"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.
No, the key legislation was on the federal level, and it came much earlier (which explains why it happened across the entire nation, not just California as this linked article seems to imply). In the early 1960s, there was a widespread bipartisan view that mental health hospitals were cruel and a different model should replace them.
The key legislation was the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. The bill passed the Senate 72-1 and the House 335-18, so it reflected very broad bipartisan support.
Signed by President John F. Kennedy, it aimed to replace large state psychiatric hospitals with a network of community-based mental health centers. The idea was to provide more humane, outpatient care close to where people lived. In practice, many hospitals were defunded or closed without enough community facilities being built, leading to what’s often called deinstitutionalization.
The states were largely just responding to a change in funding policy from the federal government.
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.
It *is* true that *homicide* specifically did not rise much in Western Europe in general in that period (although it did in the UK). But crime overall definitely did rise, and a lot.
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.
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 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.
Agreed this is a factor, but there's also this (summarized by Gemini, but I've read the book and it passes the smell test):
In the book Freakonomics, authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argue that legalized abortion in the 1970s was a primary cause of the 1990s crime drop, along with increases in incarceration, a decline in the crack cocaine trade, and more police officers on the streets. The theory suggests that fewer unwanted children were born, leading to a generation of fewer at-risk individuals who might engage in criminal activity.
Key Factors Identified in Freakonomics
Legalized Abortion:
The primary theory proposed by Levitt and Dubner is that the national legalization of abortion in 1973 led to a decline in unwanted births. These unwanted children, who would have been more likely to become troubled adults and engage in crime, were not born. The book notes that crime began to fall as the first "phantom generation" of these legally aborted children would have reached the typical age for starting a criminal career.
Increased Incarceration:
A significant increase in the number of people imprisoned contributed to the crime rate drop by removing a large number of potential criminals from society.
Changes in the Illicit Drug Market:
The decline of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1990s also played a role, as the drug's peak use was a major driver of violent crime.
More Police Officers:
A greater number of police officers on the streets also helped to deter crime and contributed to the overall reduction in criminal activity.
Factors Discounted by Freakonomics
Levitt and Dubner also explored several popular explanations for the crime drop, which they found to have little or no impact:
A strong economy
Innovative policing strategies *(something Richard is advocating here)*
Tougher gun-control laws
Capital punishment
The aging of the population
I'd conclude from the above that fewer unwanted pregnancies (solve that however you will; I'm not making a sweeping case for abortion), tougher sentencing laws, and more police are the solution. But there may be a floor with those strategies. Crime has spiked, but we're well within the bottom range of the last 30 years. The pandemic level increase in crime is going down, and I feel like the cries of "something needs to be done" are coming from a place not rooted in feelings about actual crime, per se. People see disorder and chaos (more eyeballs now due to social media), especially in cities around homeless people, junkies, and nuts (or all three). What to do about the disorder? Maybe we open up some of those mental hospitals that we shut down in the 70s, and make them more humane? Rotating homeless nutjobs from street to jail/prison and back again doesn't seem to be working. It's also shocking that only now in maga-world are people aware of or even care about this issue, due to Tiktok and X. As a center-leftie, we've been raging about this issue for 40 years because we're the ones living in it!
Finally, now that I've thought about this more, I really do feel that Richard is missing the mark by a mile by advocating the rollback of suspect rights, without a shred of proof that this was the problem. I would have liked to see him start with:
Is crime a problem now that justifies priority level effort to fix? (If not, why do people think it is, and how can we address what they're seeing?) If so, what types of crimes are being committed? What were the reasons for the historical crime rise in past decades? What worked to fix them? How can we apply those lessons?
