Sentencing Law and Policy

Sharp uptick in view that US criminal justice system is not tough enough in latest Gallup polling

As reported in this recent Gallup release, a "58% majority of Americans think the U.S. criminal justice system is not tough enough in its handling of crime, marking a sharp reversal from the prior reading in 2020 when a record-low 41% said the same.  Another 26% of U.S. adults currently say the system is about right, while 14% think it is too tough."  Here is more:

The latest readings on this measure, from Gallup’s Oct. 2-23 annual Crime survey, mark the sixth time the question has been asked since 1992. The three readings between 1992 and 2003 found solid majorities of Americans, ranging from 65% to 83%, saying the criminal justice system was not tough enough on crime. Yet, the next time the question was asked, in 2016, less than half of U.S. adults thought the system needed to be tougher and nearly as many said it was about right....

Majorities of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have consistently called for the criminal justice system to be tougher across all years, but the percentages of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents holding the same opinion have ranged from 25% to 62%. Democrats' view that the system is too tough has been between 6% and 35%.

In the current survey, three-quarters of Republicans think the criminal justice system is not tough enough, 16% say it is about right, and 7% believe it is too tough. Democrats are more divided in their views, with a 42% plurality saying it is not tough enough, 35% about right and 20% too tough....

The latest poll also finds Americans are evenly divided in their views of whether people accused of committing crimes are treated fairly by the criminal justice system.  Equal 49% shares of U.S. adults say such suspects are treated very or somewhat fairly and very or somewhat unfairly.  This marks a significant shift in opinion compared with prior readings in 2000 and 2003, when two-thirds of Americans said criminal suspects were treated at least somewhat fairly.

While majorities of Republicans (55%) and White adults (53%) believe that criminal suspects are treated fairly, majorities of Democrats (55%) and people of color (56%) think they are treated unfairly.  The percentages of Republicans and Democrats who say suspects receive fair treatment are both 18 percentage points lower than in 2003. Similarly, White adults (by 15 points) and people of color (by 18 points) are less likely now than in 2003 to believe suspects are treated fairly.

When asked which should be the greater priority for the U.S. criminal justice system today, 55% of Americans favor strengthening law and order through more police and greater enforcement of the laws, while 42% prefer reducing bias against minorities by reforming court and police practices.  When this question was last asked in 2016, just under half of Americans favored strengthening law and order.

People of color are more likely to say reducing bias against minorities (52%) should be prioritized over strengthening law and order (44%), while White adults tilt the opposite way, with 60% favoring strengthening law and order and 38% favoring reducing bias. Meanwhile, 71% of Democrats prefer reducing bias against minorities, and Republicans strongly favor strengthening law and order (82%).

Although a majority of Americans say it should be a priority, strengthening law enforcement is not viewed as a surefire way to lower the U.S. crime rate.  Rather, nearly two-thirds of Americans think it would be more effective to put money and effort toward addressing social and economic problems such as drug addiction, homelessness and mental health, while 35% favor bolstering law enforcement.  Those views are essentially unchanged from 2020 when the question was last asked.

Relatedly, the Gallup folks also report here that "Sixty-three percent of Americans describe the crime problem in the U.S. as either extremely or very serious, up from 54% when last measured in 2021 and the highest in Gallup’s trend." Here is more:

The prior high of 60% was recorded in the initial 2000 reading, as well as in 2010 and 2016. Meanwhile, far fewer, 17%, say the crime problem in their local area is extremely or very serious, but this is also up from 2021 and the highest in the trend by one point over 2014’s 16%....

Public perceptions of the national and local crime problems have been worsening since 2020, when 51% thought the U.S. crime problem was extremely or very serious, and 10% said the same of the local crime problem.

Major City Chiefs Association report all major categories of violent crime down so far in 2023

As reported here at Crime and Justice News, "Reported violent crime totals in four categories -- homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults -- declined in a compilation of data from 69 cities through September compared with the same period last year, the Major Cities Chiefs Association reported on Friday."  Here is more:

The group said homicides dropped from 6,635 last year to 5,927 this year, rapes from 22,927 to 21,181, robberies from 79,591 to 77,603, and aggravated assaults from 218,906 to 211,380.

Although the trends were consistent across many reporting jurisdictions, there were notable exceptions.  For example, homicides reported in Washington, D.C., jumped from 155 in the first nine months of last year to 213 through September this year.  Homicides in Memphis rose from 181 to 218 and in Dallas from 198 to 205.  robberies in Chicago increased from 6,277 last year to 7,845 this year. New York City did not submit numbers for the report.

Council on Criminal Justice’s Crime Trends Working Group releases "Shoplifting Trends: What You Need to Know"

Via email, I received notice of this notable new report released today by Council on Criminal Justice.  The report is titled  "Shoplifting Trends: What You Need to Know November 2023" and was authored by Ernesto Lopez, Robert Boxerman and  Kelsey Cundiff.  Here is part of the report's "Introduction" and "Key Takeaways":

Since shortly after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Council on Criminal Justice has tracked changing rates of violent and property crime in large cities across the United States. The pandemic, as well as the social justice protests during the summer of 2020 and other factors, have altered the motives, means, and opportunities to commit crimes.

Retail theft, especially organized retail theft, has received extensive media coverage and has caught the attention of policymakers. Dozens of shoplifting and “smash and grab” incidents in a variety of cities have been captured on video and have gone viral on social and mass media. Major grocers, drugstores, and other retail outlets have cited shoplifting as their reason for closing multiple locations and placing goods behind counters and in locked cases. California allocated $267 million in 2023 to a new initiative to combat retail thefts. In June 2023, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance held a hearing on incidents of organized retail theft.

Prepared for the Council on Criminal Justice’s Crime Trends Working Group, this report focuses on trends in shoplifting, a subset of retail theft which, in turn, is a subset of overall larceny-theft. The FBI defines larceny-theft as the unlawful taking of property without force, violence, or fraud.

The report looks at shoplifting patterns from before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic through mid-year 2023. To date, attempts to measure changes in retail theft, including organized retail theft, have relied on retail industry data or have been limited to one state.

The city-specific data included in this report are drawn from open-data sources from 24 cities that, over the past five years, have consistently reported specific shoplifting data. Additional data come from the U.S. Justice Department’s National Incident-Based Reporting Program (NIBRS). The NIBRS data include a sample of 3,812 local law enforcement agencies. The analyses examine the changing frequency of reported shoplifting, trends in other property offenses, changes in the value of stolen goods, offenses that co-occur with shoplifting, and the number of people involved in each incident....

Shoplifting incidents reported to police have rebounded since falling dramatically in 24 large American cities during 2020. But whether the overall tally is up or down compared with pre-pandemic levels depends on the inclusion of New York City. With New York’s numbers included, reported incidents were 16% higher (8,453 more incidents) in the study cities during the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2019; without New York, the number was 7% lower (-2, 552 incidents).

New York (64%) and Los Angeles (61%) had the largest increases in reported shoplifting among the study cities from mid-year 2019 to mid-year 2023. St. Petersburg (-78%) and St. Paul (-65%) had the largest decreases.

Comparing the most recent trends, from the first halves of 2022 and 2023, Los Angeles (109%) and Dallas (73%) experienced the largest increases among the study cities; San Francisco (-35%) and Seattle (-31%) saw the largest decreases.

Shoplifting generally followed the same patterns as other acquisitive crimes (except motor vehicle theft) over the past five years, according to the FBI’s national data. But unlike other types of larcenies, shoplifting rates remained below pre-pandemic levels through 2022.

The Sentencing Project releases latest report on racial disparities, “One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing”

As noted in this post last month, The Sentencing Project has announced that it is "producing a series of four reports examining both the narrowing and persistence of racial injustice in the criminal legal system, as well as highlighting promising reforms." Today, The Sentencing Project released this latest report in this series, the second I believe, titled “One in Five: Disparities in Crime and Policing.” Here is part of the report's executive summary:

As noted in the first installment of this One in Five series, scholars have declared a “generational shift” in the lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for Black men, from a staggering one in three for those born in 1981 to a still troubling one in five for Black men born in 2001....

This report interrogates the large footprint of policing — particularly of Black Americans— as, in part, a failed response to racial disparities in serious crimes. The wide net that police cast across people of color is at odds with advancing safety because excessive police contact often fails to intercept serious criminal activity and diminishes the perceived legitimacy of law enforcement.  Excessive policing also distracts policymakers from making investments to promote community safety without the harms of policing and incarceration. In addition, the large footprint of policing gets in the way of, as the National Academies of Sciences has called for, needed “durable investments in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods that match the persistent and longstanding nature of institutional disinvestment that such neighborhoods have endured over many years.”...

Ending racial inequity in the criminal legal system requires both effectively tackling disparities in serious criminal behavior and eliminating excessive police contact.  The subsequent installments of this One in Five series will examine additional drivers of disparity from within the criminal legal system and highlight promising reforms from dozens of jurisdictions around the country.

Prior recent related post:

• Sentencing Project releases first in series of reports on the "narrowing and persistence" of racial disparities CJ system

"A Comprehensive Analysis of the Effect of Crime-Control Policies on Murder"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by Carlisle Moody recently posted on SSRN.  Here is its abstract:

This study investigates the effects of most of the major firearm and crime control policies on murder.  We use two-way fixed-effects models based on state-level panel data from 1970-2018.  We include a comprehensive list of relevant policy variables to control for their influence in determining the effect of each.  We do a specification search using four commonly used econometric methods to estimate three models of the crime equation.  A Bonferroni correction is used to control for false rejections. A robustness check using new difference-in-differences estimators confirms the results.  We find that, with the possible exception of constitutional carry laws, no firearm policy can be shown to have a significant long-run effect on murder.  However, we find that the traditional policies of prison incarceration and police presence significantly reduce murder in the long run.  We also find that executions have no significant long-run effect on murder.  Finally, there is considerable evidence that three-strikes laws increase murder in the long run.

New Heritage report asserts "Red State Murder Problem Becomes the Blue County Murder Problem"

The Heritage Foundation today released this new report authored by Kevin Dayaratna and Alexander Gage which responds to prior reports about murder rates in "red" and "blue" states.  Here is the summary of this new report:

In January 2023, the Third Way think tank published a report claiming that homicide rates have been higher in “red” states than in “blue” states for the past 20 years. The argument is critically flawed in a number of ways. First, the report’s authors fail to acknowledge that crime is a local phenomenon and that any meaningful analysis needs to be undertaken at the local level. Second, the authors neglected to mention the fact that the electoral map changes over time. States that were “red” and “blue” in 2020 did not necessarily vote the same way in prior years. Correcting for these errors shows that crime has been higher in blue counties than in red counties.

Here is part of the report's analysis:

The Third Way authors claim that there is a difference between the murder rates in “red” states and “blue” states. Averaging these rates between the years 2014 and 2020 across states that voted for Donald Trump during the 2020 election yields an aggregate homicide rate of 6.48 per 100,000 people, while averaging across states that voted for Joe Biden yields a homicide rate of 4.83 per 100,000 people.

However, drawing conclusions from state-level homicide data in such a manner is flawed, as each state consists of a combination of federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies, as well as prosecutors with different approaches to law enforcement often based on highly divergent political beliefs.  Violations of state law are prosecuted largely at the county or city level and, thus, amalgamating data across such units neglects important variation in these different approaches.  Looking at homicide rates by county, states show skewed distributions with many counties having little or no homicides, and a handful of counties with excessively high homicide rates.  Thus, state homicide rates can be heavily influenced by a few counties. When those counties have different politics from the rest of the state, it can flip the conclusion about the association between political identifications and homicides.

