The entire discourse around this topic is so tortured and so concerned with not wanting to sound racist (in today's definition of that word) that reporters and even Matt can't come out and say what is true: The vast majority of people (including black people) want criminals (including black criminals) arrested and removed from their neighborhoods.
The disproportionate rate of crime in urban black neighborhoods has many causes, stretching back for generations. I care about those causes and their solutions. And I want criminals arrested, incarcerated and, if possible, reformed. There is no conflict between these two things.
I have so many frustrations with the discourse in this space. More than anything, I am frustrated with the obsession with mono-causality: that if someone is discussing how X contributes to a problem, it's a denial that Y is a factor
-It's possible that the national crime wave is the result of quarantine fatigue, distrust between citizens and police forces, police being under-resourced, and more
-It's possible that Trump's China-Covid language is a contributing factor to the anti-Asian crime wave but not the dominant one
-It's possible that Long held less respect for these women due to their ethnicity AND that it wasn't his primary motivation for killing them
On top of this, understanding the purity culture that seems to be the primary root cause of this killer's deranged mental state is actually profoundly enlightening. I encourage folks to check out David French's piece on it: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/why-the-atlanta-massacre-triggered As a reformed wokester, the parallels between purity culture and woke culture are profuse. The obsessive focus on one sin as primary over all others, the shame that comes when obsession with avoiding one set of thoughts leads to more of those thoughts (white bear paradox), the idea that lack of purity of thoughts is a permanently dehumanizing trait, etc etc.
(This deserves a far more in-depth, sensitive discussion that I do not have the time to complete here this morning.)
Agreed murder is bad no matter the cause. The Vox writer talks about solidarity in the minority community. This seems like the part of the narrative she cares about the most. We people of color must stand against our white oppressors. Asian people should not be fooled by the great lives they live in America. Sure in most statistics they do BETTER than their white oppressors like higher education levels and income levels and less crime. But white people are against you too. We need you to stand with us (social justice left in Marxist solidarity) against white people.
Trump gets hammered for his divisive rhetoric and justifiably so. What about this divisiveness?
Matt’s right, crime is a problem for everyone and we should all be against it. We should be looking for solutions not trying to leverage criminal acts to fit social justice narratives. The public can see when someone is trying to fit a square into a round hole.
Providing universal healthcare and significantly reducing crime in the black community would do more for social justice than anything BLM has accomplished.
If you truly care about crime than you should stand with people who are advocating for solutions even if those people have different intuitions about why the crime is occurring in the first place.
Some social justice warriors seem far more concerned with advancing their narrative than fixing problems. And they’re willing to spread fear to do it...just like Trump.
The thing about crime prevention which Matt kind of alludes to which makes me personally insane is that crime has become such a polarized issue along party lines that activists and politicians seem to think the solutions are mutually exclusive to each other. In one corner you have the punitive, city journal set who want police cracking skulls and policing with an "under siege" mentality. On the other, you have the progressive set who think that holding people in jail who have committed murder is barbaric and racist. The idea of any nuance between the two is anathema to both, with deleterious results.
The idea that seems most reasonable to me - pour resources into crime prevention like jobs programs, mental health services, violence interrupters etc, but ALSO arrest and keep incarcerated people who commit violent crimes - is championed by exactly zero people in position of power in this country. Here in DC recently we had a guy who was OUT ON PRE-TRIAL BOND FOR MURDER commit an additional murder, and it barely made a blip in the news and the city continues to look for less reasons to hold people in jail after committing serious violent crimes despite their continued rate of re-offending or ending up on the business end of gunshots themselves. The idea that we have both serious trauma and poverty problems in our poorest neighborhoods that we need to urgently address but also we should keep dangerous criminals off the streets seems like a no-brainer for a politician to win on and to help reduce crime, but so far in this country we can only seem to get one or the other, to our collective harm.
Many progressive folks really *want* to get rid of the police. And I'm sympathetic. The attitudes we see in a lot of police departments are quite reactionary and racist, and seem deeply entrenched. I can see how one would think it would be great if we could just get rid of them.
But it wont work. It will lead to an increase in crime. Which is bad. And no matter how many sophisticated arguments you try to make (and people have tried quite a few), that's still where the evidence points.
I wish people would accept that and look for solutions, like you're doing in this piece. I get that it's less emotionally satisfying then just saying "defund", but I thought as progressives we're all about figuring out ways to make actual progress.