Finally finally, while I appreciate that Richard is bold enough to publicly tackle fraught issues like the predictive nature of race and crime, I'm not sure what that tells us about the nature of crime and how to fix it. None of the strategies that seem to have worked in the 90s had anything to do with race (except that a lot of black and Latino men who were criminals were incarcerated, but that was an effect of the strategy, not THE strategy). I read the piece and concluded that a casual reader might infer that the solution would be to start heavily policing, arresting, and incarcerating more young black men (with a side order of fewer suspect rights). By the way, I'm not saying this is something Richard is recommending in his piece, but a person could reach that conclusion about halfway through the article. The actual solution would just probably be to more heavily police ALL high crime areas, and increase sentencing for the worst offenders (unless again, we've reached a floor for that strategy). You'd also have a lot more buy-in from local residents if they didn't believe cops were free to shoot fleeing unarmed suspects (keyword being SUSPECT) in the back, especially local black residents.
Good points, I’d say that the is that it’s pretty clear that incapacitation has historically been the most effective mechanism for tackling crime relative to efforts to disincentivize crime or rehabilitate criminals (Scott Alexander has a good piece on this). So whether it’s prison or mental hospitals the point is to get pathologically violent people off the streets.
Based on the data I don’t see evidence for a floor in effectiveness for incarceration, we just lost the will to persist with the policy following the simultaneous progressive/libertarian ideological offensive against the criminal justice system in the 2010s. People thought that Clinton/Giuliani/Bloomberg style tough on crime policies were not instrumental to the decrease in crime in the 90s or in any case were no longer necessary but the experience of the last 10 years have proven them wrong. El Salvador shows that if the we had kept increasing the prison population we would have eventually converged on European levels of public safety but instead we decided to abandon a successful policy with predictable consequences.
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. As long as mayors and police chiefs are motivated by fear of a George Floyd Moment, then they will not implement effective law enforcement, which necessarily involves a much higher police presence in black high-crime neighborhoods.
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.
It was fundamentally a massive shift in police tactics and supervision. Police are heavily procedure-oriented: follow the rules and you will not get fired. Police reform in the 1990s flipped the script by focusing on accountability and showing immediate results.
It is important to remember that police organizations are very decentralized and they all follow different procedure and those procedures are not accessible to the public, but in general New York City under Police Chief William Bratton pioneered a new law enforcement strategy based COMPSTAT, which was a policing software that tracks crimes by type, time and location. It was revolutionary at the time, but now we can probably do far better.
The system went like this:
1. All crime data is fed into COMPSTAT so everyone in the police department knows exactly the crimes committed each data.
2. Rigorous auditing procedures are set up by the Audit team to ensure that no cheats the system by feeding in bad data.
3. Each week, the Police Chief and Mayor review crime data from the previous week to identify the worst crimes and the ones that are trending up.
4. Each week, the Police Chief and each individual Precinct Commander review the same but for one specific precinct. The emphasis is on the trend since last week, and a solid action plan for how to immediately deal with the biggest problems. Then the next week they go through the data to see if the situation improved. The emphasis is on iterative problem-solving, not punishment. Fear of embarrassment for producing bad results while your boss is watching goes a long way.
5. Every day, the Precinct Commander implements the new weekly strategy and assigns individual police officers to deal with the worst problems using the strategy and tactics identified in the weekly meeting with the Police Chief. In particular, they deployed police to where the crimes are instead of just waiting for 911 calls.
New York City implemented this model in the early 90s and saw an immediate and huge decline in crime rate. Since New York City had such a large population and it had very high crime rates, the decline obviously stuck out in the national data. New Yorkers and the media, who were based in NYC, began noticing a real change in the city within a few months. Soon COMPSTAT became a hot trend that police departments across the nation wanted to copy. They then saw similar results, but many of the high-crime cities did not and still have very high crime rates.
What people missed was that it was not so much the software and the process of accountability for results that was established around it.
My guess is that a significant reason for the recent crime increases is that the system worked so well that the process got lazy, and the original urgency got lost. But I think that it can be reimplemented with the same results as long as the Mayor and Police Chief wants to do it.
By the way, in my mind, the COMPSTAT paradigm is just good management. Once you understand it, it seems so obvious.
I think the biggest thing getting in the way of using it is fear by Mayors and Police Chiefs of another George Floyd moment. You cannot lower crime without policing in black neighborhoods, and that guarantees incidents that social media, media, and Leftist activists can turn into a national news story.