As a result, after averaging homicide rates across counties during the same time horizon, a markedly different story from the Third Way’s narrative emerges.  Averaging across all counties that voted for Donald Trump yields an aggregate homicide rate of 4.06 per 100,000 people, while averaging across counties that voted for Joe Biden yields a homicide rate of 6.52 per 100,000 people.

Prior related post:

• New Third Way report details "The Red State Murder Problem" 

New CAP report asserts "Cities in Blue States Experiencing Larger Declines in Gun Violence in 2023"

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress Action Fund released this new report which it claims "shows that, on average, cities in blue states have lower rates of gun homicides and shooting incidents than comparably sized cities in red states and are seeing larger single-year decreases in gun violence rates in 2023."  Here is the report's "Introduction and Summary" (with footnotes removed):

Gun violence anywhere is unacceptable. Yet increasingly, Americans are forced to grieve the unimaginable horrors of school and hate-motivated shootings in innocent communities, in addition to the daily occurrence of gun violence across the United States.  It is no wonder that Americans see gun violence as a top issue for Congress.  To stop gun violence in this country, every lawmaker at every level of government must come together to pass commonsense gun laws and stop violence before it happens.  Unfortunately, this has not been the case.

Even though gun violence is an epidemic — touching the lives of Americans everywhere — instead of passing stronger gun laws, Republican leaders are choosing to weaponize the issue for political gain by using misinformation to stoke fears of “Democrat-controlled” cities.  In 2022, for example, after a shooter took the lives of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) claimed that gun violence in the cities of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago is evidence that tougher gun laws are “not a real solution.”  Similarly, despite evidence that New York City actually has relatively low rates of gun violence when controlling for its size, in April 2023, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) used his powers as the House Judiciary Committee chair to hold a field hearing on violent crime in Manhattan to disrepute Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg after Bragg brought charges against former President Donald Trump.  These examples demonstrate a larger coordinated effort by conservatives to make violent crime a “Democrat” issue while at the same time diverting attention from their own public safety failures to address gun violence, including neglecting to make it harder for individuals with violent intentions to obtain a gun.

However, despite the millions of dollars spent on this misinformation campaign, the data on gun violence homicides in America paint an entirely different picture. Original analysis conducted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund on the 300 most populous U.S. cities comparing gun homicide rates from January 2015 to August 2023 finds that, after controlling for population size:

• Cities in blue states, based on how a state voted in the 2020 presidential election, are consistently safer from guns than cities in red states, regardless of which party is represented in city leadership.
• From 2018 to 2021, red-state cities experienced larger increases in gun violence rates than blue-state cities.
• In 2023, blue-state cities are experiencing larger declines in gun violence rates than red-state cities.

Not only do blue-state cities on average experience lower rates of gun violence in each year of the study, but now, gun violence rates appear to be decreasing faster on average in these cities than in red-state cities.  Put simply, the data do not back up the blame-game politics of Republican lawmakers such as Texas Gov. Abbott and Rep. Jordan.

FBI releases crime estimates showing "national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021"

As reported in this official press release, headlined "FBI Releases 2022 Crime in the Nation Statistics," today brings new estimates of crime data in the US in 2022.  Here are highlights:

The data of Crime in the Nation, 2022 were released via several reports....  Of the 18,884 state, county, city, university and college, and tribal agencies eligible to participate in the UCR Program, 15,724 agencies submitted data in 2022.

The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates:

• Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2022 estimated nationwide decrease of 6.1% compared to the previous year.
• In 2022, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.4% decrease.
• Aggravated assault in 2022 decreased an estimated 1.1% in 2022.
• Robbery showed an estimated increase of 1.3% nationally....

The complete analysis is located on the UCR’s Crime Data Explorer.

The FBI's report of over a six percent homicide reduction in 2022 is a larger reduction than I have seen in any other reports or estimates.  For example, the Council on Criminal Justice crime accounting in January 2023 reported a 4% homicide reduction in 2022 based on certain key cities.  And the AH Datalytics final year-end spreadsheet reported a 5% reduction in murders in 2022 based on police reports from the biggest US cities.

Of course, as I have stressed in a number of prior posts, reported homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.  But these latest homicide and violent crime data from the FBI for 2022 are still good news to celebrate, especially since 2023 data from big cities suggest positive recent homicide trends are continuing and perhaps even accelerating. 

"The COVID-19 Pandemic, Prison Downsizing, and Crime Trends"

The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN and authored by Charis Kubrin and Bradley Bartos.  Here is its abstract:

California has fundamentally reformed its criminal justice system.  Since 2011, the state passed several reforms which reduced its massive prison population.  Importantly, this decaceration has not harmed public safety as research finds these measures had no impact on violent crime and only marginal impacts on property crime statewide.  The COVID-19 pandemic furthered the state’s trend in decarceration, as California reduced prison and jail populations to slow the spread of the virus.  In fact, in terms of month-to-month proportionate changes in the state correctional population, California’s efforts to reduce overcrowding as a means to limit the spread of COVID-19 reduced the correctional population more severely and abruptly than any of the state’s decarceration reforms.  Although research suggests the criminal justice reforms did not threaten public safety, there is reason to suspect COVID-mitigation releases did. How are COVID-19 jail downsizing measures and crime trends related in California, if at all?

We address this question in the current study.  We employ a synthetic control group design to estimate the impact of jail decarceration intended to mitigate COVID-19 spread on crime in California’s 58 counties.  Adapting the traditional method to account for the “fuzzy-ness” of the intervention, we utilize natural variation among counties to isolate decarceration’s impact on crime from various other shocks affecting California as a whole.  Findings do not suggest a consistent relationship between COVID-19 jail decarceration and violent or property crime at the county level.

"Forecasting US Crime Rates and the Impact of Reductions in Imprisonment: 1960-2025"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report authored by James Austin and Richard Rosenfeld for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.  Here is how the 25-page report is introduced on the HFG Foundation website:

In the latest of a series of HFG reports forecasting crime trends at the US national level and for selective states and (forthcoming) cities, James Austin and Richard Rosenfeld again created statistical models that retroactively “predicted” property and violent crime rates for past years with great accuracy and then used these models to forecast crime trends in the near future.  This report concerns national trends, updating the authors’ national-level HFG report released in 2020, before the social and economic disruptions of the pandemic and civil unrest over police violence interrupted a 25-year declining or flat trend in violent crime.

Austin and Rosenfeld forecast very modest increases in violent crime and then a flattening trend by 2025 as well as a continuation of the longstanding decline in property crime. They also use their forecasting models to project the effect of augmenting the nation’s declining rate of imprisonment by an additional 20%. Such a policy decision, they conclude, would not lead to significantly higher crime rates.

As summer ends, biggest US cities all still showing significant homicide declines

Summer is now officially over, and I am pleased to see that homicide data for 2023 remains encouraging.  As readers may recall from some of my prior posts, I have been flagging AH Datalytics' collection of homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities to note that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, homicide declines in 2022 were continuing into the first half of 2023.  Of course, homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels. Still, I continue to find the nationwide city homicide data to be encouraging, and now we have this data for almost three quarters of 2023.

Specifically, As we enter Fall 2023, according to this AH Datalytics webpage, there is now over a 12% cumulative decline in murders across the nation's largest cities.  And, as I have noted in some prior posts, the news is especially encouraging if we look at updated police reports showing 2023 homicide trends in our very biggest US cities (by population):

Chicago homicides down 14% in 2022, and down another 12% over the nine months of 2023

Houston homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 20% over the eight months of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022, and down another 25% over nine months of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022, and down another 11% over nine months of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 8% in 2022, and down another 19% over nine months of 2023

As I have said before, these homicide data from cities are likely not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide, and homicide trends always seem to be unpredictable and data can change in lots of ways in coming months.  Still, the latest nationwide homicide data from the AH Datalytics webpage continue to reinforce my hope that the surging number of homicides in just about every part of the US through 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that homicide rates may be trending back toward pre-pandemic norms. 

Still, there is clearly a very long way to go before we return to the historically low homicide (and overall crime) rates of the early 2010s.  Indeed, the recent BJS report (discussed here) delivered some sobering news about (non-homicide) violent victimization in 2022, although the Council of Criminal Justice (discussed here) had more encouraging news on violent crime in 2022 based on different metrics.  I am hoping that encouraging crime trends are real and that they persist, but time will tell.

Bureau of Justice Statistics releases "Criminal Victimization, 2022"

As discussed in this press release, the Bureau of Justice Statistics this morning released a new report titled "Criminal Victimization, 2022." This full report runs 34 pages and here is how it starts and the listed "highlights" listed on the first page:

The rate of violent victimization in the United States rose to 23.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 2022, after reaching a 30-year low of 16.4–16.5 during 2020–2021. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Despite the recent increase, the last three decades saw an overall decline in the violent victimization rate from 79.8 to 23.5 per 1,000 from 1993 to 2022.

The rate of violent victimization reported to police followed a similar pattern. This rate trended downward during the past 30 years, falling from 33.8 (1993) to 9.7 (2022) reported victimizations per 1,000 persons. However, 2022 (9.7 per 1,000) marked a rise in the rate of reported violent victimization from 2021 (7.5 per 1,000).

HIGHLIGHTS

• The violent victimization rate increased from 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons in 2021 to 23.5 per 1,000 in 2022.
• From 1993 to 2022, the overall rate of violent victimization declined from 79.8 to 23.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older.
• In 2022, about 2 in 5 (42%) violent victimizations were reported to police.
• Motor vehicle theft victimization increased from a rate of 4.3 victimizations per 1,000 households in 2021 to 5.5 per 1,000 in 2022.
• About 10% of violent victimizations involved a firearm in 2022, an increase from 2021 (7%).
• Victims received assistance from a victim service provider in 9% of violent victimizations in 2022.
• In 2022, about 1.24% (3.5 million) of persons age 12 or older nationwide experienced at least one violent crime.
• The burglary or trespassing rate was lower in 2022 (14.6 victimizations per 1,000 households) than in 2018 (21.1 per 1,000) but has been relatively flat since 2020.

CCJ publishes big new data resource, "The Footprint," which seeks to track the size of America's criminal justice system

The Council of Criminal Justice (CCJ) today published this notable new data resource titled "The Footprint: Tracking the Size of America's Criminal Justice System."  Here is how the resource introduces the data it covers on its landing page:

The overall size, or “footprint,” of the American criminal justice system remains well above historical levels, but it has shrunk substantially in recent years.  This series of interactive charts summarizes trends in crime, arrests, and correctional control (incarceration and community supervision), comparing current levels with their most recent peaks or valleys.  Time periods vary due to data availability, and where reliable data are available, trends in race and sex are also presented.

COVID-19 resulted in significant changes in crime patterns and the operations of law enforcement agencies, courts, correctional agencies, and paroling authorities.  Because of the unique influence of the pandemic across the system, analyses also examine the early effects of the pandemic on crime, arrests, and correctional control.

The first section provides a high-level overview of crime, arrest, and incarceration trends in recent decades. The following sections take a closer look at trends in each area, broken down by age, crime type, race, and sex.

The data assembled here, which provides historical national data trends based on already reported public data, are great to have in one place. Sentencing fans may be especially interested in the data trends regarding probation, parole, jails, state prisons and federal prisons, but all the data is really fascinating in all sorts of particulars.

CCJ releases encouraging new short report on "First Step Act: An Early Analysis of Recidivism"

This morning I received an email from the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) linking me to this notable new report authored by Avinash Bhati and titled ""First Step Act: An Early Analysis of Recidivism."   This CCJ press release about the short report provides this effective review of its highlights:

Previous comparisons between FSA releases and the overall federal prison population have not accounted for differences in the groups, including levels of risk of reoffending, tracking periods, and other characteristics. The CCJ analysis estimates recidivism rates among individuals released from the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) prior to the FSA who had similar risk profiles and were tracked for similar periods of time (“similarly situated”) as those released under the FSA.

