From the NYT:
Violent Crime in U.S. Rises for First Time Since 2006
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS
Violent crime rose in the United States in 2012 for the first time in six years, led by an increase in major crimes in large cities, according to preliminary data released Monday by the F.B.I.
I can't say I really know what's going on, but this isn't good news. My theory was that changes in technology such as camera phones and Facebook make crime less plausible of a career, but maybe that's fading. Or maybe the recession depressed crime, and animal spirits are reasserting themselves. Who knows?
Lots of good theories in the Comments.
Lots of good theories in the Comments.
Posts
63 comments:
Perhaps it's another Obama victory dance. During the first Obama administration crimes against whites have gone up 13%. Also, additional lawlessness may be the result of illegal aliens feeling they can take risks without fear of being deported by a Napolitano run DHS. New arrivals no longer feel the need to behave.
Or the authorities are finding it harder to lie and cover up violent crime.
The Obama Effect.
Maybe crime statistics are mostly BS.
America's criminality never really went down. In fact, following demographic trends, it should be rising.
Instead, to keep the illusion of America 1st world levels of criminality, incarceration has been the policy since Nixon. Just google the numbers imprisoned and the length of sentences for minor charges to understand how much sheer infrastructure is put in place to keep criminals off the street.
This can't last. Too costly, and the elites will be perfectly happy with neighberhood walls and private security. America's future is prisoner-run prisons and places like alphaville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphaville,_S%C3%A3o_Paulo)
Django has been unchained?
Violent crime, like nutrition or education, is a super important subject of which our ignorance is vast despite massive effort.
Worldstarhiphop and LiveLeak provide leads galore for what would otherwise be unsoiled crimes. How would the cops sort an incident like this out if it hadn't been recorded and posted?
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=222_1370334827
Maybe many of the violent people who got swept up and locked up before the mid-90s are now coming back onto the streets.
Steve said:
"Or maybe the recession depressed crime..."
That's counterintuitive. Everything I've always read indicates that financial duress/stress increases the likelihood of crime, as desperation sets in. The conventional wisdom on the depression is that it was a dangerous era of gangsters and bootleggers.
But I think your other point about technology increasing transparency, thus disincentivizing crime is spot on. I would also add the cultural effects of all the police procedurals on TV and in the movies over the past decade and a half. Americans think that every crime processing lab in any decent sized city is staffed with good-looking, crack scientists who can easily find the perps behind any crime with a couple molecules of evidence and incredible Sherlock Holmesian powers of deductive reasoning, so crime doesn't "pay" like it used to.
OTOH, the rise in violent crime in the last year is odd. Maybe the culture is sending the message that if you are a member of certain protected groups, crime may pay. I'd like to dig into the specifics of the data set to see what types of violent crimes saw increases in the last year.
even if they get caught because of technology, the fact is that many of them don't care. furthermore the DAs are more and more refusing to prosecute anything that isn't a slam dunk to pad their 'win' record. you have to remember that dope mules on the SW border often don't get prosecuted because the US Attorney considers everything up to 500 pounds as 'personal use'.
anecdotal, but my sister was beaten, kidnapped, and had her car stolen by 'two friends'. even though the evidence was documented and damning, the DA attempted to plea bargain and then refused to press the case forward because there was too much 'he said she said'. being law enforcement, I didn't have too many illusions left about the state of the justice system, but the blase attitude of the prosecution ('well at least it wasn't murder') was disquieting.
There's also the not so small elephant in the room called Compstat Fraud, with PDs across the country turning assaults into offensive touching, murder into negligent homicide, and rape into sexual misconduct so the chief can go to the mayor and say 'Yup crime is down boss!' and the mayor can run against it. all very cozy, which is why there's such a massive political divide between sheriffs and police chiefs, when one answerable to a (liberal) mayor, and the other to the people.
With most of the major metros east of the Mississippi majority uninhabitable by decent people, the only surprise left is that it took so long for a study to point out what so many of us knew. seriously, outside of Pittsburgh, DC, and a few cities in New England what cities are functional and not on federal funding life support?
c'mon, you know - it's however the stats are juked - however they're sorting the beans, etc. plus a whole lot of demographics, plus the economy
"Who knows?" is hardly the way to forge a stellar academic career, Steve.