Once Mayors lose that fear, however, it should be easy to implement again.
There are some perverse incentives here that need to be handled. I read a book by an officer in the NYPD in this period in which he described numerous instances of officers deliberately under-charging suspects to make their stats look better, including one case of an officer deliberately destroying a page of a victim's statement so that the suspect couldn't be charged with a crime that counted in their stats.
Yes, Jack Maple who was a leader in NYPD and helped conceive the tactics in Metro Police beforehand makes the compelling case in his book that a professional and autonomous Audit team is essential to making the COMPSTAT process work.
"I wonder what exactly is going on in Missouri, where St. Louis and Kansas City are the two cities with the highest residual values."
I can actually answer this. The Missouri state government hates the major city centers and makes a game out of denying them police funding so that they can use their crime rates as a political football among the rurals. Also, St. Louis is a weird anomaly where they are their own self-contained political district, so local control issues and inefficiencies are magnified.
But your theory that a good way to lower crime rates is to remove rights to counsel and evidence gathering standards is ridiculous. I know that it's not a popular position among right-leaning people, especially after BLM, but police corruption is a real problem, it does exist, and being at its mercy is not pleasant. I can see the rationale behind increased DNA gathering or surveillance, but I would not want to live under a police regime where I can both be denied counsel during interrogations and where evidence can be flung at me from God knows what source.
What stops the cities in Missouri from raising taxes to fund their own police? Does the state government also prohibit that?
Also, Richard's idea here isn't that you could be denied counsel during interrogation - it's that you would have to know to ask for it. You would still get a lawyer as soon as you asked for one, but you wouldn't get told automatically that you're entitled to one. Not taking a position on whether this is a good idea, just clarifying.
They could probably raise taxes, but the city police are also under state control, so even if there was a significant revenue increase at the local level they get throttled by the state. Law enforcement boards are largely staffed by state government officials and overall control is legally in the hands of the legislature. Here's a relevant article if you're curious.
But I disagree that Richard is not suggesting denial of counsel. The case he cited, Escobedo v. Illinois was decided over a suspect being denied counsel during questioning (literally his lawyer was turned away by police when trying to make contact with his client, even though the man had repeatedly requested to see him).
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.
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.
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.
There’s a massive omission in Richard’s theory here: it gives no explanation for the equally dramatic drop in crime in the 90s, which you can see in the chart in this article. Did any of those rights get repealed? Obviously no. So what is the explanation for why the dramatic change these rights brought about suddenly reversed? I would like to see Richard attempt to address this, as it seems like a major weakness of the theory.
Where's your study on the effect of lynching in the South? What effect did this have on the community at large? What was the prosecution rate of the perpetrators?
What should we do with people like Dylann Roof and Payton Gendron? White violence has been a problem for centuries, and it seems to go largely unnoticed.
The problem with Hanania's race stats is that it's using a correlative that obscures an important fact: As Thomas Sowel's book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" (2005) illustrates, social acceptance of committing crime in certain communities is a culture problem, not a race problem. Sowell argues that many behaviors often described as “black culture” in the U.S. actually trace back to cultural patterns of white “redneck” (or “cracker”) culture from the rural South, which itself was derived from the “borderlands” culture of Scotland, Ireland, and northern England. He contends these traits—such as attitudes toward education, speech patterns, family structure, and violence—were absorbed by both poor Southern whites and enslaved blacks, and then carried into urban black communities after migration.
What might be a more accurate comparison is what is the rate of crime in redneck white communities versus black communities in various locales. If the cultures of both were "infected" by certain UK forebears, then using race as the determiner is a mistake. Since Blacks in the US have historically had higher religiosity than whites, examining the subcultures outside of that religiosity but within the Black communities might be as valuable as looking at redneck culture in white communities, and then doing a comparison.
