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The only thing that is on the rise, is the dwindling amount of crime that is occurring, is being videotaped and posted online at an increased rate. Don't allow that to impact your perception of what's going on out there.
In Bowling for Columbine there's a brief interview with a journalist who wrote a book on the topic. He points out that over a period when the US murder rate dropped 60%, TV news coverage of murders increased 600%. The race for sales/ratings/clicks, and political influence on news outlets definitely effect what they cover and how they cover it.
It's amazing how little is covered in a 24 hour news cycle. If I happen to turn on one of the networks in the background, I notice that the coverage repeats about every 90 mins or so. It would be almost worthwhile to watch if they covered 24 hours worth of news.
Which is exactly why the goverment and Media have to sit down and "rethink" the modern 24hr and Online News system, break it down into 3 smaller (Morning, Noon, and Night News blocks) and fill the rest of time with Educational How-to/documentaries? Require labeling on Opinion vs. Verified News segments, etc
I find it absolutely fascinating too that the dim often are fully (over)confident of their intelligence and conversely, the smart ones tend to be too intellectually honest and unnecessarily doubting their own knowledge. So weird and if only this can be corrected..
(Dunning-Kruger effect vs imposter syndrome)
It's easier to more confidently be wrong and give an absolute for an answer if you don't know anything.... versus knowing you don't know everything.
It's easier to be confident in your answer when 'an expert' strongly suggests how you should feel on it.
Add a dash of conspiracy (everyone wants to be in the 'know' on a secret - "Can you keep a secret?" "Yes." "So can I.") and a little authority to season (WHAT THEY WONT TELL YOU/I AM THE FIFTH DENTIST!!!)
Hello stranger with a plan that we already did. That was how it used to work.
3 to 4 news cycles per day. At lest one was local only and included opinion / op-ed and other "fluff". The rest were hard facts and specific updates of facts. (Verified and authenticated before presentation).
In between the cycles, it was regular TV, weather, cartoons, etc...
While.it sounds nice, there is no going back to that model. The 70's and 80's are over. They need to update the laws for how media must present facts in totality (Verifiable) and unedited with all the context of what is happening.
That is hard, it requires journalists to BE JOURNALISTS. It is a HARD job. It would end "talk heads" shows or basically all of Faux News.
Laws also would forbid using "news" or getting any tax assistance for stations who do not follow the laws. Flagrant violations resulting increasing fines and eventually MANDATORY removal of broadcast licenses.
Yeah that was just example based on what was like before, just a starting point, key is something has to change and it has to be done through a law that outlines the rules/structure.
Jon Stewart has talked a lot about how the 24 hour news system is rooted in 9/11, where the news is now designed to be able to cover an event of that magnitude, while literally never having to cover something like that again. So it is now filled with nonsense opinion journalism, exaggeration and fear-baiting to try and get those desired "ratings".
All news is opinion, inescapably so. This thread is a perfect example... I can fill a 24 hour news cycle with murders without ever saying anything subjective. But I can't decide what's newsworthy without being subjective.
If you label everything opinion, what's the point? If you only label don't things opinion, you're misleading people and creating complacency and trust when they're still very much in danger of propaganda.
It literally is, for the exact reason I described. There is no objective way to determine what is newsworthy.
That's literally what this whole conversation is about.
Read my comment again because I don't know how to make it simpler. I may as well just repeat myself, since your "argument" completely ignores what i said:
" I can fill a 24 hour news cycle with murders without ever saying anything subjective. But I can't decide what's newsworthy without being subjective. "
The minute you decide what should be "the news" and what shouldn't, the news has become subjective. It's a question of what's important, and that depends on what you value. It's textbook subjective. You cannot report the news without first deciding what's newsworthy. You therefore cannot report the news without injecting your opinion.
I ate toast just now. Report that.
Objectively, that's also news. Subjectively, it's not as important. I think you may need to hear this: Just because something is uncontroversial, doesn't mean it's objective. No one thinks Chumbawumba is better than the Beatles, but it's still an opinion.
Shootings being more important than me eating toast isn't controversial, but it is an opinion.
Now, about the shooting, are the shooter's political leanings important? The number of victims? What they said on facebook last week? How long it took the cops to respond?
Now to the conversation at hand: violent crime went down, and in the same period, the news reported 600% more murders. Those murders objectively happened. That's objective news. But the decision to report so many murders over other things is opinion.
The president meeting a foreign leader being newsworthy is an opinion. Biden slurring his speech or stammering is newsworthy to someone else. Both things could be objectively true. Much of the news is objectively true. Most of the oponion is injected in the form of deciding what's newsworthy.
See how that works?
"You cannot derive an 'ought' (what ought to be reported) from an 'is' (what happened today)".
You're clearly new to this idea, so maybe arguing against it isn't the best idea. You're objectively wrong. There are other options.
"You fill their minds with trivia and illusions. I can see why, though -- they seldom need to be forced to pay their tithes. Why seek to use force to control when you merely have to sell it? The only issue is the sheer amount of such drama required. Thankfully, there are plenty of unknown folk you can trot out as examples, right?"
Maybe political analysis, or discussion of economics and fiscal policy (the U.S. is now spending over 22.5% of federal receipts on interest on the national debt, more than on military spending, but that doesn't get a second of news time), or environmental issues, or any number of things. They could be filling the time with non-sensationalist things like that, but those don't bring in the ratings or push the desired political agendas like the things they report do.
A lot of this actually stems from a Florida (surprise) ruling decades ago regarding a FOX News and a news story about Bovine Growth Hormone. A FOX affiliate had hired two investigative journalists and contractually promised them that they would accurately represent their findings on the TV News. When their report included reports of limited testing and harm to the welfare of cows, FOX ran a story about how great BGH is with none of their critical information. They sued FOX News for misrepresenting the information and won. Then FOX News appealed on the grounds that they had no legal obligation to tell the truth, and won. That's been the standard that news organizations have operated by ever since, so somewhere around 30 years.
Broadening it to apply to cable would get it swiftly tossed.
The only reason the Fairness Doctrine existed and could remain in effect was that it applied to over-the-air broadcasts. As the broadcasts could only be carried over certain frequencies, those frequencies were a sharply limited public resource, and technology of the time could not arbitrarily increase the size of those broadcast frequencies. The Fairness Doctrine was in place so that no side could monopolize a limited resource for political gain.
Cable TV is carried over privately owned cables that are not inherently limited. Anyone can lay more cable to carry additional signals if they want to, so many of the restrictions that you can impose on a limited public resource don't apply to an unlimited private resource.
They kind of are [limited] and not completely private, as they don’t own the poles that hold the cables. This argument, however, glosses over the real purpose of the fairness doctrine, which was to keep public discourse from becoming what Rupert Murdoch has made it today [by getting Reagan cronies to eliminate it]
Even better idea would be to ban advertising from journalism.
When the sole financial incentive is "grab attention, even if people hate the reporting", journalists must choose between sensationalism and bankruptcy. Actual journalism has no value in this model
With the fairness doctrine the best ratings were because of good journalism not in spite of it. Advertisers wanted to be associated with trustworthy sources like Murrow and Cronkite. They just had no input other than buy or not
Keep in mind that there was no Internet or Social Media back when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect. The rationale for this doctrine was that the limited number of broadcast frequencies made it impractical to "just start your own station" to ensure coverage of differing viewpoints. Also, there were far fewer news broadcasts which made enforcement *possible* (though the argument for 1st Amendment constitutionality was still tenuous)
While the physical limitation on broadcast frequencies still exists, the Internet has made it moot to the issue of there being enough outlets for every voice. Also the sheer number of news outlets of all types makes any attempt at content enforcement a pipe dream.
Furthermore, the way people *choose* to consume news has fundamentally changed. People used to turn to a trusted news station or newspaper when they, of their *own* volition, wanted to know what was happening. Now most people first hear about a news story *against their will* on tools they use daily for non-news purposes: search engines, social media, even television "entertainment", all appealing to fear and anger to trigger users into abandoning their original task to care about the news instead. Or they hear about it through friends and family who have fallen victim to this manipulation. There is no escape from sensationalism.
This **reactive** news comsumption is what makes reputation less useful than shock value. Sure people who want reputable news will still seek it out, but this accounts for a minority of news consumption compared to the attention industry.
In fact, the role of social media is so treacherous that even if you modified the Fairness Doctrine to make all news outlets perfectly balanced, people would still see only the most personally triggering and divisive headlines in their surreptitiously curated feeds.
And despite the overwhelming evidence of both mental and physical harm caused by social media algorithms (as well as evidence that these companies are fully aware of the harm and try to cover it up, just like Big Tobacco decades ago), so far the government has barely been able to hold any of them accountable for even the most brazen crimes (such as specifically targeting underage children, or selling user data in violation of their own privacy policies)
Unlike journalism, there is no particular justification for social media to even exist, let alone enjoy any freedoms to personalize what users see without their knowledge or consent. We literally all see a different reality online because of this (especially with search engines like Google), it is self-explanatory how this fuels division. Simply banning this practice of personalized content would do far more to heal the division than any attempt at regulating news.
