"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.
1) Which party won the 2024 Presidential election in the state is not a particularly good independent variable as this has not directly effect on policy in that state. I understand that you are using an easily accessible data, but partisanship of state legislatures is much better.
2) Crime is incredibly localized. State is much too high a level of unit-of-analysis for understanding causes of crime. Yes, you are correct that it is a good unit for determining potential reform as the states have the constitutional power to tel cities what to do. But as you mention, Republicans talk much more about crime, than actually do anything. It is mayors, police chiefs, and precinct captains that can really change things.
3) Policing strategies, particularly combined with technology, can be incredibly effective at deterring crime, but it requires a concentration of police in high-crime areas. I think that this is the biggest political barrier to fighting crime coming from the Left.
4) Crime is even more concentrated on the individual level. Even within very high-crime neighborhoods, a tiny percentage of young males commit the majority of the violence. Everyone in the neighborhood knows who they are, and often so do the police. A focus on those key individuals or gangs is a very cost-effective approach.
Agree with this. Also, what WORKED in the 90s? Obviously something did. If you can tease these factors out, maybe you could hyper-implement them now. Just thinking out loud.
So the obvious next question after the last line in the article would be, given all these new rights that the Supreme Court gifted suspects, why did the crime rate drop so precipitously in the 90s, remaining there until very recently (and even now, we are nowhere near 1980s crime levels)? It's weird to present so much data, and then casually drop a possible causal link between the correlation of Supreme Court decisions on suspect rights and an increase in crime, when that increase was not sustained. A lot of other things happened in the 60s, including a massive influx of incredibly addictive illegal drugs into urban areas and resulting criminality around both drugs and the gangs trafficking them. This seems to be a massive oversight in the article. I don't know if there's a causal link between drugs and the 1970s crime spike, but I think it would be worth investigating and talking about within the context of such an article.
While what went wrong in the late 1960s-early 1970s seems to be a complicated thing to identify a single cause for, I think the answer to what went right in the 1990s seems to be more straightforward. The thing that worked in the 1990s is the same thing that worked for Bukele: mass incarceration.
- pre-1964 Relatively low and stable homicide & incarceration rate.
-1964-1974 Constantly rising homicide rate with a basically flat incarceration rate. In retrospect this kind of looks like the "This is fine" cartoon were the US just let public disorder worsen every year without doing anything about it.
-1974-1988 Increasing incarceration rate and homicides basically stabilize at a high level. Here something is finally done to at least stop the bleeding but the homicide rate remains high.
-1988-2000 A huge acceleration in the increase of the incarceration rate leads to a decrease in homicide starting from 1993. This was the American version of what Bukele pulled off, I'd be really interested in finding out how this was accomplished all while respecting people's civil liberties more than in El Salvador.
-2000-2014 Rate of incarceration slows and reaches as a plateau with the homicide rate decreasing much less during this period. This seems to be an interesting period where the US decides to let it's foot off the gas instead of aiming for Europe-level crime rates, but things are still slowly getting better.
-2014-2022 Incarceration rates decrease and homicides predictably increase in two big spurts, the relatively mild Ferguson effect in 2014 and the more extreme George Floyd effect in 2020. I think it is somewhat underrated how harmful the talk about the ills of mass incarceration was for the US in the mid-2010s, it probably also contributed to the rise of Trump. If the US had just managed to maintain 2014 levels of homicide over the past decade tens of thousands of mostly Black people would be alive today. Ironically BLM managed to kill more Black people in a decade than the KKK did in more than a century of existence.
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.
I should perhaps add that I certainly don't believe justice and crime enforcement policies can't have a (large) effect on crime rates in general; the suggestion is not a priori absurd. I just don't think Miranda et al are to blame in this case.
For example, I think there's a very good case to be made that the crime spike in 2020 in the US was driven by Floyd and associated backlash. It certainly wasn't Covid; and I can say this for essentially the same reason I exonerate Miranda- the 2020 crime spike occurred *only* in the US- there was nothing comparable elsewhere.
Technically Canada had its first Bill of Rights introduced in 1960 under John Diefenbaker. The European Convention on Human Rights came to Europe including the UK in the early 1950s.
But I do want to emphasize that the original Bill of Rights in 1960 was very limited and only affected both the drafting of the criminal law by the Federal govt and Federal policing like the RCMP. The 1960 era Bill of Rights didn't apply to say provincial and municipal police departments or provincial prosecutors.
