>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise.
The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.
If they're aren't any records of the crime, in their minds then the crime never occurred, including the crime perpetuated by government agents against civilians.
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown.
^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
> The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint.
> Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1]
Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
Of course they're corrupt and abusive. But that's fairly tangential to crime rates unless they take it to an extreme.
I think we ought to walk backwards from your question a bit. Is the position that the police are corrupt and abusive something that I'm supposed to disagree with? Is it supposed to be something obviously untrue (hint: it's not)?
If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda.
HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
You're part of the problem that I'm talking about. Instead of engaging with the issue at hand, you jump to wild assumptions about my positions, as if there were no alternatives between absolute anarchy and full-on authoritarianism.
That's what I mean by "poisoning the well", you have 124268 karma and yet you can't help yourself but discuss in bad faith.
I didn't call anyone a Nazi because I don't like the inflationary use of that term. But the "Nazi bar problem" is, unfortunately, an established metaphor. It doesn't have to be about literal Nazis, it could be about tankies for all I care. The problem is the same.
I'm going to keep calling people right-wing authoritarian and possibly fascist not for supporting more policing, but for supporting a person who has shown repeatedly that they want to rule as an authoritarian leader and is now implementing another step of that policy.
It literally doesn't matter how bad crime in DC is, because the danger of allowing a person who has denied losing an election for 4 years to single-handedly take over the capital of the most powerful country on earth is so high, in the same way as it didn't matter whether communists actually did or didn't set fire to the Reichstag.
This is what this is about. Not reasonable disagreement about policing, or immigration.
But of course, your only response to opposing authoritarianism is that one has to be some sort of anarchist.
Rest assured that I would react exactly the same if I was talking to a Tankie who was supporting some sort of Stalinist dictatorship.
The “problem” you keep referring to can be boiled down to: extremes exist. HN, like any large population sample, is a bell curve of opinion, which, by definition has tails of extreme opinion at each end. However the most extreme and toxic opinions rarely get seen because they are taken care of by community flags and moderator bans.
They are covered by the first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines: “be kind”, which apply to all of us, including you, in the way you are engaging with others in this thread.
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread
The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.
I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.
Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.
Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.
If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.
I've suspected that Rayiner's posts were held to a different standard of moderation than others for _quite_ some time. Thank you for explicitly confirming this.
That's false. Any comment that breaks the guidelines should be flagged and killed, whether it's by rayiner or DonHopkins or anyone else. What we see with rayiner is that many of his comments are flagged because people object to his ideology, not because the comment is clearly in breach of the guidelines.
We don't give rayiner any special treatment; many of his comments get killed by flags and are left that way after we review them. But, whatever you think of his politics, he is an intelligent [1] and thoughtful person who has contributed to HN for over 15 years, and is deserving of the same kind of fair, respectful treatment by moderators and fellow community members that we'd extend to anyone else in that category. I don't see how discussions on HN would be improved if the number of notable conservatives/libertarians was much lower than it already is.
That's a very unrepresentative link. Someone interested in moderation bias should filter on flagged comments instead, if some search engine supports it. Let's just say that it doesn't require a sociology degree to see it.
We can learn much about someone from the best of what they post, and it can help us to put their worst into context. I feel like your comment is more cryptic than it would need to be if you had a clear point to make or a clear idea of what we should do differently.
I’m very moderate by world standards. For example I think we should give gang members trials before we put them all in jail forever. In my home country we don’t have a gang problem, but we have an Islamist problem. Our former PM handled that by having military special forces just kill islamists. She had a 70% approval rating before a bizarre coalition of leftist students and islamists overthrew the government.
Western liberals are just outside the Overton window in terms of their toxic sympathy for criminals and disorder.
It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.
If you're insinuating that crime is not actually down and statistics are merely lying, then you are mistaken.
Crime, pretty much everywhere in the US and by many different metrics, has been falling for over 3 decades.
It makes sense. Crime is getting harder and harder to committ with the advent of the Internet and new surveillance technology. Crime is, like all things in life, a risk-reward calculus.
Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime. You're often better off just... not... And getting help through provided channels. And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
> Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help.
> And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim.
Or, in a police state, the point isn't solving crimes.
In my city, any protest over a half dozen people gets a police response. However they may show up a couple hours late to you being robbed, but will probably tell you to go to their website and file a report they won't follow up on.