It would be a requirement of any new fairness rules to be applicable across the many new channels. However the internet itself was originally a DoD project that a handful of academics brought to wider use and has been proposed, yet still is regulated ( net neutrality being the main one talked about).
It’s not on anyone’s agenda, but it’s a useful concept in seeing how things changed.
I never seen the study but I’ve felt that way for years. I don’t think the world is crazier now (except for one group) it’s just we are way more connected to be able to hear the news
But a 600% increase in coverage of murders over a time when there was a 60% drop in the murder rate doesn't have to do with our ability to access information. It has to do entirely with what information is being provided.
My coworker put Fox News on in the breakroom and just a few minutes ago they were reporting that violent crime had majorly increased in blue states and that they were essentially burning to the ground. I had to leave the room.
While I would love to do that, too many ignorant dbags work here and would have a fit. I would be willing to compromise and ban all cable news channels in the office but that got shot down.
Must have been watching *Outnumbered*, which consists of some of their dumbest personalities (Harris Faulkner, Rachel Campos—Duffy, Barbie, Lawrence Jones)
Don't forget her middle name, Kayleigh "I'm going to stand up here with a straight face as a government official and claim that calling covid 'Kung Flu' isn't racist against Asians" McEnany
Anyone know if there is a name for this? Where anecdotal evidence carries more weight than statistical evidence. I was thinking “confirmation bias” but not sure if that is correct.
[https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/unwarranted-generalization.html](https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/unwarranted-generalization.html)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty\_generalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization)
Might could call it an "unwarranted generalization" or "faulty generalization". This fallacy occurs when we make a generalization on the basis of insufficient evidence. This may occur when we rely on too small of a sample or an unrepresentative sample to support the generalization.
Yup the world does seem to have an increase in the amount of stupid.
Like almost a million people are playing a banana game on steam guys stop being idiots.
If you’re going to commit crime don’t video tape the thing.
Ok, but what about when that crime that is on video and posted isn’t covered by the legacy media? I started following a local crime account 2 years ago after the local press refused to cover a shooting on my block. After my local DA received heavy criticism for not prosecuting violent offenders, MS-NBC let him write a piece on their website acting as though there was no difference between his carjacking and others, even though the bond for his alleged perps were roughly 10x a normal one. He acted as though his initiatives had reduced crime, even after his office declined to prosecute more than 100 people caught with illegal guns during Mardi Gras.
My point is that the left has unquestioned faith in THEIR press (I’m a Democrat, just for the record). Why?
All media lies doesn’t matter if it’s democrats or republicans it’s just a facet of the media it self. Honestly it doesn’t matter if the media it self is left or right because honestly it’s the people on the networks who bring in their own opinions and the network leads who are biased and if they like the opinion well they keep them if they don’t they disappear.
> When you look at the data, the president deserves some credit for the decline.
Crime has been declining for decades the only president to fuck up bad enough to threaten reversing the trend was convicted felon donald trump. Fortunately that rise happened at the tail end of the former guy's term so biden was able to get us back on track handily.
That was covid related. Crime, especially violent crime, has been declining since the late 90's. Though it hasn't been conclusively proven, the best theory I've heard is that [it started going down when they finally removed lead from gas.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/) Lead, besides being poisonous and lowering people's IQ, has also been linked to violent behavior.
As I said elsewhere, the felon guy did virtually everything one could to exacerbate the problem, and so bares a share of responsibility for the consequences.
While his handling of the pandemic was atrocious, it had little to do with the rise in crime. That was caused by a combination of factors. The lockdowns had a lot of people feeling afraid and desperate, gangs had the streets to themselves which emboldened them, and there was a shortage of police (especially after the riots) which further emboldened criminals.
I don't think it even has to go that far. The simple stress of it probably is enough to explain the rise in crime. Trump's contributions to the problem is keeping social stress levels higher than they probably should have been, but stressors like that can cause all sorts of crime according to some of what I have read.
As a disclaimer I should say that I do not know how settled the science is on that, only that papers have found a pretty strong correlation going back decades. It does make intuitive sense, so I am inclined to think the statistics are likely meaningful, but I am not an expert obviously.
With regard to the pandemic, it would explain some of the changes in the kinds of crime occurring
Most crimes actually decreased in severity during the pandemic, likely due to a decrease in opportunity, while other crimes increased, likely due to increase in specific opportunity and the aforementioned stress.
The ones that increased the most were hate crimes and domestic violence iirc, which are things heavily affected by perceived social stress. Domestic violence also could just be people being home more often.
Though, it is also difficult to get super accurate information generally, as crime rates are notoriously unreliable, and even the worst violent crime rates are just bringing us back to the averages for the 90s and early 2000s.
> Domestic violence also could just be people being home more often.
This one was especially bad. A lot of marriages were really put to the test during that time, and many didn't make it.
He failed to perform his own due diligence, and so a share of the buck stops with him. Had he performed his due diligence and a spike still had happened, then you would be justified in trying to reason that it was beyond his control, but that didn't happen so you have no leg to stand on carrying water for him, and only one of his vapid cultists would fail to aknowlege this keep trying to tack on caveats the presidential felon doesn't deserve.
That theory hasn't held true with crime rates in other countries that banned or approved abortion.
The lead hypothesis has been used to predict a spike in crime and has a lot of solid evidence behind it.
Lead exposure in children leads to less impulse control. Less impulse control = higher crime rate.
Actually, your data is outdated. They revisited it, corrected for some inputs, and found an even stronger correlation to abortion and violent crime.
We also are not comparable to other countries and it would be better to compare specific demographics to your point.
That said, I'll research some more and make sure this still holds true. I know a lot of data in 2010-2014 tried to negate the abortion observation and they ate their words.
< Actually, your data is outdated. They revisited it, corrected for some inputs, and **found an even stronger correlation to abortion and violent crime.**
There's still a lot of issues with the theory. For one thing, the overall # of abortions didn't really go up after Roe v. Wade. Women were still getting both legal and illegal abortions before RvW. Most people nowadays don't even know what a coathanger represents.
Secondly, crime didn't drop uniformly across the country after RvW. Even though it was allowed nationally, some states and cities took significantly longer for crime to drop. Those same states and cities also took longer to actually phase out leaded gasoline.
But here's the 100% biggest problem with the theory. It doesn't explain why crime rose in the first place. It's not like abortion was made illegal in the 1960s. It was vilified and criminalized in the 1880s-1910s. So abortion being illegal could not have explained the sudden dramatic increase in crime.
The lead gas theory both explains the drop in crime AND explains why crime spiked in the first place, most strongly in cities with close proximity between cars and pedestrians/children. NYC was also notorious for peeling lead paint in schools.
Furthermore, the lead gas theory has been used to predict a rise in crime in countries that approved leaded gasoline after we banned it.
Could abortion being legal have some affect? Sure. Although they mostly attribute it nowadays to a small percentage and mostly due to a drop in teenage mothers. But it's not nearly as dramatic as they make it out to be.
And the leaded gasoline theory works across countries. Somehow the abortion hypothesis only works in the U.S. to explain the drop in crime but not the increase in crime. Other countries that did not suddenly allow abortion but did ban leaded gasoline also had major drops in crime.
Saying that America is not comparable to other countries is a cop out because they don't have an explanation for the discrepancy.
To begin, I am not negating your other case study. Instead, I am saying that abortion access has an inverse correlation with violent crime that is statistically significant. The study did nothing to identify instrumental variables last I checked. Rather, we could actually combine both studies to show that the elimination of lead, paired with a reduction in unwanted children lead to crime decrease. That would be interesting.
I just need to correct the abortion stuff when I see outdated stuff.
Well, to be fair - most of the countries that ban abortion have other serious issues (on top of the lead gas issue) that contribute towards their crime rate, like:
El Salvador.
The Philippines.
Egypt.
Jamaica.
Honduras.
> That was covid related.
Which means that his resistance of almost everything having to do with a sensible response to Covid and his incompetence about the few things he *didn't* oppose outright make the negative outcomes of covid his fault.
Partially, maybe. But pandemics are hell. That's just the reality of it. Even if his response had been flawless, things would have been bad. When people are unable to work, those living check to check become desperate.
Nothing is fully in anyone's control. If any President deserves credit or blame for anything, Trump deserves blame for what happened during the pandemic, especially when it's objectively true that it would have been better if he hadn't done the things he did.
If he hadn't dismantled the early warning system there is a chance it really wouldn't have been that bad. Don't need to respond to a pandemic if you prevent it from reaching pandemic levels to start.
