The power law of city crime

Not from a source I recognize. From Over Half Of All Murders Occur In Just 2% Of American Counties by Ngnadmin.

A Crime Prevention research study shows us another little known fact about murders and guns. The study points out that just 2% of American counties produce 51% of the murders in this country.

Data from 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, shows us that 54% of counties (containing 11% of the population) had zero murders. 69% of counties had no more than one murder, and held about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country.

The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. The study shows more than half of all murders occurred in just 2% of counties nationwide.

Counties, for most purposes, are not the right unit of measure. We want to know the murder rate by population size. X murders per hundred thousand. The numbers don't lend themselves to ready translation but it looks something like this:

11% of the population live in locations which see no murders in an average year.

20% of the population live in locations where there is at most a single murder in a year.

Basically, a third of America lives in Camelot where there is no violence.

19% of the population live in locations where there are frequent murders accounting for 37% of all murders.

Where it does make sense to use counties is when you are looking at area and even counties is pretty crude as a measure. That is where you get 2% of counties generate 50% of murders.

Ultimately it goes to the point which I make that one principle reason that our news is so distorted is due to geographical concentration.

The great bulk of our national news sources are located in a handful of cities. Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Maybe Dallas, maybe Atlanta, maybe Miami. But primarily the first five.

Those five share a number of characteristics. They all have high murder rates and rates of violence in general (compared to the rest of the country). They have extreme concentrations based on class and race. They have bad financial conditions. They have huge inequality. They have few children. They have large homeless populations. They are political monocultures of great duration. They have dysfunctional school systems. Their local power structures are dominated by the white collar academically credentialed. They have weak religious institutions. They are dominated by the single and the childless. They have an uncharacteristically small middle class. They have exorbitant housing costs and cost of living.

If most your reporters live in such unrepresentative environments, no wonder they see America in such an inaccurate fashion.

Reportorial geographic concentration is part of the problem.

There is a second problem which dramatically exacerbates the first problem. The Ben Rhodes Phenomena. It is alluded to in this quote:

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

He notes the fact that geographic dispersion or reporters has fallen, as discussed above.

However, they have become younger, more inexperienced, less knowledgeable as well. The mainstream media, suffering from revenue loss to the internet have for more than a decade been reconfiguring their workforce. Gone are long term employees, good pay for a middle class life, older employees with deep experience, gone is deep reporting of diverse issues, gone is educational diversity. The expensive old guard is replaced by cheap, part time, journalism majors from prestigious schools with little or no life, social, or career experience. And they all live in dysfunctional cities. Doing rewrites of press release instead of actual reporting and focusing on clicks instead of comprehension.

No wonder they have such a propensity for reporting end days news. They happen to be living the media end days in dysfunctional cities manifesting the full panoply of economic and social policy failure.