Tangle - Rising violent crime.

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Over the last few months, a debate has been raging about the rise in violent crime across the United States. In 2020, murders in the U.S. went up 30%, the largest single year increase in sixty years. In 2021, new data are showing murders rising again, this time at a slower rate, but now reaching similar levels to the mid-1990s, when murders in the U.S. were near an all-time high.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about rising violent crime in America, what it means, some of the arguments about it, and then, you know, my take. Before we jump in, as always, we'll start off with some quick hits. First up, President Biden issued punishing sanctions against Russia yesterday,

calling their moves into Ukraine an invasion. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky introduced a 30-day national emergency and called up military reservists between the age of 18 and 60. Number two, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to decide whether a conservative Christian woman who designs websites has a free speech right to turn away same-sex couples. Number three, Gregory and Travis McMichael and William Bryan, who were convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, were also found guilty of federal hate crimes by a Georgia jury yesterday. Number four, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds will deliver the GOP's response to President Biden's

first State of the Union address next week. Number five, 700 National Guard troops will patrol Washington, D.C. as the nation prepares for a convoy of truckers that are planning to arrive in the nation's capital to protest pandemic restrictions. All right, that brings us to our main story today, which is violent crime in the U.S. Over the last few months, a debate has been raging about the rise in violent crime across the United States. It's important to note here that while the trends all appear similar, there can be slight discrepancies between FBI data and data from independent studies on crime, and that 2021 data are still considered to be estimates. Not all of the law enforcement agencies have submitted their data. Yet, this data does show a trend, and in 2020, murders in the U.S. went up more than 27%, some say 30%, the largest single-year increase in 60 years. In 2021, new data are

showing murders rising again, this time at a slower rate, but now reaching similar levels to the mid-1990s when murders in the U.S. were near an all-time high. There were 7.4 murders per 100,000 people in 1996. There were an estimated 6.9 murders per 100,000 people in 2021. Those data from well-known crime analyst Jeff Asher were published around the same time the Council on Criminal Justice released its own report. CCJ looked at crime data from 22 cities and found a 5% increase in homicides from 2020 and a 44% increase over 2019. The FBI estimates there were 21,570 murders in the U.S. last year. Six of the 22 cities studied, including Seattle and Omaha, saw their murder rates fall. The overall rates, according to Asher's data, are still short of the

9.5 murders per 100,000 people we saw in 1993. Additionally, while murder and violent crime have risen during the pandemic, other crimes have fallen. Murders in the U.S. are still concentrated in major cities. Most homicide victims are Black, and Black Americans were eight times more likely to be murdered in 2020 than white Americans, by some estimates. In January, two New York City police officers, Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera,

were shot and killed while responding to a call, In January, two New York City police officers, Wilbert Mora and Jason Rivera, were shot and killed while responding to a call, which reignited concerns about the violence in major U.S. cities and the tensions between police and the communities they serve. Earlier this month, 22-year-old Amir Locke was killed by Minneapolis police during a no-knock warrant raid. Despite not being named on the warrant, that reignited criticism of police actions in Minneapolis and no-knock warrants nationally. Police killed an estimated 1,134 people in the United States in 2021.

Many conservatives have criticized liberal policies like the Defund the Police movement or cash bail reform, which in some cases allows criminals to be freed while awaiting trial, for the rise in violent crime. Many liberals, meanwhile, contend that it's an increase in gun ownership and pandemic-related causes that have led to the spike. While the issues related to crime can be a priority for voters and local races, polling consistently shows it does not rank very highly for voters when asked about the most important issues facing the country as a whole. In a second, we're going to hear a few arguments from the right and the left, and then my take. Okay, first up, we'll start with what the right is saying. The right argues that the defund the police movement has caused rise in crime. They point to progressive policies like bail reform for a spike in violence on the streets, and many also called out the Ferguson effect as a reason for increased homicides. In the Wall

Street Journal, William Galston said Biden should follow the lead of New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Mr. Adams has criticized his own party's approach to criminal justice. While Democrats are comfortable prescribing solutions for root causes of crime, such as poor education and inadequate economic development, Mr. Adams said they cringe when beefed-up policing is on the table. But Democrats can't avoid what he regards as the most urgent question. How can we use our police properly to get the justice we deserve and the safety we need? In the early 1990s, when violent crime reached a modern high, Biden was a leading advocate for policies that culminated in the 1994 Clinton crime bill. He subsequently expressed regret for some of the law's consequences, including an excessive reliance on long-term incarceration of drug offenders. But nevertheless,

