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I'm fascinated by discussions of Baltimore or Gary, Indiana and other similar places on Reddit. It's usually a mixture of people describing their own terrible experiences (while studiously omitting the demographics of the perpetrators), economic explanations and occasionally cryptic comments alluding to the real cause that the mods haven't spotted. This is an example.
I can't remember where I read it, but I saw a blog post once that showed you could predict 80% of a US city's crime rate by measuring its African American population.
Back when I was a Fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I did a 'crime detection' machine learning project. The unique part was that I mixed race with wider demographics (census info) & proximity to institutions (schools, banks,etc.).
I don't want to share the full report for anonymity reasons, but old naive me found a bunch of interesting statistical co-relations.
My favorite insight: Race does not help predict crime.
I am being half truthful ofc. The more accurate takeaway is : "Race is not needed when predicting crime, as long as you have other spicy features."
The spiciest - 'Female household with no husband'. It was by far the most predictive demographic feature for crime. The black crime problem is a fatherlessness problem. Not too surprising for the the average mottezian. But for a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I genuinely could not make sense of this finding. Nice to see my 8 year old study corroborate my 2024 intuition.
The more boring, but no less important feature was - 'Participation in labor force'. Nothing surprising here. Less jobs = More crime. More crime = Less jobs.
Second spiciest - Race can be completely discarded if you're accounting for local geography. Yes, black people commit more crime. But they seem to commit all their crimes in specific places. Crime occurs near nightclubs and schools. High density places have more crime, yes, but it is trivial to triage the hotspots down to the specific block. As much as random inspections in certain neighborhoods is a liberal meme, hot spot based inspections are objectively less racist.
Takeaways:
Joblessness and fatherlessness problems are the main cultural problems contributing to crime. You don't need an average IQ workforce to do well on either. Both are endemic in urban black communities. But, pair a bunch of Appalachian whites with these 2 problems and crime will still go up.
Crime is a hyper-local phenomenon. Crime can be largely addressed through stringent policing of the hotspots. My guess is that crime-as-a-lifestyle, like any social phenomenon is memetic and relies on social contagion. Dispersed criminals might find other spots to base their operations out of, but it is hard to scale if hotspots are stamped out. It also means that police don't need proportionally higher resources to curb crime. Most of the city can do just fine with the amount of policing it has.
Very interesting stuff.
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Slight disagree on race not being a visible indicator. Its all about your immediate environ, and I can't tell whether someone was raised fatherless, but I can tell when someone doesn't belong, and race is the fastest and most statistically significant shorthand I had. A shit neighborhood with crime infesting it often is blacker, true, but in public desegregated spaces I found laying attention to isolated or 4+ groups of blacks to be optimal for barm minimization. It is precisely because black criminals are outside their local geographic bound that the racial element comes to the fore I will never go anywhere near Crown Heights of my own volition, so the black criminals there are a distant problem. Seeing a group of 4 black kids strut into the C train at Chambers is anomalous enough to immediately set off spidey senses. If they had a boombox it was Showtime, who were irritating for other reasons.
Crime stands out precisely because it is anomalous: MonkeyWithAMachinegun treats the miasma of everpresent crime as background noise to the city, and living in Bed-Dtuy made me think incidental misery was just par for the course. An extended period of crashing at a friends place in fucking Alphabet City made me realize that crime was NOT an everpresent feature, it is localized to lazy thugs who can't be bothered to stray out of their neighbourhoods and thats what makes their anomalous presence such a visible precursor to crime.
In the end I ended up getting into trouble with white criminals more often, but I treat that as statistical provenance: I curated my social environment to be as white/asian as possible, so obviously any stupid shit I encountered will be due to them. The statistical frequency for which my encountering black people lead to negative experiences for me was a much higher rate than with whites, even controlling for geographic accidents. I may nkt have been Die Hard 4 John McClane, but wearing a nice suit and shoes at the bad side of Prospect Park might as well have put a quest icon screaming 'LOOT GOBLIN' to the neighbourhood.