According to data published by the U.S. Department of Justice, 29,946 people were released from BOP facilities under the FSA from 2020 to 2022.  The Council’s analysis of this data finds that, when compared to similarly situated individuals released from the BOP prior to the Act’s implementation, individuals released under the FSA have:

• An estimated 37% lower recidivism rate. According to BOP data, the recidivism rate for FSA releases is 12.4%, compared to an estimated recidivism rate of 19.8% for similarly situated pre-FSA releases.

• An estimated 3,125 fewer arrests incurred. With a recidivism rate of 12.4%, the people released under the FSA over three years could have accounted for between 3,712 and 4,330 arrests. With an estimated recidivism of 19.8%, an equal number of similarly situated pre-FSA releases could have accounted for between 5,918 and 7,455 arrests over the same three-year period.

Major Cities Chiefs Association reporting all categories of violent crimes down in first half of 2023

As noted in this Crime and Justice News entry, "reports to police in all four major categories of violent crime declined in the first half of 2023 compared with the similar period last year in a survey answered by 69 large police departments, reports the Major Cities Chiefs Association."  Specifically, as shown in this complete midyear report, these police departments report declines in homicides, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.  (The report also shows crime increases in Canada in three of these four crimes, so something is going distinctively in the right direction in the US in 2023 (although, of course, the number of violent crimes is much greater in the US than in Canada).)

Regular readers should not be too surprised by these data, as I have been tracking encouraging 2023 US homicide data from police departments on a periodic basis (example here).  Still, it is encouraging to see another accounting of positive 2023 US crime trends, especially for a range of violent crimes.  Fingers crossed that the US can continue and build on these positive developments in the months ahead.

"Conviction, Incarceration, and Recidivism: Understanding the Revolving Door"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper that looks to provide a notable (and lengthy) empirical account of contributions to recidivism.  The piece was recently posted to SSRN and is authored by John Eric Humphries, Aurelie Ouss, Kamelia Stavreva, Megan T. Stevenson and Winnie van Dijk.  Here is its abstract:

We study the effects of conviction and incarceration on recidivism using quasi-random judge assignment.  We extend the typical binary-treatment framework to a setting with multiple treatments, and outline a set of assumptions under which standard 2SLS regressions recover causal and margin-specific treatment effects.  Under these assumptions, 2SLS regressions applied to data on felony cases in Virginia imply that conviction leads to a large and long-lasting increase in recidivism relative to dismissal, consistent with a criminogenic effect of a criminal record.  In contrast, incarceration reduces recidivism, but only in the short run.  The assumptions we outline could be considered restrictive in the random judge framework, ruling out some reasonable models of judge decision-making.  Indeed, a key assumption is empirically rejected in our data.  Nevertheless, after deriving an expression for the resulting asymptotic bias, we argue that the failure of this assumption is unlikely to overturn our qualitative conclusions.  Finally, we propose and implement alternative identification strategies.  Consistent with our characterization of the bias, these analyses yield estimates qualitatively similar to those based on the 2SLS estimates. Taken together, our results suggest that conviction is an important and potentially overlooked driver of recidivism, while incarceration mainly has shorter-term incapacitation effects.

Latest CCJ accounting of crime trends shows most good news for first half of 2023

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) continues its important and timely work on modern crime trends through this latest report titled "Crime Trends in U.S. Cities: Mid-Year 2023 Update."   This press release about the report provides an effective summary in its title: "Homicide, Other Violent Crimes Decline in U.S. Cities but Remain Above Pre-Pandemic Levels."  Here is more from the press release:

Examining homicides in 30 cities that make homicide data readily available, the analysis found that the number of murders in the first half of 2023 fell by 9.4% compared to the first half of 2022 (a decrease of 202 homicides in those cities).  Twenty of the study cities recorded a decrease in homicides during the first six months of the year, ranging from a 59% drop in Raleigh, NC, to a 2% drop in Nashville, TN.  Ten cities experienced an increase in homicide, ranging from about 5% in Seattle to 133% in Lincoln, NE.

Motor vehicle thefts, which began to rise at the onset of the pandemic, continued an upward trend.  Considered a “keystone crime” that facilitates the commission of homicide and other offenses, motor vehicle theft rose by 33.5% in the first half of the year, representing 23,974 more stolen vehicles in the 32 cities that reported data.  Seven of those cities experienced an increase of 100% or more, led by Rochester, NY, (+355%) and Cincinnati (+162%).  Overall, the number of vehicle thefts from January to June 2023 was 104.3% higher than during the same period in 2019.  While it’s likely that much of the increase is the result of thefts of Kia and Hyundai models, the authors said, rates were rising before the cars became popular targets.

In other findings, gun assaults (-5.6%), robberies (-3.6%), nonresidential burglaries (-5%), larcenies (-4.1%), residential burglaries (-3.8%), and aggravated assaults (-2.5%) all fell in the first six months of this year compared to the same timeframe last year.  Drug offenses rose by 1% and domestic violence by 0.3%.

The encouraging homicide data should not be a big surprise to followers of this blog, since I have been posting on homicide data pretty regularly based in part on data collected on this AH Datalytics webpage.  (Indeed, as this writing, that page is showing a cumulative decline of nearly 12% for nearly 100 large US cuties.)  But declines in many other violent crimes is also encouraging, though the motor vehicle theft stories is quite discouraging.

Mid-summer update on the relatively good homicide news from cities in first half of 2023

In this post from early April 2023 and this follow-up post in late May, I flagged the AH Datalytics collection of homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities to note that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, homicide declines in 2022 were continuing into the start of 2023.  Of course, homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.  Still, I continue to find the nationwide city homicide data to be encouraging, and now we almost this data for the entire first half of 2023. 

As we head into the second half of 2023, according to this AH Datalytics webpage, there is now so far just under an 11% cumulative decline in murders across the nation's cities for the first half of 2023.   And, as I have done in some prior posts on homicide rates, I find it interesting (and still encouraging) to took a closer look at a updated police reports showing 2023 homicide trends in our very biggest US cities: 

Chicago homicides down 14% in 2022, and down another 8% over the first half of 2023

Houston homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 24% over the first five months of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022, and down another 23% over the first half of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022, and down another 10% in first half of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 22% over first five months of 2023

As I have said before, these homicide data from cities are likely not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide, and homicide trends always seem to be unpredictable and data can change in lots of ways in coming months.  Still, the latest nationwide homicide data from the AH Datalytics webpage continue to reinforce my hope that the surging number of homicides in just about every part of the US through 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that homicide rates may nor be trending back toward pre-pandemic norms.

"Subtracting 420 from 922: Marijuana Legalization and the Gun Control Act After Bruen"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by Nicholas Goldrosen now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

Numerous states have legalized marijuana for medical and recreational use.  Nonetheless, federal law prohibits users of marijuana, which remains illegal federally, from possessing firearms.  I interrogate this legal tension from two angles. First, this paper brings empirical evidence to this conversation: Does legalizing marijuana lead to more gun deaths?

It doesn’t.  This article analyzes the effect of recreational and medical marijuana legalization on gun homicides, suicides, and deaths as well as on gun prevalence, gun purchasing, and federal gun prosecutions.  I combine administrative data from the National Vital Statistics System, National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and United States Sentencing Commission for the period from 2010 through 2020.  To estimate a causal effect, I employ a difference-in-differences method with staggered treatment timing from Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) to compare states that have legalized marijuana to those that have not yet legalized marijuana but will during the study period. There is no evidence of a statistically significant treatment effect of either recreational or medical marijuana legalization on firearms deaths, homicides, or suicides.  Additionally, there is no evidence that legalization causes greater firearms sales or prevalence, or that the federal gun prohibition for marijuana users deters gun killings post-legalization.

Secondly, this regulation has received new scrutiny after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen, under which firearms regulations must be justified by consistency with “this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”  Courts have come to conflicting answers on whether the prohibition on gun ownership by marijuana users accords with the Second Amendment under Bruen.  I therefore survey three potential legal paths for resolving the conflict between state legalization of marijuana and federal gun laws.  First, legislators might directly amend the Gun Control Act to allow for gun possession by some or all marijuana users.  Second, legislators might reform marijuana’s status within the Controlled Substances Act more broadly.  Finally, an uncertain future for the controlled-substance-user prohibition exists in the courts post-Bruen.  The Bruen decision’s unworkable tests do not clearly support either upholding or striking down this ban. If anything, the interpretation of the federal ban on gun possession by marijuana users under Bruen highlights the impracticability of its test.  Amongst these solutions, I argue that broader Controlled Substances Act reform is the likeliest to provide consistency while not harming public safety.

Media starting to take more note of notable homicide declines in 2023

Regular readers know I have been documenting that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, homicide numbers saw small declines in 2022 and these declines have increased into 2023.  (Posts in 2023 on this front, with links to some major city data, can be found here and here and here.)  Encouragingly, a number of media outlets have started discussing these encouraging homicide developments:

From The Atlantic, "The Murder Rate Is Suddenly Falling: The first five months of 2023 have produced an encouraging overall trend for the first time in years."

From the Christian Science Monitor, "What is behind a huge drop in the murder rate this year?"

From the Wall Street Journal, "Homicides Are Falling in Major American Cities: Local officials say pandemic factors that drove up murder rates are receding"

From the Washington Times, "Multiple U.S. cities experiencing decline in homicides, research firm says"

As I have said before, homicide trends always seem to be unpredictable and data can change in lots of ways in coming months.  Still, the latest homicide data continue to be trending the right way, and it is good to see these trends now getting broader attention.  

"Fighting Crime Requires More Police and Less Prosecution"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable new Bloomberg opinion piece by Justin Fox than is built around an interview with Jennifer Doleac (WaPo reprint here).  Here is the set up to the Q&A in the article:

The nationwide jump in shootings and homicides early in the pandemic and the rise in other crimes that followed in some places have made crime a hot topic again in the US.  It has been a prominent one for academic research for a while, with economists in particular flocking to the field as a testing ground for research strategies that aim to sift causes from data. To get a sense of how recent findings fit with the national discussion on crime, I talked to Jennifer Doleac, an economist at Texas A&M University who not only studies crime but hosts a podcast on new research, Probable Causation, and has organized the Criminal Justice Expert Panel, which sums up expert opinion on crime questions.  This summer, Doleac, who has also written a few columns for Bloomberg Opinion, will become executive vice president of criminal justice at Arnold Ventures, a leading funder of crime research.  Following is a much-abridged transcript of our conversation and a list of research papers referred to in it.

I highly recommend the full piece, but here are snippets of likely interest to sentencing fans:

JD: [Research shows] first-time offenders are sort of at a fork in the road.  We can either hope it’s enough of a wake-up call that they’ve been arrested and had to come into court, and they’ll change course on their own, or we can pull them into the system.  I’ve become a big proponent of erring toward leniency in those sorts of situations.

There’s been other work to suggest similar things with nonviolent felony defendants. There’s a whole bunch of work on pretrial detention and the fact that locking people up pretrial has a really detrimental, causal effect on their future trajectories.  They’re more likely to plead guilty in that initial case but also more likely to re-offend in the future....

The main thing I try to point out to policymakers is we don’t have to fully understand why we are here to come up with ideas of what to do about it.  We can have ideas about what to do about violent crime that don’t require us solving this problem that we might never solve.

JF:  What are some top candidates?

JD: Putting more police on the streets reduces homicide, reduces violent crime.  There’s plenty of research on that. There are also plenty of discussions now about the potential social costs of over-policing, so it’s reasonable to have conversations about whether that is the route you want to go.  Also, it’s really hard to recruit police right now.

