Rich and Strange Aeons

So there's this website (a one post blog), claiming to dispel the "myth" that the UK is more violent than the US. It talks a bit about the methodology problems of different definitions, and uses both police reports and crime surveys. It calculates per capita rates a bit oddly, but seems okay. The summaries, trying to compare like to like:

You are thus 1.1x (135.7 / 113.7) more likely to suffer robbery in the UK than in the US.

You are thus 4.03x (4.6 / 1.14) more likely to be murdered in the US than in the UK.

You are thus 1.27x (58.3 / 45.8) more likely to be knifed in the UK than in the US.

You are thus 35.2x (3.17 / 0.09) more likely to be shot dead in the US than in the UK. [I haven't been checking all the math, but that actually seems low, we have more gun homicides than his figure.]

You are thus 1.02x (26.7 / 26) more likely to be raped as a female in the US than in the UK.

You are thus 6.9x (241.05 / 34.7) more likely to suffer aggravated assault in the US than in the UK.


Also two non-violent ones:

You are thus 1.52x (702.1 / 460.1) more likely to suffer burglary in the US than in the UK.

You are thus 1.29x (229.5 / 176.9) more likely to suffer theft of a vehicle in the US than in the UK.

So, more likely to be killed or shot-killed in the US; we knew that. (You're also a bit more likely to be killed even without a gun in the US than in the UK, roughly 1.4 to 1.05), More likely to suffer property crime in the US, but those don't count here. Rape is about equal, FWIW. Somewhat more likely to be knifed or robbed in the UK, that's not good for them. And massively more likely to be assaulted in the US.

Except that if you look carefully, the definitions are still incomparable. The UK is using Grievous Bodily Harm, which as far as I can tell requires actual serious injury. Meanwhile the US's aggravated assault requires no injury at all! An assault is aggravated if it results in serious injury *or* if it involved a weapon that could have resulted in serious injury: if I slash at or shoot at you, that's agg assault, even if I fail completely and you're unarmed.

Comparing those seems... poor. Completely invalid, even.

I tried writing the listed e-mail address, but it bounced; the thing seems abandoned, not to mention anonymous, for all that someone slung it around in a recent online debate.

It's usually said that homicides are the trustworthy crime statistic, since it's hard to hide dead bodies. But the Chicago police department has apparently been cooking the books under Garry McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, reclassifying homicides as "death investigations" and other tricks.
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/29/5850100/chicago-brought-its-murder-rate-down-by-not-counting-murders
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-crime-rates/

The vox entry links to a longish (not as long as the Chicago magazine one) article by Yglesias in 2003, on the cost of prison. Link and some quotes:

http://prospect.org/article/research-wars
The trouble with prison isn't that it doesn't work; the trouble is that it doesn't work very well but does cost a fortune compared with other ways of reducing crime. Feeding, clothing, housing and guarding a convict for a year costs more than $20,000.
Post-incarceration, shorter sentences can be combined with properly supervised parole programs that replicate the crime-reduction effects of imprisonment at a fraction of the cost. In Texas (Texas!), a system of graduated sanctions for minor parole violations is credited by officials with an 8,000-person reduction in the state's prison population.
The drug business is a business like any other -- if you eliminate a salesman without eliminating the demand, the salesman's boss is just going to hire someone else. Drug treatment, by contrast, actually works because a reformed drug user isn't automatically replaced with a new addict, and treatment programs aimed at consumption reduction are seven times cheaper than prison.
laws like California's famous "three strikes and you're out" rule go "beyond the point of diminishing returns" because even "career criminals have a period of peak performance." Robbery, he explains, is "a crime of the young," with incidence dropping dramatically in the mid-20s and falling to almost nothing as people move through their 30s.
Similarly, doubling sentencing length doubles (or more) corrections expenditures without doubling the deterrent effect on potential offenders. Simply putting a larger proportion of the people who get arrested behind bars is subject to diminishing returns as well, because as long as prosecutors and judges are minimally competent, they'll have made sure that the worst criminals are already locked up. Whether you look at deterrence or incapacitation, beyond a certain point prison stops being cost-effective.
Zimring went so far as to suggest that even a "prison training program to teach robbers how to burglarize unoccupied dwellings" would work better than more prisons as a method of reducing violent crime. That's far-fetched, of course, but it illustrates a larger point: Giving muggers an alternative to mugging is the best way to get them to stop. Even Heritage's Mulhausen concedes that "there's some research that shows that vocational training helps reduce recidivism."
The notion that jobs rather than jails hold the real key to crime reduction isn't just a bleeding-heart liberal fantasy -- it's supported by sound social-science research.
RAND tried that theory out, conducting a study in which students got money as an incentive for staying in school. This, indeed, caused graduation rates to rise, and Greenwood calculates that 250 serious crimes could be averted for every $1 million spent on such incentives -- far more bang for your buck than the prison system offers. [$4000 per crime prevented]
Ten offenders could be subjected to a tough parole regime for the price of putting one man behind bars, and though testing and sanctions sounds harsh compared with freedom, it looks pretty good compared with prison.