Gangs present a unique situation in the same way the mafia has in our country's past: a business incentive to profit from organized crime, and which encourages violence to eliminate the competition as well as shakedown adjacent targets. Part of examining the stats would be to consider the crime rate within that kind of organized crime and outside of it.
This is an interesting take. Also, I think centuries of enslavenmnet and a century of Jim Crow probably have a deleterious effect on the psyche of black people.
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.
Not that you have to mention every possible factor, but I think apathy plays a part. State GOPs in Missouri and Tennessee would rather cut taxes than dedicate resources to improving their high crime cities. The price is paid mostly by poor and/or brown people. Not to be woke or anything, I genuinely think it just isn’t a high priority for their base and their donors.
Also lots of them are dumb so explaining the evidence behind lots of compicated and effective policy ideas is hard and they easily fall for stupid explanations. There are lots of scammers who offer "magic" ways to tackle crime and addiction, politicians buy into rather than asking questions and making decisions.
On the red side I think lots of people who have only worked in private sector struggle to understand how the public sector works, which makes it harder to actually get them to implement policies that might work.
1. STL for its part basically has its county almost perfectly gerrymandered around the crime areas. When you go by census metro, which tends to cover large enough geographic regions to average out an entire “city’s” crime against its population, STL drops to the mid-20’s on crime.
2. I think the “poverty vs race” stats can still be misleading, even if you’re trying to interpret them in good faith here. EG It’s completely plausible that in cities with large Black populations, they will have larger and more developed Black middle classes, thus diluting the statistical measure of poverty, BUT that poverty within those cities would still be a predominant predictor of crime among its Black population. This seems most likely to me.
IE, before they were all famous, it’s absurd to imagine that Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, or the Williams sisters would be more likely to commit crime simply because of their race; it’s obvious that they wouldn’t commit crime because they were all solidly middle class, and the crime in the cities they each grew up in was still largely localized to poor neighborhoods, not the ones they grew up in.
You seem to have established that poverty and blackness are independently correlated with the crime rate. You suggest that shooting fleeing suspects and not providing legal aid to indigent people would reduce the crime rate.
What I want to know is whether the results - and the mechanism - would be the same - if you merely shot and incarcerated random members of the demographics you have determined to correlate with higher crime rates, rather than waiting for them to be accused of something.
After all, corpses rarely commit crimes, or have crimes committed against them, and the incarcerated rarely get a chance to commit crimes against anyone except their peers.
While you're at it, you might want to check out other population demographics correlated with crime. I understand young men are (statistically) prime offenders. Perhaps shooting or incarcerating random young men would also help reduce the crime rate.
Etc. etc. ad nauseam. Statistical correlation is not guilt, and punishing people for what they haven't done is a great way to encourage their peers to do lots more of what they now expect to be punished for regardless of what they do. (I'm presuming you don't have any moral objections to harming the innocent in the name of "reducing crime," so giving only practical objections. My own objections OTOH are primarily moral/ethical.)
Shooting fleeing suspects isn't the same thing as shooting random people on the street. Where did he siggest such a thing ? You're juste strawmanning here
Hanania neglects to consider the role racism plays in crime. But you make a good point, in the spirit of Minority Report, shooting random young people of a certain demographic might bring down crime.
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.
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.
No, the key legislation was on the federal level, and it came much earlier (which explains why it happened across the entire nation, not just California as this linked article seems to imply). In the early 1960s, there was a widespread bipartisan view that mental health hospitals were cruel and a different model should replace them.
The key legislation was the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. The bill passed the Senate 72-1 and the House 335-18, so it reflected very broad bipartisan support.
Signed by President John F. Kennedy, it aimed to replace large state psychiatric hospitals with a network of community-based mental health centers. The idea was to provide more humane, outpatient care close to where people lived. In practice, many hospitals were defunded or closed without enough community facilities being built, leading to what’s often called deinstitutionalization.
The states were largely just responding to a change in funding policy from the federal government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act
No argument. I was using Cali as an example.
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.
Actually that is a strangely persistent myth.
Crime did not go up noticeably in Western Europe in the 1970s.