We know that increasing the probability of getting caught for crimes has a big deterrent effect in a way that potentially locking people up for 20 years on the back end does not.  No one is looking that far ahead.  Putting cameras everywhere, adding more people to DNA databases will increase the probability that you get caught if you offend.  We have lots of good evidence that would deter crime....

Leniency toward first-time offenders in the long run is probably a good investment.  Another thing is increasing access to mental health care.  There’s this amazing paper using data from South Carolina showing that when we kick kids off Medicaid at age 19, when it becomes much harder to stay on Medicaid, you just see all the kids get kicked off and then in the other graph you see everyone immediately locked up.  It’s these kids who were using Medicaid to get mental health treatment, they’re the ones that are now at very high risk of being locked up.

Start-of-summer update on the relatively good homicide news from cities in first half of 2023

In this post from early April 2023, I flagged the AH Datalytics collection of homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities to note that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, homicide declines in 2022 were continuing into the start of 2023.  Of course, homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.  Still, I found the nationwide city homicide data to be encouraging for 2022 and early 2023, and now we have even more data suggesting positive recent homicide trends are continuing and perhaps even accelerating across big cities. 

As we head into the unofficial start of the summer months, according to this AH Datalytics webpage, there is now so far cumulative 12% decline in murders across the nation's cities for more than the first third of 2023.   And, as I have done in some prior recent posts on homicide rates, I find it interesting (and now encouraging) to took a closer look at a updated police reports showing 2023 homicide trends in our very biggest US cities: 

Chicago homicides down 14% in 2022, and down another 7% over nearly five months of 2023

Houston homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 28% over the first fourth months of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022, and down another 28% over nearly five months of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022, and down another 13% in first three+ months of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 15% over first five months of 2023

As I have said before, these homicide data from cities are likely not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide, and homicide trends always seem to be unpredictable and data can change in lots of ways in coming months.  Still, the latest nationwide homicide data from the AH Datalytics webpage continue to reinforce my hope that the surging number of homicides in just about every part of the US through 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that homicide rates may nor be trending back toward pre-pandemic norms.

New report examines "The Opioid Epidemic and Homicide"

The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation has released this notable new report titled "The Opioid Epidemic and Homicide" authored by Joel Wallman, Richard Rosenfeld, and Randolph Roth. Here is the 20-page report's executive summary:

The twenty-five-year epidemic of opioid misuse in the United States has taken at least 750,000 lives through overdose. We undertook to learn whether this toll might have been accompanied by an increase in violence resulting from growth in the illicit opioid market, which, like most illicit drug markets, includes a risk of violence due to conflicts among sellers and between sellers and buyers.  We found that increases in activity in this market were associated with — and arguably caused — increased levels of homicide.

Using county opioid overdose rates as a measure of levels of transactions in the illicit market, we looked for an association between those rates and county homicide rates between 1999 and 2015.  As the epidemic has been especially intense in the White U.S. population, we conducted separate analyses for the White and Black populations. We also compared Appalachian counties to the rest of the country, as Appalachia has been particularly hard hit by the crisis.

In the nation as a whole, White overdose rates in this period were 28 percent higher than Black rates.  The growth in overdose rates differed markedly between the two groups: 34 percent for Blacks and 120 percent for Whites.  Black overdose rates did not differ between Appalachian and non-Appalachian counties.  The White overdose rate, however, was both considerably higher in Appalachia than elsewhere (23.5 vs. 19 per 100,000) and much higher than the Black Appalachian rate (14.5).  The growth in overdose rates was much higher for both groups within Appalachia than elsewhere: 58 percent vs. 32 percent for Blacks and 146 percent vs. 115 percent for Whites.

Despite this growth in overdose rates during the period, homicide rates declined for both groups and in both Appalachian and non-Appalachian counties.  This means that the aggregate effect of all the factors influencing U.S. homicide rates was a beneficial one.  However, to discern the independent association (if any) between changes in activity in the illicit-opioid market and changes in homicide rates, we conducted a series of multiple regression analyses.  We found a positive association between overdoses and homicides in both racial groups and both within and without Appalachia.  Holding constant several other variables known to be associated with homicide rates, we found growth in overdose among Whites in this period was associated with a 9-percent increase in homicide across all counties and a 19-percent increase within Appalachia.  The equivalent figures for Blacks were 3.5 and 16.

Assuming these associations reflect a causal relationship, we conclude that this growth in illicit opioid activity exerted upward pressure on rates of violence; were it not for the violence associated with the opioid market, the national drop in killings would have been greater.  The finding of another harm wrought by the opioid epidemic provides another reason to pursue vigorous public-health efforts, with a strong emphasis on treatment, to stem the epidemic.

"Modernize the Criminal Justice System: An Agenda for the New Congress"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new report authored by Charles Fain Lehman, who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Here is the report's executive summary:

Crime, particularly violent crime, is a pressing concern for the American people.  The surge in homicide and associated violence in the past three years has made voters skittish and prompted aggressive partisan finger-pointing.  This increase has not, however, prompted significant investment in our criminal justice system.  Ironically, as this report argues, this increase in violent crime is itself a product of fiscal neglect of that same system over the past decade.

Across a variety of measures, in fact, the American criminal justice system needs an upgrade.  Police staffing rates have been dropping since the Great Recession; prisons and jails are increasingly violent; court backlogs keep growing; essential crime data are not collected; and essential criminology research is not conducted.  These shortcomings contribute not only to the recent increase in violence but to America’s long-term violence and crime problems, problems that cost us tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

For too long, policymakers at all levels have failed to attend to this problem.  Instead, both the political left and right have subsumed criminal justice issues into the larger culture war, fighting over the worst excesses of the police or the horrors of criminal victimization.  Rather, they should look to past examples of federal policymaking in which lawmakers have used the power of the purse to dramatically improve the criminal justice system’s capacity to control crime.  Doing so again could ameliorate many of the major concerns voiced by both sides in the criminal justice debate.

As such, this report proposes an ambitious, $12-billion, five-year plan to bring the criminal justice system up to date. It outlines proposals to:

1. Hire 80,000 police officers;
2. Dramatically expand funding of public safety research, including creating an Advanced Research Projects Administration for public safety;
3. Rehabilitate failing prisons and jails with a carrot-and-stick approach;
4. Create and propagate national standards for criminal case processing;
5. Upgrade our data infrastructure, including by creating a national “sentinel cities” program.

Implementing these proposals would be a drop in the federal spending bucket, but they would likely have a dramatic and sustained impact on reducing the amount and cost of crime in America.

A Good Friday update on the relatively good homicide news from cities to start 2023

A few months ago, in this post just a few weeks into 2023, I flagged the AH Datalytics collection of homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities.  I noted in that post that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, the dashboard showed that nearly two-thirds of big cities reported homicide declines in 2022 relative to 2021 and that nationwide murders in large cities were cumulatively down nearly 5% for 2022.  

Of course, these reported homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.  But I found the nationwide city homicide data to be encouraging for 2022, the now we have additional data suggesting the positive recent homicide trends are continuing and perhaps even accelerating across cities.  Specifically, according to this AH Datalytics webpage which is now updated with early 2023 data from police reports, there is so far cumulative 10% decline in murders across the nation's cities for roughly the first quarter of 2023. 

And, as I have done for some prior recent posts on homicide rates, this morning I also took a closer look at a few updated police reports to see about 2023 homicide trends in our biggest US cities: 

Chicago homicides down 14% in 2022, and down another 15% in first three months of 2023

Houston homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 34% in first two months of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022, and down another 26% in first three months of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022, and down another 11% in first three+ months of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 14% in first three months of 2023

As I have said before, these homicide data from cities are likely not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide, and it seems that the homicide data from the month of March in the biggest cities are not quite as positive as they were to start the year.  Moreover, homicide trends are always unpredictable and data can change in lots of ways.   Still, these new encouraging nationwide homicide data from the AH Datalytics webpage continue to reinforce my hope that the surging number of homicides in just about every part of the US through 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that lower homicide rates may soon be more common. 

Last chance to register for "Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing and Prosecutorial Reforms"

In part because I have been busy helping with some of the activities, I keep forgetting to promote here this exciting event taking place in Arizona later this week.  Here are the basics with a last-minute, last chance to register:

The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University and the Academy for Justice at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University invite you to join us for a symposium titled Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms Thursday, March 16, 2023, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. MST, to examine the public safety impact of marijuana and other modern drug policy reforms. Registration closes at midnight tonight.
  
As marijuana reforms have spread, so too has discussion of broader drug reforms such as decriminalization or legalization at both state and local levels, as well as relief from drug-war excesses through clemency and expungement.  But given the increasing concern about violent crime, many advocates and lawmakers are wondering whether past and possible future drug policy reforms may be advancing or undermining the broad interest in creating safe and stable communities.  As the country moves away from marijuana prohibition, a fully informed discussion of drugs, violence, and public safety is needed now more than ever. 

This conference is committed to exploring, from a variety of perspectives and with the help of a variety of voices, how to better understand and assess the relationship between drug reforms and public safety.

For more information, visit this link, and to register visit this link (by midnight Monday, March 13, 2023). There is no fee to attend. 

Encouraging big-city homicide trends continuing into 2023

A couple months ago, in this post just a few weeks into 2023, I again flagged this AH Datalytics webpage's "YTD Murder Comparison" Dashboard that collects homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities.  I noted in that post that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, it was encouraging that the dashboard showed that nearly two-thirds of big cities were reporting homicide declines in 2022 relative to 2021 and that nationwide murders in large cities were down nearly 5% for 2022.  

Of course, these reported homicide declines for 2022 followed particularly high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.  But I found these nationwide big-city data to be encouraging for 2022, especially because in mid-January the downward trends in homicides in our nation's very largest cities appeared to be carrying over to the start of 2023.  Following up, this morning I took a look at a few updated police reports to see if these positive 2023 homicide trends are continuing a couple months later, and the encouraging trends are so far persisting.  Specifically, based on the dashboard data and (linked) police reports, we see:

Chicago homicides down 14% in 2022, and down another 11% in first two+ months of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022, and down another 30% in first two+ months of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022, and down another 19% in first two+ months of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022, and down another 20% in first two+ months of 2023

Of course, these four very big cities are not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide as 2023 shifts into daylight savings and warmer weather.  And homicide trends in the first two months of this year could change in many ways in the weeks and months ahead.  Still, these encouraging homicide data continue to reinforce my hope that the surging number of homicides in just about every part of the US through 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that lower homicide rates may soon be more common. 

Latest CCJ accounting of crime trends shows mostly encouraging news from 2022 about violent crimes (but not property crimes)

In this post last week, I flagged some of the encouraging 2022 homicide data drawn from this AH Datalytics webpage's "YTD Murder Comparison" Dashboard.  And I am now very pleased to see that the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) is continuing to do important and timely work on broader modern crime trends by continuing its on-going series of crime data reports under the heading "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities."  The latest version of this report, titled "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities: Year-End 2022 Update," was just released and this CCJ press release provides the data basic in its full heading: "Homicide, Gun Assault, Domestic Violence Declined in Major U.S. Cities in 2022 but Remain Above Pre-Pandemic Levels: New CCJ Analysis Also Documents a 59% Spike in Motor Vehicle Theft Since 2019, With Thefts More Than Doubling in 8 Cities."

The full report, which is based on "monthly crime rates for ten violent, property, and drug offenses in 35 U.S. cities in calendar year 2022," is available at this link.  Here are some of the "Findings" set forth on the report webpage:

• The number of homicides in 2022 was 4% lower than counts recorded in 2021, representing 242 fewer murders in the 27 cities that publicly report monthly homicide data.  The national homicide rate remained 34% higher than in 2019, the year before the pandemic began, and about half the historical nationwide peaks in 1980 and 1991.

