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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.)

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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.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myths-and-realities-understanding-recent-trends-violent-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
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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.

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