Leaded gas must be on the rise.
Not very much, though. Nationally, by 1.2 percent. There was another anomalous year like that, 2006, when it ticked up by 1.9 percent.
So, if you felt the anomaly in 2006, you felt it even less in 2012.
Like one of the quoted people says, we'll need another year or so to see if there's any pattern to be explained. Seems like expected random year-to-year variation around the overall downward trend since about 1993.
"Over all, the nation’s violent crime rate ticked up by 1.2 percent in 2012 after years of steep declines.
In 2011 [...] the nation’s rate of violent crime rate fell by 3.8 percent after having dropped by 6 percent in 2010 and 5.5 percent in 2009"
2012's is still lower than 2010's, then, right? (Which was lower than 09's, which was lower than '08's...). This is not a very significant rise.
Steve, it is well understood by most street thugs that to evade identification, park your escape vehicle around the block (or farther), wear hoodies, dark glasses, a baseball cap -- the standard urban uniform.
But the big driver in the increase in crime is political. Keeping crime rates down means arresting and imprisoning masses of Black and Hispanic males, to a lesser extent Black and Hispanic women. This is the voting base of the Urban Core Machine. So you can't keep that up even in NYC -- because the voters, relatives of those imprisoned, don't like it.
My knee-jerk hypothesis:
1) we've got more low-IQ, high time-preference individuals than previously, both foreign and home-grown;
2) the real economy continues to get hollowed out--people on the margins are getting desperate.
Due to data and DNA advancements, it is also more likely that crime will be reported. If we look at rape crimes, if the woman has semen in her and goes to the hosptial that same day(or usually night) you can almost always make a good case to arrest and jail someone, usually for a very long time.
Similarly, now that everyone has a camera phone, it is simply easier to just bring it up and begin taking a video of a crime in action from a distance if you're unseen.
And lastly, it could also due to the fact that the Obama administration as well as various state governments(such as California) have been less stringent about prison populations and released prisoners due to cutbacks in budgets. For the Obama administration it's also partly ideological, like when he introduced the rule that you can't disporportionally punish young blacks for being disruptive in class - even if that's a reality today.
They have also begun to loosen the rules for who gets imprisoned and this could have allowed more borderline criminal blacks on the streets.
But overall, I think it's a temporary blip. Crime rates will go up as the technology to fight crime constantly improves.
P.S. my captcha included 'Bushwhacking' as an actual word. Brilliant.
What about the converse?
Have you considered that the obiquity of small, highly-valuable, easily fenced and easily mugged or stolen items such as i-pods, i-pads etc have increased opportunistic thefts?
My impression is that the crime stats (Compstat) have been fiddled with for political purposes for years--the police can do that with almost anything.
This is from an articleon the subject:
[John Eterno, a retired NYPD Captain and Eli B. Silverman, a Professor Emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice] wrote in their recent book, “The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation,” that Compstat had been twisted into a forum where top commanders bully mid-level subordinates into coming up—honestly or not—with ever-decreasing crime statistics and ever-increasing indicators of police activity such as stop-and-frisk encounters. . . .
The statistics indicate that after Mr. Bloomberg took office, police officers felt much greater pressure to show a decrease in crime numbers and, to a lesser extent, an increase in police activity.
Mr. Eterno and Mr. Silverman used numbers from retirees who said they had personal knowledge of three or more, five or more or seven or more instances of faked crime reports to come up with their figure for under-reported crimes.
“The self-reported manipulation which these officers have personally seen and reported to us in this survey translates into a bare minimum of 14,398 incidents per year,” Mr. Eterno said in a subsequent e-mail. “This is a very conservative figure since it is only based on changes to ‘report wording’ and also ‘not taking reports to downgrade.’ There are many other ways to downgrade...
“Last year the NYPD reported 107,182 index crimes,” he continued. Adding 14,398 additional crimes to that number means there were actually 121,580 index crimes in the city (minimally). This translates into a 13.4-percent difference in the figures. This is a very appreciable difference and not, as some have suggested, tinkering around the edges.”
Maybe that sort of chicanery can only go on so long before the elastic is stretched too far and pulls back. Hard to believe that Mayor Bloomberg would be involved in anything deceptive, though .
must be running out of prison space. I know the local Cook County system is filled up.