• There were 3.5% fewer aggravated assaults in 2022 than in 2021.  The number of gun assaults dropped by 7% in 2022, but this trend is based on data from just 11 cities and should be viewed with additional caution.  Domestic violence incidents decreased by 5% between 2021 and 2022.  This finding is based on just 11 cities studied and also should be viewed with extra caution.

• Robberies (+5.5%), nonresidential burglaries (+11%), larcenies (+8%), and motor vehicle thefts (+21%) all increased from 2021 to 2022. Residential burglaries fell by 2%.

"From Causal Mechanisms to Policy Mechanisms: Why Did Crime Decline and What Lessons Can Be Learned from It?"

The newest issue of the American Journal of Criminal Justice has a bunch of new interesting articles on criminal justice reform.  The title of this post is the title of this article from the issue authored by John K. Roman.  Here is its abstract:

Criminology has not systematically identified the cause or causes of perhaps the most seminal event in crime and justice of the last half century: the crime decline of the 1990s. This paper uses a causes-of-effects analysis to infer the mechanisms of the crime decline.  This is not a purely academic exercise — there has been a large increase in violence, particularly gun violence at the beginning of the 2020s.  Identifying the mechanisms of the last crime decline can inform the development of contemporary strategies.  Here, two classes of crime decline causes are proposed: mechanisms that are endogenous to the criminal law system and mechanisms that are exogenous to it.  The latter class includes impacts of changes in macroeconomics, consumer behavior, and public interest policy where positive externalities that arose from those factors contributed to the crime decline.  A descriptive effect of causes analysis suggests that these exogenous mechanisms contributed disproportionately to the crime decline as compared to endogenous mechanisms. Further, consumer behavior and public interest externalities are well aligned with potential policy levers and particularly salient to current and future efforts to reduce crime and violence prospectively.  The analysis suggests that efforts to improve public safety require policies that fall outside of traditional criminal justice approaches.

Encouraging big-city homicide trends to close 2022 and start 2023

In this post at mid-year 2022, I flagged this AH Datalytics webpage's "YTD Murder Comparison" Dashboard that collects homicide data from police reports in nearly 100 big cities.  I noted in that post that, after significant increases in homicides throughout the US in 2020 and 2021, it was encouraging that the dashboard then showed that nearly two-thirds of big cities were reporting  homicide declines in 2022 relative to 2021 and that nationwide murders in large cities were down overall more than 2% at mid-year 2022.  Fast-forward six months, and there is more encouraging homicide data coming from big cities.

Specifically, with nearly all police data for 2022 collected, this dashboard as of this evening indicates that nearly two-thirds of all big cities reported that homicides wre down in 2022 relative to 2021 and that the total nationwide murders in large cities were down overall nearly 5% at by year end 2022.  Of course, these reported homicide declines for 2022 follow notably high homicide rates in many locales in 2021, and we still have a long way to go to get back to pre-pandemic homicide levels.

Still, these data are encouraging, and the downward trends in homicides in our nation's largest cities for all of 2022 may be carrying over to the start of 2023.  Specifically, based on the dashboard data and (linked) police reports, we see:

Chicago homicides down 13% in 2022 and down another 17% in first two weeks of 2023

Los Angeles homicides down 5% in 2022 and down another 39% in first two weeks of 2023

New York City homicides down 11% in 2022 and down another 12% in first two weeks of 2023

Philadelphia homicides down 9% in 2022 and down another 43% in first two weeks of 2023

Of course, these four very big cities are not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides nationwide as 2023 gets started, and homicide trends in the first two weeks of January could change in many ways in the weeks and months ahead.  Still,  these encouraging data reinforce my hope that surging homicides in 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that lower homicide rates may soon be more common. 

Interesting accounting of what we know about violent crime and voter concerns a week before Election Day 2022

In the first part of most election years, I tend to enjoy seeing early political commercials and commentary to get a flavor for how various policy issues are being framed and engaged by candidates and advocacy groups.  But, once we reach the homestretch in a major election year, I often start counting down the days to the election while growing ever weary of the non-stop political ads and chatter.  So, I am quite pleased we are finally just a week from Election Day 2022, and I am even more pleased about this interesting and timely new Pew Research Center piece titled "Violent crime is a key midterm voting issue, but what does the data say?".  Here is the start and numbered items from the piece (links from the original):

Political candidates around the United States have released thousands of ads focusing on violent crime this year, and most registered voters see the issue as very important in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. But official statistics from the federal government paint a complicated picture when it comes to recent changes in the U.S. violent crime rate.

With Election Day approaching, here’s a closer look at voter attitudes about violent crime, as well as an analysis of the nation’s violent crime rate itself. All findings are drawn from Center surveys and the federal government’s two primary measures of crime: a large annual survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and an annual study of local police data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

1. Around six-in-ten registered voters (61%) say violent crime is very important when making their decision about who to vote for in this year’s congressional elections....

2. Republican voters are much more likely than Democratic voters to see violent crime as a key voting issue this year....

3. Older voters are far more likely than younger ones to see violent crime as a key election issue....

4. Black voters are particularly likely to say violent crime is a very important midterm issue....

5. Annual government surveys from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show no recent increase in the U.S. violent crime rate....

6. The FBI also estimates that there was no increase in the violent crime rate in 2021....

7. While the total U.S. violent crime rate does not appear to have increased recently, the most serious form of violent crime – murder – has risen significantly during the pandemic....

8. There are many reasons why voters might be concerned about violent crime, even if official statistics do not show an increase in the nation’s total violent crime rate.

A few crime and punishment stories from the campaign trail

Last month, I noted in this post that the 2022 election campaign has seen a lot more crime and punishment talk than we have seen in a long time.  Of course, this is partly of function of the fact that violent crime clearly has spiked since the COVID pandemic and the fact voters have clearly expressed concern about this spike. 

I have mentioned in few settings that, while crime and punishment talk has become more prominent this election cycle, seemingly few 2022 candidates are talking up expanding the death penalty or seeking to increase the number of death sentences and executions nationwide.  (This DPIC fact sheet highlights the modern capital punishment lows during the Trump/Biden years.)  But, as this partial round-up of recent stories shows, lots of other tough-on-crime ideas and talk are part of this cycle's political discourse:

From the AP, "Michels wants changes to Wisconsin parole system"

Also from the AP, "Zeldin’s crime message resonates in New York governor’s race"

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "In final campaign stretch, Georgia candidates clash on crime"

From the Marshall Project, "Fetterman and Oz Battle Over Pennsylvania’s Felony Murder Law"

From the New York Times, "As Republican Campaigns Seize on Crime, Racism Becomes a New Battlefront"

From Politico, "The other issue driving the midterms"

"Violent Crime and Public Prosecution: A Review of Recent Data on Homicide, Robbery, and Progressive Prosecution in the United States"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new study looking at relationships between prosecutorial policies and crime. The full study is apparently not yet available, but this executive summary provides lots of details and also has this extended abstract:

What caused the sharp increase in homicide in dozens of major cities in the United States in 2020 is the source of acrid debate.  Most academic researchers have attributed the sudden increase in homicide to changes in the availability of guns, shifts in policing, and the pandemic’s aggravation of chronic strains in civil society such as homelessness, ill mental health, and drug abuse.  Others have hypothesized that the increase in homicide is the result of the election of prosecutors whose pledges to reform the system of criminal justice have discouraged the police from stopping and arresting emboldened lawbreakers.

We examined the most timely, reliable, and comprehensive set of data on homicide and robbery that was publicly available in the summer of 2022.  We took three different approaches to the analysis of these data: we pooled data from 65 major cities, conducted a statistical regression analysis of trends in violent crime as well as larceny in two dozen cities, and compared the incidence of homicide before and after the election of progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, cities where we are conducting on-going research on changes in criminal justice.  We have also compared trends in recorded crime across all counties in Florida and California since 2015.

We find no evidence to support the claim that progressive prosecutors were responsible for the increase in homicide during the pandemic or before it.  We also find weak evidence to support the claim that prosecutors of any broad approach to crime and justice are causally associated with changes in homicide during the pandemic.  We conclude that progressive prosecutors did not cause the rise in homicide in the United States, neither as a cohort nor in individual cities.  This conclusion echoes the findings of most of the research to date in this field.

This new piece in The Atlantic, headlined "What’s Really Going On With the Crime Rate?: Cities with progressive prosecutors may not exactly resemble the dystopian landscapes you’ve heard so much about," discusses this new study at some lengthy.

Might the recent marijuana pardons by Prez Biden "make things worse for criminal legal reform"?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this new Slate commentary by John Pfaff headlined "Biden’s Focus on Marijuana Is Part of the Problem." One should read the full lengthy piece to understand the full "hot take," but here are some excerpts (with my complaints to follow):

A bigger concern, though, is not just that the policy might accomplish very little, but that it might make things worse for criminal legal reform in the long run because it reinforces a false narrative about the causes of mass punishment in general and mass incarceration in particular.  It’s a narrative that shapes — or, better put, misshapes — policy.

Most Americans are deeply misinformed about why people are in prison.  A survey in 2017 found that solid majorities across the ideological spectrum agreed with the claim that a majority of people in U.S. prisons are there for drug crimes. That’s a far cry from reality: 14 percent of people in state prisons were locked up for drug offenses at the time, a number that has fallen since then.  (Those held in state prisons make up 90 percent of the nation’s incarcerated population.)  This misbelief likely contributed to the next two results from that survey: while majorities of liberals, moderates, and conservatives favored lesser sanctions for those convicted of non-violent crimes who posed little risk of reoffending, majorities of all three groups also opposed lesser sanctions for those convicted of violence who likewise pose little risk of reoffending.

We think we can decarcerate with easy choices.  We cannot.

Nationally, in 2019 almost 60 percent of all people in state prisons were convicted of violence; those convicted of just homicide or rape make up nearly 30 percent of the overall prison population....  If we released everyone held in state prisons convicted not just of marijuana crimes, nor just of drug offenses, but of all non-violent offenses combined, we would still have one of the world’s highest incarceration rates.  Unsurprisingly, this means that violent crimes are also at the heart of racial disparities in U.S. prison populations, as a recent study by the Council on Criminal Justice made clear.

Yet reforms continue to refuse to grapple with this reality.  A 2020 report by the Prison Policy Initiative found nearly 100 state reforms in recent years that had explicitly refused to extend the changes to those convicted of violence.  In some cases, the tradeoff between non-violent and violent crimes is explicit.  In 2016, Maryland’s Democratic legislature scaled back sanctions for non-violent crimes, but also increased punishment for violent offenses.  And just recently, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill to limit the use of solitary confinement, long viewed by behavioral scientists as torture, an indication of the lack of stomach for deeper reforms even among so-called progressive state leaders.

The inability to discuss crimes of violence remains clear in our current politics. Oz’s attacks on Fetterman on crime are now echoed in Wisconsin, where Republican Sen. Ron Johnson says Democratic challenger Mandela Barnes demonstrated “far greater sympathy for the criminal or criminals versus law enforcement or the victims.”  Anecdotal attacks about violent crime have already caused two different New York governors to roll back the state’s 2020 bail reform law, before it was even possible to assess its impact.  Even with new evidence suggesting reform did not contribute much if anything to rising crime in 2020, further rollbacks loom for 2023.  And Virginia recently amended a law that expanded the ability of people in prison to earn good time credits to expressly exclude those who were serving time for any crime of violence.

Meanwhile, as state prison populations fell nationwide by 15 percent from 2010 to 2019, Bureau of Justice Statistics data suggests that the number of people locked up for violence fell by just 1 percent; a separate analysis of the BJS data conducted by the Council on Criminal Justice estimated that the numbers confined for violence actually rose over that time, undermining the declines in drug and property cases.