during the 2020 presidential campaign, he rejected demands to defund the police and kept the proposal out of the Democratic Party's platform. He was right to do so. In 2020, homicides surged 30 percent, the largest single-year increase ever recorded. Although the increase seems to have slowed in 2021, rising crime rates have elevated public concerns about the security of communities around the country. Last fall's mayoral elections confirmed that the tide had turned against reducing police department budgets and toward giving the police what they needed to restore public safety. Jason Riley wrote about the predictable consequences of defund the police. Murder rose by nearly 30 percent last year and Americans have been making it as clear as can be that they want more and better policing, Riley said. The incoming mayors

of Atlanta, New York, and Seattle ran campaigns that prioritized public safety. A ballot initiative in Minneapolis that would have dismantled the police department was defeated soundly, and some of the strongest opposition came from low-income black communities. We are reminded almost weekly of the tragic failure of bail reform and other soft-on-crime initiatives that have frustrated the efforts of police, prosecutors, and judges to keep suspects with long criminal records off the streets. The man charged with driving his SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin last month, killing six, had been released five days earlier on $1,000 bail and another violent felony case. The man charged last week in the fatal shooting of a music producer's 81-year-old wife in her Beverly Hills, California home is a career criminal who is out on parole. The suspect in the stabbing death of a Columbia University graduate student last week

is a convicted felon and gang member who has been arrested 11 times since 2012, according to the New York Post. Charles Fane Lehman said we have two new studies showing the Ferguson effects, where public scrutiny reduced police proactivity and led to an increase in violent crime. The more recent study, just published in the Journal of Public Economics by university economists Cheng Cheng and Wei Long, looks at the effect of Brown's death on police activity and crime on a week-to-week level in St. Louis, which is near Ferguson, and on a month-to-month level in 60 big cities. Their

findings managed somehow to be both unsurprising and shocking. In the immediate aftermath of Brown's death, self-initiated arrests fell 62%. Similar declines are seen across 9 out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol down 82% and pedestrian checks 76%. Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests, more discretionary than felonies and among arrests of blacks rather than whites. This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault. But what about the effects of officer-involved fatalities

in general? A second study by Deepak Premkumar of the Public Policy Institute of California compares arrest patterns among police departments in 52 cities that experience high profile shooting incidents to 2,688 police departments that did not, and comes to a similar conclusion. Just as in Chang and Long's study, Premkumar finds that police reduce their activity as measured by arrest after a high profileprofile incident, but not evenly. He finds large average declines in arrests for minor offenses, up to 33% for marijuana possession, but no significant decline in arrests for major offenses, whether violent crime or property crime. At the same time, cities that experience high-profile incidents relative to those that did not

saw a 10% to 17% increase in murders and robberies, as well as a small increase in theft and grand theft auto. Alright, so that is it for what the right is saying, and this is what the left is saying. The left says progressive policies are not at the root of rising crime. They argue for more gun control and jobs programs, and they fear a return to tough-on-crime policies that existed in the 1990s. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne said if you want to fight crime, take on the gun lobby. If you want to talk about those blinding themselves to rising violence,

start with the politicians and jurists who offer abstract and ahistorical readings of the Second Amendment to prevent mayors, police officers, and lawmakers from getting guns off our streets. Consider how distorted our political dialogue has become, abetted by how the politics of crime are covered in the media. A dead-as-a-doornail slogan, defund the police, continues to take center stage. But a genuinely powerful movement that handcuffs efforts to fight mayhem by stemming the flow of guns into our neighborhoods continues to get a pass. If politicians in Washington were serious about rising crime, they would take a whole series of steps to limit the spread of weapons. The Senate could start by enacting two modest bills already passed by the House last year. One required background checks for all gun buyers. The other extended

the time the FBI would have to check on those trying to buy guns who were flagged by the nation's instant check system. But no, in a Senate where big cities facing the most serious crime problems are wildly underrepresented, the gun lobby rules. And we just accept this as a fact of life. Conservative members of that body are so committed to fighting crime that they're willing to do nothing about the weapons our current law is allowed to be so widely available. In the nation, Sasha Abramski expressed concern a disgruntled public may lurch rightward on criminal justice issues. There's a very real risk that murder rates won't plateau but will just keep heading north,

fueled by a lethal combination of too much psychic and economic unraveling caused by the pandemic and by America's quarter-century-long gun-buying spree, Abramski wrote. By the end of 2021, there were over 400 million guns in America, with roughly 81 million Americans owning these weapons. In the first 51 weeks of 2021, over 20,000 Americans lost their lives to gun violence, and another nearly 40,000 were shot and injured. Just in the days from December 13th to 19th, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, 350 people were fatally shot in the United States. In the 1980s and 90s, public fear of violent crime led to a backlash against liberal criminal justice reforms.

