'If it bleeds it leads' media ignores dramatic decline in violence

 According to The New Republic, in the first half of 2023, Boston had 18 homicides. In the first half of 2024, it had four—a 77 percent drop. Mesa, Arizona, saw a drop of more than 70 percent, from 21 to six. Homicides in New Orleans fell by almost 40 percent. In Baltimore City, Cleveland, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, homicides declined by around 30 percent. 

These dramatic numbers come from a midyear crime report published by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which takes data from 69 police and sheriffs’ departments. In aggregate, the study documented a 17 percent drop in homicides. If the trend persists in the latter half of the year and holds true for the whole country, the total number of homicides will end up where it was in 2015, at around 15,500, and will represent the largest single-year decline in at least 65 years, exceeding the previous record decline—of 12 percent, set just last year—by almost a third. Meaning: The entire Covid-19 homicide spike will have vanished.

It may seem risky to extrapolate the midyear data from just 69 departments to the year-end results from 18,000 local departments, but historically, midyear data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association and national year-end data track each other surprisingly well. (For those who want to dig into the weeds, I dive deep here.) Barring some sort of shocking shift, 2024 seems on pace for historic or near-historic declines.

The plunge is unambiguously good news. It is also unexpected good news. Rising homicide rates create the very real risk of vicious cycles that do not end simply because we’ve started a new statistical year. Homicide trends tend to be quite long. From 1963 to 1980, homicides rose every year except one. After a brief decline in the early 1980s, they rose again most years between 1985 and 1994, at which point all violent crime began a steady, decade-long drop.

There are clear reasons for the cyclical nature of the phenomenon. One study in Chicago found evidence that each shooting led to an average of three more retaliatory and counter-retaliatory shootings; some led to dozens more; at least one led to over 100 more. Slowing and then reversing these cycles of revenge can be challenging, yet it happened over the past few years, not long after the chaos and violence of 2020–21, and with surprising rapidity.

This is the sort of news that should spawn dozens of media pieces digging into what, exactly, caused so quick a reversal. Yet that is not what we have seen. Excluding pieces in Axios and Bloomberg, the MCCA report has largely gone unnoticed (and neither of those articles dug into why the decline occurred). To the extent these declines have popped up elsewhere in the media, it is less as a newsworthy development in and of itself and more as a means to fact-check false claims from Donald Trump. (Take, for instance, Vox on August 12: “Trump says crime is out of control. The facts say otherwise.”) Contrast this reticence with how the media handled the Covid-era homicide spike, which was covered by major outlets like The New York Times and NPR in multiple extensive pieces.

That attention made sense: The 2020 surge was the largest increase in homicides in at least 55 years; no other year’s increase comes within half its size. It had huge human costs. But the present decline demands equal attention—and could be put to good political use by the Harris-Walz campaign, should it want to.

There are important stories here. One of the most compelling explanations for the homicide declines that started in 2023 is a story of defunding—but not of the police. Contrary to claims that “defund the police” decreased budgets, police employment and especially police budgets have remained fairly constant; it was local nonpolice employment that was decimated during the pandemic. John Roman, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, has argued that the surge in homicides seems closely linked to the Covid-driven layoffs of civilian government employees, whose jobs are not framed as “law enforcement” but who regularly help reduce crime and victimization: teachers, social workers, drug counselors, people running after-school programs. Furthermore, the timing of the homicide decline lines up with local nonpolice government employment returning to its pre-pandemic levels.

Now, I’m not saying Roman’s theory is the only explanation (and I doubt he would either), but it merits careful consideration. Yet as far as I can tell, it has received almost none. The asymmetry here—deep explorations of rising homicides, passing references in political stories to sharp declines—has very real political costs. Crime is a powerful issue politically, but also one that is quite geographically concentrated. Most people go through their days with little direct exposure to it. Unlike other politically salient topics such as the economy and employment, most people’s understanding of crime is heavily shaped by how the media chooses to frame and discuss a phenomenon they do not personally experience. If the media highlights the increases and downplays the declines, it will help produce an electorate that is excessively pessimistic about crime and how to respond to it.

The politics of crime in New York in 2021 and 2022 highlights the role the media can play. In the wake of the Covid homicide spike, the state’s bail reform law faced intense opposition—and legislative rollbacks—from politicians and other defenders of the criminal legal system’s status quo. And it’s likely that appeals to people’s fears about crime helped propel Mayor Eric Adams to his razor-thin victory in 2021. They may have flipped just enough upstate House seats to give the GOP its increasingly narrow control of the House. As a 2022 Bloomberg piece pointed out, however, violent crime in New York City was far lower than in the 1980s and 1990s, and actually pretty stable during the Covid era. Media coverage does not correlate much, if at all, with actual crime trends. It does, however, seem tightly linked to politicians’ efforts to exploit crime as a political tool.

That the media is not covering a decline in violence as much as an increase is perhaps unsurprising: “If it bleeds it leads” has been an adage for a long time. 

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