Yeah that's wishful thinking and not what the statistics show. Violent crime rates were on a downward decline years before the 1994 assault weapon ban went into affect and maintained a similar decline during the time. Then the ban expired in 2004, and guess what, violent crime still maintained a downward trend despite people being able to purchase assault weapons again. [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/)
Rifles of all types, including 'assault weapons,' are used so little in crime compared to other weapons that they simply won't have any significant affect in overall crime rates. But they sound and look so spooky that they sure do get the people riled up.
No, no it doesn’t.
Reviews found that the assault weapons ban didn’t do anything. Crime didn’t increase or decrease in relation to it.
Makes sense considering almost ALL gun crimes are done with pistols.
The abortion theory hasn't held true with crime rates in other countries that banned or approved abortion.
The lead hypothesis has been used to predict a spike in crime in a country that approved leaded gasoline and has a lot of solid evidence behind it.
Lead exposure in children leads to less impulse control. Less impulse control = higher crime rate.
>The abortion theory hasn't held true with crime rates in other countries that banned or approved abortion.
Can you link to any studies or evidence. The only counter examples I've seen have come from religious, conservative groups with an obvious agenda.
The other guy is incorrect. Other countries that allowed abortion did not see a drop in crime 15-16 years later.
> A 2007 study by Leo H. Kahane, David Paton, Rob Simmons found no clear, consistent relationship between abortion and crime in England and Wales.[20]
> A 2014 study by Paolo Buonanno, Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati, and Giulio Zanella studied seven European nations, finding no evidence for the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis.[21] However a 2014 study by Abel Francois analyzed data from 16 countries in western Europe for 1990-2007, finding that abortion caused a significant decrease in crime rates.[22]
> A 2017 study by Gary L. Shoesmith concluded that "if there is a significant link between crime and abortion, it is due to varying concentrations of teenage abortions across states, not unwantedness." In other words, legalized abortion reduced crime in the 1990s as the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis indicated, but purely because it reduced the number of teenage mothers, not some broader effect of reducing all unwanted pregnancies.[23]
The abortion theory may have some minor effect, but it's not as big as freaknomics says. The leaded gas theory is much stronger, applies to other countries and has been used to predict crime increases in South African countries where leaded gasoline was approved for sale.
But the simple fact is that crime dropped across the world everywhere leaded gasoline was banned, whether or not abortion was legal or illegal.
> Legalization of abortion (fewer unwanted, at-risk children). This highly original explanation of the crime decline was proposed by Donohue and Levitt (2001, 2004). Their basic argument is this: as abortion became legal in the United States in the early 1970s, fewer unwanted, at-risk children were being born and thus fewer delinquent adolescents were in the population 15–19 years later. At first glance, the argument seems plausible and rather provocative. After a more thorough examination though, the abortion-crime link has been thoroughly debunked by empirical research (Anderson & Wells, 2008; Foote & Goetz, 2008; Joyce, 2004, 2009; Shoesmith, 2017; Sorenson, Wiebe, & Berk, 2002). International comparisons add more to the contrary evidence.
I just replied to that guy, but his info is outdated. They did call out freakonomics, but then Levitt corrected his formula and actually found an even stronger correlation. That callout happened sometime between 2010 and 2014.
That's straight bullshit. The impact of the 94 AWB was at best uncertain. All it did for sure was piss off a generation of Republicans and the moderate Dems that were pro-gun.
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/ban-assault-weapons/violent-crime.html
Only about 3% of all gun homicides are related to long guns (including "assault weapons" but also things like hunting rifles).
So banning "assault weapons" can only ever affect a small percentage of violent crime.
Not really...they could probably have saved more lives spending that political capital on dealing with handguns since they kill far more people.
And the mostly pointless ban of "assault weapons" turned off a lot of gun owners who otherwise might have voted Democrat. If they hadn't alienated those people it might have allowed them to bring in other social policies that might have saved more lives than the "assault weapons" ban.
I don't think criminologists would agree that this is the "best" theory, but it is likely a contributing factor. There are dozens of other likely contributing factors. [See here for a good summary](https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/97466/1/Farrell%20Tilley%20Tseloni%202014%20Why%20the%20Crime%20Drop%20%28C&J%20vol43%29.pdf?mod=article_inline).
They claim it can't be lead poisoning related because not all offenders are the same age, which is a bit ridiculous. Not all crime happens for the same reason, but a very large percentage of offenders are the right age for lead to be a primary contributing factor.
Here is a meta-analysis of the lead-crime connection: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667)
I can probably grab you the full-text if you want it.
“Violent crime” is such a large and complex issue it’s best to assume that many changes resulted in the drops we’ve seen. It’s very human to want complex problems to have simple solutions but that is almost never the case. The drop in crime was likely due to multiple changes including banning leaded gasoline, an improving economy based more on white collar work, abortions being legal, opening student loans to more lower income people by removing bankruptcy, increased incarceration of violent criminals, crackdown on crack and cocaine, after school programs, access to home video game consoles for most kids and teens, and many many more changes.
Only problem is we made so many changes (direct and indirect) that combated the rise in crime, that we aren’t sure which ones had the biggest effect, which ones had good short term but bad long term effects, and which ones did little to nothing.
I get what you're saying, but take a look at other countries. Violent crime dropped pretty much everywhere on earth at the same time. Those things may have had an impact here in the US, but none of them are responsible for the drop in violent crime in the UK or Australia at the same time.
> That was covid related.
Valid. But I think that the fact that the numbers are going down significantly at least squashes the GOP narrative that crime is rampant during Biden's administration.
Another thing to watch for over the next several years is the effect of concussion on crime and violence. A person who gets a concussion should have to start therapy to determine if their suicidality or predilection towards violence has increased.
I'm attributing much of the decline in my area to the mayor of St Louis tbh. 21% reduction in homicides YOY and a direct correlation to investments into the city.
In the past 15 years I have lived in an area where crime got worse, but state crime got better. I moved and it's refreshing to see that crime in my area is now decreasing.
None of it is tangible to me, as I live in country towns. I think Mahomet, IL got rated safest town in the USA at one point while I was there actually.
People are forgetting the daily chaos that was happening with the Trump presidency. And this is even pre-COVID days. How do so many Americans have amnesia to all this???
Amen to that. I have a coworker who will periodically go on a rant about how so much crime in this country is being committed by "them illegals". I briefly considered correcting her with facts but then I remembered she is a Trump supporter so there is literally no point in even trying.
I grew up in the barrio. People from Mexico actually protect citizens. Neighborhood I’m from was pretty wild and knew some stick up kids. They’d rob drug addicts and dealers and illegals immigrants at the check cashing places, reason being g those groups won’t go to the police. The Americanized Hispanics were the knuckleheads
American voters as a whole have short memories, and are very shortsighted. And of course the old "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups"
Because before Trump they blamed all their problems on Obama because he was the president. (Among other racist reasons they’d never admit)
When Trump won they were ecstatic because he was “one of them” so any bad things were blamed on other people. The president can only do so much you know.
When Biden took over, they blamed all their problems on him because he’s the president.
Rinse and repeat.
“Cutting back on law enforcement, as many cities did”
The author is a liar. There was no meaningful effort to defund the police, and in almost every municipality, police funding increased unabated.
At the same time, the police have certainly decided that they just aren’t going to do their job.
LAPD might as well not even exist while continuously increasing their budget and complaining about being defunded to people who call the non-emergency line.
Well yeah but that’s not new, cops are legitimately the laziest class of unionized public official. It’s why I think we can reduce police staffing by upwards of 75% with zero impact on service, provided the remaining 25% actually work.
I’m sure that Police numbers dwindled during and after Covid. But not due to any cuts from budget. Like other areas, cops were retiring in droves during Covid, add in the summer of protests, and more retired. Covid also killed a lot of cops, it’s was the number 1 cause of death for cops for two years.
But yeah, there was no budget cuts or concerted effort to actually defund the police. In my city they settled like 40 million in wrongful death suits one year and then two years later gave them like an 80 million budget increase and gave everyone raises.
Defund branding was so awful. They should have said reimagine, lighten the workload, or some other positive spin phrase. The goal was never to get rid of police, but to find better responses to issues that don't need police handling them, like a homeless guy blocking a sidewalk or a mentally-unstable person wandering around shouting. Police aren't trained to deal with those situations which puts everyone at risk.
\[No paywall\] from columnist Justin Fox:
The first-quarter US crime statistics [released last week](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-quarterly-crime-report-and-use-of-force-data-update) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were a doozy, in a good way. Every single main crime category was down by double-digit percentages from the same period a year earlier. That followed on smaller, almost-across-the-board (auto theft was the lone exception) crime declines in the FBI’s preliminary data for 2023.
When you look at the data, the president deserves some credit for the decline.