My opinion about "defund the police" as a policy solution is that the very concept, no matter how it is interpreted, leads us toward solutions that resemble private security only for the people who can afford it. It's a libertarian wet dream.
> Sharkey expresses optimism that instead of having cops do extra patrols, you could have civilians organized by community groups do it. He argues that private security guards are very effective — poor people just can’t afford them, but they serve as proof of concept that you could fund grassroots patrols through churches or whatever else and see less crime.
Congratulations, you've privatized police and given that (dangerous) responsibility to the public who don't have the resources or training you previously allocated to the police. And since you're not actually a libertarian and have just been cornered into embracing a dash of their anti-government nonsense, we know you didn't cut taxes while reducing government services. So how exactly is the public going to afford to do it right? Helicopter money drops that can somehow only be used to buy security gear on Amazon?
I think we have some data here that should be mentioned, and it leans more to lehman's side of the debate. The NYPD yearly reports from 2019 and 2020.
The number of hate crimes against asians went up from 3 in 2019 to 29 in 2020. That's substantial. But it is also a small minority of a hate crimes. Of felony hate crime assaults in 2020 5 were anti-lgbt, 4 were anti asian, 3 were anti-jewish, 3 were anti-black, 2 were anti-muslim and 1 was anti-white. In 2019, there actually substantially more felony hate crime assaults, including 11 anti-lgbt ones, but none were against asians.
It is also drop in the bucket compared to all assaults. In 2019 the NYPD recorded 20800 victims of felony assault in NYC, and in 2020 it recorded an almost identical 20763. In both years asians, despite making up 14% of the city's population, were just 7.7% of those who reported being assaulted to the NYPD. Black people were substantially overrepresented among assault victims (whites are just as underrepresented as asians, while hispanics resemble their population share). So you are taking about roughly 1600 asian assault victims every year in NYC, which is a much lower rate than other NYC residents, compared to hate crimes going from 3 to 29.
The massive rise was in shootings, in 2019 there were 900 people shot, and that doubled in 2020 to 1800. But the demographics didn't change, in both 19 and 20 whites and asians were massively underrepresented, hispanics underrepresented as well, but not to the same degree, and blacks overrepresented massively. Asians made up 2% of shooting victims in 2019 and 2020, so they went from 18 people shot in 2019 to 36 people shot in 2020.
In terms of demographics of assailants, shootings have almost identical demographics of shooters to victims, but for assaults asians, whites and hispanics all make up a slightly higher percentage of victims then they do for those arrested for assault, while blacks make up a higher percentage of perpetrators then they do for victims.
If you look at the numbers you see an increase in hate crimes against asians, but hate crimes are a tiny percentage of all crimes, and asians are not the majority or even substantially overrepresented among hate crimes victims. If you look at all crimes you don't see asians increasing as a share of crime victims, but you do see an overall increase in shootings and homicides, and other crimes remaining at similar rates, with the demographics of victims essentially unchanged.
The hot takes are going to focus on the police and racism: "blue flu!" "law enforcement handcuffed by political correctness!"
But it's worth wondering whether the police are causal at all.
The epidemic has given us a year of unemployment figures in which every week was worse than the worst week of the Great Recession. No jobs, no money. Lotta time on the hands of bored youth.
People are shut in with family and small children. Tempers fray. How many of these murders will turn out to be extensions of intimate partner abuse?
And what's the situation overseas? Murder rates flat in Europe, South America, rising, falling?
I just strongly suspect that the discourse is going to look in the wrong directions, at cop issues and race issues, when the real drivers are economic and sociological.
An old, and in my view correct, but extremely unpopular view, is that corporal punishment is a more effective deterrent, more effective at reducing recidivism, and is ultimately kinder on *the punished* than prison.
It also has the benefit, if conducted publicly, that people can "see justice be done". (Whether you like it or not, many people including victims of crime would like to see this.)
America's current prison system is in effect a kind of "corporal punishment but extremely unfair" system. Rates of violence, including sexual violence in prison, are high. But often the nastiest inmates are the ones doing it to others, so ironically have the best time in prison. Whilst the young kid sentenced for something relatively minor might be treated appallingly.
This also ties into the need for justice to be done quickly. Going quickly from Crime > Conviction > Sentencing > Punishment creates a strong psychological link in the mind of the convicted criminal between their action and the state's reaction.
Whereas the current US criminal justice system solution of letting *unconvicted* but charged suspects languish for sometimes years in jails (not prisons) before eventually taking a plea bargain that counts time already served means there is in their minds little link between their crime and their punishment.
