Just How Dangerous Is America, Really?
Just How Dangerous Is America, Really?
Were concerns over a “crime wave” a panic of sorts? Or can many things be true at once?
A blog titled “We’re Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here” isn’t the place you typically come to seeking good news. I think I’ve proven, however, that I’m not a doomer and, be it good or bad, I make a strong effort to ground everything I say in fact, not hyperbole and unbridled speculation. If I see something good happening, I’m going to point it out just as often as I point out the bad.
I came across the Substack of Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based crime analyst and co-founder of the consulting firm AH Datalytics. Last month, he was featured in The Atlantic, where he explained how 2023 is seeing a significant drop-off in murder in the United States, which he elaborates on in his Substack:
Murder fell in the first half of 2023 though how much it will fall at the end of the year remains to be seen. Murder is down around 11 percent in 100 cities with available data for 2023 per our dashboard. That’s up a bit from where things stood at the end of May but still well down from where things were a few years ago.
The decline in big cities would portend to a 7-10 percent decline nationally in 2023 if that figure holds up given how big cities tend to overstate the national trend. It would also be among the largest declines in murder ever formally recorded.
Murder is falling in a number of big cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia — but it’s also falling in smaller cities with big murder problems. New Orleans likely had the nation’s highest murder rate for any city over 250,000 in 2022 while Jackson, MS likely had the nation’s highest murder rate for any city over 100,000. Murder is still high in both places, but it fell over the first half of the year. The same is true for St Louis and Baltimore, two cities that have had the nation’s highest murder rate at various points over the last decade.
Asher caveats that by saying crime trends aren’t uniform across the country - inevitable, given our size - but there’s no question the drop, based on the data available, is incredible and is most certainly welcome news.
That said, what are we to make of this? Were concerns over a “crime wave” a panic of sorts? Or can many things be true at once? This is going to take some unpacking.
First, let’s see how much crime can vary on a location-by-location basis. Memphis, Tennessee went from 123 murders in all of 2022 to 172 thus far in 2023, an increase of almost 40%. Philadelphia went from 264 murders in all of 2022 to 195 thus far in 2023, a decrease of over 26%.
Right away, we see why nationwide numbers cannot be taken at face value, a point Asher would agree with. Crime is unquestionably still getting worse in many places across the country. More important, crime rates don’t always explain whether a city is getting safer or not. If Philadelphia had an over 26% drop in murders since 2022, but still manages to have almost 200 murders halfway through 2023, is the city any safer than it was last year? I think not. Note that Philadelphia had significant drops in murders a decade ago, before they began surging again.
The lesson here seems to be that the question of whether crime is a problem or not is one which needs to be answered locally, not nationally. A country the size of a continent is going to have so much variation, national data on crime isn’t particularly useful, if not entirely useless, for assessing risk. The same way every square mile of Mexico isn’t a drug cartel-ridden war zone, not everywhere in America is crime a major concern. In fact, most of us will be fortunate enough to never be victimized by violent crime in our lifetimes. I personally live in an area where crime isn’t an overriding concern and so do most of you, hopefully.
The answer to the question of whether crime is a major problem in America depends largely on what kind of story someone is trying to tell about the country. The most prominent such story is when the Left downplays the prevalence of crime (often citing statistics from almost a decade ago in doing so), while decrying the prevalence of “gun violence.” Certainly, the U.S. has a tremendous amount of gun violence compared to the rest of the developed world, but the Left decries gun violence not because it’s worried about crime, but because it’s opposed to gun ownership in principle. They view anyone who owns a gun, regardless of why, as having an equal propensity for committing violent acts.
The theory goes: if guns were taken away, America would become a less violent country. Certainly, America would have less gun violence, but it wouldn’t become a less violent country, because violence is an impulse, one which can be acted upon many different ways. Leaving aside the fact the French aren’t the same as Americans, France is an example of a country which has less gun violence, but an overall higher crime rate than the U.S. If gun ownership isn’t driving violence in France, then what is?
Murder is certainly the most egregious of crimes there is and analysts are correct to focus on it when assessing risk. However, murder is also comparatively rare - as our individual risk of victimization is low, our risk of becoming murder victims is lower. Lifestyle and proximity to violence matters, of course, but we’re talking in broad terms here. My point is that considering other crimes besides murder - assault, robbery, theft - are just as important. Even supposedly “petty” crimes serve as a gateway to serious crime and the most violent of criminals also happen to be active petty criminals as well.
Another lesson is that year-over-year numbers matter, but not as much as longer-term trends. Likewise, bringing up crime statistics from 30 years ago is useful in terms of establishing perspective, but it doesn’t have much to say about what’s going on today. For example, let’s look at New York City. The Big Apple is among the best when it comes to tracking crime statistics and the latest report proves that just like the rest of the country, New York is a much safer place today than it was 30 years ago by a margin of over 70%.
