Tag Archives: crime

Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

by JacelynSUN Posted on January 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Erik Eckholm of the New York Times writes that violent crime has plunged dramatically over the past two decades. But the reasons remain elusive:

There are some areas of consensus. The closing of open-air drug markets….revolution in urban policing….increases in drug and gun sentences….Various experts have also linked the fall in violence to the aging of the population, low inflation rates and even the decline in early-childhood lead exposure. But in the end, none of these factors fully explain a drop that occurred, in tandem, in much of the world.

“Canada, with practically none of the policy changes we point to here, had a comparable decline in crime over the same period,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and an expert in criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He described the quest for an explanation as “criminological astrology.”

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

“Criminological astrology” is a good phrase to describe the relentless effort of US criminologists to explain a worldwide phenomenon using only parochial US data. But there is one explanation that really does work pretty well everywhere: the reduction in gasoline lead, which happened all over the world, but happened at different times in different places. And everywhere it happened, crime started to decline about 20 years later. No explanation is ever perfect, but this one comes closer than most.

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Yep, Gasoline Lead Explains the Crime Decline in Canada Too

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Here’s What Democrats and Republicans Are Afraid Of

by CarissaLindquis Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Wonkblog regales us this morning with the chart on the right, which summarizes a recent Chapman University survey about what we’re afraid of. Basically, it suggests that Democrats are more afraid of things than Republicans. This goes against the conventional wisdom a bit, and it especially goes against the conventional wisdom in the “strangers” category. Supposedly, liberals are more open to strangers and outsiders than conservatives, but this survey suggests the opposite.

So that’s interesting. But what’s probably more interesting is the cause of all this fear. Here’s what the researchers say are the prime causes of fear:

Low education
Talk TV
True Crime TV

These all make sense. People with low levels of education tend to be poor and to live in poor areas. I don’t know why they’re so afraid of clowns, but it makes perfect sense that they’d have relatively high levels of economic anxiety as well as fears for their personal safety. As for talk TV, that makes sense too. “It is a simple, straight-line effect,” the researchers says. “The more one watches talk TV, the more fearful one tends to be.”

So turn off the doofus TV, OK? And tell your friends and family to turn it off too. It’s making our lives worse.

And for the record, the rest of survey suggests that Democrats tend to be afraid of crime, pollution, and man-made disasters. Republicans tend to be afraid of today’s youth, the government, and immigrants.

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Here’s What Democrats and Republicans Are Afraid Of

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Prison Rates are Down. Thanks to Lead, They’re Going to Stay Down.

by AntwanHockensmi Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

Yesterday the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest numbers on incarceration rates, and the headline news is that we’re sending fewer people to prison. But there’s an interesting wrinkle in the numbers that few news outlets have picked up on, even though it’s a trend that’s been obvious in the numbers for a long time. Here it is:

That’s from Rick Nevin, and you know what’s coming next, don’t you? Lead. It explains a lot of what’s going on here.

The US started phasing out gasoline lead in 1975, which means that children born after 1975 were exposed to steadily less lead. And the effect was cumulative: the later they were born, the less lead they were exposed to and the less crime they committed when they grew up. However, children born before 1975 were unaffected by all this. They were born in a high-lead era, and since all that matters is exposure during early childhood, the damage had already been done.

In 2013, this means that the statistics show a reduction in crime rates in adults under the age of 40, and the younger the cohort the lower the crime rate. Unsurprisingly, this also means they’re incarcerated at lower rates. The chart above shows this fairly dramatically.

But it also shows that incarceration rates have stayed steady or increased for older men. Those over the age of 40 had their lives ruined by lead when they were children, and the effect was permanent. They’re still committing crimes and being sent to prison at the same rate as ever. It’s hard to explain both these trends—lower prison rates for kids, higher prison rates for the middle-aged—without taking lead into account.