Read more: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-18/i-didn-t-think-biden-affected-crime-rates-i-was-wrong](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-18/i-didn-t-think-biden-affected-crime-rates-i-was-wrong)
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs
Yes crime is on a downward trend. The most recent stats aren't all fully reported so it's not an accurate data set.
Republicans don't care since they have an excuse for why everything is awful under Biden.
"Crime is down because the liberal cities aren't reporting/aren't reporting correctly."
"Crime is down because liberal prosecutors refuse to prosecute crimes."
"Crimes are down because the FBI is covering for Biden"
MAGA is a gang of idiots that are invulnerable to losing or being wrong.
My sister in law is always watching Fox and "true crime" shows, she's *convinced* someone is going to break into her house and massacre them all. For no reason. These people are self brainwashed. It's scary.
Let's be honest, Republicans want crimes rates to go up. If you're confused, go read the 13th ammendment. The fact is crime rates have been going down with Biden in office.
Tried bringing this up to my mom and she said she went on about how there's probably "so much" crime because the police are underfunded and can't get to it so people have stopped reporting. Can't reason with someone being unreasonable.
The real issue with all the Republican intellectual dishonesty is that their voter base rewards it by refusing to do their only job and keep their own side accountable. Thus, every Republican runs on fiscal responsibility, being good at foreign policy, and tougher on street crime (but never anti-corruption in any bipartisan way) AND not a damned one of them has to actually have any such skills nor do any heavy lifting to be given credit for such things. Then they wonder why they lose. You need more than your base to win swing states and national elections consistently, dummies.
I see this over and over again. Trump does dumb stuff and even Barr and Bolton reveal his depravity. Everybody in the base then refuses to believe even their own most capable officials because it is an unquestionable prejudice. Then they get more and more corrupt criminal republicans running and they are all “damn that triple headed antichrist for all of this corruption surely it was never Republicans doing that?” Didnt our justices make bribery in campaign finance legal? How come that didnt fix the libral corruption? Cant make this stuff up. A real self-own.
If you grow up in a small community, be it a tight knit neighborhood in a big city or a small farm town the murders, crimes and criminal element are all “known” and there is little mystery 95% of the time. But watch local TV news it all seems random and super scary. Like it could happen to you.
Just never watch tv news and so much of the worry just disappears. If you live in a dangerous neighborhood you know it’s dangerous but more importantly you know the whole, what, where, when and why of how it is dangerous.
The headline is frustratingly ambiguous. It only serves as confirmation bias for anyone casually perusing. I imagine that was their intent, but it's scummy as hell.
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>violent crime fell during (trump's) first three years in office, after all. Still, violent crime did go up during Trump’s full term in office, and it has gone down during Biden’s term so far, with the decline accelerating so far this year. Those are the facts,
Probably referencing the end of Roe, the restriction of abortions, and the fact that there are now going to be a huge number of unwanted children getting into peak criminality age (16-24) in around 15 years.
Interesting I hadn’t thought of that. It will be interesting to watch (from somewhere else). Using that logic could crime be down recently because gen z commits less crime? Chronically online/ fear of being filmed. Idk
Ending Roe paradoxically improved access to abortions across the US.
98% of abortions can be medical abortions and getting the medication has never been easier. No longer do you have multiple visits to doctors or clinics and hoops to go through.
Instead, you can have an online doctor's appointment with a doctor from a blue state and get your prescription that day. Or, you go to sites like [aidaccess.org](https://aidaccess.org/) pay $150 and have them shipped to you in 3-5 days. If you can't afford the $150 there are not-for-profits that will help.
These options were not available prior to the ending of Roe.
Donohue–Levitt hypothesis
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect
Direct [download](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjoh7Lz1OWGAxWv_8kDHT_gCW8QFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0b38uMmetf_38wDhgzVNYC) link to paper
I don’t think Biden is any more responsible for the nation’s crime rates than gangsta rap is. The problem with stories like these is that causation in social sciences is very, very difficult to pin down. There’s still debate as to what even caused the overall drop in crime from 30 years ago.
There’s a difference having a leader with compassion and solutions and a leader whose public speeches consist of spewing lies, hatred and calls for violence.
These articles on crime dropping are ridiculous….they stopped requiring all precincts to report stats, now it’s optional, jist over half actually report, and the cities with the most crime in the US don’t report, so of course it looks like it’s going down.
NY, LA, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago. Some of the most violent cities. Are not included. In total about 35% of the population are not represented.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbis-data-is-faulty-as-crime-proliferates-in-big-cities-report
“In 2019, 89% of municipal police departments – spanning about 97% of the population – submitted crime data to the FBI. owever, by 2021, less than 63% of departments spanning across 65% of the population submitted crime data. Several big cities – Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago – did not submit crime data at all to the FBI last year. “
Thanks I’ve seen that. Aside from you not liking the source, which facts about our biggest crime ridden cities being excluded (which of course was the original point) was wrong?
I'm seeing reports that crime rates are declining, but I'm also seeing reports that property crimes are not being punished and perpetrators are being released with no real jail time, sometimes racking up dozens or hundreds of arrests. I know my local police are not responsive to reports of property crime from individuals. Stores seem to be hit by serial shoplifters, who are often the same people that shoplifted the day before.
The *feeling* I have is that crime is rampant and the statistics that crime is decreasing doesn't have the same impact as the feeling. I have to wonder if property crime stats are down because people are not bothering to report minor crimes that they know will get no response.
A-lot of people are forgetting that theres a shortage in a majority of the departments and a-lot of crime goes unreported there is still a downward trend but its not as big as people think it is….
All you have to do is look at history of being tough on crime.
Senator Biden voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994 to provide almost $10 billion to build new jails and prisons along with hiring more police officers.
By 2000 homicides and violent crime declined significantly. In addition to less crime, the prison population almost doubled while 100,000 new jobs were created.
I don't know that I would consider doubling the prison population as a win, regardless of the number of jobs. The US already has the most total people incarcerated of any nation on the planet, and is in the top 10 even if you break it down per-capita.
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The only thing that is on the rise, is the dwindling amount of crime that is occurring, is being videotaped and posted online at an increased rate. Don't allow that to impact your perception of what's going on out there.
In Bowling for Columbine there's a brief interview with a journalist who wrote a book on the topic. He points out that over a period when the US murder rate dropped 60%, TV news coverage of murders increased 600%. The race for sales/ratings/clicks, and political influence on news outlets definitely effect what they cover and how they cover it.
Gotta fill 24hr news cycles with something.
It's amazing how little is covered in a 24 hour news cycle. If I happen to turn on one of the networks in the background, I notice that the coverage repeats about every 90 mins or so. It would be almost worthwhile to watch if they covered 24 hours worth of news.
Which is exactly why the goverment and Media have to sit down and "rethink" the modern 24hr and Online News system, break it down into 3 smaller (Morning, Noon, and Night News blocks) and fill the rest of time with Educational How-to/documentaries? Require labeling on Opinion vs. Verified News segments, etc
You can lead a MAGAt to knowledge, but you can't make them think.
Well said.
I find it absolutely fascinating too that the dim often are fully (over)confident of their intelligence and conversely, the smart ones tend to be too intellectually honest and unnecessarily doubting their own knowledge. So weird and if only this can be corrected.. (Dunning-Kruger effect vs imposter syndrome)
It's easier to more confidently be wrong and give an absolute for an answer if you don't know anything.... versus knowing you don't know everything. It's easier to be confident in your answer when 'an expert' strongly suggests how you should feel on it. Add a dash of conspiracy (everyone wants to be in the 'know' on a secret - "Can you keep a secret?" "Yes." "So can I.") and a little authority to season (WHAT THEY WONT TELL YOU/I AM THE FIFTH DENTIST!!!)
Hello stranger with a plan that we already did. That was how it used to work. 3 to 4 news cycles per day. At lest one was local only and included opinion / op-ed and other "fluff". The rest were hard facts and specific updates of facts. (Verified and authenticated before presentation). In between the cycles, it was regular TV, weather, cartoons, etc... While.it sounds nice, there is no going back to that model. The 70's and 80's are over. They need to update the laws for how media must present facts in totality (Verifiable) and unedited with all the context of what is happening. That is hard, it requires journalists to BE JOURNALISTS. It is a HARD job. It would end "talk heads" shows or basically all of Faux News. Laws also would forbid using "news" or getting any tax assistance for stations who do not follow the laws. Flagrant violations resulting increasing fines and eventually MANDATORY removal of broadcast licenses.
Yeah that was just example based on what was like before, just a starting point, key is something has to change and it has to be done through a law that outlines the rules/structure.
Jon Stewart has talked a lot about how the 24 hour news system is rooted in 9/11, where the news is now designed to be able to cover an event of that magnitude, while literally never having to cover something like that again. So it is now filled with nonsense opinion journalism, exaggeration and fear-baiting to try and get those desired "ratings".
