My new Taki's column: Trust, But Verify
From Taki’s Magazine:
It has also become dogma among conservatives that crime can’t possibly be going down recently, even though Democrats and the media have stopped egging crime on for the past couple of years.
Instead, conservatives allege, big-city cops like the NYPD must be failing to report crime because they are all liberal Democrats conspiring against Trump. In reality, the NYPD and the U.S. Marines were the only top 100 employers in 2020 whose workers gave more to the Republicans than to the Democrats. …
There exist numerous data sources, most of which suggest that the worst kind of crime started falling about when the Democratic Establishment stopped egging it on a couple of years ago for fear of blowing the 2022 midterm elections.
For example, the Gun Violence Archive, a crowdsourced site devoted to firearm homicides, reports that during the first half of 2024, killings by shootings were down 10 percent since the first half of 2023.
That’s nice.
But shooting homicides are still up about 46 percent since the first half of 2014, before Black Lives Matter emerged at Ferguson in August 2014.
That’s nasty.
Read the whole thing there.
It hinges on what "down" means in a practical sense. Your graph shows it all: Yes, homicides are "down" in 2024, in the sense that the graph is trending downward, but the number of homicides is still much higher than 8-10 years ago. Similarly, a while ago the Biden administration touted that inflation had "declined"; yes, for one month, after 15 months of increasing!
We talk about rates, but crime is cumulative. The bodies pile up until they’ve passed from living memory. Who forgets being raped, beaten, or robbed?
Likewise, inflation adds up until there’s some rare deflation. Most wages might catch up eventually, but you'll still notice it decades later when you have to pay tax on gains from inflation.