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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump keeps saying that the murder rate is the highest it’s been in 45 years. This is wildly untrue, but other people are joining the bandwagon anyway. Jeff Sessions says the current rise in crime is a “dangerous permanent trend.” Talk show hosts agree. America is a dark and dangerous place, and it’s getting more dangerous all the time.

Aside from outright lies, a lot of this is based on cherry-picked statistics. The murder rate in Chicago has skyrocketed over the past three years. Los Angeles has seen a substantial rise in its violent crime rate. Etc. But if you’re interested in the whole picture, I have it for you below, complete and un-cherry-picked.

You’re all used to seeing long-term crime charts from me because I’m usually illustrating the effect of lead on crime over the past 50 or 60 years. Those charts show national crime rates plummeting in the 90s and early aughts. This time, though, the chatter is all about recent increases in murder and violent crime in big cities. For starters, then, here are the basic numbers for the past decade on violent crime in large cities from the National Crime Victimization Survey:1

The data goes through 2015,2 and shows that big-city violent crime did tick upward slightly in 2015. More generally, though, violent crime has displayed a noisy but steadily downward trend over the past decade. In 2015, violent crime in big cities was nearly a third lower than it was in 2007.

Next up is violent crime from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. This is based on reports from police departments, and includes detailed data at the city level. Here are violent crime rates in America’s ten biggest cities3 through the first half of 2016:4

Some big cities have indeed shown worrying upward trends: Chicago, San Antonio, and Los Angeles are all up over the past two or three years. At the same time, Philadelphia, New York City, and San Diego are all down. More generally, except for San Antonio every single one of these cities has a lower violent crime rate than in 2006, ranging from 4 percent down (San Jose) to 40 percent down (Dallas and Philadelphia). The overall violent crime rate for all big cities is up over the past two years, but still lower than it was in 2006.

Finally, here are the murder rates in our ten biggest cities:

Chicago, obviously, is a big outlier, with a high and rising murder rate (up 53 percent over the past two years). The three biggest cities in Texas have also seen big recent increases. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and New York City are down compared to 2015.

You can draw different conclusions from this data depending on what you look at.5 However, this is the best data we have. This is reality. Whatever you decide to say about violent crime, it needs to be based on this.


1The NCVS data on violent crime doesn’t include homicide because, obviously, you can’t call up people and ask if they’ve been murdered in the past year. Generally speaking, however, violent crime as a category includes murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

2Unlike the other charts in this post, this one starts in 2007 because the Bureau of Justice Statistics warns that a change in methodology in 2006 makes it difficult to compare 2006 to other years.

3Because of a dispute over methodology, Chicago has no official numbers for forcible rape before 2015. Because of this, it also has no official numbers for violent crime. However, it’s pretty easy to create a close estimate of the rape rate and then use that to recreate the violent crime rate. That’s what I’ve done here.

4I’ve annualized the rates for the first half of 2016 so they’re comparable to the other years.

5It’s worth mentioning that property crime is also down over the past decade. Ditto for crime in smaller cities and towns. I haven’t shown any of that here because big-city violent crime seems to be the topic of the moment. However, you might be interested in a little-known bit of crime trivia that will surprise most people: violent crime in big cities has fallen so much that it’s actually lower than anyplace else. The safest places in America are the biggest and smallest cities. It’s the medium-sized cities that now have the biggest violent crime problems.

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Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Raw Data: Here’s What Violent Crime Really Looks Like Over the Past Decade

John Oliver takes on Donald Trump and it’s everything we hoped it would be

John Oliver takes on Donald Trump and it’s everything we hoped it would be

By on 29 Feb 2016commentsShare

After months of largely ignoring Donald Trump in the hopes that he would just go away, America’s best Brit John Oliver finally took on the apish rich kid (and future president?) in a brilliant 22-minute tirade on Last Week Tonight.

In addition to the usual criticisms — for instance, Trump is a vulgar, racist, corrupt and failed businessman whose largest vocabulary word is “great” — Oliver looked at Trump’s claim that he is self-funding his campaign, a myth he trots out to prove that he isn’t beholden to corporate interests. But, as Oliver pointed out:

While it is true that he hasn’t taken corporate money, the implication that he has personally spent $20 to 25 million is a bit of a stretch, because what he’s actually done is loaned his own campaign $17.5 million, and has personally given just $250,000. And that’s important because up until the convention, he can pay himself back for the loan with campaign funds.

He didn’t stop there. Trump — who recently blamed his refusal to disavow the Ku Klux Klan on a faulty headset — is also remarkably thin-skinned. In 1988, Oliver pointed out, Trump was called a “short-fingered vulgarian” by writer Graydon Carter, and he’s still pissed about it. To this day, Carter said he occasionally receives photographs in the mail from Trump, usually tear-sheets from magazines, with his hand circled in gold Sharpie and the message, “See? Not so short.”

It’s not the sort of behavior one really looks for in a presidential candidate, but like a Zika-infected mosquito who just won’t go away, Trump continues to beguile the American people — many of whom plan on voting for him, despite his refusal to acknowledge climate change, his endorsement of war crimes, and his utter lack of qualifications. A big part of his popularity is the idea that Trump is a successful businessman. But is he? Not according to Oliver:

Over the years, his name has been on some things that have arguably been very un-good, including Drumpf Shuttle, which no longer exists; Drumpf Vodka, which was discontinued; Drumpf Magazine, which folded; Drumpf World Magazine, which also folded; Drumpf University, over which he’s being sued; and of course, the travel-booking site GoTrump.com, whose brief existence was, I imagine, a real thorn in the side of anyone hoping GotRump.com featured a single thing worth masturbating to.

But Oliver has a plan to take down Donald Trump, and it starts with separating the man from his brand — and his name. According to Gwenda Blair, author of The Drumpfs: Three Generations That Built An Empire, the name Drumpf was originally the slightly less presidential sounding Drumpf. And as Oliver said:

Drumpf is much less magical. It’s the sound produced when a morbidly obese pigeon flies into the window of a foreclosed Old Navy. Drumpf. It’s the sound of a bottle of store-brand root beer falling off the shelf in a gas station minimart.

And while Oliver acknowledged that it might be odd to bring up Trump’s ancestral name, Trump deserves it, for the following tweet about Oliver’s former boss:

Oliver then informed the audience that he has registered the domain DonaldJDrumpf.com, where he will be selling hats (at cost!) reading Make Donald Drumpf Again and offering a web extension that will turn every instance of the word Trump on your internet browser into Drumpf.

“If you are thinking of voting for Donald Trump,” Oliver said, “the charismatic guy promising to make America great again, stop and take a moment to imagine how you would feel if you just met a guy named Donald Drumpf, a litigious serial liar with a string of broken business ventures and the support of a former Klan leader who he can’t decide whether or not to condemn. Would you think he would make a good president, or is the spell now somewhat broken? That is why tonight I am asking America to make Donald Drumpf again.”

It may be too late to make Donald Drumpf again before Super Tuesday, but it’s still a long way to November. You can get your Drumpf hat here.

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John Oliver takes on Donald Trump and it’s everything we hoped it would be

Posted in Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on John Oliver takes on Donald Trump and it’s everything we hoped it would be