No, it's not a myth.
It *is* true that *homicide* specifically did not rise much in Western Europe in general in that period (although it did in the UK). But crime overall definitely did rise, and a lot.
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.
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 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.
Agreed this is a factor, but there's also this (summarized by Gemini, but I've read the book and it passes the smell test):
In the book Freakonomics, authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner argue that legalized abortion in the 1970s was a primary cause of the 1990s crime drop, along with increases in incarceration, a decline in the crack cocaine trade, and more police officers on the streets. The theory suggests that fewer unwanted children were born, leading to a generation of fewer at-risk individuals who might engage in criminal activity.
Key Factors Identified in Freakonomics
Legalized Abortion:
The primary theory proposed by Levitt and Dubner is that the national legalization of abortion in 1973 led to a decline in unwanted births. These unwanted children, who would have been more likely to become troubled adults and engage in crime, were not born. The book notes that crime began to fall as the first "phantom generation" of these legally aborted children would have reached the typical age for starting a criminal career.
Increased Incarceration:
A significant increase in the number of people imprisoned contributed to the crime rate drop by removing a large number of potential criminals from society.
Changes in the Illicit Drug Market:
The decline of the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1990s also played a role, as the drug's peak use was a major driver of violent crime.
More Police Officers:
A greater number of police officers on the streets also helped to deter crime and contributed to the overall reduction in criminal activity.
Factors Discounted by Freakonomics
Levitt and Dubner also explored several popular explanations for the crime drop, which they found to have little or no impact:
A strong economy
Innovative policing strategies *(something Richard is advocating here)*
Tougher gun-control laws
Capital punishment
The aging of the population
I'd conclude from the above that fewer unwanted pregnancies (solve that however you will; I'm not making a sweeping case for abortion), tougher sentencing laws, and more police are the solution. But there may be a floor with those strategies. Crime has spiked, but we're well within the bottom range of the last 30 years. The pandemic level increase in crime is going down, and I feel like the cries of "something needs to be done" are coming from a place not rooted in feelings about actual crime, per se. People see disorder and chaos (more eyeballs now due to social media), especially in cities around homeless people, junkies, and nuts (or all three). What to do about the disorder? Maybe we open up some of those mental hospitals that we shut down in the 70s, and make them more humane? Rotating homeless nutjobs from street to jail/prison and back again doesn't seem to be working. It's also shocking that only now in maga-world are people aware of or even care about this issue, due to Tiktok and X. As a center-leftie, we've been raging about this issue for 40 years because we're the ones living in it!
Finally, now that I've thought about this more, I really do feel that Richard is missing the mark by a mile by advocating the rollback of suspect rights, without a shred of proof that this was the problem. I would have liked to see him start with:
Is crime a problem now that justifies priority level effort to fix? (If not, why do people think it is, and how can we address what they're seeing?) If so, what types of crimes are being committed? What were the reasons for the historical crime rise in past decades? What worked to fix them? How can we apply those lessons?
Finally finally, while I appreciate that Richard is bold enough to publicly tackle fraught issues like the predictive nature of race and crime, I'm not sure what that tells us about the nature of crime and how to fix it. None of the strategies that seem to have worked in the 90s had anything to do with race (except that a lot of black and Latino men who were criminals were incarcerated, but that was an effect of the strategy, not THE strategy). I read the piece and concluded that a casual reader might infer that the solution would be to start heavily policing, arresting, and incarcerating more young black men (with a side order of fewer suspect rights). By the way, I'm not saying this is something Richard is recommending in his piece, but a person could reach that conclusion about halfway through the article. The actual solution would just probably be to more heavily police ALL high crime areas, and increase sentencing for the worst offenders (unless again, we've reached a floor for that strategy). You'd also have a lot more buy-in from local residents if they didn't believe cops were free to shoot fleeing unarmed suspects (keyword being SUSPECT) in the back, especially local black residents.