Last night at Grendel's I brought up the leaded gas crime connection, and there was the usual "correlation isn't causation" debate. I don't know if anyone involved will see this, but I realized that my old blog posts didn't call out the strongest points, so figured I would now. Italics are quotes; paragraphs adjacent here aren't necessarily adjacent in the article. Quotes also don't include some links which exist there.


...a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America.

Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.

Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."


[The linked paper, open access, lists eight countries besides the USA.)


Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the '50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up."

Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes.

(From the editor's summary of a linked paper: "For example, for every 5 μg/dl increase in blood lead levels at six years of age, the risk of being arrested for a violent crime as a young adult increased by almost 50% ")

because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.

(Last night I was saying the difference was urban vs. rural, and Martin I think was skeptical; I misremembered, it's big city vs. small city that have converge.)

Although both sexes are affected by lead, the neurological impact turns out to be greater among boys than girls.

Other recent studies link even minuscule blood lead levels with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Even at concentrations well below those usually considered safe—levels still common today—lead increases the odds of kids developing ADHD.

short version
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-crime-connection

Followup, including George Monbiot being skeptical, then convinced:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-assessing-evidence
http://www.monbiot.com/2013/01/07/the-grime-behind-the-crime/

why leaded gasoline, or how corporations got what they already knew was a known neurotoxin into our gas supply (and it's still being made and sold to poor countries!)
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/how-did-lead-get-our-gasoline-anyway
http://www.thenation.com/print/article/secret-history-lead

contains links to 20 page articles on international lead levels
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/lead-and-crime-ill-be-melissa-harris-perry-show-sunday-10-am

lead paint and murder
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/does-lead-paint-produce-more-crime-too

Personal observation: American white flight from the cities may have been motivated by a mix of justifiable fear of crime and less justifiable fear of black people, but in retrospect getting away from all the lead was sensible too. People are moving back now, to cities with lower crime rates (in fact, crime rates matching those of smaller cities) and lower lead levels to endanger one's children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster Deadliest US incident after 9/11 and Oklahoma City. 45 dead via bombs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akihabara_massacre 3 dead by car, 7 by knife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_school_massacre 8 schoolchildren killed by a knife.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_attack_on_the_Dutch_Royal_Family 8 dead by car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isla_Vista_massacre 4 dead by car.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/aurora_shooting_how_did_people_commit_mass_murder_before_automatic_weapons_.html mentions an case where 6 were killed and 15 wounded with a pair of knives. (The article has confused automatic and semi-automatic weapons, BTW. No automatics in Aurora, or any of the other shootings AFAIK.)

"Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns."

And of course http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway though with 10 people involved and only 13 deaths they underperformed by a lot, compared to 4-8 per culprit with knives or cars. 6000 injured though. A previous Aum sarin attack killed 8 and injured 144.

Elsewhere it's noted that mass killings tend to be well planned. Reducing the number of guns carried could plausibly reduce the number of shootings in the heat of the moment, but you'd have to eliminate guns to eliminate mass shootings; if guns are available at all then killers could get them. And you're not going to eliminate guns in a country that hasn't made all large non-human animals go extinct. And even if you did, mass killers could turn to other means. Killing 27 with just a car might be hard but most of the other shootings have been much smaller scale.

And US mass shooting deaths tend to total under one hundred per year, vs. the 11,000 murdered with guns in general, or the 35,000 killed in traffic accidents.

Note: I could actually be friendly to gun control! But mass shootings are a terrible justification for it. TSA-level terrible, as in harassing 100 million gun owners and likely not even saving any lives. The 8000 handgun murders every year would be much more apropos, though it's also true that the US non-gun homicide rate is higher than most rich countries' total homicide rate. (http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html gives 1.38/100,000 for non-gun. 1.0 or less is typical for peaceful countries' total homicide.)

Also, if you insist on talking about guns, it's helpful to remember they're not all equal. Handguns make up the vast majority of gun murders (and half of all murders) and even the majority of mass shootings, I think, though semi-auto "assault" rifles do play a bigger (but still overall tiny) role in those. Hunting rifles are almost pristine at the moment... though I suspect you could easily kill 4-8 with a bolt action rifle if you wanted. Let alone a shotgun.

http://www.law.upenn.edu/blogs/dskeel/archives/2008/03/race_and_crimestuntz.html

Article argues that inner cities get too much drug enforcement policing and not nearly enough violent crime policing -- clearance rate for violent crimes there being much lower than in white suburbs. Makes brief analogy to the "boots on the ground" and surge policies in Iraq; brings up lack of local control of police and prosecutors.

Comments bring up other factors, like "no snitch" culture in the neighborhoods; cause and effect between police ineffectiveness and local distrust of police might be entangled.