You can get them out the city (Chicago) but you can't get them out of the county!
I blame global warming or maybe demographics. Are the 1986 amnesty babies hitting their high-crime years?
Are we allowed to mention the work of Colin Flaherty?
Or will that raise the ire of Komment Kontrol?
It's hard to know how much weight to give to subjective impressions. I have been shocked by the numbers of foreigners wandering around Stockholm lately, though, and I am not new to the anti-immigration thing. The last time I was in the US, a couple years ago, I was surprised that the stewardess's first question to the people in the exit rows on a Chicago-Denver flight with an otherwise exceptionally SWPLy (I was impressed by the reading matter I saw, walking down the aisles) was, "Do you speak English?"
If you go by Freakonomics, I guess the right-to-life movement is to blame?
Another hypothesis is that they've been manipulating the data, and are increasingly unable or unwilling to do so any longer.
What do they expect. When illegal immigration is rampant and unemployment runs high, where do they think people are going to go to survive? Even government cheese doesn't last forever.
Declining incarceration rates while crime-prone sub-populations continue their proportional ascent.
Criminals have to be embolden by the lack of prosecution of flash mobs and the knockout game
It's good news for agnostic - didn't he predict this would happen soon?
My bet would be that mugging is a gateway violent crime. When credit cards became ubiquitous and people stopped carrying much cash, mugging stopped being worth it. Now that people have started carrying expensive little gadgets around, it's starting to pay again.
Anecdotally, the muggings I read about in my area always involve the victim talking on or fiddling with their iphone, and then looking up to see a gun pointing at them.
Captain Tripps:"That's counterintuitive. Everything I've always read indicates that financial duress/stress increases the likelihood of crime, as desperation sets in. The conventional wisdom on the depression is that it was a dangerous era of gangsters and bootleggers."
What you've read is wrong. Crime rates during the Great Depression went down, not up. For that matter, crime started going up during the prosperous 1960s.
"And lastly, it could also due to the fact that the Obama administration as well as various state governments(such as California) have been less stringent about prison populations and released prisoners due to cutbacks in budgets. For the Obama administration it's also partly ideological, like when he introduced the rule that you can't disporportionally punish young blacks for being disruptive in class - even if that's a reality today."
I wonder if this is going to lead to even more de facto segregation than we have seen.
Wasn't there mention on this site about some guys theory that we were on 50 year crime spikes? The last being the 60's, so we are due?
You know like those Fourth Turning guys.
"Keeping crime rates down means arresting and imprisoning masses..."
Which would drive crime rates up in the short run.
Crime never really went down. It goes up steadily every year. Actual crime committed may have gone up and down but "crime" didn't.
What i mean by this is "crime" is the number of criminals. The underclass environment actively breeds more criminals plus more are being imported every year through immigration. I actually find it quite amazing that people can believe you can import millions of young men and crime as i have defined it can do down. It simply can't.
However actual crime committed by the increasing number of criminals can go down for various reasons some of them real and some of them illusions e.g incarceration rates, replacing a particularly violent population with a less violent population in a particular city, police and government stat manipulation, peaks in gangbanger deaths leading to a lull while their kids grow up to replace them, medical advances lowering the homicide rate making it possible for the police to lower aggravated assault in line even though in reality those once-homicides should have shown up in increases in aggravated assaults etc.
So what you're looking at is two lines on a graph. One line is "crime" which has a declining component from the white population aging and two inclining components: gangbanger breeding and immigration, giving a steady net positive year on year since the 60s.
The second line would be the sum of all the things the ruling class has done to hide the truth about the first line.
The times when the second line has been above the first it looks like crime is coming down. The times when the second line is lagging the first line you can see it going up.
It's all part of the pro-immigration big lie.
(If the increase in the incarceration rate had coincided with a moratorium on immigration then crime would have gone down for real generation by generation but because it didn't all it did was hide the increase in crime for a while.)
"Due to data and DNA advancements, it is also more likely that crime will be reported. If we look at rape crimes, if the woman has semen in her and goes to the hosptial that same day(or usually night) you can almost always make a good case to arrest and jail someone, usually for a very long time."
