The New York Times Does Crime Analysis...
...and gets about the same results it's been getting with its circulation.
The New York Times has this story out about the falloff in murder in major cities over the first five months of this year (the falloff being about 12% from the number over the same period last year). The Times quietly acknowledges that the murder rate “is still about 10 percent higher than it was in 2019,” but at least, it notes, the trend is in the right direction.
The Times opines that the decrease is the product principally of two factors: The ending of the COVID pandemic, and the ebbing of the reaction to the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. It tentatively adds a third factor, however:
Policy seems to have played a role as well, as cities have moved to hire more police officers and embraced new anti-violence strategies. Combined, these forces have created the possibility that 2023 will bring one of the largest drops in murder since the U.S. began keeping national statistics more than 60 years ago.
Two things to note here. First, the admission in the Left’s main clarion that more police help reduce violence would be welcome — but for the facts that (1) no sensible person ever doubted it, and (2) the NYT has to put it out there, not because it’s newsworthy, but because the Times has found that the Left’s demand to “defund the police” has been polling in the tank, and a little face-saving is called for.
Second, extrapolating “one of the biggest drops in murder” in 60 years from a a scant five months of statistics is, obviously, pushing it. But the Times needs to push it for a reason: Criminal justice “reform” has rough sledding when violent crime is high, so any reason at all to suggest it might be receding — although we can’t say just yet — needs to get hyped.
The Times then examines the “explanations” for the decrease in murder.
Among the many aspects of life that Covid upended were social services that help keep people out of trouble, such as the police, schools, workplaces and addiction treatment. As those services have returned, so have their potentially protective effects.
It’s hard to believe, but unfortunately true, that America’s leading newspaper is this disconnected from understanding why people commit murder. It’s not because of closed schools (hey, wait — didn’t the Times support that?); or that the people doing the killing were not at work (if they ever had been); or that drug counselors were less available. People commit murder because the clerk at the 7-11 wasn’t fast enough scooping out the cash; or because they wanted to eliminate the witness; or because the security guard looked fidgety; or the competing smack dealer was poaching on the wrong turf; or Mr. Smooth was getting too familiar with the girlfriend. Thinking that the absence of social workers causes murder is just a liberal fantasy, and has just as much documentation as other fantasies.
Some experts are skeptical of the Covid explanation because other countries saw no large increases in murder rates during the pandemic.
Well, yes, there is that.
But Americans have far more guns than their peers around the world, possibly putting them at greater risk for violence when much of society is upended.
This is because the gun pulls its own trigger. But entirely apart from that, the Times just walks past the fact that for almost a quarter century (1991 - 2014), the murder rate significantly declined (see https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm), even while gun ownership significantly increased. This fact overwhelmingly disproves the notion that gun ownership spikes the murder rate, but the Times, like virtually all other liberal organs, is simply going to blink away the truth when it’s ideologically incompatible.
The second explanation: More time has passed since Floyd’s death at the hands of the police in 2020 strained relations between law enforcement and their communities….How does this strain contribute to crime? After high-profile killings, some officers pull back from proactive practices that keep people safe.
This much is true, and we should be happy to see that the Times acknowledges that proactive policing “keep[s] people safe.” We sure could have used that acknowledgement earlier, when the Times was aghast at stop-and-frisk, enhanced patrolling of high crime (and typically minority) neighborhoods, and cash bail requirements.
The public becomes more reluctant to work with the police. And with less confidence in the justice system, some Americans resort instead to violence to resolve conflicts.
What complete tripe. Even assuming the undocumented assertion that the public was more reluctant to work with police post-George Floyd, that would affect how readily the police were able to solve murder, not whether more murders would get committed to begin with. And the idea that peaceable people — people who otherwise would work with the police to resolve the conflicts they’re having — would, out of distress about George Floyd, instead opt to blow someone’s head off, is somewhere between wildly speculative and crazy.
Again, the Times’ “understanding” of the reasons people kill one another seems to be drawn less from the real world than from liberal fantasyland.
Predictably only toward the end of the analysis, the Times edges closer to reality:
The third explanation for the murder drop is government policy: Many places have recently invested more in policing and other anti-violence programs. Cities used Covid relief money to bolster their law enforcement ranks, and some have received federal dollars for community-led efforts to break up violence. In Baltimore, a new strategy of focusing policing and other resources on people with a history of violence seems to be paying off, as The Baltimore Banner reported.
Unmentioned here is the fact that “focusing policing and other resources on people with a history of violence” is certain to mean focusing on a population that’s disproportionately minority, and thus will draw loud wailing from the Times’ editorial staff when — I would estimate next week — it drops this fact down the memory hole.
Still, the Times seems to realize that it’s out on a limb, so it adds:
Experts caution that these three explanations are not proven. And it is possible that the rest of the year will be more violent than the first half. “I do think it’s a little premature to be making any strong conclusions about what it all means just yet,” Jeff Asher, a crime analyst who tracks the big-city murder data, told me.
But unable to leave some overdue circumspection alone, it throws in:
The lack of certainty is typical in discussions about crime. Starting in the 1990s, crime rates plummeted. Yet decades later, after much scholarship, no consensus has emerged for why violence subsided.
This is simply false. The Left says this sort of thing because it understands that the explanation for the huge drop in crime in the 1990’s and the early 2000’s puts the lie to much if not nearly all of its anti-police, anti-incarceration agenda.
This Pew study summarizes the consensus of informed thinking about why we had the big crime decrease. Among the reasons are the aging of the (previously more agitated) Baby Boom generation; vastly increased private security and surveillance; less cash; and — conspicuously — more police, more pro-active policing, stiffer sentencing, and more incarceration. That the Times and other Leftists don’t like this and pretend it’s all A Great Big Mystery doesn’t make it any less true.