Violence has gone up, but this is masked by the fact that more shooting victims are surviving due to improved medical care. Professor Paul Robinson and Jeffrey Seaman explain this in their new book Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away With Murder and Rape, available here.
As they explain:
serious crimes such as murder, rape, and aggravated assault are on the rise again, especially in urban jurisdictions, after falling from their peak in the early 90s….Modern violent crime rates are well above double the 1960 benchmark, mainly due to the explosion in aggravated assault….This data does not even account for the recent surge in homicides since 2019 which saw the murder rate rise by nearly 30% from 2019 to 2020. Even the 2019 data understates the size of the problem as the murder-rate comparison is deceptive: enormous advances in emergency medical care since 1960 have dramatically improved the survivability of a shooting or aggravated assault. Victims now arrive at hospitals sooner due to better ambulance and helicopter response times, and most hospitals now have dedicated trauma centers skilled in treating severe wounds. For example, serious gunshot wounds treated in hospitals increased almost 50% between 2001 and 2011 even as the death rate decreased, causing the murder rate to drop from 5.6 to 4.7. Studies show that if 1960s medical technology prevailed today, the murder rate would be more than five times higher than it is. In 2020, 22,000 homicides took place in America. Without modern technologies, this number would be closer to 110,000….
It is worth noting that official crime statistics fail to tell the whole story due to non-reporting. Less than half of violent crime is even reported to police, a fact that can obscure trendlines. For example, while reported violent crime fell 2% between 2021 and 2022—a fact many journalists loudly touted to suggest worrying over crime was fearmongering—total violent crime incidents (including non-reported crimes) rose by around 40%. Violent crime in 2022 was almost 20% higher than the 2015-2019 average.
In addition to serious crime rates increasing or stagnating, clearance rates are also dismal and getting worse in many jurisdictions. National homicide clearance rates decreased from around 90% in 1960 to under 50% in 2020, and the true homicide clearance rate is even lower due to police declaring “solved” cases that never even lead to an arrest, much less a conviction. Despite advances in investigative technology, killers are escaping justice at increasingly high rates. Police departments are sitting on over 250,000 cold murder cases….Clearance rates in many large cities have reached truly abysmal levels. In 2022, in cities with populations larger than a million, only about 8.4% of violent crime and 1.4% of property crimes even led to an arrest.
America needs to incarcerate more criminals. When El Salvador increased its incarceration rate, its murder rate fell dramatically, and violence and crime fell enormously. Jailing more criminals saved thousands of lives in El Salvador. Catching criminals and keeping them in jail would lower the crime rate, by keeping repeat offenders locked up where they can’t commit more crimes. The typical state prison inmate has five prior offenses, and they commit more crimes after you let them out: 81.9% of state prison inmates released in 2008 were arrested again within a decade. Letting inmates out early increases the murder rate: Most murders in Baltimore are committed by people who previously were convicted of a serious crime, but didn’t serve a lengthy sentence for that crime.
Soft-on-crime people try to blame violent crime on poverty, which makes no sense. Violent crime more than quadrupled in the United States from 1960 to the early 1990s, as welfare programs expanded, the social safety net grew, and black poverty declined sharply. Increasing someone’s income through government handouts doesn’t cut the violent crime rate at all. Conversely, crime often falls during recessions, when people get poorer. As the Manhattan Institute’s Rafael Mangual notes, “In New York, for example, the poverty rate in 1989 — the year before homicides hit a record-high 2,262 — was actually slightly lower than it was in 2016, the year before Big Apple homicides hit a record-low 292. And during the Great Recession, the national homicide rate actually declined by 15%, going from 5.7 per 100,000 in 2007 to 4.8 per 100,000 in 2010 — a period in which the civilian unemployment rate rose from 4.6 to 9.3 percent.”
To catch more criminals, America may need to spend more on its police. Europe spends more of its economy on its police than the U.S. does (it also has a lower murder rate, less than half of America’s). As Daniel Bier notes, “As a share of GDP, the EU [European Union] spends 33% more than the US on police.” “European countries almost uniformly spend a much larger share on police than US states, though just how much larger varies wildly.”
A peer-reviewed 2014 study in the American Economic Journal found that incarceration reduces crime through incapacitation. Studies also find that longer sentences also deter crime better.