However, has New York become more dangerous over the last two years? The same dataset says “yes.” Murder aside, all other crimes have increased rather dramatically, including assault and robbery. In fact, over a 13-year period, crime has gone up by over 20% in New York, even as murders have dropped significantly! What was I saying earlier about many things being true at once?
Nationwide crime statistics are tough to come by and the FBI has not released numbers for 2022. But again, national numbers are a short-sighted way of tracking just how peaceful or violent this country is becoming. At least in New York, the long-term trend is clearly down, but the short- to medium-term trend is up, suggesting that concerns about worsening crime are, in fact, rooted in in something real and not the product of alarmism or media coverage.
It’s important not to turn this into a numbers’ game. Crime isn’t a mathematical problem, it’s a social problem. However, the numbers do tell us we should regard crime, specifically crime surges, the way we do fires - they don’t always happen, but they do from time to time. What sets the blaze alight is the question nobody has a definitive answer to. Similarly, it’s not always so obvious why crime declines. Just as scholars are still debating why crime began dropping off so significantly during the 1990s, I doubt anyone will be able to explain why murder seems to be dropping off so significantly in 2023.
I think there’s sufficient data to support the assertion that crime has a cyclical nature to it; as it’s ever-present, there are times where it’ll spike and times when it retracts suddenly. The last few years have been turbulent to say the least, so it follows that a society under stress can produce chaos and instability. Again, this isn’t a numbers’ game, but we could very well be regressing towards some kind of statistical average.
My own theory is that murder is dropping because the fuel for the inferno is being burned out. There are only so many killers out there and so many victims who can be had. Eventually, killers get caught or killed and while there are many bad people out there, they’re few compared to the rest of the population, thank goodness. I also believe this is why crime began declining in the 1990s - by that point, a mass die-off or mass incarceration (for which there exists evidence) began. Similarly, I think a mass die-off or mass arrests (whether they remain locked up is another story) has been occurring, the logical endgame of a surge in murders.
But what kind of statistical average are we returning to? I’ve noted on multiple occasions that the “historic lows” in crime frequently cited by commentators were from almost 10 years ago now:
Because the data doesn’t extend to 2023, you can’t see how recent trends stack up with the longer-term trend, but you can clearly see that a new baseline has been established. So even if we were to see a decline in violent crime, we’re not going back to 2014 lows any time soon. Likewise, if the longer-term trend since 2014 has been a steady upward climb, any reprieve is likely to be short-lived. We may be far off from the hideous heights of crime in the early 1990s, but it’s a long road to the top. The whole idea is to avoid ever getting back there, but as I’ve written extensively in these spaces, that seems to be the goal of the Regime, whether they know it or not.
Another feature of crime today seems to be how openly and randomly it occurs. Maybe social media and our increasingly surveilled society is merely exposing us all to what was always there. I’m sure there’s an element of fact to this, but anecdotal evidence suggests criminals aren’t exactly afraid of being seen, either. You have all the thefts and smash-and-grabs occurring every nearly every major city (including mine). Then you have incidents like the one that happened in New York last week, where a someone riding a scooter randomly shot four people, murdering one of them.
Here’s some footage of the incident (WARNING: graphic):
https://twitter.com/McgooShakes/status/1678004767530930177
The lone fatality was 86-year-old Homod Ali Saeidi, a father of six. Sure seems like nobody is safe from crime, either. Old, young, male, female, we have no choice but to proceed with the understanding that criminals spare nobody and that our lives are expendable to them, no matter how straight-and-narrow we lead our lives.
America isn’t a peaceful place, unfortunately. I think the facts establish that. But is America a violent place? The answer has many layers to it and it is important to consider all the different sets of data to arrive at the equally multilayered conclusion. Note, for example, that only two U.S. cities feature on the list of the top 20 most violent cities in the world and New York isn’t one of them. Even if America is becoming a more dangerous place, we have a long way to go before we ever become as dangerous as our southern neighbor, Mexico, most prominently.
There’s also no way to talk about crime without talking about race. Regardless of how racially reactionary or progressive you are, the numbers don’t lie: if Black criminality is removed from the equation, the U.S. would be a far less dangerous place:
The fact is, this is a debate we’re going to be having for years to come. Though I think this country is only a few short years away from its next serious bout of social unrest, I also don’t believe overall crime will get worse so quickly as to destabilize society or impact our day-to-day existence within the same time-frame. The destabilization will occur over a longer period of time, however. Converging with a more hostile political climate and economic turbulence, I believe America will endure cyclical increases and declines in crime, with the overall trend being upwards, unfortunately. With anarcho-tyranny not going away any time soon, the combustible mixture exists in our country for armed conflict - a conflict fought, if only at low levels, for our right to stop those who seek to do us harm and to live free from anarcho-tyranny.
What do you think? Was there not much to the “crime wave” narrative of the past few years? Or is there something to it? What’s going on in your part of the country? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below.
Max Remington is a defense, military, and foreign policy writer. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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