> "We're using tools like crime-gun intelligence, the ability to trace the gun and the spent shell casing from a crime scene to identify who's that shooter, how many violent crimes have they been involved with," she said in the interview.
I don't think that prevents enough crime to account for the drop, though I would believe it helps catch criminals after the fact. I'm basing this on the assumption that the average number of homicide incidents per murderer is somewhere around one, and that most people who are likely to commit murder wouldn't decide to do it or not based on the state of this year's gun-crime intelligence analysis packages.
Almost all police activity is there to document crime not to prevent it.
And yes. They’re full of crap here. To the best of my knowledge not once has a recovered shell been matched to the the case casing library system - it was so ineffective that they dropped it after at least a decade of forcing mfgs to supply two shell casings with every handgun made. Shell casings are basically only good for additional evidence, they can’t even be 100% confirmed to the firearm they were shot from. The fact they even mention it is highly suspect in the truthfulness of the claim.
For anyone that believes the stories… she’ll casing almost never have fingerprints on them after being fired. The firing pin indentation is not a scientific match. I can pick up shells and tell you if it was a certain gun, Glocks specifically have blocky firing pins. MP5s have fluted chambers. Extractor marks and ejector dents, etc. But it’s such minor add-on evidence. The reason you might see police marking shells at a crime is for the count of rounds far more than anything else.
> Almost all police activity is there to document crime not to prevent it.
You say this like it's a bad thing (to the extent it's even true). One of the main purposes of the criminal justice system is to deter crime, and in order for the criminal justice system to work, someone has to be supplying the information.
I didn’t imply it was bad at all. Just true. The primary job of police is to document after a crime has been committed. The deterrence doesn’t come from them, but the legal system… notice I said legal system and you said justice system? I think mine is more apt.
Let's make up some numbers, say 98% commit a single murder and 2% commit 20 leaving an average of 1.38. If the new system stops every murderer after the first one, the number of murders have a 27.5% reduction. Actual reduction quoted in the article is 12.8%.
So it could very well be true that the average number of murders committed is close to 1 and at the same time the reduction is wholly accounted for by stopping multiple murders.
I still doubt that either cause speculated on in the article are the actual full reason, or even possibly the primary reasons, but it would at least be possible with the information provided.
ithkuil noted that the data may not support that assumption. Merely repeating the assumption is not a very persuasive reply, nor is it a very thoughtful one.
It absolutely is. The worst was when anti-gun groups were pushing “micro-stamping” of firing pins to imprint a number on the primer face. Complete and utter fantasy, easily defeat-able, unenforceable, nonsense. Didn’t stop them from pushing it for at least a decade.
Even the bullet to barrel match of a gun fired in the lab is pretty much BS.
You can tell major aspects like ”the gun this bullet came from had 5R or polygonal rifling” but that is about where it ends in reality. You can prove a bullet didn’t come from some gun, but pretty much never that it did.
Indeed. Not sure where the notion came from that devices mass produced with interchangeable parts would have some kind of mechanical fingerprint that could be forensically identified. Most modern handguns use the browning short recoil action. Of those, most use the Sig Sauer updated system. They are all going to do very similar things cases. That's by design. The most you may ever be able to prove is "yeah this was fired by a glock" Which is next to useless and even then I doubt it.
It's still above 2019 levels, looks like it just dropped from the pandemic spike. Autotheft and carjackings are on the rise, its pretty terrible in my area with boys and girl as young as 12 and 13 stealing cars for joyrides because they are being let go after being caught, resulting in fatalities in some cases.
This was my reply with examples and sources to someone saying crimes weren't for fun.
Its not their job to prevent crime. But it is their job to take reasonable steps to secure their products. What they did is akin to Google not supporting HTTPS for their services and then blaming the users for their data being stolen. People have a reasonable expectation that cars come with immobilizers because its been an industry standard for decades. Its also not something you can easily check and verify yourself.
The other crimes have been declining dramatically for decades, too. American perception of crime doesn't match the reality; it's a 24/7 cable news phenomenon.
