That’s missing the whole point.
Conservatives use the lie of ever-increasing crime as a bogeyman to scare suburbanites into voting for their “tough-on-crime” (read ‘anti-poor + anti-minority’) policies. That homicide rates went up during the pandemic has been falsely used to demonize Biden, immigrants, and anyone else that Fox News dislikes.
We need people to actually have and care about data like this so they can resist misinformation and propaganda.
Now I’m sad that the point of reporting changes in homicide rates is political.
Well, it continued to increase post-pandemic as well. And even this dip in crime may be a transient state that does not keep decreasing.
My best explanation for this is that obviously people got desperate and the economy is one of the biggest predictors of crime. So inflation is also partially responsible for crime.
Not to mention that, despite me being very opposed to conservative narratives, I can see that policing was greatly disrupted by the protests in 2020/2021. They continue to be ineffective in most large cities basically. The US still has a long way to go on handling crime and criminals.
They continue to be ineffective in most large cities basically.
wtf? Do you actually live in a “large city”? I do. In fact, I live in SF, the supposed heart of all this, and police are out doing their usual stuff, same as always. What exactly do you think they are not doing right now?
Precisely, they’re doing the same stuff as always. Police have a maximum affect on crime in an area. And city police can be particularly bad about certain types of crime where increasing the amount of police can lead to worse effects instead of better ones.
The protests were in large part a response about the damage that police do to communities and also about how they frequently escalate situations.
So what I’m speaking to here is that our society correctly pointed out the disadvantages of policing. And then correctly took funds from police. However, not many tools that would serve people better are in place.
It makes it really easy for “law and order” types of people to just tell us to go back to the same system we had before. And some of those tools take a long time to be effective but we have to start somewhere. Here ain’t it.
