Crime is on the political agenda in a big way this year, with Republicans zeroing in on it as their favorite topic now that gasoline prices are moderating, reported Bloomberg.
Which naturally raises the question: Is crime
rising? To which the shocking answer is — nobody knows. Not because anything
unusual is happening, but simply because the usual state of America’s
information on crime and policing is incredibly poor.
Contrast this state of affairs with the amount of
data available on the US economy. There are monthly updates on job creation,
the unemployment rate and multiple indexes of inflation. Commodity prices are
publicized on a daily basis. Reports on gross national product come out
quarterly, with timely revisions as more data comes in. Policymakers benefit
from a deeply informed debate, enriched by commentary from academics and other
observers.
But on crime the US is, to a shocking extent, flying
blind. As a July report from the Brennan Center for Justice noted: “More than six months into 2022, national-level data
on crime in 2021 remains unavailable.”
There is some data. In America’s largest cities,
the murder rate rose in 2021. And since national crime
trends almost invariably follow the trends observed in this sample of
22 cities, analysts are confident that there was a nationwide increase in
murders last year. It’s also very likely that there was an overall increase in
shootings and violent assaults. But beyond that, it’s hard to say.
It’s possible to draw sharper conclusions by going
back to 2020, the most recent year for which there is official data. The FBI’s
Uniform Crime Reporting program makes clear that there was a very large
increase in murdering in 2020. It also shows that the rise took place across the
board — murders rose 20% in rural counties and 20% in suburban ones, so
whatever went wrong can’t be pinned entirely on “Democrat mayors” or big-city
politics.
That said, the increase in central cities with
250,000 or more people was even larger — about 34%. With hard numbers rather
than statistical imputations in hand, it’s clear both that there was a
city-specific problem — presumably related to the fallout from George Floyd’s
murder and the subsequent national wave of protests — and that whatever that
problem was, it doesn’t explain the majority of the increased killings.
For 2021, the picture gets much fuzzier. Murder rose
in big cities, but by a much smaller amount than it did the prior year. And in
smaller communities? Who knows.
For 2022, researchers tell me the best source is the
data assembled by a private company called AH Datalytics. Its team basically
looks at 92 large cities that publicly report murder data in a somewhat timely
matter and puts the numbers into a spreadsheet. This ends up pretty messy,
since as of this writing some cities (Kansas City, Washington) have updated
information from as recently as Sept. 14, while others (San Antonio, Shreveport,
La.) are updated only to March 31. And of course this rough-and-ready calculus
doesn’t allow for comparison of crime trends in central cities with suburbs and
rural areas.
Nonetheless, for the record, murder is running at a
pace that’s about 3.5% lower this year than last year.
The dearth of information is a problem not only for
rigor-minded policymakers. It also leaves the political arena open for
manipulation by demagogues. Since nobody actually knows in real time what’s
happening, anecdotes can just stand in for made-up fears. Since the very real
murder surge of 2020 now has people primed to believe “crime is out of control”
narratives, any particular instance of violence can be used to support that
story.
What all this anecdata fails to recognize is that
the US is a gigantic country, so even in a very low-crime year like 2014, there
were multiple people being murdered every day. A person could have issued daily
updates painting a terrifying portrait of life in the US even at a time when
violence was at its lowest ebb.
By the same token, when murder really was soaring in
2020, it was easy for progressives to stay in ideologically convenient denial
for far too long, since it was genuinely impossible to actually prove that it
was happening until much later. The people who dismissed the anecdotal evidence
of rising crime were, in that case, mistaken. But the Republicans who are
stoking fears of rising crime right now also appear to be mistaken. And the
lack of information about geographical patterns in murder trends means no one
has much ability to assess what social or policy factors may be in play.
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