You missed a fairly major point when comparing states violence rates by race.
High violent crime isn't just a tendency of black male youth (15-44)
It's a tendency of Black AND Native American male youth.
If I were asking myself: "What states have the highest percentage of Native American population?" I would be guessing that Alaska wins and New Mexico is second (Both low population, high tribal presence). Checked, confirmed.
It remins me a bit of Tyler Cowen's "state capacity libertarianism" and Matt Yglesias's points about enforcing traffic and gun laws. Despite the massive partisan divide both sides are fairly equally unconcerned with making things work better and many of the things that would improve things are obvious. Competent people could just make things better.
There are ideologues on both sides who stand in the way. Libertarians and leftists alike both hate things like increased public surveillance, facial recognition, DNA databases, etc. That’s what produces the lack of a clear pattern in policies on this front.
We need a moderate revolution on crime and policing, and it is Democrats who stand in the way because they are beholden to pro-crime racial/social justice non-profits. Eric Adams could have charted a new way forward, unfortunately he is a dumb, crazy, and corrupt man.
Some of the issues are caused by leftists and libertarians but it is more a blob associated with not coordinating systems, not being competent and a fear of being sued. It is similar to housing where a bunch of veto wielders stop things that most people would support.
There are some leftists who oppose gun law enforcement but there are far more who want to prosecute police officers who make mistakes and are worried about comprehensive databases who in the end make gun law enforcement much harder.
This is well considered, data-based, and politically incorrect in the best way.
It is interesting red states have higher poverty without higher crime. As a potential counter you could argue the culture's keeping it in check to some degree--maybe Christianity--though as you say it's not reflected much in statutes.
Being middle-aged (ie a kid in the 80s) I can remember the 70s movies that used to come on as reruns showing the dismay with rising crime rates. People definitely did notice.
Your supreme court cases all occur DURING rather than strictly before the steady increase in national criminality. You argue that these cases led to more criminality but is it possible that greater criminality meant the supreme court heard and ruled on more of criminal justice cases?
Also, the national violent crime rate has been declining steadily since the early 90s with your rulings in place, if the rulings were the root cause, how could this be?
My last thought is:
I like law and order, I like the police. I think that police can, and do, engage in criminal behavior in their work. I think that this crime is relatively worse than civilian crime since police are trusted agents of the state with substantial power. I don't think "ACAB" is productive, but I do think that holding police to high standards is. I dont think I can be convinced that allowing illegally obtained evidence or barring lawyers from interrogations is compatible with law and order. I would encourage you to look at the Peter Reilly case to understand why restrictions on interrogations are important.
Hanania rightly notes that SCOTUS opinions are national and thus had a nationwide impact on policing and prosecution. Our current conservative SCOTUS could roll back these rulings (indeed, most have been chipped away at since the Rehnquist Court).
But the rollback wouldn’t be felt nationally. State Supreme Courts will have a say. Several progressive state SCs already interpret their state constitutions to provide greater protections to criminal defendants than the federal constitution. SCOTUS can create a floor that binds all states, but it’s not a ceiling, and many blue states go above that floor.
That is to say, if there were a sea change from SCOTUS on protections for criminal defendants, Blue states would (generally) not benefit, and we would see a stronger contrast between red and blue states.
Unfortunately, for some reason, the GOP has recently nominated more libertarian-flavored conservatives (mainly looking at Gorsuch) who are unlikely to be much help in rolling back these criminal-coddling doctrines.
What you're talking about is a demolition of basic civil liberties. To take the most egregious example, killing someone who is not an imminent threat to others, and who hasn't been convicted through a system of due process, is murder.
To make a more practical point: As you of all people should understand now, although there are many good cops, a large minority of American police are racist MAGAs. They cannot be trusted with the kind of unrestricted powers you're talking about.
I agree about the surveillance stuff near the end, and I take the point about the exclusion rule seriously. If the enforcement of laws against police were more consistent, that would make a better solution to the problem of illegal evidence possible.
One other factor; a lot of red states adopt laws for fiscal convenience. "Look at how progressive we are, and more importantly, all the money we're saving!".