In gangbanger land if a girl did that it would leave her and her family open to retaliation from the rest of the gang hence why they don't say anything hence why there is a *vast* amount of rape and gang-rape in gangbangerland which nobody outside those areas knows about because the media lies.
If all that was suddenly added to the crime stats it would look like a giant peak in crime except it wouldn't be really because it's been the same way for years.
Perhaps it's a statistical blip, and we'll have to wait until next year to see if this trend continues.
Perhaps government manipulation of the data made the drop in crime after the early nineties seem more precipitous than it really was.
Perhaps Hispanics are really starting to feel their oats. Has the impending amnesty emboldened illegal immigrants to "come out of the shadows" and commit more crimes? It's an interesting question, which of course means that it will never, ever be asked by anyone working in the au courant media.
Just google the numbers imprisoned and the length of sentences for minor charges to understand how much sheer infrastructure is put in place to keep criminals off the street.
This can't last. Too costly, and the elites will be perfectly happy with neighberhood walls and private security.
This is horseshit. The BOP budget is only $6.9 billion. This is 0.2% of the federal budget.
Steve - you're the movie critic. Could it be that the vision of the future we have seen in so many movies is coming true?
Movies like 'Dredd' and 'Escape from New York' paint a dystopian urban future where the police can't control the populace.
Poets and Sci-Fi authors are supposed to be particularly sensitive to trends. It is well known that sociologists and their ilk are much less reliable about what's going on than are journalists. It's too bad that journalism also died.
Here in Northern California things do look a little apocalyptic. Our cops makes $200K a year and can retire at 50 for 90% of their pay. Somehow we don't seem to be able to afford very many. Local cities are going are going bankrupt. They won't have enough cops either.
Meanwhile black teens use cell phones to coordinate flash mobs. It all sounds like a movie script. A very violent movie script.
But I'm mindful that violent crime was higher in the nineties and most of the most violent cities in the world are not American but Central and South American. If we just make sure that those people never come here we should be OK.
Albertosaurus
To better explain one of the points above.
Imagine an area with 100 homicides and 1000 aggravated assaults and medical advances gradually turn 50 of the once-homicides into aggravated assaults.
In theory that would leave you with 50 homicides and 1050 aggravated assaults.
However in reality after stat fondling it gives you 50 homicides, 500 aggravated assaults and 550 aggravated assaults down-graded to assaults thanks to the cover given by the drop in homicides.
didn't ed rubenstein discuss this on vdare? since 2006, european violent crime is down 1%, african violent crime is up 5%, and mexican violent crime is up 22%.
europeans are the biggest group, so if their rate goes down a point, that brings the combined national rate down more than if the rate for the other groups goes up a point.
how much does the rate for one or more of the other groups have to go up, to counterbalance a 1 point decline for the europeans, is the question.
there are less europeans in prison for murder right now than there were in 2006, but more africans, and more mexicans.
ed's article:
http://tinyurl.com/kwcsqhp
contra agnostic, canada does not have much to tell us about violent crime in the united states. it's still going up, among the vibrant.
i remember a few years ago when me and steve noticed the los angeles murder map was removed from the LA times site. this was back when the european murder rate had fallen so far that it was BELOW the asian murder rate. mexicans were still whacking people at a pretty good clip. africans, who comprised the bulk of the 1980s and 1990s crime wave, were being pushed out of LA by mexicans, which was bringing the violent crime rate down. same process the yuppies are doing to the africans in NYC now.
this topic is much like the voting demographics topic. can't be analyzed with one generic number, has to be broken down by groups to figure out what's going on. europeans not showing up to vote is akin to europeans not showing up to murder. they're the biggest group still so their behavior swings the combined figures the most. if this is the least violent generation of europeans in the US in 100 years then the violent crime rate can go down overall, while still inching up among the other groups.
