There’s a lot of celebration over our falling crime rate. Even Steve Sailer suggests the LA Riots may have fostered serious introspection in the black community over violent trends. Of course, this doesn’t square with recent phenomena like the flash mob riots and the like.
What if things are getting worse in the sense of more shootings and other aggravated assaults, but medical technology is saving lives that would have been murders only five or ten years ago? What if we’re having a moral meltdown masked by the resources and skill of the medical profession?
Consider the graph below re: shooting and homicide statistics in San Francisco. While shootings are up, up, and up, deaths are steady. A higher proportion of shooting victims are surviving. But they’re still shot, and it’s still a pretty serious thing to be shot, and even survivors are often bound to wheelchairs or otherwise out of commission.
Dave Grossman discussed this in his book On Killing a few years ago. It’s always worth keeping in mind when homicide–the rarest of crimes–is discussed. Many aggravated assaults would have been murders until very recently, and they’ve not fallen nearly as much.
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Yes, I’ve suggested this as a dissertation topic on my blog—produce a homicide rate curve normalized to @1900 medical technology. It’d probably be worth several publications and its implications would probably totally upend a lot of narratives about the crime rate.
Some would claim that some parts of medicine have been scamming us for a long time
Yes, there has certainly been a drop in crime in the last twenty years, but the drop in homicides over-represents this trend. Crime is down, but not as much as we’d like to think
I think the drop is mostly a result of more people in prison. The crack epidemic kind of screwed up the correlation, but take out those years and there’s a pretty clear relationship.
On the last point, I’m open to that explanation and think it has much to do with it, but both of these things seem to be happening at once.
There is no better place to study the “crime drop” than NYC. There has been a serious push not only to water down the crime with countless new classifications and definitions of crime. The efforts to keep the numbers down has lead the just spreading the numbers out. The most recent example I have heard that a hit in run only applies if there is an injury. If there is no injury there is no crime.
[...] – Technology and crime [...]
The effect of medical advances on the homicide rate is quantified in this article: http://www.wku.edu/~james.kanan/Murder%20and%20Medicine.pdf
J, That’s an excellent article. I’ve linked it on my blog to in a followup to a previous post.