Paradoxically, as you reach more and more of a police state, the point of the police isn't to solve or prevent crimes. It's to use violence against threats to the police state.
“With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime.”
Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance. Rather, crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics, policing or lack there of, surely not by aggregate health care spending lol.
Medical debt is one of the most common kinds of debt in America. Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. So is anxiety over bills. Untreated mental or physical health issues can come into play as well.
I’ve known criminals, and a lot of people with huge debts, even known a few people who have had to declare bankruptcy. I assure you nobody is robbing or stealing or raping or killing people over medical debt. Student loans on the other hand…
> Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, the same factors that make one more prone to criminal activity also make them more prone to poverty; therefore, you cannot solve criminality by solving poverty, because the confounding factor is still present afterwards.
A man was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned to great fanfare by the Innocence Project. He received $4.1m for his troubles. A few years later, he killed another man over a $1200 drug deal gone bad[0].
Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
> Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
I think the vast, vast majority of people are committing crime to make money, and I think your singular counter example, which isn't really a counter example, is worthless.
Yes, SOME people are just bad and will always commit crime. Some.
However, most criminals do it for monetary gain.
Why do people even sell drugs? Surely, if their goal is to be evil and just make a lot of people hooked on heroin, they'd just give it away for free right?
Well, that isn't their goal. Their goal is to make money.
> Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance.
Its a simple question - is crime motivated by money or not?
If you answer yes, then you're wrong - things like the ACA that lessen financial burden MUST lead to less crime over time.
If you answer no, then you're probably not reasonable. Who legitimately believes that crime isn't caused by money issues?
> crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics,
Demographics absolutely do not drive crime, otherwise you have a broken world view. Being of a different demographic is a SYMPTOM, not the cause.
Being black does not cause crime, or being in a zip code does not cause crime. Being poor does, that zip code having poor education does, that zip code providing no opportunities does.
There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.
I'm starting to understand the "touch grass" meme.
Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
Born and raised, and still living in an area that you likely wouldn't. You have no idea.
To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets.
However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does.
If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime?
Or will they continue to deny the tipping point?
At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets?
No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
> If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
Where is this "broad support" coming from? The actual people living in Washington DC, or rural outsiders who have conjured up some picture in their minds of "crime infested cities?" If you did a poll of everyone in DC, would the majority be in favor of increased policing?
It always seems like the people who are most vocal about crime in big cities are always the people who don't live in or visit those big cities.
You questioning my experience and where I live isn't an argument.
In liberal circles, we "believe" people. Remember? Especially those with bad experiences.
You questioning me just means that you can't tolerate people with differing experiences having opinions and perspectives that are counter to your own.
What I said is factual.
You're a sheltered person with a false entitlement to an opinion on this specific matter.
I live in a major city between Boston and DC. I've implied enough of my experience to warrant telling you to shove your rude scare quotes up your a*.
I've also lived in NYC. I have family that still lives in NYC. Who was just punched in the face for the second time in a couple of years, walking home at night. And that's in "safe" lower Manhattan.
What does where you live have to do where I live?
Just like the "person who walks with cameras", the only thing that you are communicating is that you are privileged and awful on a couple of levels. One of which is having zero perspective and real experience living in an urban area that is outside of wealthier zones and, especially in poorer cities, is only barely managed by police. Bourgeoise bubble living does not entitle you to having a policy opinion on how the poorer areas of cities should be managed, what it's like living in them let alone growing up in them, and on how they are doing on the street level. "Relativity" aside.
There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
Hmm, to your anecdotes I will add mine. I have been harassed in the International District at around 10:00 pm by drug dealers - was offered drugs, told them to go away so I was yelled “Get off my block”. A hobo spilled his beer on my wife while riding the bus. A female coworker was offered oral sex by a hobo and asked to take her glasses off to “see her pretty eyes”. At a bus school stop on Fairview (right next to Amazon Campus) a hobo with his pants down to his knees was exposing himself in front of some kids (their mothers were trying to make some shield around the kids)
All of these around 2021-2022-2023. We moved out of Seattle in 2023. Maybe these snecdotes are not a big deal for you. For me they are scary.
>There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.
And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?
I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.
The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.