From one part of your data- could immigrant crime not be a bit of a hidden issue? Most crime happens intra-group- and I imagine illegal immigrants arent going to go to the police to report assault, rape or robbery. (Murder is of course a bit trickier to elide- but if you don’t get reported as missing, and your body isn’t found, you don’t get reported as a murder stat…)
I imagine if we only looked at crime happening between race- only counting black on white crime, rather than black on black, the statistical picture might look very different.
Yes, why should we rely on the data we have, rather than speculation about unseen people committing undetected murders? It’s easy to imagine, if you try.
This may be a dumb question, but the catch-and-release "restorative justice" regime is pretty new, post-Floyd, right? Would the guy who was previously released 14 times have had the same luck 10 years ago? This would not show up in academic literature yet and would indeed be something new and unique to hard-blue cities.
Surveillance is going to offer us a way to solve most crime. Flock is already doing some of this but it's just going to become more powerful over time as drones and AI get better.
Right now surveillance is focused on catching people after crimes have been reported. License plate readers to find people who fled, and drones which are primarily used to track criminals after they have first been spotted. But as drones become cheaper, we will be able to have essentially every high-crime public location under constant surveillance.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats really get this on a national scale, because it's more of a local issue. But that's okay, it doesn't have to be a national issue, Flock and the other crime-fighting tech companies can scale up and sell into local police departments.
Punishing recidivism is the low hanging fruit. The third instance of violent felony, and you're done. Execution or imprisonment for life. We could just count arrests and lock you up forever after number 5, and that would be the majority of the crime halted.
Regarding not being able to shoot fleeing suspects, how many suspects even successfully flee police in the first place? Is it seriously enough to justify letting cops potentially kill them?
I have a difficult time imagining that the death penalty would work as a serious deterrent. Someone who commits a capital crime is likely either doing it in the heat of passion, where rational calculation never even factors into the decision, or is assuming they won’t get caught anyways.
What works for deterrence is not severity of punishment, but certainty, which is why the DNA and surveillance methods you discuss have strong evidence for their effectiveness.
Overall, I think the technological approach has more potential and far fewer costs than rolling back suspects’ rights.
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.
Overall, a good overview.
A few thoughts:
1) Which party won the 2024 Presidential election in the state is not a particularly good independent variable as this has not directly effect on policy in that state. I understand that you are using an easily accessible data, but partisanship of state legislatures is much better.
2) Crime is incredibly localized. State is much too high a level of unit-of-analysis for understanding causes of crime. Yes, you are correct that it is a good unit for determining potential reform as the states have the constitutional power to tel cities what to do. But as you mention, Republicans talk much more about crime, than actually do anything. It is mayors, police chiefs, and precinct captains that can really change things.
3) Policing strategies, particularly combined with technology, can be incredibly effective at deterring crime, but it requires a concentration of police in high-crime areas. I think that this is the biggest political barrier to fighting crime coming from the Left.
4) Crime is even more concentrated on the individual level. Even within very high-crime neighborhoods, a tiny percentage of young males commit the majority of the violence. Everyone in the neighborhood knows who they are, and often so do the police. A focus on those key individuals or gangs is a very cost-effective approach.
Agree with this. Also, what WORKED in the 90s? Obviously something did. If you can tease these factors out, maybe you could hyper-implement them now. Just thinking out loud.
So the obvious next question after the last line in the article would be, given all these new rights that the Supreme Court gifted suspects, why did the crime rate drop so precipitously in the 90s, remaining there until very recently (and even now, we are nowhere near 1980s crime levels)? It's weird to present so much data, and then casually drop a possible causal link between the correlation of Supreme Court decisions on suspect rights and an increase in crime, when that increase was not sustained. A lot of other things happened in the 60s, including a massive influx of incredibly addictive illegal drugs into urban areas and resulting criminality around both drugs and the gangs trafficking them. This seems to be a massive oversight in the article. I don't know if there's a causal link between drugs and the 1970s crime spike, but I think it would be worth investigating and talking about within the context of such an article.
While what went wrong in the late 1960s-early 1970s seems to be a complicated thing to identify a single cause for, I think the answer to what went right in the 1990s seems to be more straightforward. The thing that worked in the 1990s is the same thing that worked for Bukele: mass incarceration.
If you look at the data for homicide rate on one side: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/dataviz/murder-rate-in-the-united-states-per-100000-1950-2024v
And incarceration rate on the other:
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration-trends/
You can identify a few distinct periods:
- pre-1964 Relatively low and stable homicide & incarceration rate.
