More killings result from woke policies about crime. In the United States, the murder rate rose after the death of George Floyd in 2020, as policing diminished, police manpower fell, and incarceration rates fell during the pandemic (the number of people in America’s prisons and jails dropped by 14% from 2019 to mid-2020).
But in much of the world, the murder rate has steadily fallen over the last ten or twenty years. Naturally, the murder rate tends to fall over time, as improved trauma care increases the survival rate of shooting victims. In many countries, murder rates have fallen due to improved forensics, which help police solve more crimes and catch more killers.
“Mexico’s government claims that the country’s murder rate has fallen 32 percent over the past year, though this may be an overestimate. According to The Economist, the true figure is 14 percent…India is also reporting falling crime. According to their National Crime Records Bureau, the violent crime rate dropped by 29 percent between 2014 and 2023″ in India, reports The Doomslayer.
The Economist notes that “Mexico is on track for about 24,300 murders this year, horribly high, but well below the recent annual average of slightly over 30,000.”
NDTV reports that “Violent crime in India has recorded a decisive decline over the past decade, with official data showing a significant drop across key categories, including rape, dowry deaths, riots and murders. The findings, drawn from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), point to a sharp turnaround in India’s law and order landscape since 2014. Overall, the total number of violent crimes across these four categories fell by 29 per cent..The 2023 figure is even lower than in 2004, highlighting sustained improvement over a 20-year period…Officials attribute the turnaround to sustained efforts to modernize policing and strengthen internal security. The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems (CCTNS) now connects 17,712 police stations and provides access to over 35 crore crime records across the country. Under the Police Modernization Scheme,” a great deal of money “has been allocated since 2021 to upgrade communication systems, surveillance tools and weaponry.”
Crime has also fallen a great deal in Italy and (in the last few years) Iraq.
In the United States, the murder rate stopped falling after 2014, partly due to the “Ferguson Effect” (named after Ferguson, Missouri, where the media peddled a false “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative about the killing of Michael Brown, who was actually the aggressor. After a police officer killed Brown in self-defense, a misinformation campaign made the false claim that Brown was murdered after saying “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” That false claim triggered rioting, looting, and arson in cities such as Ferguson. But in 2015 the Obama Justice Department issued a report debunking that claim, noting on page 82 that “the shots fired” by the police officer “were in self-defense.” As The Washington Post reported in 2015, Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson “was justified in shooting Brown,” according to the Civil Rights Division of the Obama Justice Department. “It was reasonable for police Officer Darren Wilson to be afraid of Michael Brown in their encounter last summer, a Justice Department investigation concluded,” admitted the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In the U.S., shootings have increased in many recent years, but this is masked by the fact that more shooting victims are surviving due to improved medical care, keeping the murder rate from rising. Professor Paul Robinson and Jeffrey Seaman explain this in their recent book Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away With Murder and Rape, available here.
The murder rate has declined dramatically in Italy in recent years, unlike the United States. Italy now has a much better rate of clearing homicides than the United States does. In America, the killer is often never identified, much less caught. Rates of catching criminals are more important than sentence length in deterring crime, although longer sentences can also reduce crime, such as by incapacitating criminals who will re-offend if released. Nationally, 81.9% of all state prisoners released in 2008 were subsequently arrested within a decade, including 74.5% of those 40 or older at the time of their release. (See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Recidivism of Prisoners in 24 States Released in 2008: A 10-Year Follow-Up Period (2008-2018), pg. 4, Table 4).
In most of the world, the population has aged, and the birth rate has plunged. An aging population is less innovative and productive, but it also has a lower crime rate, because older people commit fewer crimes on average than young people. So the aging of the population also is contributing to the falling crime rate in many nations.
