Has crime—and specifically homicide—risen sharply in the past year and five months since the Ferguson protests? The answer is yes, but fivethirtyeight.com analyst Carl Bialik is still trying to downplay the trend in a blogpost this week, as he did in a blogpost last September. Bialik makes the valid point that crime statistics are often “conflicting, confusing and misleading,” to quote the headline on his piece, and backs it up with a detailed discussion of the data. But his overall thrust comes very close to being “Nothing to see here, move on.” Consider the following two paragraphs:
“For what it’s worth, homicides are up — though probably by less than what you’ve read. I compiled data for the 60 most populous cities in September and found that homicides had in fact risen by 16 percent — a significant increase, but less than many headlines suggested and far below the highs reached in the 1990s. Since September, the rise in homicides has grown in profile — mentioned by the FBI director and by a Republican presidential candidate in a nationally televised debate — but not in magnitude. I updated my earlier analysis, using year-end counts when possible, and found that homicides remained 16 percent higher than in 2014 in the biggest cities.
“If it can seem from media coverage like crime is on the rise, that’s because rising crime gets covered. In the cities for which I found the latest data reported in a news article, homicide rates were up on average by 22 percent. In other cities, where homicide didn’t make headlines, rates were up by 14 percent.”
So, hey, 14 percent is a whole lot less than 100 percent, and so is 22 percent — so don’t be alarmed. Don’t pay any attention to the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald and others who have argued that homicides have risen because of a “Ferguson effect” — cops refraining from active policing for fear of attacks from Black Lives Matter and other such groups. Homicide rates nationally are far below those of the early 1990s, Bialik notes (though per capita homicides are at an all-time high in Baltimore). But a 14 percent increase in homicides in a single year is unprecedented; a 22 percent increase, repeated year after year, would get us up to the horrifying levels of the early 1990s very soon.
Bialik and fivethirtyeight.com are trying to encourage complacency about a trend that is, seen in the proper context, alarming in the extreme. “Most of America’s 50 largest cities have seen an increase in homicides and shootings this year, and many of them have seen a huge increase,” FBI Director James Comey said in October. There is something to see here, and it is not time to move on.
