at the Social Evolution Forum, has a series of four posts on inequality and spree-type murders where the victims are chosen for their association with some hated institution, like the postal shootings or high school shootings.
That seems more plausibly linked to anger about inequality than street crime does. "Student indiscriminately guns down peers at school where he was a loser" makes us ask how the individual related to the larger group around him.
But "Husband stabs wife after discovering her in bed with other man" obviously has nothing to do with the Broader Social Context. The motive is entirely personal.
This is a pretty weak argument by your standards. You invoke an intuitive feel for income inequality in those cities rather than data. (You're probably right, but still...) More importantly, you assume that the homicidal poor get their sense of inequality from rich people living near them rather than from the TV.
ReplyDeleteI wish researchers would just be frank about the relationship between race and crime so I could gain a more nuanced view. As it is, I pretty much go around assuming that violent crime is caused by black and Hispanic males age 16-25, and that all the "research" is nothing more than deliberate obfuscation of that truth. I'm sure it's more complex than that, but I'll never know because I simply can't trust sociologists.
just running my eye down the list it looks like there is a strong correlation to vibrancy. But what do I know?
ReplyDeletePrediction for 2013: the ranking will remain the same. All one has to do is to figure out what the front runners have in common and place one's bets accordingly. Most homicides are of the dingy, dirty lowbrow variety that people don't want to make note of since they are all too dreary and depressing to contemplate. Those are the ones that add up, though. The freaky ones are what get people's attention, such as the spree type.
ReplyDeleteAlthough commentators in previous threads have pointed out, and listed examples, that non-whites are actually overrepresented in the spree/serial killing category you still get a flock of dunces who claim it's all just a white thing. The wheel has to keep getting reinvented constantly; nobody out there seems to know or learn anything. They simply repeat what someone else has said; it's like living in a nation of parrots.
Whites are simply much more interesting people. Even when they do something abysmal, as in the Batman massacre, they grab one's attention. Spouse killers Scott and Drew Peterson are what draws interest. The vast majority of domestic killings committed by minorities are just depressing, ho-hum, business-as-usual events that are forgotten immediately. Perceptions are thus somewhat misleading.
Fremont's a pretty diverse place. No white rednecks, but lots of white computer geeks and other sorts of yuppies-with-kids. Lots of Chinese, Indians, and middle-easterners. A surprising number of Hispanics, too.
ReplyDeletetest
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of 1%’s in DC, but they live in some of the safest areas in the country. When I moved to DC in the 1990s, I lived in the Kalorama neighborhood. This is near the Hilton where Reagan was shot and some palatial embassies and mansions (including Ted Kennedy’s after he sold his estate in McLean). I was single and wandered around at all hours without fear. Every third car was police of some kind—MPD, embassy police, State Sept police, Capitol Hill police, etc. Half of the other cars were probably undercover cops.
ReplyDeleteTrue Ted Kennedy story. Early one weekend morning, I was taking a walk-- bedraggled, unshaved and even wearing a hoodie! I looked up and saw Ted and his then-wife getting in a car on the street. He caught sight of me (an unkempt white man, 5’8” and 145 pounds,) and he froze in fear. By Kalorama standards, I was a terrifying presence.
Re: El Paso
ReplyDeleteCiudad Juarez acts as an escape valve for a lot of the violent crime there. There's also the relatively unknown fact that El Paso is the law enforcement hub of the Southwest- you have so many agencies there you can't throw a stone without hitting someone wearing a badge. Finally, there's the always looming spectre of compstat fraud that turns murder into accidental homicide.
Well, this is the wee hours of the morning in the land 'down under' and I've just had the most 'Sicilian' New Year's Eve night in a long time. 'Sicilian 'is in quotes because I'm not Sicilian but you could most certainly say I've grown up and lived as an 'honorary' Sicilian and to me a sense of ethnoracial belonging is one of one of the most beautiful things in this world and that whites who deny that belonging to themselves are the greatest living [expletive] idiots who have ever walked God's green earth.
ReplyDeleteJust by pure chance -- I said nothing to spark the conversation -- I had two 'white boys' ('WASPs') talk race with me, one of them -- pretty damn 'awakened,' as they say -- telling me how much he used to hate the greasy dagoes, but nowadays what's the point, what with all manner of riff raff flooding in, and all I could think to say was, pal, your own people are the greatest pack of delusional retards who have ever lived, bar none. It's just undeniable. White people are so fantastically [explitive-ed] in the head about race it's no joke.