If there's one thing I've noticed about the "Stop AAPI Hate" movement that is picking up steam, it's that the issue is becoming bigger than the crime wave which helped launch it. My Asian-American friends who are posting about it, sharing their experiences with racism and the alienation they have felt by being othered in their own country; they haven't been victims of any crime at all. But they are still feeling drawn to this movement because of the racism they have lived with for their whole lives. We could see assaults against Asian folks drop to zero tomorrow and the problems they are talking about would still be relevant.
So I think it's important that we take the murder surge seriously, as its own issue, and also take the issue of anti-Asian racism seriously as well. And while the two issues are currently intertwined, I have a feeling they are aren't going to remain that way for long. The movement that started at Stonewall didn't end when police stopped doing extortion raids on gay bars.
I agree with you, as usual. But why is it so controversial and even "dangerous" for you to suggest that police play a role in reducing crime, and therefore proposing to defund the police is not such a great idea? I'd say it reflects disturbing pathologies within the Progressive movement.
Matt, your mention of CCTV also makes me think another thread to pull here is how privacy hawkery and anti-surveillance thinking make the US implementation of CCTVs and full study of the use of airborne surveillance imagery in crime investigation hard.
"Conversely, if you’re a 'Blame BLM' guy, then what is the solution here? Next time we see a video of an unarmed man being strangled to death, don’t mention anything?"
It seems to me there is probably some middle ground between ignoring violent cops and tolerating the like of BLM.
I feel like the Philly DA election in May will be a good test for how much this is filtering through to Democratic voters. The police union has been going hard at him for years now, and there really has been a pretty big increase in the murder rate at least—499 murders last year was the most since 1990, and it’s on pace for a 30% increase this year. If Philadelphia voters are done with Krasner’s approach, that probably bodes pretty poorly for the reform project.
The entire discourse around this topic is so tortured and so concerned with not wanting to sound racist (in today's definition of that word) that reporters and even Matt can't come out and say what is true: The vast majority of people (including black people) want criminals (including black criminals) arrested and removed from their neighborhoods.
The disproportionate rate of crime in urban black neighborhoods has many causes, stretching back for generations. I care about those causes and their solutions. And I want criminals arrested, incarcerated and, if possible, reformed. There is no conflict between these two things.
I have so many frustrations with the discourse in this space. More than anything, I am frustrated with the obsession with mono-causality: that if someone is discussing how X contributes to a problem, it's a denial that Y is a factor
-It's possible that the national crime wave is the result of quarantine fatigue, distrust between citizens and police forces, police being under-resourced, and more
-It's possible that Trump's China-Covid language is a contributing factor to the anti-Asian crime wave but not the dominant one
-It's possible that Long held less respect for these women due to their ethnicity AND that it wasn't his primary motivation for killing them
On top of this, understanding the purity culture that seems to be the primary root cause of this killer's deranged mental state is actually profoundly enlightening. I encourage folks to check out David French's piece on it: https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/why-the-atlanta-massacre-triggered As a reformed wokester, the parallels between purity culture and woke culture are profuse. The obsessive focus on one sin as primary over all others, the shame that comes when obsession with avoiding one set of thoughts leads to more of those thoughts (white bear paradox), the idea that lack of purity of thoughts is a permanently dehumanizing trait, etc etc.
(This deserves a far more in-depth, sensitive discussion that I do not have the time to complete here this morning.)
Agreed murder is bad no matter the cause. The Vox writer talks about solidarity in the minority community. This seems like the part of the narrative she cares about the most. We people of color must stand against our white oppressors. Asian people should not be fooled by the great lives they live in America. Sure in most statistics they do BETTER than their white oppressors like higher education levels and income levels and less crime. But white people are against you too. We need you to stand with us (social justice left in Marxist solidarity) against white people.
Trump gets hammered for his divisive rhetoric and justifiably so. What about this divisiveness?
Matt’s right, crime is a problem for everyone and we should all be against it. We should be looking for solutions not trying to leverage criminal acts to fit social justice narratives. The public can see when someone is trying to fit a square into a round hole.
Providing universal healthcare and significantly reducing crime in the black community would do more for social justice than anything BLM has accomplished.
If you truly care about crime than you should stand with people who are advocating for solutions even if those people have different intuitions about why the crime is occurring in the first place.
Some social justice warriors seem far more concerned with advancing their narrative than fixing problems. And they’re willing to spread fear to do it...just like Trump.