This is one of the reasons that the lead-crime hypothesis is important. In one sense, it’s little more than a historical curio. It explains the rise and fall of crime between 1960 and 2010, but by now most environmental lead has been cleaned up and there’s only a limited amount left to worry about. So it’s interesting, but nothing more.

But here’s why it matters: if the hypothesis is true, it means that violent crime rates aren’t down because of transient factors like drug use or poverty or harsh penal codes. The reduction is permanent. Our children are just flatly less violent than the lead-addled kids who grew up in the years after World War II. And that in turn means that the decline in incarceration rates is permanent. We don’t need as much prison space as we used to, and we don’t need punitive penal codes designed to toss kids behind bars for 20 years at the first sign of danger.

In other words, we can ease up. Our kids are less violent and our streets are less dangerous. Nor is that likely to change. The lead is mostly gone, and it’s going to stay gone. We’re safer today not because of broken windows or three-strikes laws or 20-year sentences for dealing cocaine. We’re safer because we’re no longer poisoning our children in ways that turn them into hair-trigger thugs. And guess what? If we cleaned up the ambient lead that still remains, we’d be even safer 20 years from now.

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Prison Rates are Down. Thanks to Lead, They’re Going to Stay Down.

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

by DewayneEdmonson Posted on September 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Since a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, one month ago, reporters and researchers have scrambled to find detailed data on how often cops wound or kill civilians. What they’ve uncovered has been frustratingly incomplete: Perhaps not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies don’t keep very good stats on incidents that turn deadly. In short, it’s a mystery exactly how many Americans are shot by the police every year.

However, as I and others have reported, there is some national data out there. It’s not complete, but it provides a general idea of how many people die at the hands of the police—and the significant racial disparity among them:

• The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program records that 410 people were killed in justifiable homicides by police in 2012. While the FBI collects information on the victims’ race, it does not publish the overall racial breakdown.

• The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that between 2003 and 2009 there were more than 2,900 arrest-related deaths involving law enforcement. Averaged over seven years, that’s about 420 deaths a year. While BJS does not provide the annual number of arrest-related deaths by race or ethnicity, a rough calculation based on its data shows that black people were about four times as likely to die in custody or while being arrested than whites.

Note: Most arrest-related deaths by homicide are by law enforcement, not private citizens. Rate calculated by dividing deaths by the average Census population for each race in 2003-09. “Other” includes American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, Native Hawaiians, other Pacific Islander, and persons of two or more races.

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System offers another view into officers’ use of deadly force. In 2011, the CDC counted 460 people who died by “legal intervention” involving a firearm discharge. In theory, this includes any death caused by a law enforcement or state agent (it does not include legal executions).

The CDC’s cause-of-death data, based on death certificates collected at the state level, also reveals a profound racial disparity among the victims of police shootings. Between 1968 and 2011, black people were between two to eight times more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement than whites. Annually, over those 40 years, a black person was on average 4.2 times as likely to get shot and killed by a cop than a white person. The disparity dropped to 2 to 1 between 2003 and 2009, lower than the 4-to-1 disparity shown in the BJS data over those same years. The CDC’s database of emergency room records also shows similar racial disparities among those injured by police.

However, these numbers provide an extremely limited view of the lethal use of force by law enforcement. For reasons that have been outlined by USA Today, Vox, FiveThirtyEight, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others, the FBI data is pretty unreliable and represents a conservative estimate. Some 18,000 agencies contribute to the FBI’s broader crime reporting program, but only about 750 reported their justifiable homicide figures in 2012. New York state, for example, does not report justifiable homicides to the FBI, according to bureau spokesperson Stephen G. Fischer, Jr.

