Crime by the numbers

From Why Violent Crime Is Rising by Michael Shellenberger.  Infused with supporting data.  

Incarceration rates in the United States are at a thirty-year low. In 2019, the state and federal imprisonment rate of 419 prisoners per 100,000 US residents was the lowest it had been since 1995, and was a 17 percent decrease from 2009.

 And there is a consequence.

Progressives sold criminal justice reform based on the idea that nonviolent offenders would be released into some kind of supervisory care, but Gascón and other progressive D.A.s are releasing many violent offenders with few restrictions. Law enforcement say they can feel the difference on the streets. “The criminals know they can do whatever they want,” said Beverly Hills police chief Mark Stainbrook after Avant’s death. “Then multiply that by all the prisoners released from jail because of the coronavirus and the no-bail and it’s a nightmare and very frustrating from our end of it.”

Megan McArdle wrote about this back in the 2000s.  Inspired by the prison reform movement, she spent some time investigating how many prisoners were imprisoned simply for possession and use of drugs, so-called victimless crimes.  What she discovered was - vanishingly few.  People were in prison for drug possession and use but almost always in connection with some violent criminal act.  If you were unwilling to release violent criminals, then you could not reduce the prison population by any meaningful degree.

I think she covers this in her book, The Upside of Down.

How much a difference basic policy makes is illustrated by this simple fact.

In New York City, effective policing helped reduce homicides dramatically between 2000 and 2020. Where Minneapolis homicide rate between 2015 and 2019 was between 15 and 17, New York's homicide rate was around 4 per 100,000 from 2015 to 2019. 

 

He also shows the positive impact of policing which is so often overlooked.  Most think of improved policing leading to safer environments.  But there is more to it than that.

Neither greater incarceration nor demographic changes can explain the dramatic declines in homicides and other crimes in New York. An 11 percent increase in people locked up correlated with a drop in killings five times as large. Street crime fell 80 percent without a significant change in population structure, age distribution, or incarceration, which undermines the belief that those factors cause crime.

By 2009, over three-quarters of the young men who would have gone to prison if New York had followed the national trends did not. Good policing had prevented over-incarceration.

More and better policing leads to fewer people being charged because fewer crimes are being committed.  Good policing represents an emancipation.  For every person not committing a crime, there is the possibility and probability of employment and family formation and social opportunity.

He also provides data that I had sought but not nailed down.  Yes BLM believes that too many black citizens are killed by the police.  And that is true.  Any citizen killed by the police is too many, but it may also be unavoidable.  But what are the trend lines of police killings?  It is a bad story getting much, much better.

But black Americans are eight times more die from homicide than white Americans, which makes homicide, not just policing and incarceration, a racial justice issue. Meanwhile, police killings of African Americans have declined from 217 per year in the 1970s to 157 per year in the 2010s in the 58 largest US cities. 

Well worth a read.  Links as well.