Talking exclusively about drugs does little in the short-run and reinforces a narrative that appears to affirmatively undermine the sorts of difficult discussions we need to have about the ways we respond to violence.  There are things that Biden could have done, or at least done at the same time, that could have taken advantage of his bully pulpit.

He could have encouraged state and local governments to think about alternative ways to address not just crime, but serious violence.  Biden’s August 2022 Safer America Plan did include some funding for just this but that part of the plan was always secondary to the push to hire more police; it was even framed merely as a way to free up the police to focus more on violence....

He could have announced a push for a repeal of the PLRA or AEDPA, two Clinton era laws that continue to impose real costs on people held in prison or challenging potentially wrongful convictions.  Or, he could have pushed harder to amend the federal code to eliminate qualified immunity for police, or pushed state legislatures to pass such bills, about 35 of which have been proposed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder only to almost all be thwarted by police union lobbying.  Such an approach could help improve police-community relations, which in turn could help address the single biggest challenge we face in reducing violence: the general unwillingness of victims of violence to contact the police.

It’s true that these are long-shot proposals.  But short of pardoning every single person in federal prison — an impossibility — nothing any president does will have a significant impact on the size and reach of a criminal legal system that is almost entirely driven by local politics, policies, and funding.  The president’s biggest power is his ability to shape the debate around criminal legal policy, not the policy itself.

Biden’s proposal here did nothing to shape that debate. There are lots of ways he could have taken steps to push the discussion in the direction it needs to go, but he disappointingly chose to highlight, once again, marijuana.  That choice will make it harder to move the reform discussion beyond where it has mostly been mired for the past decade.

I am a big fan of so much of Pfaff's work, especially his emphasis on "the numbers," but there is much about this commentary that just does not add up.  For starters, these World Population data of incarceration rates suggests that the US would easily fall out of the top 10 in incarceration rates if we cut our prison population 40% by releasing everyone held for non-violent offenses.  Pfaff has long been eager to say we must not ignore violent offenders when thinking about the problem of mass incarceration.  That is basically right, but dramatic decreases in our use of prison for non-violent offense would still make a very big impact AND his own commentary highlights why this is far more politically achievable than massive cuts to sentences for violent offenders.  (Indeed, there is good reason to hope and expect that much shorter and many fewer prison sentences for non-violent offenses would serve as an essential first step to laying the foundation for reducing the overall severity scale of all our punishments.)  

More generally, Pfaff claims there is an "inability to discuss crimes of violence," but I am seeing plenty of discussion (and political ads) about crimes of violence and especially murder having increased considerably over the last few years.  When violent crime has spiked — which it clearly has and which Pfaff does not discuss — and when many polls indicate many voters are troubled greatly by this spike — which they clearly have and which Pfaff does not discuss — one should not be surprised that politicians are responsive to voter concerns about violent crime in their actions and rhetoric.  Indeed, I think it notable (and encouraging) that some criminal justice reform efforts continue moving forward (at least for non-violent crimes) even when "tough on crime" political conditions seems to be prevalent.

And while I support various reforms to PLRA and AEDPA and qualified immunity, I am not aware of any significant research or evidence that such reform will reduce violence in our communities.  If there was such evidence, these reforms could and likely would become a central element of reform supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle.  There are all sort of good arguments for all sorts of criminal justice reforms, but wishing away the facts of increased violent crime (and increased voter concerns about violent crime) will surely "make things worse for criminal legal reform in the long run," much more than will Prez Biden granting blanket pardons to thousands of marijuana possession offenders. 

Extended Final Call for Papers: "Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms"

In this post a few months ago, I highlighted a new call for papers relating to an exciting event I am helping to plan on "Drugs and Public Safety Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms."  I am grateful we have already received a number of great proposals, and we have now  extended the closing date for proposals until the end of this month.  Here again is the call, which is available in full at this link:

The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University and the Academy for Justice at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University are organizing a symposium titled “Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms” to examine the public safety impact of marijuana and other modern drug policy reforms.  The conference is committed to exploring, from a variety of perspectives and with the help of a variety of voices, how to better understand and assess the relationship between drug reforms (broadly defined, including clemency policy and criminal justice reform) and public safety (broadly defined, with an emphasis on violent and serious crime).  [The conference will take place at Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ from March 14-16, 2022.]

Background

In 1996, California kicked off a new state-driven law reform era through a ballot initiative legalizing medical marijuana.  In subsequent decades, as dozens of states legalized marijuana use, various advocates, public officials, and researchers warned about the possibility of dire public safety consequences.  More drug crimes, more general criminality, more drugged driving, and all sorts of other public safety harms were often mentioned as the possible short- or long-term consequence of significant state-level marijuana reforms.

As of summer 2022, there are 37 states with robust medical marijuana regimes and 19 with full adult-use marijuana programs.  The continued support for state-level marijuana reforms seems to reflect, at least in part, the fact that so far, researchers have not documented direct connections between marijuana reforms and adverse public safety outcomes.  Though crime is a growing public concern given the rise in violent crimes in recent years, few advocates or researchers have documented clear connections or correlations between jurisdictions that have reformed their marijuana laws and increases in crimes.

As marijuana reforms have spread, so too has discussion of broader drug reforms such as decriminalization or legalization at both state and local level, as well as relief from drug-war excesses through clemency and expungement.  But given the increasing concern about violent crime, many advocates and lawmakers are wondering whether past and possible future drug policy reforms may be advancing or undermining the broad interest in creating safe and stable communities. As the country moves away from marijuana prohibition, a fully informed discussion of drugs, violence, and public safety is needed now more than ever.

Call for Papers

The symposium is soliciting papers from researchers to be included in the scholarship workshop.  Each paper will be assigned a discussant to provide feedback during the workshop.  The papers will be gathered and published in a symposium edition of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, a peer-reviewed publication in Spring of 2024.

Though proposed papers can and should look to explore the relationship between drug reforms and public safety in any number of diverse ways, the conference organizers are particularly interested in explorations of the impact of: (a) legalization of medical and/or adult-use marijuana, (b) drug decriminalization efforts, and (c) back-end relief efforts (e.g., clemency) — on crime and violence, the enforcement of criminal laws, and the operation of criminal justice systems.

Deadlines and Length of Paper

A proposed abstract of no more than 300 words are now due by October 31, 2022.  Abstracts can be submitted to Jana Hrdinova at [email protected].  Accepted researchers will be notified by November 18, 2022.

Participants should plan to have a full draft to discuss and circulate by March 1, 2023.  Papers may range in length from 10,000 words to 25,000 words.  Final papers for publication will be due on August 1, 2023.

Reminder on a call for papers for "Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms"

As first flagged here a couple of months ago, the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University and the Academy for Justice at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University are organizing a symposium titled “Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms.” The deadline for the new call for papers for this event is approaching, so I wanted to provide another link to the full call here and also report the basics:

The conference is committed to exploring, from a variety of perspectives and with the help of a variety of voices, how to better understand and assess the relationship between drug reforms (broadly defined, including clemency policy and criminal justice reform) and public safety (broadly defined, with an emphasis on violent and serious crime).  [The conference will take place at Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ from March 14-16, 2022.]

Background

In 1996, California kicked off a new state-driven law reform era through a ballot initiative legalizing medical marijuana.  In subsequent decades, as dozens of states legalized marijuana use, various advocates, public officials, and researchers warned about the possibility of dire public safety consequences.  More drug crimes, more general criminality, more drugged driving, and all sorts of other public safety harms were often mentioned as the possible short- or long-term consequence of significant state-level marijuana reforms.

As of summer 2022, there are 37 states with robust medical marijuana regimes and 19 with full adult-use marijuana programs.  The continued support for state-level marijuana reforms seems to reflect, at least in part, the fact that so far, researchers have not documented direct connections between marijuana reforms and adverse public safety outcomes.  Though crime is a growing public concern given the rise in violent crimes in recent years, few advocates or researchers have documented clear connections or correlations between jurisdictions that have reformed their marijuana laws and increases in crimes.

As marijuana reforms have spread, so too has discussion of broader drug reforms such as decriminalization or legalization at both state and local level, as well as relief from drug-war excesses through clemency and expungement.  But given the increasing concern about violent crime, many advocates and lawmakers are wondering whether past and possible future drug policy reforms may be advancing or undermining the broad interest in creating safe and stable communities. As the country moves away from marijuana prohibition, a fully informed discussion of drugs, violence, and public safety is needed now more than ever.

Call for Papers

The symposium is soliciting papers from researchers to be included in the scholarship workshop.  Each paper will be assigned a discussant to provide feedback during the workshop.  The papers will be gathered and published in a symposium edition of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, a peer-reviewed publication in Spring of 2024.

Though proposed papers can and should look to explore the relationship between drug reforms and public safety in any number of diverse ways, the conference organizers are particularly interested in explorations of the impact of: (a) legalization of medical and/or adult-use marijuana, (b) drug decriminalization efforts, and (c) back-end relief efforts (e.g., clemency) — on crime and violence, the enforcement of criminal laws, and the operation of criminal justice systems.

Deadlines and Length of Paper

A proposed abstract of no more than 300 words are due on October 17, 2022.  Abstracts can be submitted to Jana Hrdinova at [email protected].

Accepted researchers will be notified by November 18, 2022.

Participants should plan to have a full draft to discuss and circulate by March 1, 2023. Papers may range in length from 10,000 words to 25,000 words.

Final papers for publication will be due on August 1, 2023.

Latest, but not greatest, FBI crime numbers show murders up in 2021, but overall violent and property crime down

This Time article, headlined "Homicides Continued to Increase in 2021, According to the FBI's Flawed Crime Report," highlights the challenges of reporting on the challenging latest crime data from the FBI.  (This Brennan Center Explainer, titled "Understanding the FBI’s 2021 Crime Data: Changes to the way the FBI reports national crime data may significantly complicate public understanding of recent crime trends," provides context.")   Here are the essentials from the Time piece:

The pandemic surge in violence continued across the U.S. in 2021, with homicides rising by 4.3% over the previous year, according to estimates from the FBI’s annual crime report, released Wednesday.  The estimated 22,900 murders and other killings last year would bring the nation’s homicide rate to 6.9 per 100,000 — the highest in almost 25 years. The 2021 increase is on top of the nearly 30% spike in homicides the U.S. experienced between 2019 and 2020.

However, the FBI report—the most comprehensive picture of crime rates and trends in the U.S. — comes with a giant asterisk this year. Because the FBI switched how it collects crime data from local law enforcement agencies, up to 40% of police departments — including major ones like the New York Police Department and the Los Angeles Police Department—are missing from the report.

As a result, the FBI used estimates to calculate national crime figures. The FBI’s range of estimates means that homicides, for instance, may have increased more than 4.3% in 2021, or may have actually decreased.

According to the FBI’s data, overall violent crime decreased by 1%, led by a drop in robberies.  Property crime decreased by 3.8%.  However, rape increased by 3.4%. Reported drug crimes also increased for all drug categories, except marijuana.  Methamphetamine saw the biggest jump, surging by 17.8%.

It is quite discouraging that the spike in murders in 2020 was apparently not only a one-year ugly reality.  But somewhat encouragingly, this AH Datalytics dashboard focused on murder in large cities suggests that murders are generally down nationwide nearly 5% in 2022 compared to 2021 in our larger cities.  So there is at least some basis to hope that 2021 represented a recent murder peak (assuming the FBI data is right that there was an increase in 2021).  