It’s also not clear that Brown’s death—the circumstances of which remain in dispute—would show up in the FBI’s data in the first place. (Ferguson reported two homicides to the 2012 Uniform Crime Report, but neither were justifiable homicides, according to Fischer.) The FBI’s justifiable homicide data only counts “felons,” but its definition of a felon differs from the common legal understanding of a felon as someone who has been convicted of a felony. “A felon in this case is someone who is committing a felony criminal offense at the time of the justifiable homicide,” according to a statement provided by Uniform Crime Reporting staff. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook describes the following scenario to illustrate what constitutes the justifiable killing of a criminal caught in the act:

A police officer answered a bank alarm and surprised the robber coming out of the bank. The robber saw the responding officer and fired at him. The officer returned fire, killing the robber. The officer was charged in a court of record as a matter of routine in such cases.

And since the classification of felonies—usually serious criminal offenses such as murder and assault—may vary by jurisdiction, UCR staff states, there is no standard definition of the word.

This leaves much room for interpretation. Was Michael Brown committing a felony at the time Officer Darren Wilson shot him? Local authorities in Ferguson have claimed that Brown was a robbery suspect and that he assaulted Wilson prior to the shooting. Whether Brown’s case might be classified as a justifiable homicide hinges on the details of what happened in the moments before his death and whether local investigations determine that Wilson was justified to shoot. The FBI’s records ultimately rely on police departments’ word and the assumption that the victim was a criminal.

BJS, meanwhile, collects its data from state-level coordinators that identify arrest-related deaths in part by surveying law enforcement agencies. But the majority of these coordinators do not contact each law enforcement agency in their states, so BJS has no way of telling how many deaths have gone unidentified, according to spokesperson Kara McCarthy. BJS collects some details about each reported death, such as how the victims died, whether they were armed, whether they were intoxicated or displayed signs of mental illness, and whether charges had been filed against them at the time of death. It does not collect information about whether the victims had any prior convictions.

Some of the gaps in the FBI and BJS data can be filled in by the CDC data, but there are limitations here, too. The CDC data does not evaluate whether these killings were justified or not. The agency categorizes fatalities by International Classification of Diseases codes, which are used by coroners and medical examiners to record the medical cause, not the legal justification, of death. And death certificates aren’t immune to reporting problems, explains Robert Anderson, chief of the CDC’s Mortality Statistics Branch. This data is still “at the mercy of the medical examiner and coroner,” who often write death certificates and may not include details about officer involvement. Anderson says those details are necessary in order for the CDC to categorize a death as a legal intervention.

Better data, and the will to collect it, is necessary to get the full picture of how many criminals and law-abiding citizens are killed by police every year. Until then Michael Brown—and others like him—may never even become a statistic.

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Here’s the Data That Shows Cops Kill Black People at a Higher Rate Than White People

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We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake

by AllenTritt Posted on August 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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Although I’ve avoided writing about Ferguson for private reasons, I almost wrote a short post yesterday in order to make one specific point. But it turns out to be OK that I didn’t, because Annie Lowrey wrote it for me and did a better job than I would have.

The point of her post is simple: Two decades ago violent crime really was out of control, and it seemed reasonable to a lot of people that police needed to respond in a much more forceful way. We can argue forever about whether militarizing our police forces was an appropriate response to higher crime rates, but at least it was an understandable motivation. Later, police militarization got a further boost from 9/11, and again, that was at least an understandable response.

But at the same time this trend started in the early 90s, the crime wave of the 70s and 80s finally crested and then began to ebb. Likewise, Al Qaeda terrorism never evolved into a serious local problem. We’ve spent the past two decades militarizing our police forces to respond to problems that never materialized, and now we’re stuck with them. We don’t need commando teams and SWAT units in every town in America to deal with either terrorism or an epidemic of crime, so they get used for other things instead. And that’s how we end up with debacles like Ferguson.

Police militarization was a mistake. You can argue that perhaps we didn’t know that at the time. No one knew in 1990 that crime was about to begin a dramatic long-term decline, and no one knew in 2001 that domestic terrorism would never become a serious threat. But we know now. There’s no longer even a thin excuse for arming our police forces this way.