The thing about crime prevention which Matt kind of alludes to which makes me personally insane is that crime has become such a polarized issue along party lines that activists and politicians seem to think the solutions are mutually exclusive to each other. In one corner you have the punitive, city journal set who want police cracking skulls and policing with an "under siege" mentality. On the other, you have the progressive set who think that holding people in jail who have committed murder is barbaric and racist. The idea of any nuance between the two is anathema to both, with deleterious results.
The idea that seems most reasonable to me - pour resources into crime prevention like jobs programs, mental health services, violence interrupters etc, but ALSO arrest and keep incarcerated people who commit violent crimes - is championed by exactly zero people in position of power in this country. Here in DC recently we had a guy who was OUT ON PRE-TRIAL BOND FOR MURDER commit an additional murder, and it barely made a blip in the news and the city continues to look for less reasons to hold people in jail after committing serious violent crimes despite their continued rate of re-offending or ending up on the business end of gunshots themselves. The idea that we have both serious trauma and poverty problems in our poorest neighborhoods that we need to urgently address but also we should keep dangerous criminals off the streets seems like a no-brainer for a politician to win on and to help reduce crime, but so far in this country we can only seem to get one or the other, to our collective harm.
Many progressive folks really *want* to get rid of the police. And I'm sympathetic. The attitudes we see in a lot of police departments are quite reactionary and racist, and seem deeply entrenched. I can see how one would think it would be great if we could just get rid of them.
But it wont work. It will lead to an increase in crime. Which is bad. And no matter how many sophisticated arguments you try to make (and people have tried quite a few), that's still where the evidence points.
I wish people would accept that and look for solutions, like you're doing in this piece. I get that it's less emotionally satisfying then just saying "defund", but I thought as progressives we're all about figuring out ways to make actual progress.
My opinion about "defund the police" as a policy solution is that the very concept, no matter how it is interpreted, leads us toward solutions that resemble private security only for the people who can afford it. It's a libertarian wet dream.
> Sharkey expresses optimism that instead of having cops do extra patrols, you could have civilians organized by community groups do it. He argues that private security guards are very effective — poor people just can’t afford them, but they serve as proof of concept that you could fund grassroots patrols through churches or whatever else and see less crime.
Congratulations, you've privatized police and given that (dangerous) responsibility to the public who don't have the resources or training you previously allocated to the police. And since you're not actually a libertarian and have just been cornered into embracing a dash of their anti-government nonsense, we know you didn't cut taxes while reducing government services. So how exactly is the public going to afford to do it right? Helicopter money drops that can somehow only be used to buy security gear on Amazon?
I think we have some data here that should be mentioned, and it leans more to lehman's side of the debate. The NYPD yearly reports from 2019 and 2020.
The number of hate crimes against asians went up from 3 in 2019 to 29 in 2020. That's substantial. But it is also a small minority of a hate crimes. Of felony hate crime assaults in 2020 5 were anti-lgbt, 4 were anti asian, 3 were anti-jewish, 3 were anti-black, 2 were anti-muslim and 1 was anti-white. In 2019, there actually substantially more felony hate crime assaults, including 11 anti-lgbt ones, but none were against asians.
It is also drop in the bucket compared to all assaults. In 2019 the NYPD recorded 20800 victims of felony assault in NYC, and in 2020 it recorded an almost identical 20763. In both years asians, despite making up 14% of the city's population, were just 7.7% of those who reported being assaulted to the NYPD. Black people were substantially overrepresented among assault victims (whites are just as underrepresented as asians, while hispanics resemble their population share). So you are taking about roughly 1600 asian assault victims every year in NYC, which is a much lower rate than other NYC residents, compared to hate crimes going from 3 to 29.
The massive rise was in shootings, in 2019 there were 900 people shot, and that doubled in 2020 to 1800. But the demographics didn't change, in both 19 and 20 whites and asians were massively underrepresented, hispanics underrepresented as well, but not to the same degree, and blacks overrepresented massively. Asians made up 2% of shooting victims in 2019 and 2020, so they went from 18 people shot in 2019 to 36 people shot in 2020.
In terms of demographics of assailants, shootings have almost identical demographics of shooters to victims, but for assaults asians, whites and hispanics all make up a slightly higher percentage of victims then they do for those arrested for assault, while blacks make up a higher percentage of perpetrators then they do for victims.
