High_DC t1_j2auq15 wrote
Reply to comment by Brickleberried in ABC News: "Washington, DC, records back-to-back years with 200 murders for 1st time in nearly 20 years" by Swampoodle1984
I think that a lot of it was also related to short-term pandemic effects. A lot of people were out of work. A lot of teenagers were out of school. A lot of stimulus dollars ensured a fairly high circulation of cash.
We've seen the homicide rate drop significantly just in the past six months, and I'm expecting to a see a pretty sizeable year-on-year decrease for the first half of 2023. Check back in six months to see how accurate that is!
violet-shift t1_j2b9q01 wrote
Yeah, like holy shit people seem to be bad about realizing this. From what I've read there was a noticeable uptick in crime over the last two years across the entire country, including both cities and rural areas, in democratic and republican dominated areas.
Given the timing and scope, the default assumption here should be that its pandemic related, and like you say -- we're seeing signs that violent crime may be dropping now.
e: Wikipedia has some per state data on homicides -- in that list almost every state had a noticeable uptick from 2019 to 2020. Hopefully someone is doing actual analysis of this data somewhere, but certainly eyeballing it seems to agree with what I've read. (With Puerto Rico being an outlier, but I have no idea how Covid affected them.)
Most_kinds_of_Dirt t1_j2cerlq wrote
>Despite politicized claims that this rise was the result of criminal justice reform in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, murders rose roughly equally in cities run by Republicans and cities run by Democrats. So-called “red” states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all. This data makes it difficult to pin recent trends on local policy shifts and reveals the basic inaccuracy of attempts to politicize a problem as complex as crime.
It's also important to note that this increase was for homicides, not overall crime. Overall crime has continued to decrease both nationally and in DC.
DC crime stats:
| Category | 2011 | 2016 | 2021 | 2022 YTD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homicide | 108 | 135 | 226 | 201 |
| Sex Abuse | 174 | 346 | 176 | 158 |
| Assault w/ a dangerous weapon | 2,520 | 2,278 | 1,675 | 1,383 |
| Robbery | 4,207 | 3,000 | 2,040 | 2,064 |
| Violent Crime (total) | 7,009 | 5,759 | 4,117 | 3,806 |
| Burglary | 3,948 | 2,122 | 1,172 | 1,042 |
| Motor Vehicle Theft | 3,820 | 2,700 | 3,515 | 3,730 |
| Theft from Auto | 7,839 | 12,175 | 8,690 | 7,779 |
| Theft (Other) | 10,206 | 14,574 | 10,915 | 10,777 |
| Arson | 39 | 6 | 4 | 4 |
| Property Crime (total) | 25,852 | 31,577 | 24,296 | 23,332 |
| All Crime (total) | 32,861 | 37,336 | 28,413 | 27,138 |
Effective_Golf_3311 t1_j2e76to wrote
I love this use of the murder rate. My ~100k pop city jumped nearly 400% during 2020 and 2021 due to some drug beefs gone bad but now it’s gone from 4 murders to one in 2022.
But that stat allows us to pretend that jurisdictions like mine were the problem. Meanwhile we can fill mass graves with the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies of young black men murdered in our major cities — red or blue — and we lack a desire to do anything about it so we’re just gonna blame the orange man.
[deleted] t1_j2cebde wrote
[deleted]
well-that-was-fast t1_j2bkfmi wrote
> I think that a lot of it was also related to short-term pandemic effects. A lot of people were out of work.
I agree with pandemic effects but think it's more mental health, not financial. It's a long jump from people being unemployed to becoming murders, and were talking about 50+ cases (100+ from 2012).
This is more about people who were able to mentally keep things together until society underwent a lot of scary upheavals very quickly and they were unable to find help adjusting.
LeoMarius t1_j2bog20 wrote
A lot of people left DC because they were teleworking and not originally from here. That made many neighborhoods empty that were normally bustling with activity. Homeless camps set up and made the area less safe than when there were people regularly walking around.
They are just starting to come back to the area because offices are reopening.
harkuponthegay t1_j2c08x2 wrote
>made the area less safe than when there were people regularly walking around.
Homeless people are people though. (??)
If the homeless encampments are there then there are probably people who live there that are walking around.
To be honest I don’t think that homeless encampments had much of an effect on the homicide rate, nor do they make an area inherently less safe— there’s no reason to be afraid of homeless people, they aren’t some boogeyman—they’re no more violent than the rest of us.
You may not like them aesthetically, but they are not dangerous. It’s not the homeless who are running around shooting each other over petty gang conflicts.
LeoMarius t1_j2c0hpm wrote
Funny, because I got mugged by one. Must have been my imagination.
harkuponthegay t1_j2c1lu4 wrote
I doubt that you knew the housing situation of the person who mugged you (assuming you’re not just making shit up).
Did that happen in DC or back in university park Maryland?
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