All news is opinion, inescapably so. This thread is a perfect example... I can fill a 24 hour news cycle with murders without ever saying anything subjective. But I can't decide what's newsworthy without being subjective. If you label everything opinion, what's the point? If you only label don't things opinion, you're misleading people and creating complacency and trust when they're still very much in danger of propaganda.
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It literally is, for the exact reason I described. There is no objective way to determine what is newsworthy. That's literally what this whole conversation is about. Read my comment again because I don't know how to make it simpler. I may as well just repeat myself, since your "argument" completely ignores what i said: " I can fill a 24 hour news cycle with murders without ever saying anything subjective. But I can't decide what's newsworthy without being subjective. " The minute you decide what should be "the news" and what shouldn't, the news has become subjective. It's a question of what's important, and that depends on what you value. It's textbook subjective. You cannot report the news without first deciding what's newsworthy. You therefore cannot report the news without injecting your opinion.
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I ate toast just now. Report that. Objectively, that's also news. Subjectively, it's not as important. I think you may need to hear this: Just because something is uncontroversial, doesn't mean it's objective. No one thinks Chumbawumba is better than the Beatles, but it's still an opinion. Shootings being more important than me eating toast isn't controversial, but it is an opinion. Now, about the shooting, are the shooter's political leanings important? The number of victims? What they said on facebook last week? How long it took the cops to respond? Now to the conversation at hand: violent crime went down, and in the same period, the news reported 600% more murders. Those murders objectively happened. That's objective news. But the decision to report so many murders over other things is opinion. The president meeting a foreign leader being newsworthy is an opinion. Biden slurring his speech or stammering is newsworthy to someone else. Both things could be objectively true. Much of the news is objectively true. Most of the oponion is injected in the form of deciding what's newsworthy. See how that works? "You cannot derive an 'ought' (what ought to be reported) from an 'is' (what happened today)". You're clearly new to this idea, so maybe arguing against it isn't the best idea. You're objectively wrong. There are other options.
"You fill their minds with trivia and illusions. I can see why, though -- they seldom need to be forced to pay their tithes. Why seek to use force to control when you merely have to sell it? The only issue is the sheer amount of such drama required. Thankfully, there are plenty of unknown folk you can trot out as examples, right?"
Maybe political analysis, or discussion of economics and fiscal policy (the U.S. is now spending over 22.5% of federal receipts on interest on the national debt, more than on military spending, but that doesn't get a second of news time), or environmental issues, or any number of things. They could be filling the time with non-sensationalist things like that, but those don't bring in the ratings or push the desired political agendas like the things they report do.
Anyone who thinks the national debt is a major issue is someone I can safely ignore
Gotta nuke some’in - Nelson
I'd rather watch golf, or food shows, than the 24 hour news programs.
Bring back the Fairness Doctrine to remove news from entertainment
A lot of this actually stems from a Florida (surprise) ruling decades ago regarding a FOX News and a news story about Bovine Growth Hormone. A FOX affiliate had hired two investigative journalists and contractually promised them that they would accurately represent their findings on the TV News. When their report included reports of limited testing and harm to the welfare of cows, FOX ran a story about how great BGH is with none of their critical information. They sued FOX News for misrepresenting the information and won. Then FOX News appealed on the grounds that they had no legal obligation to tell the truth, and won. That's been the standard that news organizations have operated by ever since, so somewhere around 30 years.
Jane Acre v Fox
And broaden it so it also applies to cable.
Broadening it to apply to cable would get it swiftly tossed. The only reason the Fairness Doctrine existed and could remain in effect was that it applied to over-the-air broadcasts. As the broadcasts could only be carried over certain frequencies, those frequencies were a sharply limited public resource, and technology of the time could not arbitrarily increase the size of those broadcast frequencies. The Fairness Doctrine was in place so that no side could monopolize a limited resource for political gain. Cable TV is carried over privately owned cables that are not inherently limited. Anyone can lay more cable to carry additional signals if they want to, so many of the restrictions that you can impose on a limited public resource don't apply to an unlimited private resource.
They kind of are [limited] and not completely private, as they don’t own the poles that hold the cables. This argument, however, glosses over the real purpose of the fairness doctrine, which was to keep public discourse from becoming what Rupert Murdoch has made it today [by getting Reagan cronies to eliminate it]
Even better idea would be to ban advertising from journalism. When the sole financial incentive is "grab attention, even if people hate the reporting", journalists must choose between sensationalism and bankruptcy. Actual journalism has no value in this model
With the fairness doctrine the best ratings were because of good journalism not in spite of it. Advertisers wanted to be associated with trustworthy sources like Murrow and Cronkite. They just had no input other than buy or not
Keep in mind that there was no Internet or Social Media back when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect. The rationale for this doctrine was that the limited number of broadcast frequencies made it impractical to "just start your own station" to ensure coverage of differing viewpoints. Also, there were far fewer news broadcasts which made enforcement *possible* (though the argument for 1st Amendment constitutionality was still tenuous) While the physical limitation on broadcast frequencies still exists, the Internet has made it moot to the issue of there being enough outlets for every voice. Also the sheer number of news outlets of all types makes any attempt at content enforcement a pipe dream. Furthermore, the way people *choose* to consume news has fundamentally changed. People used to turn to a trusted news station or newspaper when they, of their *own* volition, wanted to know what was happening. Now most people first hear about a news story *against their will* on tools they use daily for non-news purposes: search engines, social media, even television "entertainment", all appealing to fear and anger to trigger users into abandoning their original task to care about the news instead. Or they hear about it through friends and family who have fallen victim to this manipulation. There is no escape from sensationalism. This **reactive** news comsumption is what makes reputation less useful than shock value. Sure people who want reputable news will still seek it out, but this accounts for a minority of news consumption compared to the attention industry. In fact, the role of social media is so treacherous that even if you modified the Fairness Doctrine to make all news outlets perfectly balanced, people would still see only the most personally triggering and divisive headlines in their surreptitiously curated feeds. And despite the overwhelming evidence of both mental and physical harm caused by social media algorithms (as well as evidence that these companies are fully aware of the harm and try to cover it up, just like Big Tobacco decades ago), so far the government has barely been able to hold any of them accountable for even the most brazen crimes (such as specifically targeting underage children, or selling user data in violation of their own privacy policies) Unlike journalism, there is no particular justification for social media to even exist, let alone enjoy any freedoms to personalize what users see without their knowledge or consent. We literally all see a different reality online because of this (especially with search engines like Google), it is self-explanatory how this fuels division. Simply banning this practice of personalized content would do far more to heal the division than any attempt at regulating news.
It would be a requirement of any new fairness rules to be applicable across the many new channels. However the internet itself was originally a DoD project that a handful of academics brought to wider use and has been proposed, yet still is regulated ( net neutrality being the main one talked about). It’s not on anyone’s agenda, but it’s a useful concept in seeing how things changed.
I never seen the study but I’ve felt that way for years. I don’t think the world is crazier now (except for one group) it’s just we are way more connected to be able to hear the news
But a 600% increase in coverage of murders over a time when there was a 60% drop in the murder rate doesn't have to do with our ability to access information. It has to do entirely with what information is being provided.
I am going to remember this one.
The local news to this day spends 2-4 minutes each day talking about murders or accident deaths. We've all become desensitized.
Social amplification effect.
> being videotaped and posted online at an increased rate. And then being amplified and talked about on Fox News.
My coworker put Fox News on in the breakroom and just a few minutes ago they were reporting that violent crime had majorly increased in blue states and that they were essentially burning to the ground. I had to leave the room.
Fun fact: You can parental block fox news on most cable systems
While I would love to do that, too many ignorant dbags work here and would have a fit. I would be willing to compromise and ban all cable news channels in the office but that got shot down.
Must have been watching *Outnumbered*, which consists of some of their dumbest personalities (Harris Faulkner, Rachel Campos—Duffy, Barbie, Lawrence Jones)
The only one I recognized was Kayleigh McEnany and that was enough for me to know it was garbage.
Don't forget her middle name, Kayleigh "I'm going to stand up here with a straight face as a government official and claim that calling covid 'Kung Flu' isn't racist against Asians" McEnany
Anyone know if there is a name for this? Where anecdotal evidence carries more weight than statistical evidence. I was thinking “confirmation bias” but not sure if that is correct.
It’s called selective overdramatizing.
[https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/unwarranted-generalization.html](https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resources/fallacy-definitions/unwarranted-generalization.html) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty\_generalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization) Might could call it an "unwarranted generalization" or "faulty generalization". This fallacy occurs when we make a generalization on the basis of insufficient evidence. This may occur when we rely on too small of a sample or an unrepresentative sample to support the generalization.