If you look at the numbers you see an increase in hate crimes against asians, but hate crimes are a tiny percentage of all crimes, and asians are not the majority or even substantially overrepresented among hate crimes victims. If you look at all crimes you don't see asians increasing as a share of crime victims, but you do see an overall increase in shootings and homicides, and other crimes remaining at similar rates, with the demographics of victims essentially unchanged.
Sources
https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjg1NWI3YjgtYzkzOS00Nzc0LTkwMDAtNTgzM2I2M2JmYWE1IiwidCI6IjJiOWY1N2ViLTc4ZDEtNDZmYi1iZTgzLWEyYWZkZDdjNjA0MyJ9
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year-end-2019-enforcement-report.pdf
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/year-end-2020-enforcement-report.pdf
The hot takes are going to focus on the police and racism: "blue flu!" "law enforcement handcuffed by political correctness!"
But it's worth wondering whether the police are causal at all.
The epidemic has given us a year of unemployment figures in which every week was worse than the worst week of the Great Recession. No jobs, no money. Lotta time on the hands of bored youth.
People are shut in with family and small children. Tempers fray. How many of these murders will turn out to be extensions of intimate partner abuse?
And what's the situation overseas? Murder rates flat in Europe, South America, rising, falling?
I just strongly suspect that the discourse is going to look in the wrong directions, at cop issues and race issues, when the real drivers are economic and sociological.
> tinder for violence
I knew following this blog was a good way to get startup ideas
What's happening in other countries? If this rise also occurred in other rich countries then why do anything?
I'd bet that a similar rise has happened across most rich nations and is unrelated to any cultural factors.
An old, and in my view correct, but extremely unpopular view, is that corporal punishment is a more effective deterrent, more effective at reducing recidivism, and is ultimately kinder on *the punished* than prison.
It also has the benefit, if conducted publicly, that people can "see justice be done". (Whether you like it or not, many people including victims of crime would like to see this.)
America's current prison system is in effect a kind of "corporal punishment but extremely unfair" system. Rates of violence, including sexual violence in prison, are high. But often the nastiest inmates are the ones doing it to others, so ironically have the best time in prison. Whilst the young kid sentenced for something relatively minor might be treated appallingly.
This also ties into the need for justice to be done quickly. Going quickly from Crime > Conviction > Sentencing > Punishment creates a strong psychological link in the mind of the convicted criminal between their action and the state's reaction.
Whereas the current US criminal justice system solution of letting *unconvicted* but charged suspects languish for sometimes years in jails (not prisons) before eventually taking a plea bargain that counts time already served means there is in their minds little link between their crime and their punishment.
If there's one thing I've noticed about the "Stop AAPI Hate" movement that is picking up steam, it's that the issue is becoming bigger than the crime wave which helped launch it. My Asian-American friends who are posting about it, sharing their experiences with racism and the alienation they have felt by being othered in their own country; they haven't been victims of any crime at all. But they are still feeling drawn to this movement because of the racism they have lived with for their whole lives. We could see assaults against Asian folks drop to zero tomorrow and the problems they are talking about would still be relevant.
So I think it's important that we take the murder surge seriously, as its own issue, and also take the issue of anti-Asian racism seriously as well. And while the two issues are currently intertwined, I have a feeling they are aren't going to remain that way for long. The movement that started at Stonewall didn't end when police stopped doing extortion raids on gay bars.
Also, if you haven't read R.O. Kwan's piece in Vanity Fair, I highly recommend it: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/03/ro-kwon-letter-to-asian-women
I agree with you, as usual. But why is it so controversial and even "dangerous" for you to suggest that police play a role in reducing crime, and therefore proposing to defund the police is not such a great idea? I'd say it reflects disturbing pathologies within the Progressive movement.
Matt, your mention of CCTV also makes me think another thread to pull here is how privacy hawkery and anti-surveillance thinking make the US implementation of CCTVs and full study of the use of airborne surveillance imagery in crime investigation hard.
"Conversely, if you’re a 'Blame BLM' guy, then what is the solution here? Next time we see a video of an unarmed man being strangled to death, don’t mention anything?"
It seems to me there is probably some middle ground between ignoring violent cops and tolerating the like of BLM.
I feel like the Philly DA election in May will be a good test for how much this is filtering through to Democratic voters. The police union has been going hard at him for years now, and there really has been a pretty big increase in the murder rate at least—499 murders last year was the most since 1990, and it’s on pace for a 30% increase this year. If Philadelphia voters are done with Krasner’s approach, that probably bodes pretty poorly for the reform project.