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We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake

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Marijuana Legalization Seems to Be Working Out….So Far

by MiloTQBHoozqo Posted on August 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here are a few typical headlines I’ve seen recently about Colorado’s legalization of marijuana:

Washington Post: Since marijuana legalization, highway fatalities in Colorado are at near-historic lows

Vox: Marijuana legalization didn’t stop Colorado’s decade-long decline in teen pot use

HuffPo: If Legalizing Marijuana Was Supposed To Cause More Crime, It’s Not Doing A Very Good Job

There’s a phrase missing from all of these: “so far.” I hope that pot legalization turns out great and every other state eventually follows the lead of Colorado and Washington. But honestly folks, it’s early days yet. Legalization almost certainly has long-term dynamics and feedback effects that we simply won’t know about for years. What happens during the first few months is all but meaningless. Even if the stories themselves are more nuanced, this ought to be reflected in the headlines too.

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Marijuana Legalization Seems to Be Working Out….So Far

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Murder Is Down 63% in San Francisco. Lead Probably Isn’t the Reason.

by DrusillJnb Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Every time a city reports a big drop in crime, someone sends me a link to a story about it. San Francisco is the latest:

During the first half of the year, the city saw 14 killings — a 36 percent drop from the 22 recorded at the midpoint last year and a 63 percent decrease from the 38 in 2012.

….”The best guess one can make is that they’re associated with a national trend of lowered homicide rates over the last 20 years,” said Robert Weisberg, a law professor who co-directs the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. “They have settled a bit, but they have gone down in some places.”

Weisberg said one big factor in the national drop in killings is “just smarter policing, which requires more police and smarter police, and that includes the use of technology, the targeting of hot spots and CompStat-style policing and gang intervention.”

I know what you’re wondering: is it lead, Kevin? What about this “smarter policing” stuff? Here are a few things that should help you think about this stuff:

The long-term trend in San Francisco is pretty familiar, and pretty similar to other mid-size cities. Over the past 20 years, a big part of San Francisco’s drop in violent crime is probably due to the phaseout of leaded gasoline between 1975 and 1995.
However, lead isn’t responsible for short-term changes. It has nothing to do with the 63 percent drop in homicides since 2012.
Generally speaking, you have to be careful with homicide numbers. Overall violent crime statistics are based on a large number of incidents, so they’re fairly reliable. But even big cities don’t have that many murders, which means the numbers can bounce around a lot from year to year just by random chance.
A drop in crime can create a virtuous circle, because it allows police to spend more time on the crime that remains. So lead might well have acted as a sort of tailwind here, producing a drop in violent crime that allowed systems like CompStat to be more effective, thus producing further drops even after the impact of lead has flattened out.

The phaseout of leaded gasoline did its job in San Francisco, but at this point any further drops will most likely have to come from other sources. More effective policing strategies are certainly one of the things that can make a difference.

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Murder Is Down 63% in San Francisco. Lead Probably Isn’t the Reason.

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Here’s Mindy Kaling’s Hilarious Speech to Harvard Law: "You Will Defend BP From Birds."

by TysonGoldfarb Posted on May 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s actress/comedian Mindy Kaling speaking at this year’s Harvard Law School Class Day on Wednesday:

With this diploma in hand, most of you will go on to the noblest of pursuits, like helping a cable company acquire a telecom company. You will defend BP from birds. You will spend hours arguing that the well water was contaminated well before the fracking occurred. One of you will sort out the details of my prenup. A dozen of you will help me with my acrimonious divorce. And one of you will fall in love in the process.

Later, on a more serious note, Kaling urged graduates to “please just try to be the kind of people who give advice to celebrities, not the other way around.” She continued: “You are entering a profession where no matter how bad the crime, or the criminal, you have to defend the alleged perpetrator. That’s incredible to me.”

You can check out other highlights from her speech here, and you should watch the whole thing above.

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Here’s Mindy Kaling’s Hilarious Speech to Harvard Law: "You Will Defend BP From Birds."