The result was financially and morally catastrophic. The rise of a mass incarceration society in which politicians and electorates alike cast common sense to the wind and embraced unprecedentedly punitive and ham-handed sentencing strategies such as three strikes you're out. These strategies ended up destroying the lives of millions of people, breaking low-income and minority communities, and, over the course of several decades, emptying public coffers of hundreds of billions of dollars. That is why it's vital that progressive states and progressive organizers do everything in their power to turn the tide against this violence and against the almost casual usage of guns that's taking place around

the country these days. The New York Times editorial board wrote about how to address crime in New York and other big cities. The big challenge will be how to make the city safer without reverting to over-policing, especially in black and Latino communities seen under previous mayors, the board said. Mr. Adams promised better oversight of the new anti-gun units, and in the coming days, New Yorkers deserve to know more about what that oversight will be and how it will work. It was promising to hear the mayor focus on jobs for young people. Saying that roughly 250,000 people ages 16 to 24 are neither in school nor employed, he promised an unprecedented summer jobs program for youth. That's a good start, but ultimately these young people will need the skills to help find permanent, well-paying jobs.

Other proposals by the mayor deserve more scrutiny. One of his ideas, allowing 16 and 17-year-old repeat offenders arrested on gun charges to be charged in criminal court instead of family court, should be a non-starter. Mr. Adams also said he would campaign the rollback provisions in the state's 2019 bail reforms and push for a change that would allow judges to consider dangerousness when setting bail. If these changes will make New Yorkers safer, lawmakers should consider them. But the burden of proof lies with those who want to undo these important reforms, the board said. The causes of crime are complex, and New York's rise in shooting mirrors a national trend.

Homicides during the pandemic, for instance, have been on the rise in cities run by Republicans and Democrats, cities that liberalized their anti-crime policies and those that did not. All right, that is it for what the left and the right is saying, which brings us to my take. I've written about crime and policing in America, and at this point, I think long-time readers of Tangle and long-time listeners of this podcast have a good idea of where I stand, which is somewhere among the lefties and libertarians. As I've said before, my most radical position in politics is that we shouldn't lock human beings in cages as a form of punishment or rehabilitation. It's a concept I think is fairly benign if you consider it for more than a few minutes and shed some of the societal indoctrination that has taught us such a practice is normal or okay.

But a future where prisons don't exist is not something that happens by flipping a switch, and it's not something that solves our present-day issues of crime. It's more of my own personal pipe dream for now. So, with the requisite caveat that crime is complex and the answer is not singular and I have my own biases, I'll tell you the flaws I see in the left's argument, and then I'll tell you why I think they get most of this story right. Politically, I think the left's response to the rise in violent crime, which is real, has been inadequate and self-defeating. Saying things aren't as bad as the 1990s or that other crime is going down or that it's just the guns is not something that quells the fear of most Americans. It also ignores the very real difficulty police face in urban enclaves, namely that they seem hated by a large chunk of the people they're

supposed to be serving. Of course, decades of discriminatory policing, stop and frisk, police brutality, and other tough-on-crime legacies created that tension, but it's there, and the defund the police movement has almost certainly thrown gas on it. More tangibly, though, the predominant progressive, and that's not democratic, but the progressive left angle on policing, is divorced from what many people of color, city-dwelling, or low-income Americans want. A quick reminder that black or African-American is not synonymous with urban or poor. The majority of African-Americans live above the poverty line and outside of inner cities today. Poll after poll shows that Americans living in big cities want better policing, not fewer cops on the street.

Defunding the police, pulling them back, or replacing them wholesale with the Department of Public Safety is not a winning issue with the constituents these reforms are supposed to help. That is likely because most of these people understand police presence as a near-term solution can reduce crime. Nikima Levy Armstrong, a Minneapolis lawyer and the founder of the Racial Justice Network, put it this way in a recent New York Times op-ed. While many white progressives embrace the Minneapolis ballot measure as a sign of progress, many black residents like me raise concerns that the plan lacks specificity and could reduce public safety in the black community without increasing police accountability. The city's largest black

neighborhoods voted it down while support was greater in areas where more white liberals lived. What many black people are demanding is a system that is effective, cost-efficient, non-militarized, and transparent. We want officials to be accountable for who is hired, how they are disciplined, and how they treat us. We want officials to be accountable for who is hired, how they are disciplined, and how they treat us. We want police leaders to admit that racism, white supremacy, and misogyny are endemic in many police forces, and we want them to commit to radically shift police culture. Black lives need to be valued not just when unjustly taken by the police, but when we are alive and demanding our right to be heard, to breathe, to live in safe

neighborhoods, and to enjoy the full benefits of our status as American citizens. In some ways, I think progressive activists have hijacked the conversation from ordinary Americans and activists like Armstrong, who are most impacted by crime and bad policing. But that brings me to what the left gets right. The case that the defund the police movement or progressive policies have ushered in the rise in crime is tenuous at best. For starters, police haven't been defunded. In many cities, they're getting more funding, not less. The defund the police movement has failed in democratic politics and been wholesale rejected by the current president and the leaders of the democratic party. Many democrats now blame progressives for the movement costing them politically.