-1964-1974 Constantly rising homicide rate with a basically flat incarceration rate. In retrospect this kind of looks like the "This is fine" cartoon were the US just let public disorder worsen every year without doing anything about it.
-1974-1988 Increasing incarceration rate and homicides basically stabilize at a high level. Here something is finally done to at least stop the bleeding but the homicide rate remains high.
-1988-2000 A huge acceleration in the increase of the incarceration rate leads to a decrease in homicide starting from 1993. This was the American version of what Bukele pulled off, I'd be really interested in finding out how this was accomplished all while respecting people's civil liberties more than in El Salvador.
-2000-2014 Rate of incarceration slows and reaches as a plateau with the homicide rate decreasing much less during this period. This seems to be an interesting period where the US decides to let it's foot off the gas instead of aiming for Europe-level crime rates, but things are still slowly getting better.
-2014-2022 Incarceration rates decrease and homicides predictably increase in two big spurts, the relatively mild Ferguson effect in 2014 and the more extreme George Floyd effect in 2020. I think it is somewhat underrated how harmful the talk about the ills of mass incarceration was for the US in the mid-2010s, it probably also contributed to the rise of Trump. If the US had just managed to maintain 2014 levels of homicide over the past decade tens of thousands of mostly Black people would be alive today. Ironically BLM managed to kill more Black people in a decade than the KKK did in more than a century of existence.
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.
I should perhaps add that I certainly don't believe justice and crime enforcement policies can't have a (large) effect on crime rates in general; the suggestion is not a priori absurd. I just don't think Miranda et al are to blame in this case.
For example, I think there's a very good case to be made that the crime spike in 2020 in the US was driven by Floyd and associated backlash. It certainly wasn't Covid; and I can say this for essentially the same reason I exonerate Miranda- the 2020 crime spike occurred *only* in the US- there was nothing comparable elsewhere.
Technically Canada had its first Bill of Rights introduced in 1960 under John Diefenbaker. The European Convention on Human Rights came to Europe including the UK in the early 1950s.
But I do want to emphasize that the original Bill of Rights in 1960 was very limited and only affected both the drafting of the criminal law by the Federal govt and Federal policing like the RCMP. The 1960 era Bill of Rights didn't apply to say provincial and municipal police departments or provincial prosecutors.
You missed a fairly major point when comparing states violence rates by race.
High violent crime isn't just a tendency of black male youth (15-44)
It's a tendency of Black AND Native American male youth.
If I were asking myself: "What states have the highest percentage of Native American population?" I would be guessing that Alaska wins and New Mexico is second (Both low population, high tribal presence). Checked, confirmed.
So Mississippi is the only outlier, really.
It remins me a bit of Tyler Cowen's "state capacity libertarianism" and Matt Yglesias's points about enforcing traffic and gun laws. Despite the massive partisan divide both sides are fairly equally unconcerned with making things work better and many of the things that would improve things are obvious. Competent people could just make things better.
There are ideologues on both sides who stand in the way. Libertarians and leftists alike both hate things like increased public surveillance, facial recognition, DNA databases, etc. That’s what produces the lack of a clear pattern in policies on this front.
We need a moderate revolution on crime and policing, and it is Democrats who stand in the way because they are beholden to pro-crime racial/social justice non-profits. Eric Adams could have charted a new way forward, unfortunately he is a dumb, crazy, and corrupt man.
Some of the issues are caused by leftists and libertarians but it is more a blob associated with not coordinating systems, not being competent and a fear of being sued. It is similar to housing where a bunch of veto wielders stop things that most people would support.
There are some leftists who oppose gun law enforcement but there are far more who want to prosecute police officers who make mistakes and are worried about comprehensive databases who in the end make gun law enforcement much harder.
This is well considered, data-based, and politically incorrect in the best way.
It is interesting red states have higher poverty without higher crime. As a potential counter you could argue the culture's keeping it in check to some degree--maybe Christianity--though as you say it's not reflected much in statutes.
Being middle-aged (ie a kid in the 80s) I can remember the 70s movies that used to come on as reruns showing the dismay with rising crime rates. People definitely did notice.
Your supreme court cases all occur DURING rather than strictly before the steady increase in national criminality. You argue that these cases led to more criminality but is it possible that greater criminality meant the supreme court heard and ruled on more of criminal justice cases?
