I sincerely hope people do not notice that they’ve not been killed.
It was be a sad state of affairs indeed if you are all making it to the end of the day and that’s noteworthy.
That’s missing the whole point.
Conservatives use the lie of ever-increasing crime as a bogeyman to scare suburbanites into voting for their “tough-on-crime” (read ‘anti-poor + anti-minority’) policies. That homicide rates went up during the pandemic has been falsely used to demonize Biden, immigrants, and anyone else that Fox News dislikes.
We need people to actually have and care about data like this so they can resist misinformation and propaganda.
That’s why the gun lobby nails it – the propaganda they use to sell guns creates more issues to use as propaganda to sell guns.
Now I’m sad that the point of reporting changes in homicide rates is political.
It always has been. It’s a quick and easy way of manipulating emotions of people on a large scale.
Well, it continued to increase post-pandemic as well. And even this dip in crime may be a transient state that does not keep decreasing.
My best explanation for this is that obviously people got desperate and the economy is one of the biggest predictors of crime. So inflation is also partially responsible for crime.
Not to mention that, despite me being very opposed to conservative narratives, I can see that policing was greatly disrupted by the protests in 2020/2021. They continue to be ineffective in most large cities basically. The US still has a long way to go on handling crime and criminals.
They continue to be ineffective in most large cities basically.
wtf? Do you actually live in a “large city”? I do. In fact, I live in SF, the supposed heart of all this, and police are out doing their usual stuff, same as always. What exactly do you think they are not doing right now?
Precisely, they’re doing the same stuff as always. Police have a maximum affect on crime in an area. And city police can be particularly bad about certain types of crime where increasing the amount of police can lead to worse effects instead of better ones.
The protests were in large part a response about the damage that police do to communities and also about how they frequently escalate situations.
So what I’m speaking to here is that our society correctly pointed out the disadvantages of policing. And then correctly took funds from police. However, not many tools that would serve people better are in place.
It makes it really easy for “law and order” types of people to just tell us to go back to the same system we had before. And some of those tools take a long time to be effective but we have to start somewhere. Here ain’t it.
In Seattle a paper found out that the police department supported defunding (moving certain responsibilities and their associated funds to civilian authorities)… but once people called for the same they started a massive campaign against it.
Violence is changing in the US, and the “dip” is … temporary.
( the calm before the storm )
Notice that mass-shootings are now over 2x per day in the US.
That isn’t a decrease, that is skyrocketing.
After economic collapse destroys Biden in 2024 ( incumbents lose when the economy wrecks, and right-wing “getting even” often/usually wins on that circumstance, exactly as Hitler did, nearly a century ago ),
and the kkk rules the US, you won’t see low violence statistics, you may well not see any statistics, because it might be illegal to collect them, just as the NRA lobbied until it got child-deaths-by-guns to no longer be monitored ( anti-evidence on that, is evil ).
People like Steven Pinker, who insists that “economic violence doesn’t exist” ( really? double the unemployment rate, & see if violent-crime changes, and in which direction, if your ideology permits you to see the evidence, Pinker ), and others who look at short term ( some years, a decade or 2 ), but who ignore the consequences of the now-normal working-destitution, of the enforcing learned-helplessness into more & more & more of the population ( learned-helplessness produces nihilism & sadism, as Russian culture, and all the torture-chambers Russians create throughout Ukraine, or Wagner-territory )…
There are consequences that take a generation or 2 to “flower”.
The chickens are coming home to roost, soon.
Nobody on the planet, who has intellectual integrity, is going to claim “violence has decreased” once the now-inevitable slaughter has got going.
Wait until 2026 & try claiming that lethal violence has decreased in the US, on average, I dare you/anyone.
Humanity wouldn’t correct the real/fundamental problems, and so … the distractions … didn’t work, and the fundamental problems now get to take possession/ownership of our world.
Oh, well: I guess people can’t learn until experience-induced-understanding forces learning into one, so it’s natural, but … it’s going to cost an ocean of lives.