"This can't last. Too costly"
in 1990, queensryche wrote a song about the violent crime rate in the US, called empire.
in it they lament the defense budget, indeed, the NASA budget, is larger than the DOJ budget for law enforcement. they wondered why nobody was doing anything to increase it.
forward 23 years and doubling the police presence and prison population has worked, yet the law enforcement budget is still lower than the NASA budget, let alone the defense budget. 12 billion DOJ LE, 16 billion NASA, 553 billion DOD.
it's expensive and costly to maintain this extensive police state apparatus in the US, but not that expensive relatively speaking. however, it's something only nations such as the US could afford. it doesn't exist in the third world, because there, they actually CAN'T afford it. cost IS the prohibitive factor when you get outside the 10 or 15 best run nations.
it DOES cost almost as much as a space program. which nations even HAVE a space program? only a few. note, it's not a one time cost. that's 12 billion a year, every year, forever. that's over 120 billion per decade, excluding state and city police forces. most nations don't have the cash for that.
jody
"didn't ed rubenstein discuss this on vdare? since 2006, european violent crime is down 1%, african violent crime is up 5%, and mexican violent crime is up 22%.
europeans are the biggest group, so if their rate goes down a point, that brings the combined national rate down more than if the rate for the other groups goes up a point.
how much does the rate for one or more of the other groups have to go up, to counterbalance a 1 point decline for the europeans, is the question."
Yes, that is the big question and the only way "crime" as in number of criminals could be going down.
My experience has all been in areas that were already heavily diverse or becoming more so so to me it's just gone up steadily since year on year but it's possible the white decline could reduce it overall on a national scale.
I don't think it has in the states though it may have in places where immigration was more selective and/or their gangbanger breeding program was less effective (i.e. they started from a lower base).
Jody, part of the figure you're missing is that federal law enforcement isn't concentrated in the DOJ. You've got natural resource law enforcement in the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and National Parks Service, immigration law enforcement in DHS with the Border Patrol, wannabe FBI agents in ICE/HSI, the Postal Inspectors, and all the other types spread across the federal government with a gun and a badge often concentrated in various Offices of the Inspector General.
This is how we have shit like the Department of Education having a Special Response Team knocking down someone's door over suspected student loan fraud, or the FDA rapelling from helicopters onto a farm in Amish country that was selling raw milk. A bunch of dumbasses who take any chance they can to play tacti-cool commando.
I think we spend plenty of money, its just that instead of getting on with the business of enforcing laws we have too much bureaucracy. Do we need Offices of Civil Rights and Diversity in every bureau level agency? I work as a fed, and did you know this month is Carribbean American Month? Every month I get an email about what flavor of diversity it is and how there's a diversity celebration.
In Federal law enforcement, its all about child porn, counter terror, counterfeiting, or cybercrime. Nothing else is reallY 'high speed' enough for them. I don't think we need more money until we get our priorities straight.
Anonydroid at 3:37 PM said: This is horseshit. The BOP budget is only $6.9 billion. This is 0.2% of the federal budget.
Hunsdon said: You ever hear the expression, "Don't make a federal case out of this?" Most felony prosecutions, convictions and incarcerations take place at the state level.
Mississippi School System Agrees to Keep More Misbehaving Students in Class
By Susan Jones
May 31, 2013
cnsnews.com
(CNSNews.com) - Compelled by the U.S. Justice Department, a Mississippi school district has agreed to keep more misbehaving students in the classroom instead of suspending them, expelling them, or letting the police deal with them.
The goal of the consent decree approved by a federal court on Thursday is to "prevent and address racial discrimination in student discipline," and to keep black students out of the so-called school-to-prison pipeline...
Many big cities are cutting back on police- they can't afford them. In some cases, police are being shortchanged on promised salaries/benefits and going on strike. In other cases they're getting rid of officers, cutting back on services, telling people they won't respond - there was a case recently in the national news where a woman called 911 to report her ex-boyfriend was breaking in, and they told her they couldn't afford to respond. So perhaps predictably, she was attacked.
I'd move to a small whitopia if I could.
If the long-term fall in crime rates is all cooked statistics, then we should see a divergence over time between the official crime stats and the crime victimization survey stats. But the crime victimization survey shows a long-term pattern of falling crime rates that looks pretty similar to my eye to the reported crime rates. There must be people who have really dug into this--anyone have a link?
maybe its the cohort of kids born after the last amnesty who are now reaching adulthood. same idea as the crack explosion, or something similar - first generation after abortion was legalized.
Hunsdon said: You ever hear the expression, "Don't make a federal case out of this?" Most felony prosecutions, convictions and incarcerations take place at the state level.
