Hard numbers get you closer to useful truths

A very useful central repository of well-documented information which is contested rhetorically.  From Crime in the USA by Inquisitive Bird.  The subheading is A short primer and collection of basic descriptive facts.  

The data behind this chart is well known to those that follow the subject but not among the general public.  

Click to enlarge.

The rise in murder rates in the recent era follows the Ferguson riots in 2014 and is largely driven by murders in select neighborhoods in particular cities which have either defunded police or, more commonly, simply indulged in depolicing.  They kept the police but wouldn't let them conduct ordinary policing functions.

Megan McArdle, among others, established several years ago the falsity of the canard that American prisons are stuffed with people who committed minor drug offenses.  She looked into it and found that that simply was not true.  That if you were in prison, you were there for acts of violence.  Inquisitive Bird acknowledges the fact and brings an interesting alternative perspective.

A common misconception is that American high incarceration rate is driven by mass incarceration of drug criminals or other minor offenses. In fact, only a small fraction of prisoners are there for mere drug offenses (see section Prisoners by offense type). The reality is that the high incarceration rate is largely a consequence of the high rate of violent crime in America. Excluding prisoners imprisoned for non-violent crimes, the prisoner rate remains higher than any of the 24 other countries in the above list — if the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

This is worth emphasizing:

If the United States only imprisoned violent criminals, it would still have a higher prisoner rate than the rest of the highly developed world.

This is strongly suggestive that the issue is less about policy and judicial practice and more about the reality of crime in America.  My point for a long time has been that as a multinational and multicultural country, we can clearly see that crime commission is very much a function of cultural norms.  Policy does have a material influence but the basic driver is cultural norms.  The same policies in different jurisdictions with different cultural norms have dramatically different outcomes.

Inquisitive Bird makes another point which I have seen discussed and about which I remain unresolved.

A natural question is how high the America’s incarceration rate is in comparison with its rate of serious crime. To analyze this, Lewis & Usmani (2022) compared First World countries in terms of their number of prisoners per homicide, instead of the usual prisoners relative to population size. They find that the American prisoner/homicide ratio is about average for the First World, whereas the number of police per homicide is very low. In this sense, when compared to the rate of serious violent crime, the American prisoner rate is unexceptional, but its number of police is exceptionally low.

I have lived in six other countries and worked extensively in another dozen.  The police force structure in countries is highly variable and counting the number of police is challenging.  Even in the US it is quite murky.  Local police?  Relatively easy.  Armed security officers in the private sector?  Usually not included but shouldn't they be?  Armed state level agents?  Armed federal agents such as the FBI?  Armed Park Services employees?  And so on.  I am very leery that anyone has a good apples-apples headcount of "police" between countries.  

So my concern is about the facts rather than the conclusions.  If you accept the facts as Inquisitive Bird has presented them, then the analytic conclusion is interesting.  The salient facts would be.

1) America has a much higher murder rate than other developed nations but it is highly concentrated geographically.

2) American police are equally effective at finding and convicting murderers as are our developed nation peers (prisoners per homicide)

3) American security is lower than peer developed nations because we have so many fewer police.

Conclusion 1 is reasonably secure.

Conclusion 2 is plausibly true but with some definitional caveats.

Conclusion 3 might be true but is very dependent on an accurate headcount in all comparison countries with highly variant civil security force structures.  

The whole piece is an excellent piece of work and should be the basis for discussion on how we efficiently and effectively provide greater security to all citizens, both tactically and strategically.  Regrettably, the numbers in the article are politically anathema and therefore won't be addressed.