There has been some discourse about the homicide rate dropping fast in the USA over the last two years, with various claims about how this is downstream of different policies or cultural changes.
Thank you for sharing! These are hopeful trends. Reminded of " Better Angels" by Pinker. Do you think this can be seen as a larger trend, as in longterm decline in violence in general?
I think in general yes, it's part of a longer trend of less violence, but there are some countries where homicide/violence has spiked for several years, or in the case where gang violence has taken over, for much longer periods.
I think this may be due to "the system's" bounce back from the Covid disruption. It was common news that their was an uptick in crime or violence, in general, due to lockdown. So I guess it took a while for the system to get back to peak functioning.
Do you have the pre-covid homicide rates? I think it'll be very informative if we can get that time series.
It depends on the country, some had upticks in 2020/21 but most didn't from the data I looked at. Some people have suggested it was because of anti policing policies becoming more popular in some places in the US.
If you look at most European countries they didn't have a spike, or in the UK the spike was from 2017
Is there available data on the attempted homicide rate? Curious if the decline in homicides is at least partially due to medical care improving (although I suppose that wouldn’t account for drops within the past few years)
It might explain a small part of it but generally when I've seen attempted homicide data it seems correlated with the homicide data. There is a post looking at shootings in Chicago - https://jasher.substack.com/p/contextualizing-chicagos-enormous - which seems to show the same thing, decreased shootings and decreased homicides.
Thank you for sharing! These are hopeful trends. Reminded of " Better Angels" by Pinker. Do you think this can be seen as a larger trend, as in longterm decline in violence in general?
I think in general yes, it's part of a longer trend of less violence, but there are some countries where homicide/violence has spiked for several years, or in the case where gang violence has taken over, for much longer periods.
I think this may be due to "the system's" bounce back from the Covid disruption. It was common news that their was an uptick in crime or violence, in general, due to lockdown. So I guess it took a while for the system to get back to peak functioning.
Do you have the pre-covid homicide rates? I think it'll be very informative if we can get that time series.
It depends on the country, some had upticks in 2020/21 but most didn't from the data I looked at. Some people have suggested it was because of anti policing policies becoming more popular in some places in the US.
If you look at most European countries they didn't have a spike, or in the UK the spike was from 2017
Is there available data on the attempted homicide rate? Curious if the decline in homicides is at least partially due to medical care improving (although I suppose that wouldn’t account for drops within the past few years)
It might explain a small part of it but generally when I've seen attempted homicide data it seems correlated with the homicide data. There is a post looking at shootings in Chicago - https://jasher.substack.com/p/contextualizing-chicagos-enormous - which seems to show the same thing, decreased shootings and decreased homicides.