What could possibly be more obvious than the fact that %negro of your city is at the very, very least a major factor in your city going to ruin? There is no other sociological factor remotely as obvious. But white retards, it seems to me, will deny it to their dying die. I would piss myself laughing if it weren't so tragic.
Just read Richard Allen Davis's criminal history on Wiki. After
ReplyDelete20 years of major crimes, gets paroled in '93 after serving only half of a 16 yr. sentence for kidnapping/bank robbery. Maybe there is racism in the system.
Fremont ... Lots of Chinese, Indians, and middle-easterners. A surprising number of Hispanics, too
ReplyDeleteHow'dja forget the Afghans?
Off topic - NYtimes is becoming quite brazen in its calls for a dictatorship of the proletariat: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-the-constitution.html?hp&_r=0&gwh=051DECCD891BF49AEF58969F369A4B43
ReplyDeleteGood point, New York has lower crime rate in the past. Also, New York economy is medicore around 8.7 percent unemployment but its not totaling the worst. Notice that California with few exceptions has not real high crime rates. California which many on the right hate with a passion has lower crime rates on average than states people on the right don't hate as much such as New Orleans in LA.
ReplyDeleteIn general, it's better to live near where the One Percenters live, there's more security and more cultural options, except it's usually too expensive for most people.
ReplyDeleteThe missing demographic measure is this: percentage of single parent households.
ReplyDeleteSingle parent households is a pretty good proxy for single/divorced moms which is a pretty good proxy for the utter absence of a civilizing fatherly influence on children.
cipher
"The cities ranking high on that list are simply places where black culture has overthrown the tyranny of white culture"
ReplyDeleteYes, because black Americans have the same culture as black Africans. It's just the culture! It has nothing, nothing to do with the genetics that produce the culture.
A TED talk by Richard Wilkinson alleges a significant relationship between inequality and various social problems on the level of countries and states: http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html. My suspicion is that the actual causal factor that's being trakced is proportion of NAMs in the population or perhaps racial diversity, but I haven't looked into the data enough to be sure.
ReplyDeleteSteve, why did you approve that long aimlesspost by Anonymous-7:25, and approve a second copy yet three minutes later?
ReplyDeleteSteve, you know how easy it is to fudge homicide stats. You know how famed coroners and medical examiners are for telling lies and miracling bodies out of the ether, and how police just love love love to have the number of homicides exceed the national averages by large multiples, by any means necessary. It um, is a favored tactic to, um, increase their budgets or something. Uh yeah, that's it.
ReplyDeleteAnd uh, the number of people who self-identify as African American or Hispanic on the census is um, very prone to, uhh, inflation by, uh racists, for, uh, some reason unknown.
Re: El Paso
ReplyDeleteI've heard several times -- whether it's true, I don't know -- that there is or used to be a large amount of lithium in the water supply.
Second City Cop says:
ReplyDeleteBut remember, crime is down. If the police don't show up, it never gets reported, therefore, it never happened.
So, how much of that much heralded decline in crime is due to:
1. Reductions in police forces, and thus a reduction in reporting, and
2. Police departments fiddling the numbers, and
3. Bodies not being found in Detroit and other places of urban decay?
re: reduction in crime rates, and something I haven't noticed written here:
ReplyDeleteOn p. 168 of David Simon's "Homicide" (written during a year that the author followed a homicide unit in Baltimore around 1991):
"The unit's institutional memory includes a few 300-plus years in the early 1970s, but the rate declined abruptly when the state's shock-trauma medical system came on line and the emergency rooms at Hopkins and University started saving some of the bleeders."
Just by pure chance -- I said nothing to spark the conversation -- I had two 'white boys' ('WASPs') talk race with me, one of them -- pretty damn 'awakened,' as they say -- telling me how much he used to hate the greasy dagoes, but nowadays what's the point, what with all manner of riff raff flooding in,"
ReplyDeleteSeriously? "Greasy dago"...how old are these "white boys"? 85? That was a derogatory phrase many, many years ago, but I haven't heard it in donkey's years. Kind of thinking "Paddy wagon" is an anti-Irish slur, which 110 years ago, it was.
I grew up in a city that still has a Little Italy, and I never heard anything like that. But then, I'm not Italian. I think the various European nationalities more or less came together in this country many decades ago. I was reading about the Our Lady of Angels fire that killed 93 children and 3 nuns in a Catholic school in Chicago in 1958. The neighborhood was mostly Italian,maybe 60%, but also east European and Irish. It was fascinating to read the names of the families. So many Lithuanian/Italian/Polish. Some Irish. The neighborhood was extremely close knit. Of course 12 years later, everybody was fleeing as it became black. By then they realized it didn't matter much whether you were Italic, Celt, Balt or Pole. You were Euro-descended and you must leave. There was no choice. It was block busting and breaking the political power of the white ethnics. Who would want to do that? Why?
