“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Charles Dickens, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’
Lots of things seem to be getting worse, at least if you read the internet ever
This is not an episode to say, “nothing is getting worse,” but that what you hear about is probably not very correlated with what’s going on.
I’m leaving abortion out of this because honestly I can’t even deal with this shit right now.
Major problem with talking about trends: how long are we talking here? A lot of stuff goes up and down. If you just look at this year and extrapolate, then the stock market trends down, which it obviously doesn’t. So we’ll do our best, I’m focusing on the current adult generation (Millennials/GenX), but keep all that in mind.
What are things that sound like they’ve been getting worse (in the USA)?
- Gun deaths
Up recently, actually. Had been trending steadily down cine early 1990s (see: Freakonomics and leaded gasoline) but has gone back up significantly since 2013 and especially since 2018
Interestingly, “Red” states have far and away much higher rates of gun deaths
- Mass shootings specifically
Definitely up, in a few ways. “Active shooter incidents” up from 3 in 2000, to local high of 27 in 2009, 20 31 in 2017, to 40 in 2020 – but as always, it’s a very small portion of total gun deaths or gun murders
- Crime, including violent crime
Other than gun deaths, violent and property crime is WAY WAY WAY down, even though people keep thinking more and more that it’s going up (news bias)
- Rape / violence against women
Interesting one here. Reporting is way up (but then dropped starting in 2020)
There are ongoing questions all over the place about how much there is a change in frequency vs. a change in reporting. NCVS and bureau of justice seem to be struggling with this, as there are clear increases in reporting since the early 2010s, perhaps due to #metoo beginning in 2006.
https://nij.ojp.gov/media/image/16721
Other major issues with reporting/methodology for these estimates are widespread. Example: if someone was fairly intoxicated when they had sex, under what circumstances would it be marked as rape in a given survey? Certainly not way in the past.
https://time.com/3393442/cdc-rape-numbers/
- Incarceration
Interestingly, different data sources have very different data, so I’m looking at trends rather than hard numbers. Some of this is because some sources include local jails, some include juveniles, some include immigration detention, etc etc etc.
The US does indeed have the highest rate of incarceration of anywhere in the world, and we apparently spend $182B/year just to keep people locked up.
Has dropped precipitously through 2020. From 1970 to 2006, the rate of incarceration per 100,000 went from about 200 to about 1000 (this from BJS). It started dropping after 2008 and then from 2015 to 2021 it tanked to just over 600.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/US.html
Interestingly there is a myth that some significant number of people are in prison for drug possession. It’s actually less than 4%. 40k people are in state prison (where I have the highest fidelity data) for drug possession; 160,000 are in prison for murder, and 143,000 for rape or sexual assault.
Other interesting note: the South imprisons far and away the most people, where places like Maine, Minnesota, Iowa, Washington, Hawaii imprison far fewer.
- Incarceration of black Americans
Almost ALL of the decline has been in the black population. Peak incarceration (2006) had Black Americans incarcerated at a rate of 2261 per 100k (Hispanic at 1073, whites at 324). That rate has dropped by more than 37%; white and Hispanic imprisonment has been just about flat. (Interestingly, black FEMALE incarceration has dropped by 60% and white female incarceration has INCREASED by 60% over just about the same time period).
https://www.statista.com/chart/18376/us-incarceration-rates-by-sex-and-race-ethnic-origin/
- Police brutality – fatal
So: 99% of instances in which a police officer has killed an American, in the 21st century, have not resulted in any criminal charges.
Another interesting fact is there isn’t a super strong correlation between police killings and violent crime. Definitely some, but doesn’t appear strong.
The US has 13.2% of police killings globally even though it’s 4% of global population.
There is a great meta-study by the Lancet that shows somewhat radically different numbers between different sources, but one thing we know for certain: since about 2010, deaths by police officers started climbing quickly, and continued to climb through 2019. (Things get weird in 2020 for a lot of reasons so we’ll leave it out.)
- Police brutality against Black americans
Looking at these trends, what’s actually kinda interesting is a few things:
- Police mortality is up against black Americans since 2010, but peaked in about 2014 and dropped some…
- …where police mortality against white Americans has gone up continuously since about 1990, and spiked the most since 2010 (and is nevertheless significantly lower than against Black Americans, but is now indistinguishable from mortality for Hispanic Americans)
- Police mortality among black and Hispanic Americans is actually significantly down from its peak in 1980 (it had dropped continuously from 1980 to 2005 before starting to trend upward)
- By state, this is super duper lumpy. In West Virginia, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, and Washington, police mortality among black Americans is up significantly in the last 10-20 years, where in Connecticut, DC, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, we’ve seen declines.
I’ve mentioned this before, but interestingly it is also the case that per police encounter, white Americans are significantly more likely to be killed by a police officer than black Americans are. Black Americans are, of course, much more likely to encounter the police, and through their lives they are 2.5x more likely to be killed by police than whites.
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