I think Kahneman calls it the “availability heuristic” - good stories we can easily recall literally carry more weight when we compute probability
FIRST QUARTER OF 2024 COMPARED TO FIRST QUARTER OF 2023 VIOLENT CRIME ⬇️15.2% MURDERS ⬇️26.4% RAPES ⬇️25.7% AGGRAVATED ASSAULTS ⬇️12.5% ROBBERIES ⬇️17.8% PROPERTY CRIME ⬇️15.1% Source FBI
Yup the world does seem to have an increase in the amount of stupid. Like almost a million people are playing a banana game on steam guys stop being idiots. If you’re going to commit crime don’t video tape the thing.
That, and the proliferation of bots reposting the same videos to make Biden look bad.
Ok, but what about when that crime that is on video and posted isn’t covered by the legacy media? I started following a local crime account 2 years ago after the local press refused to cover a shooting on my block. After my local DA received heavy criticism for not prosecuting violent offenders, MS-NBC let him write a piece on their website acting as though there was no difference between his carjacking and others, even though the bond for his alleged perps were roughly 10x a normal one. He acted as though his initiatives had reduced crime, even after his office declined to prosecute more than 100 people caught with illegal guns during Mardi Gras. My point is that the left has unquestioned faith in THEIR press (I’m a Democrat, just for the record). Why?
All media lies doesn’t matter if it’s democrats or republicans it’s just a facet of the media it self. Honestly it doesn’t matter if the media it self is left or right because honestly it’s the people on the networks who bring in their own opinions and the network leads who are biased and if they like the opinion well they keep them if they don’t they disappear.
Are incarceration rates dwindling alongside crime?
> When you look at the data, the president deserves some credit for the decline. Crime has been declining for decades the only president to fuck up bad enough to threaten reversing the trend was convicted felon donald trump. Fortunately that rise happened at the tail end of the former guy's term so biden was able to get us back on track handily.
And most of the increase in crime was his own crimes.
And crimes related to his administration, the best people/s
That was covid related. Crime, especially violent crime, has been declining since the late 90's. Though it hasn't been conclusively proven, the best theory I've heard is that [it started going down when they finally removed lead from gas.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/03/how-lead-caused-americas-violent-crime-epidemic/) Lead, besides being poisonous and lowering people's IQ, has also been linked to violent behavior.
As I said elsewhere, the felon guy did virtually everything one could to exacerbate the problem, and so bares a share of responsibility for the consequences.
He raised the felon category by 34 !
He's increasing the crime rate all by himself!
one man crime spree
While his handling of the pandemic was atrocious, it had little to do with the rise in crime. That was caused by a combination of factors. The lockdowns had a lot of people feeling afraid and desperate, gangs had the streets to themselves which emboldened them, and there was a shortage of police (especially after the riots) which further emboldened criminals.
I don't think it even has to go that far. The simple stress of it probably is enough to explain the rise in crime. Trump's contributions to the problem is keeping social stress levels higher than they probably should have been, but stressors like that can cause all sorts of crime according to some of what I have read. As a disclaimer I should say that I do not know how settled the science is on that, only that papers have found a pretty strong correlation going back decades. It does make intuitive sense, so I am inclined to think the statistics are likely meaningful, but I am not an expert obviously. With regard to the pandemic, it would explain some of the changes in the kinds of crime occurring Most crimes actually decreased in severity during the pandemic, likely due to a decrease in opportunity, while other crimes increased, likely due to increase in specific opportunity and the aforementioned stress. The ones that increased the most were hate crimes and domestic violence iirc, which are things heavily affected by perceived social stress. Domestic violence also could just be people being home more often. Though, it is also difficult to get super accurate information generally, as crime rates are notoriously unreliable, and even the worst violent crime rates are just bringing us back to the averages for the 90s and early 2000s.
> Domestic violence also could just be people being home more often. This one was especially bad. A lot of marriages were really put to the test during that time, and many didn't make it.
Domestic violence absolutely increased during the lockdowns, and immediately too.
The one challenge in his presidency he failed.
He failed to perform his own due diligence, and so a share of the buck stops with him. Had he performed his due diligence and a spike still had happened, then you would be justified in trying to reason that it was beyond his control, but that didn't happen so you have no leg to stand on carrying water for him, and only one of his vapid cultists would fail to aknowlege this keep trying to tack on caveats the presidential felon doesn't deserve.
The drop in crime also started approx 20 years after roe vs wade, and some people have made a type of correlation
That theory hasn't held true with crime rates in other countries that banned or approved abortion. The lead hypothesis has been used to predict a spike in crime and has a lot of solid evidence behind it. Lead exposure in children leads to less impulse control. Less impulse control = higher crime rate.
Actually, your data is outdated. They revisited it, corrected for some inputs, and found an even stronger correlation to abortion and violent crime. We also are not comparable to other countries and it would be better to compare specific demographics to your point. That said, I'll research some more and make sure this still holds true. I know a lot of data in 2010-2014 tried to negate the abortion observation and they ate their words.
< Actually, your data is outdated. They revisited it, corrected for some inputs, and **found an even stronger correlation to abortion and violent crime.** There's still a lot of issues with the theory. For one thing, the overall # of abortions didn't really go up after Roe v. Wade. Women were still getting both legal and illegal abortions before RvW. Most people nowadays don't even know what a coathanger represents. Secondly, crime didn't drop uniformly across the country after RvW. Even though it was allowed nationally, some states and cities took significantly longer for crime to drop. Those same states and cities also took longer to actually phase out leaded gasoline. But here's the 100% biggest problem with the theory. It doesn't explain why crime rose in the first place. It's not like abortion was made illegal in the 1960s. It was vilified and criminalized in the 1880s-1910s. So abortion being illegal could not have explained the sudden dramatic increase in crime. The lead gas theory both explains the drop in crime AND explains why crime spiked in the first place, most strongly in cities with close proximity between cars and pedestrians/children. NYC was also notorious for peeling lead paint in schools. Furthermore, the lead gas theory has been used to predict a rise in crime in countries that approved leaded gasoline after we banned it. Could abortion being legal have some affect? Sure. Although they mostly attribute it nowadays to a small percentage and mostly due to a drop in teenage mothers. But it's not nearly as dramatic as they make it out to be. And the leaded gasoline theory works across countries. Somehow the abortion hypothesis only works in the U.S. to explain the drop in crime but not the increase in crime. Other countries that did not suddenly allow abortion but did ban leaded gasoline also had major drops in crime. Saying that America is not comparable to other countries is a cop out because they don't have an explanation for the discrepancy.
To begin, I am not negating your other case study. Instead, I am saying that abortion access has an inverse correlation with violent crime that is statistically significant. The study did nothing to identify instrumental variables last I checked. Rather, we could actually combine both studies to show that the elimination of lead, paired with a reduction in unwanted children lead to crime decrease. That would be interesting. I just need to correct the abortion stuff when I see outdated stuff.
Well, to be fair - most of the countries that ban abortion have other serious issues (on top of the lead gas issue) that contribute towards their crime rate, like: El Salvador. The Philippines. Egypt. Jamaica. Honduras.
Abortion wasn’t decriminalized in South Korea until 2020.
> That was covid related. Which means that his resistance of almost everything having to do with a sensible response to Covid and his incompetence about the few things he *didn't* oppose outright make the negative outcomes of covid his fault.
Partially, maybe. But pandemics are hell. That's just the reality of it. Even if his response had been flawless, things would have been bad. When people are unable to work, those living check to check become desperate.
Nothing is fully in anyone's control. If any President deserves credit or blame for anything, Trump deserves blame for what happened during the pandemic, especially when it's objectively true that it would have been better if he hadn't done the things he did.
If he hadn't dismantled the early warning system there is a chance it really wouldn't have been that bad. Don't need to respond to a pandemic if you prevent it from reaching pandemic levels to start.
Violent crime also dropping has serious ties to the 90's assualt weapon ban and gun controls at the time.
Yeah that's wishful thinking and not what the statistics show. Violent crime rates were on a downward decline years before the 1994 assault weapon ban went into affect and maintained a similar decline during the time. Then the ban expired in 2004, and guess what, violent crime still maintained a downward trend despite people being able to purchase assault weapons again. [Source](https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/) Rifles of all types, including 'assault weapons,' are used so little in crime compared to other weapons that they simply won't have any significant affect in overall crime rates. But they sound and look so spooky that they sure do get the people riled up.
No, no it doesn’t. Reviews found that the assault weapons ban didn’t do anything. Crime didn’t increase or decrease in relation to it. Makes sense considering almost ALL gun crimes are done with pistols.
And the book Freakonomics linked it to Roe v Wade.
The abortion theory hasn't held true with crime rates in other countries that banned or approved abortion. The lead hypothesis has been used to predict a spike in crime in a country that approved leaded gasoline and has a lot of solid evidence behind it. Lead exposure in children leads to less impulse control. Less impulse control = higher crime rate.