You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
>I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
And I remember that that was about focusing police on policing and spending more on having specialists provide social support and the kind of things that prevent crime, which cops aren't trained to do or any good at.
Not OP, but yes, "defund" meaning to reverse the excessive budgetary increases of the past 5-10 years, which increased militarization of police, alongside increasing qualified immunity precedent. Some people took "Defund The Police" to mean "No Police" (there will always be extremists, sincere or planted), and it turned out to be a terrible slogan for this reason. There's a healthy middle ground in which the police force is reduced to a reasonable level, and other services are funded, so the police with their guns and military training aren't the first responders when e.g. someone is suicidal or spraypainting graffiti.
And even if the suicidal person is holding a knife, or it's my house being spraypainted, I don't want the person shot!
>The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
>We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.
I did some minimal searching for Seattle and explosions in 2020 and I found plenty of sources reporting on different supposed explosions, at different times and places (within Seattle). Seems perfectly plausible to me.
None of those sources detail anything that I would describe as “two large bombs”.
And I can’t find a 72 hour power outage in Seattle in 2020.
Can you help me out?
mrangle also later said [0] they live “in a major city between Boston and DC”. So they aren’t describing Seattle. (Or actually any city in the US based on what they have shared so far)
I'm observing how this is breaking down into questioning where I live (in another post), or whether what I say happened actually happened.
Should I not believe that people's post's here defending cities are from legitimate experience (at least as stated, in their bubbles)?
What happened to the "believe" people ethic?
I don't live in Oakland. What do you want me to read carefully, super-sleuth? To what purpose? In spite of your masterful rhetorical question, you're wrong about the event in question and location.
Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
You can't be good with nine months of nationwide riots and then ever think that you understand the impact or can get a handle on everything that occurred via zero-start google searches.
Those other commenters are talking about named cities which the rest of us are able to verify what they say based on simple internet searches.
You are describing an unnamed war-torn hellscape that matches no city in America. It’s like something out of a fictional writing class.
Which of those two types of comments are something you would believe?
>Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
We are _trying_ to consider them. But we are unable to make the leap from reality to the fantasy world you’ve been describing, so it’s really hard.
>Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
I guess it is a pretty good thing we live in a modern world with an internet that lets anybody that wants to share actual evidence. Unfortunately it also allows people to post they made up accounts they use in a conservative fireside story telling event, but those are identifiable by including outlandish details that would be easily verifiable, but also refusing to provide evidence, like names of cities.
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down?
More than one.
>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?
More than once.
>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?
Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.
So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
I've been beaten, pistol-whipped by a group and had to go to the hospital, had a kid try to knock me out from behind (remember the knock out craze fifteen years ago?), seen people beaten and shot, and had the cops draw their guns on me and threaten to blow my head off on more than one occasion in New Haven (and if you're curious, I'm not a criminal, but was just an adventurous kid who tried to defy the segregation in the city).
As someone like you who has also been the victim of violent crime, I definitely do not want the military patroling any city. I hate violent crime, but that is not the way to solve it, period. It takes community policing and the slow process of raising people out of poverty, desperation and hopelessness, by undoing the damage that has been done to them through decades of economic oppression.
>Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?
No need to be snark. Unlike your comment, where you iterated what happened to you without any time specifics, my comment was for a specific time period as evident from the discussion.
There was nothing clearly stating any dates or years.
Just like you did, I assumed what you said all happened in the past three weeks.
Especially since I said[0]:
"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge."
Because we grow up fast here in NYC. A month ago I was a child. Now I'm pushing 60. All in the past three weeks!
>> Did you?
Literally the first line was starting with ">> Yugoslav communism...".
#Especially since I said[0]:
#"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several #attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the #Brooklyn Bridge."
That was for the robbery and before that you said:
#>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many #gun barrels have you stared down?
#More than one.
#>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just #standing there?
#More than once.
Nothing specific there. Why are you so antagonizing about it and trying to straw man something with my comment that doesn't exist? I only told you how I read (I'm probably not the only one) your comment and pointed out some context was missing and when you explained it, I accepted it.
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime?
Not really. Maybe you just have really punchable face? Given the diarrhea you're spewing, those traits combined would probably make most people want to beat the crap out of you.
Which would explain quite a bit. Hey. Let's be careful out there![0]
Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.
Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)