Good points, I’d say that the is that it’s pretty clear that incapacitation has historically been the most effective mechanism for tackling crime relative to efforts to disincentivize crime or rehabilitate criminals (Scott Alexander has a good piece on this). So whether it’s prison or mental hospitals the point is to get pathologically violent people off the streets.
Based on the data I don’t see evidence for a floor in effectiveness for incarceration, we just lost the will to persist with the policy following the simultaneous progressive/libertarian ideological offensive against the criminal justice system in the 2010s. People thought that Clinton/Giuliani/Bloomberg style tough on crime policies were not instrumental to the decrease in crime in the 90s or in any case were no longer necessary but the experience of the last 10 years have proven them wrong. El Salvador shows that if the we had kept increasing the prison population we would have eventually converged on European levels of public safety but instead we decided to abandon a successful policy with predictable consequences.
I think my comment above answers your question.
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. As long as mayors and police chiefs are motivated by fear of a George Floyd Moment, then they will not implement effective law enforcement, which necessarily involves a much higher police presence in black high-crime neighborhoods.
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.
It was fundamentally a massive shift in police tactics and supervision. Police are heavily procedure-oriented: follow the rules and you will not get fired. Police reform in the 1990s flipped the script by focusing on accountability and showing immediate results.
It is important to remember that police organizations are very decentralized and they all follow different procedure and those procedures are not accessible to the public, but in general New York City under Police Chief William Bratton pioneered a new law enforcement strategy based COMPSTAT, which was a policing software that tracks crimes by type, time and location. It was revolutionary at the time, but now we can probably do far better.
The system went like this:
1. All crime data is fed into COMPSTAT so everyone in the police department knows exactly the crimes committed each data.
2. Rigorous auditing procedures are set up by the Audit team to ensure that no cheats the system by feeding in bad data.
3. Each week, the Police Chief and Mayor review crime data from the previous week to identify the worst crimes and the ones that are trending up.
4. Each week, the Police Chief and each individual Precinct Commander review the same but for one specific precinct. The emphasis is on the trend since last week, and a solid action plan for how to immediately deal with the biggest problems. Then the next week they go through the data to see if the situation improved. The emphasis is on iterative problem-solving, not punishment. Fear of embarrassment for producing bad results while your boss is watching goes a long way.
5. Every day, the Precinct Commander implements the new weekly strategy and assigns individual police officers to deal with the worst problems using the strategy and tactics identified in the weekly meeting with the Police Chief. In particular, they deployed police to where the crimes are instead of just waiting for 911 calls.
New York City implemented this model in the early 90s and saw an immediate and huge decline in crime rate. Since New York City had such a large population and it had very high crime rates, the decline obviously stuck out in the national data. New Yorkers and the media, who were based in NYC, began noticing a real change in the city within a few months. Soon COMPSTAT became a hot trend that police departments across the nation wanted to copy. They then saw similar results, but many of the high-crime cities did not and still have very high crime rates.
What people missed was that it was not so much the software and the process of accountability for results that was established around it.
My guess is that a significant reason for the recent crime increases is that the system worked so well that the process got lazy, and the original urgency got lost. But I think that it can be reimplemented with the same results as long as the Mayor and Police Chief wants to do it.
That is a brief summary. Here is more:
https://www.amazon.com/Compstat-Paradigm-Management-Accountability-Policing/dp/1889031151
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompStat
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/compstat-its-origins-evolution-and-future-law-enforcement-agencies
https://www.iadlest.org/Portals/0/Files/Documents/DDACTS/Docs/The%20CompStat%20Process.pdf
https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/compstat-a-game-changer-in-crime-analysis
By the way, in my mind, the COMPSTAT paradigm is just good management. Once you understand it, it seems so obvious.
I think the biggest thing getting in the way of using it is fear by Mayors and Police Chiefs of another George Floyd moment. You cannot lower crime without policing in black neighborhoods, and that guarantees incidents that social media, media, and Leftist activists can turn into a national news story.
Once Mayors lose that fear, however, it should be easy to implement again.
I think bodycams have a place here, and full transparency with them. Overall, data driven policing seems to be good.