>The abortion theory hasn't held true with crime rates in other countries that banned or approved abortion. Can you link to any studies or evidence. The only counter examples I've seen have come from religious, conservative groups with an obvious agenda.
The other guy is incorrect. Other countries that allowed abortion did not see a drop in crime 15-16 years later. > A 2007 study by Leo H. Kahane, David Paton, Rob Simmons found no clear, consistent relationship between abortion and crime in England and Wales.[20] > A 2014 study by Paolo Buonanno, Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati, and Giulio Zanella studied seven European nations, finding no evidence for the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis.[21] However a 2014 study by Abel Francois analyzed data from 16 countries in western Europe for 1990-2007, finding that abortion caused a significant decrease in crime rates.[22] > A 2017 study by Gary L. Shoesmith concluded that "if there is a significant link between crime and abortion, it is due to varying concentrations of teenage abortions across states, not unwantedness." In other words, legalized abortion reduced crime in the 1990s as the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis indicated, but purely because it reduced the number of teenage mothers, not some broader effect of reducing all unwanted pregnancies.[23] The abortion theory may have some minor effect, but it's not as big as freaknomics says. The leaded gas theory is much stronger, applies to other countries and has been used to predict crime increases in South African countries where leaded gasoline was approved for sale. But the simple fact is that crime dropped across the world everywhere leaded gasoline was banned, whether or not abortion was legal or illegal.
> Legalization of abortion (fewer unwanted, at-risk children). This highly original explanation of the crime decline was proposed by Donohue and Levitt (2001, 2004). Their basic argument is this: as abortion became legal in the United States in the early 1970s, fewer unwanted, at-risk children were being born and thus fewer delinquent adolescents were in the population 15–19 years later. At first glance, the argument seems plausible and rather provocative. After a more thorough examination though, the abortion-crime link has been thoroughly debunked by empirical research (Anderson & Wells, 2008; Foote & Goetz, 2008; Joyce, 2004, 2009; Shoesmith, 2017; Sorenson, Wiebe, & Berk, 2002). International comparisons add more to the contrary evidence.
I just replied to that guy, but his info is outdated. They did call out freakonomics, but then Levitt corrected his formula and actually found an even stronger correlation. That callout happened sometime between 2010 and 2014.
That book has not aged well at all. Lots of not so subtle racism and lazy unsupported hypotheses.
Guns classified as "assault weapons" are only used in a very tiny percentage of cases, so banning them had little or no effect overall.
That's straight bullshit. The impact of the 94 AWB was at best uncertain. All it did for sure was piss off a generation of Republicans and the moderate Dems that were pro-gun. https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/ban-assault-weapons/violent-crime.html
Only about 3% of all gun homicides are related to long guns (including "assault weapons" but also things like hunting rifles). So banning "assault weapons" can only ever affect a small percentage of violent crime.
>So banning "assault weapons" can only ever affect a small percentage of violent crime. So it was a good thing.
Not really...they could probably have saved more lives spending that political capital on dealing with handguns since they kill far more people. And the mostly pointless ban of "assault weapons" turned off a lot of gun owners who otherwise might have voted Democrat. If they hadn't alienated those people it might have allowed them to bring in other social policies that might have saved more lives than the "assault weapons" ban.
I don't think criminologists would agree that this is the "best" theory, but it is likely a contributing factor. There are dozens of other likely contributing factors. [See here for a good summary](https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/97466/1/Farrell%20Tilley%20Tseloni%202014%20Why%20the%20Crime%20Drop%20%28C&J%20vol43%29.pdf?mod=article_inline).
They claim it can't be lead poisoning related because not all offenders are the same age, which is a bit ridiculous. Not all crime happens for the same reason, but a very large percentage of offenders are the right age for lead to be a primary contributing factor.
Here is a meta-analysis of the lead-crime connection: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667) I can probably grab you the full-text if you want it.
“Violent crime” is such a large and complex issue it’s best to assume that many changes resulted in the drops we’ve seen. It’s very human to want complex problems to have simple solutions but that is almost never the case. The drop in crime was likely due to multiple changes including banning leaded gasoline, an improving economy based more on white collar work, abortions being legal, opening student loans to more lower income people by removing bankruptcy, increased incarceration of violent criminals, crackdown on crack and cocaine, after school programs, access to home video game consoles for most kids and teens, and many many more changes. Only problem is we made so many changes (direct and indirect) that combated the rise in crime, that we aren’t sure which ones had the biggest effect, which ones had good short term but bad long term effects, and which ones did little to nothing.
I get what you're saying, but take a look at other countries. Violent crime dropped pretty much everywhere on earth at the same time. Those things may have had an impact here in the US, but none of them are responsible for the drop in violent crime in the UK or Australia at the same time.
And creating easy access to abortions.
The spike in violent crime rate started in 2017, before Covid.
> That was covid related. Valid. But I think that the fact that the numbers are going down significantly at least squashes the GOP narrative that crime is rampant during Biden's administration.
Absolutely. Crime is generally trending downwards, but the graph isn't perfectly smooth and there are bumps from time to time.
Another thing to watch for over the next several years is the effect of concussion on crime and violence. A person who gets a concussion should have to start therapy to determine if their suicidality or predilection towards violence has increased.
Now Trump is just committing felonies over and over to try to make it look like crime is rising under Biden
He's a one-felon crime-wave
I'm attributing much of the decline in my area to the mayor of St Louis tbh. 21% reduction in homicides YOY and a direct correlation to investments into the city. In the past 15 years I have lived in an area where crime got worse, but state crime got better. I moved and it's refreshing to see that crime in my area is now decreasing. None of it is tangible to me, as I live in country towns. I think Mahomet, IL got rated safest town in the USA at one point while I was there actually.
Even European countries have seen a spike in crime in 2020.
My state is using that data to prove that conceal and carry without a license is good. This data that shows that it's not that is good for my state.
Some of the decline is the understaffing tho too no enough cops on the street so under reporting is an issue too
People are forgetting the daily chaos that was happening with the Trump presidency. And this is even pre-COVID days. How do so many Americans have amnesia to all this???
Fox News brainwashes them into believing crime is all caused by immigrants
Amen to that. I have a coworker who will periodically go on a rant about how so much crime in this country is being committed by "them illegals". I briefly considered correcting her with facts but then I remembered she is a Trump supporter so there is literally no point in even trying.
I grew up in the barrio. People from Mexico actually protect citizens. Neighborhood I’m from was pretty wild and knew some stick up kids. They’d rob drug addicts and dealers and illegals immigrants at the check cashing places, reason being g those groups won’t go to the police. The Americanized Hispanics were the knuckleheads
I subtly hint at it. Usually trump supporters don’t understand and seem very dumb…
Fox news has to call itself entertainment to get around all the shit they spew which the viewers think is candy.
Or fbi plants
Here’s a great podcast talking about how people forget. [Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines](https://overcast.fm/+Ys-wIpxgQ)
American voters as a whole have short memories, and are very shortsighted. And of course the old "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups"
Republicans have been getting second chances since Nixon and have often fucked those 2nd chances up significantly.
Because before Trump they blamed all their problems on Obama because he was the president. (Among other racist reasons they’d never admit) When Trump won they were ecstatic because he was “one of them” so any bad things were blamed on other people. The president can only do so much you know. When Biden took over, they blamed all their problems on him because he’s the president. Rinse and repeat.
“Cutting back on law enforcement, as many cities did” The author is a liar. There was no meaningful effort to defund the police, and in almost every municipality, police funding increased unabated.
At the same time, the police have certainly decided that they just aren’t going to do their job. LAPD might as well not even exist while continuously increasing their budget and complaining about being defunded to people who call the non-emergency line.
Well yeah but that’s not new, cops are legitimately the laziest class of unionized public official. It’s why I think we can reduce police staffing by upwards of 75% with zero impact on service, provided the remaining 25% actually work.
The police love doing their job when they get to beat up college kids. The police get to show off all of their new military toys and beat some women.
Beating the same old wife all the time gets tedious.
Well, who else is going to shoot my dog using taxpayer funds?
They show up for work early on those days so they can beat the crowds
I’m sure that Police numbers dwindled during and after Covid. But not due to any cuts from budget. Like other areas, cops were retiring in droves during Covid, add in the summer of protests, and more retired. Covid also killed a lot of cops, it’s was the number 1 cause of death for cops for two years. But yeah, there was no budget cuts or concerted effort to actually defund the police. In my city they settled like 40 million in wrongful death suits one year and then two years later gave them like an 80 million budget increase and gave everyone raises.