Crimes had been declining for decades. The last couple years have had pretty significant increases, and violent crime in general is the highest it's been in ten years, for instance: https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/quick-graphics
So no one is allowed to notice that crime is getting worse until it reaches the same levels as the 70s/80s/90s? Despite rising crime, their perception is wrong because it hasn’t reached historic highs?
Cable news are evil. FOMO induced by things you shouldn't be seeing naturally. You wouldn't be saddened by the footage of some crime that happened a thousand miles afar, back in the days before the Industrial Revolution. Is a murder important? Hell yeah, it's an absolutely serious and sad situation, thus the subconscious FOMO if you aren't watching. Did you need to know about it? No, it's entirely artificial that you can even know about some horrendous crime that happened at the other side of the world and negatively impacted by it. You shouldn't be, human mind-body and emotional systems are not designed nor prepared for this. How many murders per month pre-IR people were witnessing, let alone with their own eyes? I don't watch cable TV but my parents do, and I can see the effect.
I'm not even mentioning TV debates which are mostly BS, with all the 'experts' trying to sound important on some topic irrelevant to %99 of the population.
An again, all this is for advertising, the new root of all evil. TBH some amount is for political agendas too.
It's good that young people don't really watch TV anymore. (Not to imply what replaced it - social media - causes any less mental illness [1].)
Internationally, there is evidence that COVID decreased rather than increased crime rates. One example:
"We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime."
-- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01139-z
What evidence is there that COVID was the cause of increased crime rates in the US?
> What evidence is there that COVID was the cause of increased crime rates in the US?
The timing of the spike?
Your link is specific to “stay at home policies”, correctly notes even those were short-lived, and that their relaxation in June/July/August saw the impact of those undone.
Speaking as someone who has lived in the downtown area of a dense US city for the past 8 years, US crime stats and perception are weird.
Yes I live in a neighborhood with high crime stats. Even relatively high violent crime stats. But it feels pretty safe regardless. Random violent crime is extremely rare. Mostly what you get are violent disputes between people who know each other.
You can literally walk by a drug deal happening and be fully uninvolved. The people won’t even look at you or notice you’re there. It’s like the two parts of society live past each other.
Never leave stuff in your car tho. It will get broken into.
Yup, I live in a similar spot. High homicide rates, but... also a residential neighborhood full of families and tons of community.
The murders aren't from random muggings or store stick-ups or people going crazy in a church or a school. They're from dudes who have a beef with a specific other dude, and it just so happens that there are a lot of beefs.
But if you just live here... none of that affects you. Everybody seems to feel perfectly safe walking down the street, going shopping, going out at night. (It's not like there are drive-by shootings with stray bullets or anything.)
The degree of randomness of crime is an extremely important aspect of crime rates that, unfortunately, doesn't seem to get measured. Or if it is, it isn't publicized or part of the conversation.
I'm deep in one of the most violent areas of South Side Chicago. People always telling me to be safe. Sure, there are gun battles every night, but it doesn't feel inherently unsafe in the neighborhood. The biggest risk is just living in a house near a gun battle where a stray bullet will get you. Otherwise all the shooting is gang-on-gang violence, sad as that is. Young kids just killing each other for points.
As practically the only white guy in a couple-mile radius I get given a wide berth because everyone assumes I must be police.
Years ago I lived on the edge of a violent area in a big city. People were sometimes shot and killed near my apartment, and I often heard gunfire. But I agree -- no one ever bothered me, and after some initial hesitation I felt fine. It was really gang members with guns shooting each other.
I'm half a block from an elementary school so how bad can it be? My nearest intersection literally has those crosswalk guards you see in the movies every morning. They always say hi when I run past them.
And oddly, no matter the political bent of viewer or of caster, people seriously shouldn’t believe the press (corporate or otherwise). The corporate press is just a few politically and financially well connected megacorps who have both their own corporate agenda as well as their connections’ agendas. The amateur press is precisely that and therefore shouldn’t be blindly trusted either. Do you trust Comcast to speak honestly about ISPs?
This is ridiculous. Most of the things the mainstream media report on are true. Do you believe there are wars right now in Ukraine and Israel? Do you believe that the UK exited the EU? Do you believe that SpaceX lost a rocket last week when it tipped over on a boat?
