Good News! Joe Biden Convinced Americans To Murder Each Other Less
No, Donald Trump, you get no credit.
What makes crime rates go up or down is an ageless enigma, and no one’s more motivated to solve the mystery than local politicians, who regularly get voted in or out over it. Especially the homicide rate, such a seemingly simple number! And now, all across the land, people are murdering each other about 20 percent less than they did last year, nowhere more so than in those big blue Democrat-run cities that Republicans are too scared to go to. You know, the sanctuary cities harboring immigrants, the places where MAGA claims the police got abolished. Now they’re safer than ever! And not only that, crime fell in every category last year and has been continuing to record-breaking lows, a trend that started in 2022 under accused criminal-hugger Joe Biden.
Why? What makes crime rates go up or down has been studied forever, and still nobody really knows, because it’s complicated. It’s not like you can run a controlled study of every factor that might make a person hold up a convenience store, set stuff on fire, rape and/or kill.
But theories abound. More or less lead in the air? More abortions? All of those immigrants that MAGA claims Biden and Harris drove over the border from Mexico in their minivan, moving in and fixing broken windows and lighting dark city alleys with strings of fiesta lights? Maybe it is the fruits of 2022’s bi-partisan Safer Communities Act, funding violence prevention efforts, or maybe it was the end of the pandemic and the return of social support services that had been disrupted. Or maybe 988, the mental health crisis line, which was fully implemented by July 2022 and diverts callers in mental health crisis to mental health services, instead of to the local police or fire department.
Whatever it was Biden or anybody did, or didn’t, it worked, and seems to still be working. The murder rate has been plummeting, and not only that, so has the incarceration rate. So much for arresting the way out of the crime problem!
And maybe it’s not even the guns. Obama and Biden in no way succeeded in taking everybody’s away, and they only get more available and easy to use all the time, for even the weakest and drunkest trigger-pullers. Maybe America has finally reached peak armed-to-the teeth, and nobody wants to fuck with anybody else any more!
Or is coordinated violence interruption working? One city that’s seen a massive decline is Baltimore, which through June had 68 homicides. Not all month, all year, the lowest number in 50 years. Compared to the same time last year, the city recorded a 22.7 percent decrease in homicides and a 19.6 percent decline in nonfatal shootings.
In 2022, Duly Elected Incumbent Mayor Brandon Scott launched a new strategy, with money allocated by Senator Chris Van Hollen’s Congressional District Spending program called Group Violence Reduction, for focused deterrence, identifying and intervening with individuals at the highest acute risk of involvement in gun violence.
While the arrest rate is down everywhere else around the country, Baltimore’s arrest rate is up, and the juvenile arrest rate is WAY up, 146 percent. Which does not sound very progressive! But the mayor and State’s Attorney Ivan Bates are hoping that by intervening with little handcuffs for at-risk offenders, directing them to social services like behavioral health support, and keeping closer tabs on their little ankle monitors, the city can disrupt the cycle of crime and violence.
Maybe so. It’s an uphill climb. Baltimore’s poorest and darkest kids, like so many in other formerly formally redlined cities, have been trapped in a school-to-prison lead-lined pipeline. The public schools (with the exception of the magnet schools) are simply not good, with test scores among the country’s lowest, and 30 percent of the kids who attend do not graduate. Jobs with advancement opportunities for high school dropouts are scant everywhere but the drug trade, a conviction in the War on Drugs makes it hard to find any other job, and there you have a major plotline of “The Wire.”
And, if you or a family member are involved in said drug trade, or you have a criminal record, or you’ve noticed Baltimore’s abysmal (but improving) homicide clearance rate, you’re not going to trust the justice system to protect you from a perpetrator. If you have a record, you can’t buy a gun legally. Or you are in the drug trade, and a neighboring drug dealer decides you’re in his way or did him wrong, you can’t call the police or the Better Business Bureau, so, what are you going to do? The largest category of homicides in Baltimore are what you might call pro-active self defense, which you can see in a Baltimore Police Department analysis of murder victims: 81.9 percent had prior criminal records, 67 percent had previous drug arrests, 44 percent were arrested for gun crimes, and 16.1 percent were also victims of prior nonfatal shootings.
How do you break that cycle? Over the decades Baltimore mayors have tried all sorts of things. In the 1990s Kurt Schmoke tried non-enforcement zones, AKA “Hamsterdam.” As mayor, Martin O’Malley tried zero tolerance, and using arrests as the punishment itself, Alina Habba-style, picking up people for low-level crimes like loitering on a stoop that were not prosecutable, and then blaming crime on the State’s Attorney for not getting “off her ass” to prosecute. And prosecuting isn’t easy when much of the jury pool dislikes and distrusts the police, often for excellent reasons.
And so through the ‘90s, naughts and the teens, the homicide rate got still worse, and the police-involved violence and deaths were not good either. After the in-custody death of Freddie Gray in 2015, and ensuing protests and the attempted prosecution of the police officers involved, the BPD seemed to practice “quiet quitting,” and also literal quitting, and the homicide rate went up even more. And during the pandemic the murder rate went up in Baltimore, and everywhere.
And now, like some kind of miracle cure, the crime and murder rate in Baltimore is lower than in the ‘70s, and lower nationwide than even pre-Covid. It is something to celebrate! And to try to understand, however futile it may be, so that maybe we can maintain it. With Trump and Republicans gleeful to take on any funding for violence prevention efforts, and abolishing consent decrees that improve police training and keep abuses in check, guess we are all about to be a control group of some kind.
[Vox archive link / Baltimore Sun / CBS / Baltimore Banner archive link / Baltimore Magazine / Baltimore Brew]
When people feel they have opportunities for education, growth, quality of life and meaningful wages, the crime rates in cities go down.
Trump misses 70s New York when everyone was broke and hopeless, life was dangerous, and the Rich had "special lives" shielded from the nasty things going on in the streets; he's going to bring it all back.
OT: paul is just climbing into the truck and the pharmacy opens in four minutes. I am in SO much pain; it's now been more than three days with no pain meds and I'm really in bad shape.
Sorry to whine; I will feel better soon.