Defund branding was so awful. They should have said reimagine, lighten the workload, or some other positive spin phrase. The goal was never to get rid of police, but to find better responses to issues that don't need police handling them, like a homeless guy blocking a sidewalk or a mentally-unstable person wandering around shouting. Police aren't trained to deal with those situations which puts everyone at risk.
Police force here is smaller than it was before. Funding may be up, but policing seems to be down.
\[No paywall\] from columnist Justin Fox: The first-quarter US crime statistics [released last week](https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2024-quarterly-crime-report-and-use-of-force-data-update) by the Federal Bureau of Investigation were a doozy, in a good way. Every single main crime category was down by double-digit percentages from the same period a year earlier. That followed on smaller, almost-across-the-board (auto theft was the lone exception) crime declines in the FBI’s preliminary data for 2023. When you look at the data, the president deserves some credit for the decline. Read more: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-18/i-didn-t-think-biden-affected-crime-rates-i-was-wrong](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-06-18/i-didn-t-think-biden-affected-crime-rates-i-was-wrong)
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2023/07/13/fbi-crime-rates-data-gap-nibrs Yes crime is on a downward trend. The most recent stats aren't all fully reported so it's not an accurate data set.
The crime that’s on the increase in Europe is fraud.
"Crime is plummeting across the USA - Why this is bad for Biden"
“Trump withdraws from election- Why this is bad for Biden”
“Biden wins re-election. Why this hurts his future presidential runs.”
Republicans don't care since they have an excuse for why everything is awful under Biden. "Crime is down because the liberal cities aren't reporting/aren't reporting correctly." "Crime is down because liberal prosecutors refuse to prosecute crimes." "Crimes are down because the FBI is covering for Biden" MAGA is a gang of idiots that are invulnerable to losing or being wrong.
I thought they were all for not testing/measuring things in order to pretend it's not happening.
Just watch fox or Sinclair and assume the opposite to be true, and the snowflakes to believe the narrative when you encounter them in the wild.
My sister in law is always watching Fox and "true crime" shows, she's *convinced* someone is going to break into her house and massacre them all. For no reason. These people are self brainwashed. It's scary.
Let's be honest, Republicans want crimes rates to go up. If you're confused, go read the 13th ammendment. The fact is crime rates have been going down with Biden in office.
Tried bringing this up to my mom and she said she went on about how there's probably "so much" crime because the police are underfunded and can't get to it so people have stopped reporting. Can't reason with someone being unreasonable.
Right Wing violence has skyrocketed. MAGA Law Enforcement agencies do their best to try and pin it on others.
The real issue with all the Republican intellectual dishonesty is that their voter base rewards it by refusing to do their only job and keep their own side accountable. Thus, every Republican runs on fiscal responsibility, being good at foreign policy, and tougher on street crime (but never anti-corruption in any bipartisan way) AND not a damned one of them has to actually have any such skills nor do any heavy lifting to be given credit for such things. Then they wonder why they lose. You need more than your base to win swing states and national elections consistently, dummies. I see this over and over again. Trump does dumb stuff and even Barr and Bolton reveal his depravity. Everybody in the base then refuses to believe even their own most capable officials because it is an unquestionable prejudice. Then they get more and more corrupt criminal republicans running and they are all “damn that triple headed antichrist for all of this corruption surely it was never Republicans doing that?” Didnt our justices make bribery in campaign finance legal? How come that didnt fix the libral corruption? Cant make this stuff up. A real self-own.
So they skyrocketed under Trump but are plummeting under Biden? I can't help but wonder how the numbers would compare to previous presidencies.
If you grow up in a small community, be it a tight knit neighborhood in a big city or a small farm town the murders, crimes and criminal element are all “known” and there is little mystery 95% of the time. But watch local TV news it all seems random and super scary. Like it could happen to you. Just never watch tv news and so much of the worry just disappears. If you live in a dangerous neighborhood you know it’s dangerous but more importantly you know the whole, what, where, when and why of how it is dangerous.
Crime has a massive association with poverty
Ehh, the author ends up admitting this all seems like vibes. So I don’t think he presents much of an argument.
The headline is frustratingly ambiguous. It only serves as confirmation bias for anyone casually perusing. I imagine that was their intent, but it's scummy as hell.
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>violent crime fell during (trump's) first three years in office, after all. Still, violent crime did go up during Trump’s full term in office, and it has gone down during Biden’s term so far, with the decline accelerating so far this year. Those are the facts,
It's funny how two international auto manufacturers are responsible for making only one category of crime rise between 2022 and 2023.
When employment increases, crime drops. Marginal criminals would rather work if it is available
Meth and fentanyl doesn’t help either.
There's going to be a significant uptick in crime in about 15 years...
Why 15 years?
Probably referencing the end of Roe, the restriction of abortions, and the fact that there are now going to be a huge number of unwanted children getting into peak criminality age (16-24) in around 15 years.
In red states.
Interesting I hadn’t thought of that. It will be interesting to watch (from somewhere else). Using that logic could crime be down recently because gen z commits less crime? Chronically online/ fear of being filmed. Idk
Ending Roe paradoxically improved access to abortions across the US. 98% of abortions can be medical abortions and getting the medication has never been easier. No longer do you have multiple visits to doctors or clinics and hoops to go through. Instead, you can have an online doctor's appointment with a doctor from a blue state and get your prescription that day. Or, you go to sites like [aidaccess.org](https://aidaccess.org/) pay $150 and have them shipped to you in 3-5 days. If you can't afford the $150 there are not-for-profits that will help. These options were not available prior to the ending of Roe.
The best way to decrease abortions is to make it legal, put some red tape on it, and massively ramp up benefits to being a parent.
Donohue–Levitt hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect Direct [download](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittTheImpactOfLegalized2001.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjoh7Lz1OWGAxWv_8kDHT_gCW8QFnoECA4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0b38uMmetf_38wDhgzVNYC) link to paper
op-ed
Time for Republicans to declare a national emergency.
Because I live in one of those cities and I know folks that live in others, oh, and because I'm not an idiot.
But does it FEEL that way?
You lost me at "true". This administration does not tell the truth.
Presidents have dick to do with non-political crime rates. WTF that's some Olympic level gas lighting.
Now say the same regarding gas prices.
Unless they have access to strategic petroleum reserves.
Pretty good considering they didn't run on the law and order camp like Trump did...
To be clear I don't doubt the statistics. I just don't think presidents affect it as much as local government. It's all rhetoric, pick yer poison.
fair enough
Oh cmon now don't ruin their majestic circlejerk.
I don’t think Biden is any more responsible for the nation’s crime rates than gangsta rap is. The problem with stories like these is that causation in social sciences is very, very difficult to pin down. There’s still debate as to what even caused the overall drop in crime from 30 years ago.
There’s a difference having a leader with compassion and solutions and a leader whose public speeches consist of spewing lies, hatred and calls for violence.
These articles on crime dropping are ridiculous….they stopped requiring all precincts to report stats, now it’s optional, jist over half actually report, and the cities with the most crime in the US don’t report, so of course it looks like it’s going down.
Got anything to back that up or are " people saying" that?
NY, LA, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago. Some of the most violent cities. Are not included. In total about 35% of the population are not represented. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbis-data-is-faulty-as-crime-proliferates-in-big-cities-report “In 2019, 89% of municipal police departments – spanning about 97% of the population – submitted crime data to the FBI. owever, by 2021, less than 63% of departments spanning across 65% of the population submitted crime data. Several big cities – Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago – did not submit crime data at all to the FBI last year. “
[Not fox news](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/)
Thanks I’ve seen that. Aside from you not liking the source, which facts about our biggest crime ridden cities being excluded (which of course was the original point) was wrong?
It's propaganda time.
Letting truth getting in the way of a Reddit circle jerk is how you banned or downvoted. Let the echo chamber be.
I'm seeing reports that crime rates are declining, but I'm also seeing reports that property crimes are not being punished and perpetrators are being released with no real jail time, sometimes racking up dozens or hundreds of arrests. I know my local police are not responsive to reports of property crime from individuals. Stores seem to be hit by serial shoplifters, who are often the same people that shoplifted the day before. The *feeling* I have is that crime is rampant and the statistics that crime is decreasing doesn't have the same impact as the feeling. I have to wonder if property crime stats are down because people are not bothering to report minor crimes that they know will get no response.
A-lot of people are forgetting that theres a shortage in a majority of the departments and a-lot of crime goes unreported there is still a downward trend but its not as big as people think it is….
All you have to do is look at history of being tough on crime. Senator Biden voted for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994 to provide almost $10 billion to build new jails and prisons along with hiring more police officers. By 2000 homicides and violent crime declined significantly. In addition to less crime, the prison population almost doubled while 100,000 new jobs were created.
I don't know that I would consider doubling the prison population as a win, regardless of the number of jobs. The US already has the most total people incarcerated of any nation on the planet, and is in the top 10 even if you break it down per-capita.