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I've visited Gary multiple times, just to look around and do photography. I would say that I honestly felt quite safe there; much like Cairo, Illinois, another place where I've been which has suffered a similar fate - anyone that would rob or shoot me migrated away 20 or more years ago. The place is simply empty of people to a degree that's hard to even explain. There's nobody there.
I wish I could share my pictures, but it would destroy my already crap opsec.
In the 2007/2008 Google street view of Cairo, one of the buildings on the main commercial strip had completely collapsed and was just a pile of rubble spilling out onto the sidewalk.
I can confirm that when I was there in 2018, it certainly had not gotten any better. From 2000 to 2020, the population fell by half from around 3,600 to around 1,800. This from a peak of over 15,000 in 1920.
With the general decline of the river trade, Cairo is remarkably remote now. It's very hard for me to see how it could ever attract investment again. I imagine if you had commercial interests in the area, you'd base yourself in Cape Girardeau or Paducah.
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I actually have a very rare thing - a friend who grew up in Gary. Her description is that that the only people left are the very elderly, and the people who are so dysfunctional they drop out of the South Side of Chicago and go to Gary. The latter would be a real problem if they got a gun and spotted you, but for the most part they're too low-functioning even to do that, otherwise they'd be driving up Chicago's crime rate.
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Peoria, Illinois also feels like that. I've done urban decay photography around there, and I didn’t feel so much unsafe as…spooked out. There’s a certain “hollowed out” feeling to small-ish Midwestern rustbelt cities where even the criminals have ghosted away, and there’s just the dusty bones of long-dead businesses and echoes of decay.
It's incredible to me, just how large a portion of the U.S. consists of areas like that. You can drive for hours through formerly-inhabited areas, in most of which you can fairly confidently say: "This will never be anything again." "That building will eventually cave in, no one's gonna save it." "This must have been beautiful in the '50s."
I wish we lived in a different world, where that didn't happen.
I guess I haven't spent too much time in the Rust Belt specifically, but there has been a lot of migration around the country for at least the last century. It's easy to point to growing Sun Belt cities and stagnating-or-shrinking northern ones -- an older friend from Ohio noted that Cincinnati is about the same size it was in the 70s and still mostly fits inside the same interstate ring road, while Houston is in the process of building a third.
But it's also impacted smaller communities. My family history involves a couple tiny rural towns in the South that have since completely evaporated and left only road signs and a couple still-occupied houses. The historical marker points to where the one room schoolhouse and the general store had been. These places disappeared with better cars and roads in the middle of the last century: we can just bus the kids to the bigger school down the road, and drive into town for the store. Will this get rebuilt? I don't know: some developers nearby have been trying to sell swanky ranchettes, but even if that happened in the same place, it's a fundamentally different community -- this time around it has electricity and indoor plumbing, not to mention air conditioning and a major city within a few hours of driving, none of which were there a century ago.
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Gary had 52 homicides in 2023, a per-100k rate of 76.8. This is a third higher than Baltimore, and 12x the rate of the US as a whole.
And they were a little proud of that number, because it was 18% fewer homicides than in 2022.
Time for a little math. Let's make a simplified model of Gary where the population is gender balanced, and equally age distributed between age 0 and 65. Let's further say that males age 15-30 represent 75% of homicide victims.
Among this sliver of the population the murder rate is 499 per 100,000!
A 15 year old boy in Gary will have a nearly 7.5% chance of being murdered before age 30.
Obviously there are all sorts of problems with the model, but it should be mostly accurate. I think it's possible that a quarter of adult men in Gary have been shot at some point.
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Well, I can't argue with that. I just wonder where they were happening, and over what. I admit I didn't go into the residential areas much.
That's still only 1 murder a week, and a population who goes 99.9% unmurdered each year. Hard to casually distinguish from 0 and 100%; it just adds up over time.
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