There is certainly a bias towards outrage and inciting strong feelings to get eyeballs and attention. Certain networks have leaned into a political bias as well. But the media is still, by far, the best and most trustworthy source for the basic facts of what is going on in the world.
>> "We are doing everything we can to recover guns, reduce this level of violence," Diaz told KOMO News in an interview Thursday. That number keeps rising and it's the highest since Seattle reported 71 homicides in 1994.
>> "Homelessness has been a huge driver of it," he responded. "Almost 20% of our homicides are related to homelessness. Eight percent is related to domestic violence."
The point is that homicides are declining in the US. Pointing to hot spots and saying otherwise is like saying climate change doesn't exist because some city set a record low temperature.
It isn’t “pointing to hotspots.” Homicides spiked during Covid and still haven’t returned to those previous levels. Pointing to an overall slight dip while places like Seattle are at 30 year highs seems extremely dishonest.
Arguing "it isn't pointing to hotspots" by... pointing to a hotspot again is just goofy.
The article has a chart going back to 1960; even the COVID spike is low by 70s/80s/90s standards; 2023's numbers visibly aren't that far off 2014's lowest ever.
Having places at 30 year highs is irrelevant to measure the overall trend--- when the US overall is 40% below the peak in the last 30 years.
We're not quite as good as the 2014 low, but we've returned to the 5-6 per 100k band that we've spent the majority of the last 30 years in (9 years above, many far above; 5 years somewhat below).
I'm not saying there isn't decline in places. I'm saying that if people think everything is just fine when there are places that are having serious issues.
Ran across an interesting observation a little while ago that while homicides—deaths—have been dropping, that doesn't necessarily mean that 'the streets' have gotten safer:
> That's how good trauma surgeons are now. They're looking for solutions [to gun deaths] outside the hospital.
> Now, think about the implications of that in a place like Washington, DC. In the last 30 years, the number of homicides in Washington in a typical year has been cut in half. People look at that statistic and say, "Oh, the city's gotten a lot safer." But isn't some part of that decline simply that Eddie Cornwell and Mallory Williams and all the other trauma surgeons of Washington, DC are now saving lives that were once lost?
> A city's murder rate is not a measure of the number of people victimized by potentially lethal violence. No. It's a measure of the number of people victimized by potentially lethal violence minus how good a job doctors do at saving that person's life once they get to the hospital.
I also have a feel that how random crime is depends on type and varies from place to place. Some places it's mostly personal and others not as much. So personal risk doesn't necessarily track averages. Could be significantly lower or maybe higher.
I think in San Francisco violent crime tends to be personal and someone stealing your bike isn't. Where the east bay I feel is more dangerous for someone just going about their business.
I tend to treat crime as a trailing indicator of the economy overall.
Lower-crime rates correlate with lower unemployment, and vice-versa.
Of course, every police department is going to pretend they've developed some novel new crime fighting methods – instead of just realizing that, hey, less poor people means less crime.
Homicides are interesting in isolation, because so many of our domestic homicides are gun-and-drug violence. One of the hypothesis in drug legalization was that homicide rates would decrease.
Black market drugs are still a thing even if you make marijuana legal. That market will always self regulate with whatever means available, which primarily is guns.
This is kind of damning to social media. What was supposed to be an information boon only gave the opposite perception to people. When crime has a huge drop year over year, people think it went way up.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told ABC News in a recent interview that she believes increased federal assistance to local law enforcement agencies is partially responsible for the decrease
It’s really difficult when one of the political parties spent all of 2020 calling to defund police and has made no effort to announce that they were wrong or that they won’t do it again. Makes these kinds of moves feel hollow.
> Other forms of violent crime — rape, aggravated assault and robbery — are set to see a decline as well, according to preliminary quarterly data published by the FBI earlier this month.
I don't think that prevents enough crime to account for the drop, though I would believe it helps catch criminals after the fact. I'm basing this on the assumption that the average number of homicide incidents per murderer is somewhere around one, and that most people who are likely to commit murder wouldn't decide to do it or not based on the state of this year's gun-crime intelligence analysis packages.