Good point. Thanks for pointing that out. I used NY state as a sample, and if that is anything representative the total prison budget is roughly 3.8% of the US total budget. So yes, it gets costly.
Of course, to some extent I would expect that the prison budget should be in inverse proportion to the police budget. If all the criminals are in prison, the police will have less to do and can really focus on crimes that are hard to solve. If there aren't enough prisons, the police will have much more work to do. OTOH, with a more criminally inclined populace the budgets for both police and prisons will rise.
The other problem of importing peoples with high criminal fractions is that generally, the rest of that population aren't great generators of tax revenue. There are some that are less dysfunctional than others, but in order to have a really functional ethnicity they need to have culled the criminal element out of society to the point where the rest of the population doesn't have to worry about someone stabbing them in the back all the time.
"jody said...
forward 23 years and doubling the police presence and prison population has worked, yet the law enforcement budget is still lower than the NASA budget, let alone the defense budget. 12 billion DOJ LE, 16 billion NASA, 553 billion DOD."
One also has to add that the large amount of money spent by the private sector: Security guards, security consultants, alarm systems, loss-prevention agents, etc.
"The largest increases took place in cities with populations of between 500,000 and one million people, "
Section 8
Domestic violence?
"If the long-term fall in crime rates is all cooked statistics"
It's not all. There's a declining White component in the number of criminals (due to age profile) and an incarceration component in the drop in the amount of actual crime.
"This is horseshit. The BOP budget is only $6.9 billion. This is 0.2% of the federal budget."
True, but the biggest strain has been on state and local budgets, like in California which has a huge prison population and (until recently) was releasing a lot of prisoners to help ease the deficit.
Another random theory thrown out there:
Maybe due to increased segregation? A lot of blacks who climbed out of the ghetto, not necessarily middle-class or upper-middle class blacks, probably fell in due to joblessness and disproportinate amount of subprime mortgages.
This could have increased the level of blacks in an area and thus made it more violent/deadly(mostly to other blacks).
I'm thinking of the fact that in places like New York or Chicago blacks are actively being pushed out of the city by usage of private developers, same is true in Washington D.C.
The result is that more and more blacks are concentrated in places like St. Louis or Memphis, which then become more violent as whites move out. Or take Newark, New Jersey as another example. Or Baltimore.
And so on. I saw a report made by a left-wing think tank(and why does the right ignore race so much?) that showed that although general segregation has decreased since the 1950s, in large part due to influx of asians and hispanics, the black/white segregation index is as of 2010 as high as it was in 1950, during Jim Crow.
And I'd wager that since then, with all the foreclosures, that segregation has increased even a bit more. So blacks are getting more concentrated in one place and as a result, crime goes up.
True, but the biggest strain has been on state and local budgets, like in California which has a huge prison population and (until recently) was releasing a lot of prisoners to help ease the deficit.
I was wrong. The federal prison budget is a blip compared to the state prison budget.
The murder rate among blacks fell a great deal, as well. Usually people explain that in terms of the crack market shaking out and stabilizing, and lots of the gangsters involved ending up dead in the process.
The result is that more and more blacks are concentrated in places like St. Louis or Memphis, which then become more violent as whites move out. Or take Newark, New Jersey as another example. Or Baltimore.
Camdren is also another bad city in New Jersey. New Jersey basically isn't bad but some cities are terrbile, its like in California Frenso-Mexican Town, Oakland-now black/Mexican and Asian and Compton-Mexican/black are out of whack as well. Blacks in the south seem to have lower rates than those in the urban North.
I think that some counties or cities like San Diego have been low on the crime rate because of lack of blacks. Probably gang crime is much higher than 1980 there. San Diego probably only has a handful of white biker or supremist and there are some asian gangs.
[QUOTE]I think that some counties or cities like San Diego have been low on the crime rate because of lack of blacks. Probably gang crime is much higher than 1980 there. San Diego probably only has a handful of white biker or supremist and there are some asian gangs.[/QUOTE]
The suburbs of San Diego are even less Black than the city of San Diego itself.
I have a cousin who lives in a San Diego suburb called Carlsbad.
Only 1 percent of the population in Carlsbad is Black.
Carlsbad is also one of the safest cities in California to live in, thanks to the fact that it is only 1 percent Black.
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