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Obama’s Foreign Policy Paradox

by 0ge7rota Posted on May 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fareed Zakaria is the latest columnist to acknowledge that although President Obama’s foreign policy decisions have been largely correct, they’ve been sadly unaccompanied by any magic powers:

President Obama has not made a major mistake. He has done a skillful job steering the United States out of the muddy waters he inherited — Iraq, Afghanistan — and resisted plunging the country into another major conflict.

….Obama’s strategy of putting pressure on Moscow, using targeted sanctions and rallying support in Europe is the right one — and might even be showing some signs of paying off.

….From the Asia pivot to new trade deals to Russian sanctions, Obama has put forward an agenda that is ambitious and important, but he approaches it cautiously, as if his heart is not in it, seemingly pulled along by events rather than shaping them. Once more, with feeling, Mr. President!

I’ll concede that as a political partisan, maybe I’m cutting Obama too much slack. But I still wonder what all these critics want. I don’t mean the Bill Kristols and John McCains of the world. I know what they want: maximum confrontation, maximum bluster, and maximum military intervention. But what about the others? Like Zakaria, they sort of grudgingly recognize that Obama’s actual foreign policy actions have been about as good as they could have been, and yet they’re still unhappy. They want inspiration, dammit! They want the rest of the world to fall immediately into line. They want victory! That’s how it happens in the movies, after all. The president gives a big speech, and everyone swoons.

I wonder: Has any president in history been so widely criticized for doing everything right but not crowing loudly enough about it? I mean, it’s nice to think that a silver tongue would have gotten congressional Republicans to support intervention in Syria and Germans to approve harsher sanctions against Russia, but it’s just not so. I think everyone knows this perfectly well, but we find it so frustrating that we blame Obama for it anyway. It’s as if we’re all five-year-olds.

Which, come to think of it, maybe we are. We want this circle squared—triumph on every front but without any actual exercise of military power—and when we don’t get it we demand someone to blame, logic be damned. Before long we’re going to be holding Obama responsible for the fact that pi doesn’t equal three.

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Obama’s Foreign Policy Paradox

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Republicans Drink Their Own Kool-Aid, End Up Looking Like Idiots

by donnajansen Posted on May 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Bernstein makes a telling point today about the Fox News bubble that so many Republicans are trapped in. As you may recall, last week House Republicans released a survey suggesting that only 67 percent of Obamacare enrollees had paid their premiums. It was a laughably dumb survey, and it prompted the usual question: stupid or mendacious? Did Republicans really believe this nonsense, or were they just tossing out lies to muddy the waters?

Bernstein says the Republican follow-up to the survey demonstrates that they really believed their own spin:

This could be just a story of ineptitude. The House Energy and Commerce Committee wouldn’t be the first to construct a survey poorly….But yesterday, a House subcommittee invited insurance company executives to testify and, according to the Hill, Republicans on the panel were “visibly exasperated, as insurers failed to confirm certain claims about ObamaCare, such as the committee’s allegation that one-third of federal exchange enrollees have not paid their first premium.”

We don’t have to rely on reporter interpretations (here’s another one). It made no sense to hold the hearing unless Republicans were (foolishly) confident that the testimony would support their talking point, instead of undermining it.

The only plausible explanation is that closed feedback loop. Either members of the committee managed not to be aware of the criticisms of their survey, or they mistakenly wrote off the criticism as partisan backbiting.

Good catch! Obviously Republicans were caught off guard at yesterday’s hearing, and that could only happen if they really and truly believed their own flawed survey. And that, in turn, could only happen if they get pretty much all their information from Fox News and don’t bother with anything else. After all, the flaw in their survey was obvious. You didn’t have to be a brain surgeon to know that it would never stand up to scrutiny.

Welcome to the alternate universe of movement conservatism. Sometimes it bites you in the ass.

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Republicans Drink Their Own Kool-Aid, End Up Looking Like Idiots

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