There are some perverse incentives here that need to be handled. I read a book by an officer in the NYPD in this period in which he described numerous instances of officers deliberately under-charging suspects to make their stats look better, including one case of an officer deliberately destroying a page of a victim's statement so that the suspect couldn't be charged with a crime that counted in their stats.
Yes, Jack Maple who was a leader in NYPD and helped conceive the tactics in Metro Police beforehand makes the compelling case in his book that a professional and autonomous Audit team is essential to making the COMPSTAT process work.
That is why I mentioned it in #2 above.
https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Fighter-Make-Your-Community/dp/0767905547
"I wonder what exactly is going on in Missouri, where St. Louis and Kansas City are the two cities with the highest residual values."
I can actually answer this. The Missouri state government hates the major city centers and makes a game out of denying them police funding so that they can use their crime rates as a political football among the rurals. Also, St. Louis is a weird anomaly where they are their own self-contained political district, so local control issues and inefficiencies are magnified.
But your theory that a good way to lower crime rates is to remove rights to counsel and evidence gathering standards is ridiculous. I know that it's not a popular position among right-leaning people, especially after BLM, but police corruption is a real problem, it does exist, and being at its mercy is not pleasant. I can see the rationale behind increased DNA gathering or surveillance, but I would not want to live under a police regime where I can both be denied counsel during interrogations and where evidence can be flung at me from God knows what source.
Two things:
What stops the cities in Missouri from raising taxes to fund their own police? Does the state government also prohibit that?
Also, Richard's idea here isn't that you could be denied counsel during interrogation - it's that you would have to know to ask for it. You would still get a lawyer as soon as you asked for one, but you wouldn't get told automatically that you're entitled to one. Not taking a position on whether this is a good idea, just clarifying.
They could probably raise taxes, but the city police are also under state control, so even if there was a significant revenue increase at the local level they get throttled by the state. Law enforcement boards are largely staffed by state government officials and overall control is legally in the hands of the legislature. Here's a relevant article if you're curious.
https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-01-03/when-did-kansas-city-police-come-under-state-control-the-answer-dates-back-to-the-civil-war
But I disagree that Richard is not suggesting denial of counsel. The case he cited, Escobedo v. Illinois was decided over a suspect being denied counsel during questioning (literally his lawyer was turned away by police when trying to make contact with his client, even though the man had repeatedly requested to see him).
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.
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.
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.
There’s a massive omission in Richard’s theory here: it gives no explanation for the equally dramatic drop in crime in the 90s, which you can see in the chart in this article. Did any of those rights get repealed? Obviously no. So what is the explanation for why the dramatic change these rights brought about suddenly reversed? I would like to see Richard attempt to address this, as it seems like a major weakness of the theory.
Someone answered it. Abortion in the 60s and 70s.
So if the crime reduction from abortion rights exactly offsets the crime rise from civil rights, sounds like we don’t really have a problem!
No one has a solid answer to your question. It's easier to ignore it.
I've been posting graphs like these for years. For example, from over three years ago:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-gun-control-drive-down-the-black-homicide-rate/
Here's another example
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-geography-of-homicide/
We can always use more replications to drive it into people’s heads.
True.
Where's your study on the effect of lynching in the South? What effect did this have on the community at large? What was the prosecution rate of the perpetrators?
https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore
What should we do with people like Dylann Roof and Payton Gendron? White violence has been a problem for centuries, and it seems to go largely unnoticed.
The problem with Hanania's race stats is that it's using a correlative that obscures an important fact: As Thomas Sowel's book "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" (2005) illustrates, social acceptance of committing crime in certain communities is a culture problem, not a race problem. Sowell argues that many behaviors often described as “black culture” in the U.S. actually trace back to cultural patterns of white “redneck” (or “cracker”) culture from the rural South, which itself was derived from the “borderlands” culture of Scotland, Ireland, and northern England. He contends these traits—such as attitudes toward education, speech patterns, family structure, and violence—were absorbed by both poor Southern whites and enslaved blacks, and then carried into urban black communities after migration.