"What’s Dangerous Is America’s Lack of Crime Data"

The title of this post is the headline of this new opinion piece by Matthew Yglesias.  I recommend the full piece and here are excerpts:

Crime is on the political agenda in a big way this year, with Republicans zeroing in on it as their favorite topic now that gasoline prices are moderating.  Which naturally raises the question: Is crime rising?  To which the shocking answer is — nobody knows.  Not because anything unusual is happening, but simply because the usual state of America’s information on crime and policing is incredibly poor.

Contrast this state of affairs with the amount of data available on the US economy.  There are monthly updates on job creation, the unemployment rate and multiple indexes of inflation.  Commodity prices are publicized on a daily basis. Reports on gross national product come out quarterly, with timely revisions as more data comes in.  Policymakers benefit from a deeply informed debate, enriched by commentary from academics and other observers.

But on crime the US is, to a shocking extent, flying blind.  As a July report from the Brennan Center for Justice noted: “More than six months into 2022, national-level data on crime in 2021 remains unavailable.”...

The dearth of information is a problem not only for rigor-minded policymakers.  It also leaves the political arena open for manipulation by demagogues.  Since nobody actually knows in real time what’s happening, anecdotes can just stand in for made-up fears.  Since the very real murder surge of 2020 now has people primed to believe “crime is out of control” narratives, any particular instance of violence can be used to support that story....

By the same token, when murder really was soaring in 2020, it was easy for progressives to stay in ideologically convenient denial for far too long, since it was genuinely impossible to actually prove that it was happening until much later.  The people who dismissed the anecdotal evidence of rising crime were, in that case, mistaken. But the Republicans who are stoking fears of rising crime right now also appear to be mistaken.  And the lack of information about geographical patterns in murder trends means no one has much ability to assess what social or policy factors may be in play.

What makes this all especially maddening is that collecting this information in a timely manner shouldn’t be that difficult. Police departments know how many murders are committed in their jurisdiction. That information is stored on computers. It doesn’t need to be delivered to the Department of Justice via carrier pigeon. The DOJ should be given some money to create a system that can be easily updated by law enforcement agencies, and actually filing that information in a timely way should be a condition of receiving federal police grants.  A small team at the Bureau of Justice Statistics could have the job of phoning up departments who haven’t done it and “reminding” them to update the numbers.  And then the data could be released on a regular basis in a machine-readable form — the same way numbers for jobs, inflation, and other major economic statistics are.

Knowing what’s actually happening would not, by itself, solve America’s crime problems.  But successful efforts to reduce violence, such as the one in New York City in the 1990s, were driven by a commitment to rigorous measurement.  A serious federal investment in crime data collection is no panacea, and it’s not exactly a winning political slogan.  But it would be a huge boost to all kinds of crime-control efforts.

Traffic deaths continue to climb even as homicides seem to be declining in 2022

Amid persistent discussions and debates over public safety, I often notice that traffic harms do not garner the amount of attention or concern as traditional crimes.  This reality is on my mind again with the latest official news on traffic fatalities reported in this Hill article headlined "Road deaths rise further, hitting highest first-quarter level since 2002."  Here are excerpts:

Nearly 10,000 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the first quarter of the year, marking the largest first-quarter level since 2002, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced on Wednesday.

NHTSA projected 9,560 traffic fatalities in the first three months of 2022, the seventh consecutive quarterly increase, as Americans increased driving that was sharply reduced during the coronavirus pandemic. But the 7 percent increase in fatalities outpaced the 5.6 percent increase in total miles traveled on U.S. roads over the same period. “The overall numbers are still moving in the wrong direction,” NHTSA Administrator Steven Cliff said in a statement.

“Now is the time for all states to double down on traffic safety,” he said. “Through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there are more resources than ever for research, interventions and effective messaging and programs that can reverse the deadly trend and save lives.”...

The NHTSA projected 29 states and Washington, D.C., to experience increases in traffic fatalities in the first quarter, while 19 states and Puerto Rico saw traffic deaths decline. Delaware recorded the highest increase out of any state, roughly a 163 percent jump from the same period the previous year. Connecticut, Virginia, Vermont, D.C., Hawaii, Nebraska and North Carolina all saw increases exceeding 50 percent....

The NHTSA previously released data showing that nearly 43,000 people were killed on U.S. roads last year, the highest annual level in 16 years.

For a little public safety context, the FBI reported "more than 21,500 homicides" in the US for 2020; we do not have an FBI number for 2021, but most reporting suggests there may have been over 22,000 homicides. But, encouragingly, this AH Datalytics webpage with a "YTD Murder Comparison" Dashboard collecting homicide data from police in nearly 100 big cities suggests homicides are not trending down in 2022.

Returning to the disconcerting roadway data, even with the recent pandemic-era spike in US murders, there are still nearly twice as many persons killed on the roadways than by homicides throughout the US.  And while its seems homicide numbers are starting to trend in a positive direction in 2022, traffic fatalities are still headed the wrong way.  

Notable effort to link fighting climate change to fighting crime

I often preach to my students (and others) that any and every issue of public policy concern can and does become be a crime-and-punishment issue in some way.  As but one example, in recent years I have done a few posts highlighting connections between climate change concerns and crime concerns (see links below).  This new New Republic piece by Liza Featherstone connects these dots with new research under this full headline: "If Republicans Really Wanted to Fight Crime, They’d Support Climate Policy: Summer murders are a perennial problem that conservatives, despite their rhetoric, are uniquely ill-equipped to solve."  Here are excerpts (with links from the original):

We’ve known for years that violent crime increases during the summer months.  In the past, researchers weren’t always sure that it was because of heat, speculating that the summer vacation, with more young men up to no good, was the problem, or that spending time outside, as we do in warm weather, occasions more interaction, for better and for worse.  But newer research has made the links to heat waves much clearer, suggesting that without intervention global warming will lead to more murders.

Research shows that on average, violent crime increases by over 5 percent on days hotter than 85 degrees Fahrenheit compared to days below that threshold.  Studies mapping violent crime and weather in Los Angeles and Chicago show violence reliably rising with the temperature.  This effect has been found by different scholars and in countries all over the world.  A 2021 study using data from 159 countries from 1970 to 2015 even found that higher temperatures were associated with more deaths from terrorist attacks.  An Australian study found that daily assault counts rose as the temperature rose, as did another study in Seoul, South Korea. Finnish researchers found that spikes in temperature explained about 10 percent of the variation in that nation’s violent crime rate.

Like many other problems associated with extreme weather, this one hits the poor hardest.  A study by University of Southern California researchers found that extreme heat was especially likely to exacerbate violence in low-income neighborhoods.

Prior related posts:

• Why global warming (like everything else) is really a criminal justice issue
• "Crime, Weather, and Climate Change"
• Interesting analysis of how summer impacts crime rates
• "Climate Change and the Criminal Justice System" 
• Should Senator Cotton and any others fretting about crime after passage of the FIRST STEP Act focus a lot more attention on crime risks presented by climate change? 

Call for Papers: "Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms"

I am pleased to highlight a new call for papers relating to an exciting event I am excited to be involved in helping to plan, "Drugs and Public Safety Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms." Here is the full call, which is available in full at this link:

The Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University and the Academy for Justice at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University are organizing a symposium titled “Drugs and Public Safety: Exploring the Impact of Policy, Policing, and Prosecutorial Reforms” to examine the public safety impact of marijuana and other modern drug policy reforms.  The conference is committed to exploring, from a variety of perspectives and with the help of a variety of voices, how to better understand and assess the relationship between drug reforms (broadly defined, including clemency policy and criminal justice reform) and public safety (broadly defined, with an emphasis on violent and serious crime).  [The conference will take place at Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ from March 14-16, 2022.]

Background

In 1996, California kicked off a new state-driven law reform era through a ballot initiative legalizing medical marijuana.  In subsequent decades, as dozens of states legalized marijuana use, various advocates, public officials, and researchers warned about the possibility of dire public safety consequences.  More drug crimes, more general criminality, more drugged driving, and all sorts of other public safety harms were often mentioned as the possible short- or long-term consequence of significant state-level marijuana reforms.

As of summer 2022, there are 37 states with robust medical marijuana regimes and 19 with full adult-use marijuana programs.  The continued support for state-level marijuana reforms seems to reflect, at least in part, the fact that so far, researchers have not documented direct connections between marijuana reforms and adverse public safety outcomes.  Though crime is a growing public concern given the rise in violent crimes in recent years, few advocates or researchers have documented clear connections or correlations between jurisdictions that have reformed their marijuana laws and increases in crimes.

As marijuana reforms have spread, so too has discussion of broader drug reforms such as decriminalization or legalization at both state and local level, as well as relief from drug-war excesses through clemency and expungement.  But given the increasing concern about violent crime, many advocates and lawmakers are wondering whether past and possible future drug policy reforms may be advancing or undermining the broad interest in creating safe and stable communities. As the country moves away from marijuana prohibition, a fully informed discussion of drugs, violence, and public safety is needed now more than ever.

Call for Papers

The symposium is soliciting papers from researchers to be included in the scholarship workshop.  Each paper will be assigned a discussant to provide feedback during the workshop.  The papers will be gathered and published in a symposium edition of the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, a peer-reviewed publication in Spring of 2024.

Though proposed papers can and should look to explore the relationship between drug reforms and public safety in any number of diverse ways, the conference organizers are particularly interested in explorations of the impact of: (a) legalization of medical and/or adult-use marijuana, (b) drug decriminalization efforts, and (c) back-end relief efforts (e.g., clemency) — on crime and violence, the enforcement of criminal laws, and the operation of criminal justice systems.

Deadlines and Length of Paper

A proposed abstract of no more than 300 words are due on October 17, 2022.  Abstracts can be submitted to Jana Hrdinova at [email protected].

Accepted researchers will be notified by November 18, 2022.

Participants should plan to have a full draft to discuss and circulate by March 1, 2023. Papers may range in length from 10,000 words to 25,000 words.

Final papers for publication will be due on August 1, 2023.

Notable review of research on public safety and criminal justice reform from Arnold Ventures

This new webpage at Arnold Ventures explores in thoughtful ways the important question that it is title of the webpage: "What Does the Research Say About Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform?".  Here is an explanation of the effort (with emphasis in the original) along with the links to the research papers most focused on reform of the back-end of the criminal justice system:

As a philanthropy dedicated to improving lives by driving sustainable change to the justice system, the spike in homicides and the resulting political pushback by some against criminal justice reform led Arnold Ventures to reflect on the relationship between community safety and justice reform. Arnold Ventures’ programmatic work, from policing to pretrial justice to corrections, is built on the idea that reform and safety are not opposite ends of a spectrum, but can operate in tandem. 

That is why we turned to the experts to help us understand what the evidence says about the relationship between community safety, the justice system, and reform. We collaborated with eight scholars who have deep substantive and methodological expertise in their respective issue areas, and asked that they write discussion papers looking at the state of research around specific aspects of the criminal justice system. These papers each respond to two broad prompts. 

First, how does a particular aspect of the justice system advance or undermine community safety? 

Second, what is your summary or assessment of the evidence, and are there remaining research questions that need to be answered? 

The following six papers are the scholars’ independent and thoughtful reviews of the available evidence in response to those prompts:...

[Other papers looked at community-based, policing and pre-trial reforms...]

• Dr. Jennifer Doleac (Texas A&M University) and Dr. Michael LaForest (Penn State University) discuss the limited empirical evidence of the effect of community supervision (probation and parole) policy and practice on community safety despite the scale of its use as a sanction for criminal behavior and alternative to incarceration. 
  Read the paper: Community Supervision & Public Safety
  
• Dr. Daniel Nagin (Carnegie Mellon University) discusses how the current incarceration practices in the United States, particularly multi-decade sentences, are an inefficient use of public resources and are not shown by evidence to have a deterrent effect on crime. 
  Read the paper: Incarceration & Public Safety
  
• Dr. Megan Denver and Ms. Abigail Ballou (Northeastern University) discuss how widespread post-conviction sanctions, restrictions, and disqualifications for individuals with criminal records and histories of justice system involvement can interact and accumulate in ways that are counterproductive to safety. 
  Read the paper: Collateral Consequences & Public Safety

These papers make a significant contribution to the public conversation as individual products, but they can also be read together as concluding: The evidence suggests there are real public safety benefits associated with the functions of the justice system.  At the same time, some of the current practices remain inefficient, produce serious harms, and operate in ways that are counterproductive to community safety.