Some of you have probably seen this, but here is a study from Princeton from 2001, called 'Mortality, inequality and Race in American cities and states'. The conclusion is especially surprising given that it came from an Ivy League school.
ReplyDeleteConclusion
In American cities and states, the fraction of the population that is black significantly affects white mortality rates. Deaton and Lubotsky’s results cast remarkably little light on which mechanisms cause the findings. They are robust to the inclusion of state fixed effects and education controls, and holds within all four Census regions and among nearly all age groups of men and women. They also cannot plausibly be attributed to variation in the local provision of public health services. Nevertheless, the failure to properly account for racial composition led previous researchers to find a spurious significant correlation between income inequality and mortality. Further research on mechanisms that drive the correlation between racial composition and mortality is likely to be a more fruitful line of inquiry for learning about how social forces influence population health than would additional work on the link between income inequality and mortality.
Link to executive summary
Link to full report
there is no place in the usa that is safe from black or liberal undertow.i am 70 years old and i do not recognize my country any more.
ReplyDeleteRe: El Paso
ReplyDeleteCiudad Juarez acts as an escape valve for a lot of the violent crime there.
What, El Pasoans go to Juarez to commit crime? That doesn't really make a lot of sense. If you're an El Pasoan and you want to chimp out or rob someone, would you go to Juarez to do it?
There's also the relatively unknown fact that El Paso is the law enforcement hub of the Southwest- you have so many agencies there you can't throw a stone without hitting someone wearing a badge.
There's border patrol and DEA there, but I had the impression that there were more regular cops in Houston, having spent a fair amount of time in both places. Border patrol and DEA presence probably isn't too relevant to the kind of chimpouts you see on the local news. I don't think border patrol will bother typical criminals unless they're stupid enough to drive through a checkpoint carrying drugs.
Finally, there's the always looming spectre of compstat fraud that turns murder into accidental homicide.
Sure, but is there any reason to believe that it's systematically lower in El Paso than it is in other cities? Or the (heavily Mexican) Southwest in general, seeing as how there are a lot of cities in that region in the bottom half of the list?
When it comes to who is doing the crime i just use my common sense. And i avoid those people.
ReplyDeleteAnon said:
ReplyDeletethere is no place in the usa that is safe from black or liberal undertow.i am 70 years old and i do not recognize my country any more.
I doubt that you are 70 years old. Someone that old who has enough education to use the Internet would be more fastidious about the use of capitalization.
Re: El Paso
ReplyDeleteA lot of the drug violence occurs in Juarez, which is the main mover for violent crime in the region.
There's not only DEA and the Border Patrol, but EPIC (El Paso Intelligence Center), Joint Southwest Intellience Center (JSWIC), OCDETF (Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force), and all the movers and shakers from the rest of the alphabet soup law enforcement, just to name a few. Its also a center for the Natural Resources Law Enforcement types (Forest/NPS/BLM/FG&W Rangers), since El Paso's location makes it easy to coordinate across the region between NM and Texas.
A lot of these are plain clothes guys or guys driving around in 2013 Tahoes with limo tinting, so its not as obvious as seeing a ride with a big PD on the side.
Part of the reason for the Southwest urban area's low violence is because no one is going out to the little towns along the border and seeing what the violence is there. Everyone touts El Paso's crime rate, then everyone in municipal government is getting arrested for corruption in Columbus, NM.
There's also the not so secret fact that law enforcement doesn't like dealing with illegal aliens because its a pain in the ass, and when you have to deport someone every pro-criminal group comes screaming in at you. Look at what's been happening in CA, where $500 tickets are getting thrown away because the recipient is here illegally, but whites are expected to pay up immediately.
Anyone who as lived in the SW has seen a variant of this: A small truck goes flying by with crap stacked nine feet high, and it has plates from Baja California, Sonora, or Chihuahua.
The state troopers don't yank them over as they belch clouds of smoke, but damned if you won't get pulled over if your license plate light is out.
A few super-wealthy people can skew an index of income-inequality. But clearly it is not the super-rich who are the murder-victims. I expect that there is a strong anti-correlation between someone's wealth and the likelihood that he ends up murdered.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if Cormac knows what he is talking about. But No Country makes it sound like those little towns referenced by ANON 9:26 are basically being bought up by the cartels so I think ANON has a very good point about El Paso's data obscuring just how bad things are getting in Colombus etc. The good news is that El Paso shows that if the government wants to get serious it can its about will not strength. Mexico has the opposite problem.