What might be a more accurate comparison is what is the rate of crime in redneck white communities versus black communities in various locales. If the cultures of both were "infected" by certain UK forebears, then using race as the determiner is a mistake. Since Blacks in the US have historically had higher religiosity than whites, examining the subcultures outside of that religiosity but within the Black communities might be as valuable as looking at redneck culture in white communities, and then doing a comparison.
It would be a valid argument if white rural crime rate was as high as black urban crime rate. It's just not
Gangs present a unique situation in the same way the mafia has in our country's past: a business incentive to profit from organized crime, and which encourages violence to eliminate the competition as well as shakedown adjacent targets. Part of examining the stats would be to consider the crime rate within that kind of organized crime and outside of it.
This is an interesting take. Also, I think centuries of enslavenmnet and a century of Jim Crow probably have a deleterious effect on the psyche of black people.
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.
Not that you have to mention every possible factor, but I think apathy plays a part. State GOPs in Missouri and Tennessee would rather cut taxes than dedicate resources to improving their high crime cities. The price is paid mostly by poor and/or brown people. Not to be woke or anything, I genuinely think it just isn’t a high priority for their base and their donors.
Also lots of them are dumb so explaining the evidence behind lots of compicated and effective policy ideas is hard and they easily fall for stupid explanations. There are lots of scammers who offer "magic" ways to tackle crime and addiction, politicians buy into rather than asking questions and making decisions.
On the red side I think lots of people who have only worked in private sector struggle to understand how the public sector works, which makes it harder to actually get them to implement policies that might work.
1. STL for its part basically has its county almost perfectly gerrymandered around the crime areas. When you go by census metro, which tends to cover large enough geographic regions to average out an entire “city’s” crime against its population, STL drops to the mid-20’s on crime.
2. I think the “poverty vs race” stats can still be misleading, even if you’re trying to interpret them in good faith here. EG It’s completely plausible that in cities with large Black populations, they will have larger and more developed Black middle classes, thus diluting the statistical measure of poverty, BUT that poverty within those cities would still be a predominant predictor of crime among its Black population. This seems most likely to me.
IE, before they were all famous, it’s absurd to imagine that Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, or the Williams sisters would be more likely to commit crime simply because of their race; it’s obvious that they wouldn’t commit crime because they were all solidly middle class, and the crime in the cities they each grew up in was still largely localized to poor neighborhoods, not the ones they grew up in.
Nice overview. However, you need to bring lead into this discussion as that is the actual reason for the crime spike starting in the 60s and continuing into the 90s. It's pretty bullet proof. the great Kevin Drum has the details: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
Yup that's what I came into the comments to say.
You seem to have established that poverty and blackness are independently correlated with the crime rate. You suggest that shooting fleeing suspects and not providing legal aid to indigent people would reduce the crime rate.
What I want to know is whether the results - and the mechanism - would be the same - if you merely shot and incarcerated random members of the demographics you have determined to correlate with higher crime rates, rather than waiting for them to be accused of something.
After all, corpses rarely commit crimes, or have crimes committed against them, and the incarcerated rarely get a chance to commit crimes against anyone except their peers.
While you're at it, you might want to check out other population demographics correlated with crime. I understand young men are (statistically) prime offenders. Perhaps shooting or incarcerating random young men would also help reduce the crime rate.
Etc. etc. ad nauseam. Statistical correlation is not guilt, and punishing people for what they haven't done is a great way to encourage their peers to do lots more of what they now expect to be punished for regardless of what they do. (I'm presuming you don't have any moral objections to harming the innocent in the name of "reducing crime," so giving only practical objections. My own objections OTOH are primarily moral/ethical.)
Shooting fleeing suspects isn't the same thing as shooting random people on the street. Where did he siggest such a thing ? You're juste strawmanning here
Hanania neglects to consider the role racism plays in crime. But you make a good point, in the spirit of Minority Report, shooting random young people of a certain demographic might bring down crime.
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.