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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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law & order they remember from their childhood back.

Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this. The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.

  • -14

The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.

This is an absolutely absurd and willfully uncharitable straw-man. Crime peaked in the 1990s at extremely high levels, and serious crackdowns were required for the subsequent gradual draw-down. That draw-down reversed in 2014, IIRC, and 2020 wiped out something like two decades of progress in the fastest increase in the crime rate ever recorded. Crime is in fact out of control in many areas of the country. Further, there is reason to believe that the federal statistics on which our analysis depends are significantly less reliable than they have been previously, given that the FBI recently made significant changes to its data collection practices and has failed both to collect data and to ensure that the data it collects and presents is accurate.:

In 2019, 89% of agencies covering 97% of the population submitted data, but by 2021, that coverage plummeted to less than 63% of departments overseeing just 65% of the population. Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City all failed to submit crime data. To increase participation, the FBI relaxed the NIBRS requirement in 2022, allowing agencies to report via the legacy system.

But many other cities, such as St. Louis, which had transitioned to the new method, still struggle to comply and submit partial or faulty data. The FBI compensates by relying more heavily on “estimation,” or informed guesswork, to fill in the gaps and produce aggregated data.

And the figures the agencies do report to the FBI do not match the agencies’ publicly reported figures. For Baltimore, the FBI reported 225 murders in 2023, but the city reported 262 — which means the FBI left out 37 murders. In Milwaukee, the police department reported a 7% increase in robberies, but the FBI showed a 13% drop. Nashville’s own data tallied more than 6,900 aggravated assaults in 2023, but the FBI counted only 5,941, leaving almost 1,000 of those offenses “missing.” This trend is consistent across the board: While 2022’s FBI city-level figures track the police’s own data, the 2023 numbers consistently undercount offense totals. Any year-to-year comparison overstates decline.

Other measures of crime levels undermine, or at least muddle, the veracity of the FBI’s data, which rely on “reported” offenses by victims and law enforcement themselves. The federal government’s own victims’ survey, which attempts to capture the gap between the number of actual offenses and the number reported to police, shows much higher offense rates than the FBI does. Moreover, a rising share of victims are failing to report their victimizations at all. In 2022, only 42% of violent crime victims and 33% of property crime victims bothered to report the crime to police.

People are not worried about out-of-control crime because they "see brown faces on the streets". We are worried about out-of-control crime because we are watching video of stores being looted without repercussions, and then watching businesses retreat en-masse from the cities. We are watching video evidence of vicious crimes being committed against the innocent while the authorities stand idly by. We are watching the authorities willfully nullifying the laws we've enacted through the democratic process in favor of signaling their own virtue. We are watching the criminals they refuse to police and incarcerate wreak havoc on our communities, and we're watching law-abiding citizens who attempt to intervene or resist be hammered by the full force of the state.

We are, in fact, suffering a sustained crime wave. That crime wave is very clearly the result of a series of intentional Blue Tribe actions: a sustained propaganda campaign to foment racial discord throughout the country, deliberate institutional support for and approval of large-scale, organized political violence, and a widespread policy of minimizing policing, prosecution and incarceration of all sorts of crime. The connection is so blindingly obvious that it cannot be addressed without unacceptable damage to Blue Tribe's cultural position, and so it is being ignored until the passage of time provides sufficient fog to allow them, per standard protocol, to be blamed entirely on the Red Tribe outgroup. In the meantime, tens of thousands of additional blacks will be murdered, hundreds-of-thousands to millions of additional blacks will be victimized by criminals, black participation in crime has increased dramatically and will continue to do so, and majority-black communities have been and will continue to be blighted by all the attendant ills of living without effective rule of law. All of this has happened before, is happening now, and will happen again. In another decade, people will admit it, on the condition that it is all attributed to an amorphous, undefinable "legacy of racism in a fundamentally white-supremacist society", and then in another decade or two the process will repeat in its entirety. All this has happened before, and will happen again, until Blue Tribe's social controls are broken for good.

Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world

Not true. It's comparably low in the post-Soviet provinces, but quite a bit higher in places with a lot of immigrants. So the entirety of Western Europe, Scandinavia.

Don't be so parochial.

Murder is the easiest crime to count, and OWID has homicide rates falling since a 1990s peak in every Western European country with decent data (except Sweden, which has a migration-driven uptrend since 2010 but is still below the peak). In the UK, crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales has been falling consistently since 1995 - this is a victim survey so results are not affected by willingness to talk to cops, and the scope of crimes counted has been consistent over time. I don't know how to find the equivalent survey data for other countries.

I live in London, and the drop in crime since the 1990s is as viscerally obvious as it was in post-Giuliani NYC. Before you quibble, I have been to the alleged "Islamic no-go zones" in Tower Hamlets, and some of the individual estates that have been taken over by Muslim gangs were so rough beforehand that the Muslim gangs were an improvement - just like when Mexican illegals take over a black neighborhood of a US city, the fall in crime is real.

I live in London, and the drop in crime since the 1990s

Drop? It stayed flat, despite presumably vast improvements in trauma surgery.

With better medicine, if homicide isn't dropping, it suggest violence is increasing.

has been falling consistently since 1995

If that's the case, why is the burglary rate that incredibly high, in contrast to places like Germany or Poland ?

Crime is still lower than it was in the 1970s-1990s pretty much everywhere in the 1st world, and everyone who can actually remember the bad old days knows this

Are you sure this isn't more of a US / Anglosphere thing? Sweden went from a left-wing meme about the glories of social welfare and prison rehabilitation, to a right-wing meme about the dangers of immigration. Data from any country that has the guts to record the ethnicity of criminals tends to show that whatever crime they have, is mostly attributable to immigrants.

The only people who see brown faces on the streets and assume that crime is out of control are American racists.

What is this bit supposed to bring to the discussion? If it turns out you're wrong, are you going to admit to your racism, or does it only go one way?

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