From the New York Times Upshot data analytics section:
Most Candidates Running on Crime Don’t Have Much Power to Solve It
Your congressman doesn’t control the police budget. Your senator probably doesn’t know where the worst hot spots are.
By Emily Badger
Nov. 4, 2022Politicians around the country have promised in the closing days of the midterm election to crack down on crime. Would-be governors will crack down on crime. Senators will crack down on crime. Members of Congress will do it, too. Obviously, their opponents won’t.
The law-and-order messaging is often disconnected from the nuance of crime trends (in 2022, homicide is up in some places, but down in others like New York City;
It’s all very complicated!
Yeah, okay, there was a historic change in homicide and traffic fatality rates in the week after George Floyd’s death, but only Steve Sailer is going to show you graphs of that.
And he is Bad, so you’ve never seen these graphs (unless you too are Bad, and you wouldn’t want to be Bad, do you? Remember, bad things can happen to Bad People). So we’re just going to continue in the press to vaguely handwave about the pandemic and call attention to “Look, a squirrel!” trivia about small changes between 2021 and 2022 as if there isn’t a post–George Floyd New Normal.
yes, Oklahoma has higher violent crime rates than California). But it’s also devoid of the reality that these offices generally have little power to bend crime trends on the ground tomorrow.
Crime surges and falls for reasons that experts don’t fully understand,
Especially when they don’t want to understand or even think about one of the most stunning changes seen in 21st century social statistics.
and it’s hard for even the most proven ideas to quickly reverse its direction. But the people with ready levers to pull are not sitting in the Senate. And your current sense of order in your community is definitely not controlled by your congressman.
“You’re not going to fix the problems from there,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant with AH Datalytics in New Orleans (and a former Upshot contributor). “If you want to fix the problems, go run for mayor.”
Your governor isn’t going to solve a spike in murder, he added. And it’s generally not the governor who’s been failing to solve it, either. As for Senate candidates who say they will make sure we keep criminals behind bars who don’t belong on our streets?
“U.S. senators don’t determine state prison release policies,” said John MacDonald, a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who you elect to Senate is going to have zero impact on state prisons.”
Seriously, according to the latest CDC data on causes of deaths, running from 1999 thru March 2022, both homicides and traffic fatalities, especially among blacks, absolutely exploded following George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020 and the liberal establishment’s declaration of “the racial reckoning.” Ironically, the triumph of Black Lives Matter got thousands of incremental blacks killed, in large measure due to the craze among the influential for demanding the “depolicing” of blacks. When society tells cops to retreat to the donut shop, people tend to drive worse and carry more illegal handguns.
The cause of the historic outbreak of carnage especially among blacks is less that long-term policies were carefully changed as it is that the zeitgeist among the great and the good suddenly went insane in late May 2020.
The institutions that who contributed to the mayhem on the streets in 2020—the Democratic party, academia, the media, etc.—need to be called out and punished so they learn a lesson not to throw out their judgement and sense again the next time they click on a disturbing YouTube video from somewhere in this country of 330 million.
Voting Republican on Tuesday probably won’t have too much impact on law enforcement policy, but it will send a message of rebuke to the permanent establishment.
There needs to be a reckoning over the catastrophic Racial Reckoning.