Also, the national violent crime rate has been declining steadily since the early 90s with your rulings in place, if the rulings were the root cause, how could this be?
My last thought is:
I like law and order, I like the police. I think that police can, and do, engage in criminal behavior in their work. I think that this crime is relatively worse than civilian crime since police are trusted agents of the state with substantial power. I don't think "ACAB" is productive, but I do think that holding police to high standards is. I dont think I can be convinced that allowing illegally obtained evidence or barring lawyers from interrogations is compatible with law and order. I would encourage you to look at the Peter Reilly case to understand why restrictions on interrogations are important.
Hanania rightly notes that SCOTUS opinions are national and thus had a nationwide impact on policing and prosecution. Our current conservative SCOTUS could roll back these rulings (indeed, most have been chipped away at since the Rehnquist Court).
But the rollback wouldn’t be felt nationally. State Supreme Courts will have a say. Several progressive state SCs already interpret their state constitutions to provide greater protections to criminal defendants than the federal constitution. SCOTUS can create a floor that binds all states, but it’s not a ceiling, and many blue states go above that floor.
That is to say, if there were a sea change from SCOTUS on protections for criminal defendants, Blue states would (generally) not benefit, and we would see a stronger contrast between red and blue states.
Unfortunately, for some reason, the GOP has recently nominated more libertarian-flavored conservatives (mainly looking at Gorsuch) who are unlikely to be much help in rolling back these criminal-coddling doctrines.
What you're talking about is a demolition of basic civil liberties. To take the most egregious example, killing someone who is not an imminent threat to others, and who hasn't been convicted through a system of due process, is murder.
To make a more practical point: As you of all people should understand now, although there are many good cops, a large minority of American police are racist MAGAs. They cannot be trusted with the kind of unrestricted powers you're talking about.
I agree about the surveillance stuff near the end, and I take the point about the exclusion rule seriously. If the enforcement of laws against police were more consistent, that would make a better solution to the problem of illegal evidence possible.
One other factor; a lot of red states adopt laws for fiscal convenience. "Look at how progressive we are, and more importantly, all the money we're saving!".
From one part of your data- could immigrant crime not be a bit of a hidden issue? Most crime happens intra-group- and I imagine illegal immigrants arent going to go to the police to report assault, rape or robbery. (Murder is of course a bit trickier to elide- but if you don’t get reported as missing, and your body isn’t found, you don’t get reported as a murder stat…)
I imagine if we only looked at crime happening between race- only counting black on white crime, rather than black on black, the statistical picture might look very different.
Yes, why should we rely on the data we have, rather than speculation about unseen people committing undetected murders? It’s easy to imagine, if you try.
This may be a dumb question, but the catch-and-release "restorative justice" regime is pretty new, post-Floyd, right? Would the guy who was previously released 14 times have had the same luck 10 years ago? This would not show up in academic literature yet and would indeed be something new and unique to hard-blue cities.
Surveillance is going to offer us a way to solve most crime. Flock is already doing some of this but it's just going to become more powerful over time as drones and AI get better.
Right now surveillance is focused on catching people after crimes have been reported. License plate readers to find people who fled, and drones which are primarily used to track criminals after they have first been spotted. But as drones become cheaper, we will be able to have essentially every high-crime public location under constant surveillance.
Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats really get this on a national scale, because it's more of a local issue. But that's okay, it doesn't have to be a national issue, Flock and the other crime-fighting tech companies can scale up and sell into local police departments.
Punishing recidivism is the low hanging fruit. The third instance of violent felony, and you're done. Execution or imprisonment for life. We could just count arrests and lock you up forever after number 5, and that would be the majority of the crime halted.
Regarding not being able to shoot fleeing suspects, how many suspects even successfully flee police in the first place? Is it seriously enough to justify letting cops potentially kill them?
I have a difficult time imagining that the death penalty would work as a serious deterrent. Someone who commits a capital crime is likely either doing it in the heat of passion, where rational calculation never even factors into the decision, or is assuming they won’t get caught anyways.
What works for deterrence is not severity of punishment, but certainty, which is why the DNA and surveillance methods you discuss have strong evidence for their effectiveness.
Overall, I think the technological approach has more potential and far fewer costs than rolling back suspects’ rights.