ReplyDeleteWell, actually the 1950's to 1964 was not that equal. A lot of leftist seem to think so because marginal tax rates were so high but white poverty was in 1960 closed to 20 percent. LBJ spent lots and lots of money on the mountain region were a lot of poor whites lived to bring electricity and sewage. Also, LBJ expanded Social Security and created medicare. He was more successful with whites than blacks. Marginal tax rates because of Kennedy were brought down to 70 percent and the wealth to do like today got around the system to not have so much. Michael Harrington, the Other America in the early 1960's got the Dems into the war on poverty.
ReplyDeleteAnon @ 1:07
ReplyDeleteWell yes, exactly. The cartels know if they try the kind of ultraviolence they pull off north of the border the USG is going to smash them flat and rip up their entire organization to the root.
However outside of major metro areas incidents vanish down the memory hole. Remember the Consular workers at the US Embassy in Juarez who were killed for providing visas to rival gangs?
If you look at the list, you see a lot of cities in the Phoenix metro area, which simply encompasses about twelve or so cities. They're pretty safe, more or less, thanks to Sheriff Arpaio keeping everyone on their toes. Liberal media loves to scream about how evil he is, but car stealing and kidnappings went down on his watch because he went after the "sea" (illegal aliens) that the "fish" (criminals) swim in.
Here's the thing about that list though: about thirty miles outside of Chandler (the eastern most city), you have Casa Grande, which is Sheriff Paul Babeu's turf. In Casa Grande you had an Iraqi refugee blow up a social security office, and it vanished down the memory hole. You've also got running gun battles through the southern and eastern portions of town as the smugglers try to avoid the Border Patrol and deputies coming up from the I-8. In Eloy, a crime family was recently arrested en masse for participating in illegal smuggling of people and drugs.
Yet none of this makes the nightly news because its considered "local".
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteHere's the thing about that list though: about thirty miles outside of Chandler (the eastern most city), you have Casa Grande, which is Sheriff Paul Babeu's turf."
The national media leaves Paul Babeu alone, because he is a homosexual - a member of a protected class.
Any list with Boston having a higher murder rate than Tampa is suspect.
ReplyDeleteIt was a left wing "alternative" magazine that outed Babeu originally during the election in order to kill enthusiasm in his base because, y'know, everyone just hates homosexuals out here who live quietly and mind their own business. Then his ex-boyfriend claimed Babeu tried to deport him, a permanent resident, after they broke up.
ReplyDeleteAnd then Babeu won the vote, and the liberals still hate him out here.
Well, I wonder if the illegal immirgation population is really employed more than the native. Take Santa Ana in this study which has more illegal immirgants compared to most cities here its unemployment is 11 percent versus 5.8 for Huntington Beach a white town. I think alot of illegal immirgants are surviving in the states by living with another family that is employed. Most of the studies from the unemployement rates of towns with larger illegal immirgation don't match.
ReplyDeleteBoston I think has more blacks than Tampa, maybe I'm wrong here.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that really skews these lists is that white folks tend to live in suburbs where city boundaries -- even in part of a conurbation -- keep the jurisdictions' population under 100,000, so they don't make these lists. For example, Mission Viejo in South OC has 98,000, and it hasn't had a single murder in something like 6 years, according to citydata.com.
ReplyDeleteMission Viejo is mainly white and about 17 percent hispanic, 9 percent asian and only 1 percent black. Irvine is over the 200,000. Even the Mexican towns of OC Anaheim and Santa Ana started out as white suburbs until white flight around 1975 in Santa Ana and around 1983 in Anaheim.
ReplyDeleteWest Virginia has a high murder rate, even though it's one of the nation's whitest states.
ReplyDeleteI had to check multiple sources, and it's true. Sophisticated, civilized, gun controlled-to-a-fare-thee-well Boston (22.4% black,17.5% Hispanic) has a higher murder rate than trashy melting pot, (26.2% black, 23.1% Hispanic) gun-friendly Tampa.
ReplyDeleteThere may be no two better cities to prove the NRA point about gun ownership and violent crime than these.
Years ago people advanced the theory that there is arsenic in the water in el paso thus acting as a tranquilizer, now its some cock eyed notion that its the presence of law enforcement etc...
ReplyDeleteLithium.