So if the argument is that police are simply policing less because the job is dangerous or the people they're policing hate them, that's a separate argument than that departments are losing funding and not able to do their jobs. But if that is the case, that police are policing less because they feel hated or the job's more dangerous, there's a level of responsibility that falls into the laps of those police. The Ferguson effect, the idea that increased scrutiny

causes police to interact with the public less, is not actually a particularly good look for cops. Second is that we can look at how progressive policies impact crime in cities because cities across America have different district attorneys, mayors, and leaders directing their policy. And we can see that progressive policies had little impact on homicides across cities. There is a lot of research out there to suggest that policies like not jailing defendants while they await trial or not imprisoning people for petty offenses like shoplifting or trespassing

does not actually increase crime. And then there are the things we do know. We know that a vast majority of violent crime is driven by societal ails like addiction or poverty or joblessness. We know that 8 in 10 U.S. murders in 2020 involved a firearm. And we know that in 2020 and 2021, at the same time we were hit by a global pandemic and COVID-19 related mitigation measures, millions of people lost their jobs, we saw an increase in addiction, increase in social anxiety, the second highest number of guns purchased ever, and poverty going up. Does that mean that anti-police activism or progressive policies didn't impact crime? Of course not. Some new

police chiefs have said getting cops re-engaged on the job has lowered crime rates. Policies like bail reform, for instance, have produced some legitimate horror stories. But horror stories are just that, they're stories, they're anecdotal, they don't necessarily reflect the net positive, and they do little to weigh the balance of, say, a working dad convicted of a petty crime who didn't have to spend months or years in jail awaiting a sentence and thus was able to keep his job and his life in order. That's why I think, on the whole, the left's argument is stronger, albeit flawed in places, and it's why we should be careful not to, the left's argument is stronger, albeit flawed, in places.

And it's why we should be careful not to react to this rising crime by undoing policies that may not be causing harm, or by increasing police presence, especially not without also addressing a whole slew of other root causes behind what we're seeing. All right, that's it for my take. A quick reminder, if you've got beef and you want to share your feelings, you can always write to me, Isaac, I-S-A-A-C, at readtangle.com. All right, next up is our story that matters. This one is about some companies who are responding to high inflation and strong demand for workers by reviewing worker pay more frequently, not just once a year. Manufacturers and technology firms in particular say they are offering raises more regularly to

workers to keep up with the rising wages and worker shortage. Employers added 6.7 million jobs last year, yet U.S. job openings and worker turnover are hovering near their highest levels on record. Those trends are spurring wage growth. Wages climbed 5.7% in January from a year earlier, government data show, nearly double the average gain before the pandemic hit, the Wall Street Journal reported. Full off-cycle salary reviews remain relatively rare, surveys show, and executives say companies are turning to other options such as using one-time bonuses, expanding benefits, or adding vacation days to help retain workers without boosting wages. The Wall Street Journal has a whole story about this, how employers are finding new ways to keep workers. There is a link to it in today's newsletter.

All right, next up is our numbers section. The number of law enforcement agencies in the country is 18,623. The percentage of those law enforcement agencies that submitted 2021 crime data so far is 85%. The number of murder victims in 2020 who were black was 9,941. The number of murder victims in 2020 who were white was 7,043. The number of murder victims in 2020 who were white was 7,043. The number of murder victims in 2020 who were Hispanic was 2,851. All right, last but not least, our have a nice day story, which we definitely need in today's newsletter. The fossil of a 170 million year old pterosaur, commonly known as a pterodactyl, has been uncovered and it is nearly flawless. The fossil is being called the world's best preserved skeleton of the prehistoric winged

reptile, discovered in the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The reptile had a wingspan of 8.2 feet, about the same size as an albatross. Pterosaurs preserved in such quality are exceedingly rare and are usually reserved to select rock formations in Brazil and China, and yet an enormous, Natalia Jagielska, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, said, The fossil has feather-like bones as thin as sheets of paper. The researchers now believe pterodactyls, the first vertebrates to fly some 50 million years before birds, were larger than they previously thought. The Washington Post has this story, and you can find a link to it in today's podcast. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, if you want to support our work, you can go do that by clicking any of the links in our episode description.

I'm serious. Just click a link. See what happens. Help us out. Subscribe. ReadTangle.com slash membership. And we'll see you tomorrow. Either way. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangled.com.