There’s a recurring debate about crime on X. It goes through the exact same cycle every time.
Conservatives: Look at those blue cities and how out of control they are
Liberals: Actually, Red States have much higher crime rates, har-har-har
Conservatives: Because they have black people! Oooh where’s Steve Sailer, wait until he sees this
Number one reflects the views of mainstream conservatives, and is the type of argument you would hear on Fox News. The third point is put forward by those who consider themselves edgy thinkers, more sophisticated than your average consumer of slop political content, although it is increasingly breaking into the conservative mainstream.
Pointing to demographics as an explainer for crime doesn’t provide much policy direction, other than perhaps as an argument against concerns over disparate impact. When it comes to policy debates, the main question we always end up discussing is whether Republicans or Democrats are better at fighting crime.
The recent murder of Iryna Zarutska brought this issue once again to the forefront. Charlotte is a blue city, in a state with a Republican legislature but a Democrat governor. On X, conservatives blamed lenient criminal justice policies for Zarutska’s killer being out on the streets, a point that is often made alongside statements that this is “what the left wants” or something. Yet state governments have power over cities, and if there is no difference in violence between red and blue states, as I will show is the case, it would indicate that Democrats aren’t necessarily the problem. Nonetheless, I would argue that there is a sense in which the left is at fault for the high rates of crime the US experiences, but to find our villains we need to go back to the 1960s and 1970s. I conclude by discussing what a more serious anti-crime agenda, one that goes beyond culture war point scoring, would look like.
Race and Poverty Matter, Party Doesn’t
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I very much doubt justice-related civil liberties expansion had much effect on crime rates. For one thing, crime rose basically everywhere in this period, at least in Western Europe. England and Canada both introduced their major expansion of suspect's rights in the mid 1980s, for example (Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1982), after the rise in crime (which occurred there as well) had almost finished- crime started falling not much afterwards.
I think the most boring, prosaic explanation that the 60s/70s rise in crime (and subsequent fall) were largely driven by the post-war baby boom resulting in a lot of young men, is probably basically correct. I still think the lead hypothesis may have some merit, too.
More thoughts. Not only is the influx of drugs omitted from the article, but there's this:
https://capitolweekly.net/the-republican-who-emptied-the-asylums/
"As state hospitals emptied, the number of inmates with diagnosed mental illness incarcerated in jails and prison increased, as did homelessness, to the consternation of Lanterman and his Democratic coauthors, Sens. Nicholas Petris of Oakland, and Alan Short of Stockton."
Mental hospitals were essentially emptied in the 70s, and those people became homeless, addicts, incarcerated, some combination or all three. Drugs and mental illness are a toxic brew, and both issues collided and are correlated with the increase in crime (as well as vagrancy and public disorder). I think both data points should have been included and discussed.