Latest CCJ accounting of crime trends shows good news and bad news for first half of 2022

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) is continuing to do important and timely work on modern crime trends through an on-going series of reports under the heading "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities."  The latest version of this report, titled "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities: Mid-End 2021 Update," was just released this week and is flagged in this new CCJ press release.  Here is an excerpt:

Murders and gun assaults in major American cities fell slightly during the first half of 2022, while robberies and some property offenses posted double-digit increases, according to a new analysis of crime trends released today by the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ).

Examining homicides in 23 cities that make data readily available, the study found that the number of murders in the first half of the year dipped by 2% compared to the first half of 2021 (a decrease of 54 homicides in those cities). Gun assaults also fell, by 6%, during the first six months of this year compared to the same timeframe last year, while overall aggravated assault counts rose 4%. Robbery jumped by 19%....

In other findings, trends in most property crimes reversed from the first two years of the pandemic.  Residential burglaries (+6%), nonresidential burglaries (+8%), and larcenies (+20%) all rose in the first half of 2022.  Motor vehicle thefts increased (+15%) but that trend began during the early months of the pandemic.  The number of drug offenses fell in the first half of 2022 (-7%), continuing earlier pandemic patterns.

This CCJ webpage provides a link to the full report and a bit full overview of the report's methodology and key findings.  One can find plenty of heartening and disheartening data in the graphs and other information in this full report.  The recent decline in homicides and gun assaults still leave us a long way from the lower pre-pandemic rates of these harmful crime.  But the recent uptick in various property crimes still leave us well below the higher pre-pandemic rates of these crimes.  And there is still an extraordinary diversity of of crime patterns in cities large and small throughout the US.

Homicides (perhaps) trending down through first half of 2022, including in big cities like Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia

With significant upticks in homicides and some other crimes reported in many areas throughout the US in 2020 and 2021(see background/complications here and here and here and here), it is not surprising that there is considerable concern in many quarters about crime policies and crime politics.  Still, anyone who follows crime trends knows they can often have an unpredictable and unexplained quality.  Against that backdrop, I have been watching closely the homicides being reported via police crime reports in various cities over the first half of 2022.  In particular, this AH Datalytics webpage provides a very helpful "YTD Murder Comparison" Dashboard that collects homicide data from police in nearly 100 big cities. 

Though the AH Datalytics page has some lags in the data and only has city data, I still think it notable as we approach the end of the first half of 2022 that this dashboard as of this morning indicates that nearly two-thirds of all cities are reporting that homicides are down in 2022 relative to 2021.  In addition, the cumulated data from all the cities tracked show that nationwide murders in large cities are down more than 2%.  Also notable are encouraging downward trends in homicides over the first half of this year in some of our nation's largest cities.  Specifically, based on (linked) police reports, we see: 

Chicago homicides down 11% (as of June 19)

Los Angeles homicides up 1% (as of June 25)

New York City homicides down 13% (as of June 26)

Philadelphia homicides down 10% (as of June 28)

(I could not find up-to-date homicide data from Houston and Phoenix.)  Of course, these four very big cities (and all the AH Datalytics cities) are not fully representative of what may be going on with homicides in every area nationwide.  Moreover, these reported homicide declines are on the heels of notably high homicide rates in many locales in 2021.  And a few mass shootings (or bad days) in these cities could erase the small homicide safety gains over the first half of 2022.  Still, with all these caveats, these encouraging data at least provide a basis for me to begin to hope that surging homicides in 2020 and 2021 were mostly a pandemic era phenomenon and that we may return to lower homicide rates before too long.  But, reiterating that homicide and broader crime trend often have unpredictable and unexplained qualities, it is certainly possible that six months from now the 2022 data could tell a very different story.

Some headlines and discussions of crime research catching my eye

Thanks to a number of forces, perhaps most notably rising homicide rates and recent salient mass shootings, crime is getting a lot of attention from media outlets big and small.  Valuably, some of this attention include reviews of research, and these piece in that vein recently caught my attention:

From Bloomberg by Justin Fox, "New York City Is a Lot Safer Than Small-Town America: Rising homicide rates don’t tell the whole story. When you dig deeper into data on deaths, you'll find the more urban your surroundings, the less danger you face."

From Phys.org by Oxford University Press, "New study shows welfare prevents crime, quite dramatically"

From Vital City by Jennifer Doleac & Anna Harvey, "Stemming Violence by Investing in Civic Goods: Evidence suggests that investments in summer jobs, neighborhood improvements and services can reduce crime."

From Vox by Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg, "How to prevent gun deaths without gun control: Can summer jobs and mental health care save lives?"

"'Tough Talking' Sacramento District Attorney Presides Over Homicide And Violence Surge While 'Liberal' San Francisco Enjoys Major Decreases"

Next week brings a high-profile recall vote on San Francisco's District Attorney Chesa Boudin, an election that many have come to view as a referendum on the progressive prosecutor movement. Because I consider all "movements" in the criminal justice reform space to be dynamic and erratic, I rarely think any one local vote itself reshapes the reform landscape.  But I still understand why this vote is getting considerable attention, and lots of politicians and pundits will surely see lots of lessons from the outcome of this interesting bit of local criminal justice democracy.  

Against that backdrop comes this notable new report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.  Here is the report's introduction:

San Francisco has seen major decreases in crime amid progressive reforms, while nearby Sacramento is seeing a homicide and violence surge under the leadership of a conservative prosecutor whose policies feature high rates of incarceration.  Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert has positioned herself as the state’s leading “tough-on-crime” candidate as she criticizes progressive San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and seeks to unseat California’s reform-minded Attorney General Rob Bonta (Hooks, 2021; Schubert, 2022).  Yet DA Schubert’s tenure has coincided with increased homicide and violent crime, lesser declines in property crime, and above average rates of homicide and violent crime for urban Sacramento than in San Francisco.  Schubert’s “tough on crime” rhetoric and policies have not delivered lower or falling crime rates.

This analysis compares crime trends during Schubert’s conservative prosecutorial term in office (2015- present) with those of San Francisco’s progressive prosecutors (George Gascón and Chesa Boudin) during a key period in California’s criminal justice reform era.  If talking “tough on crime” and incarcerating more people actually reduced crime, we would expect to see a much bigger decline in crime and a lower crime rate in Sacramento than in San Francisco.  In fact, the opposite is the case. San Francisco has sustained larger crime declines and achieved lower rates of violent crime than the City of Sacramento since 2014.

The figure reprinted here is only one of a number of graphics from the report seeking to provide a broad view of crime rates and trends in two nearby (but very different) California cities. According to the report, the data show that "violent crime rates have risen an average of 9% in Sacramento while falling an average of 29% in San Francisco from 2014-2021, a period that spans the tenures of DA Schubert and San Francisco's progressive DA’s."  Here are some more data points from the report as highlighted on this CJCJ webpage:

• Rates of homicide, other violent crimes, and property crimes fell faster in San Francisco than in the City of Sacramento from 2014-2021, even as San Francisco reduced its incarceration rate (-38%) much faster than Sacramento County (-24%).
• Today, the City of Sacramento has higher rates of violent crime than San Francisco, including for homicide, rape, and aggravated assault.
• The San Francisco Police Department solves a far smaller share of reported crimes than police in any major California city, presenting the DA with fewer cases to prosecute. Sacramento’s DA receives a higher proportion of reported cases from local police departments, particularly for violent offenses.
• Sacramento’s heavy reliance on imprisonment cost California taxpayers $151.6 million, while San Francisco’s progressive approach saved the state $163.3 million.

"A Welfare Analysis of Medicaid and Crime"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new empirical paper now on SSRN and authored by Erkmen Giray Aslim, Murat Mungan and Han Yu.  Here is its abstract:

We calculate conservative estimates for the marginal value of public funds (MVPF) associated with providing Medicaid to inmates exiting prison.  Our MVPF estimates, which measure the ratio between the benefits associated with the policy (measured in terms of willingness to pay) and its costs net of fiscal externalities, range between 3.44 and 10.61.  A large proportion of the benefits that we account for are related to the reduced future criminal involvement of exiting inmates who receive Medicaid.  Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that Medicaid expansions reduce the average number of times a released inmate is reimprisoned within a year by about 11.5%.

We use this estimate along with key values reported elsewhere (e.g., victimization costs, data on victimization and incarceration) to calculate specific benefits from the policy. These include reduced criminal harm due to reductions in reoffenses; direct benefits to former inmates from receiving Medicaid; increased employment; and reduced loss of liberty due to fewer future reimprisonments.  Net-costs consist of the cost of providing Medicaid net of changes in the governmental cost of imprisonment; changes in the tax revenue due to increased employment; and changes in spending on other public assistance programs. We interpret our estimates as being conservative, because we err on the side of under-estimating benefits and over-estimating costs when data on specific items are imprecise or incomplete.

Our findings are largely consistent with others in the sparse literature investigating the crime-related welfare impacts of Medicaid access, and suggest that public health insurance programs can deliver sizeable indirect benefits from reduced crime in addition to their direct health-related benefits.

New Third Way report details "The Red State Murder Problem"

The "center-left" think tank Third Way has this interesting new accounting of the increase in murders in 2020 in a new report titled "The Red State Murder Problem."  I recommend the full report and its linked data, and here is an excerpt:

The US saw an alarming 30% increase in murder in 2020.  While 2021 data is not yet complete, murder was on the rise again this past year. Some “blue” cities, like Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, have seen real and persistent increases in homicides.  These cities — along with others like Los Angeles, New York, and Minneapolis — are also in places with wall-to-wall media coverage and national media interest.

But there is a large piece of the homicide story that is missing and calls into question the veracity of the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states.  And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.

For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations.  In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.  Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry, over the stunning levels of murders in these and other places.

We collected 2019 and 2020 murder data from all 50 states.  (Comprehensive 2021 data is not yet available.)  We pulled the data from yearly crime reports released by state governments, specifically the Departments of Justice and Safety. For states that didn’t issue state crime reports, we pulled data from reputable local news sources.  To allow for comparison, we calculated the state’s per capita murder rate, the number of murders per 100,000 residents, and categorized states by their presidential vote in the 2020 election, resulting in an even 25-25 split.

We found that murder rates are, on average, 40% higher in the 25 states Donald Trump won in the last presidential election compared to those that voted for Joe Biden.  In addition, murder rates in many of these red states dwarf those in blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts.  And finally, many of the states with the worst murder rates — like Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and Arkansas — are ones that few would describe as urban. Only 2 of America’s top 100 cities in population are located in these high murder rate states.  And not a single one of the top 10 murder states registers in the top 15 for population density.

Whether one does or does not blame Republican leaders for high murder rates, it seems that Republican officeholders do a better job of blaming Democrats for lethal crime than actually reducing lethal crime.

Of course, one does not need to be a criminologist to notice that most "red states" with high murder rates are southern states, and lots of lots of research has identified relationships between higher temperature and and higher violent crime rates. It would be quite interesting (though probably challenging) to try to run these data by comparing states and cities with comparable climates.

Though one might temper reactions to this report with an eye on temperatures, this report still provide a useful reminder (1) that crime challenges are always dynamic nationwide regardless of the political concerns of the moment, and (2) that it will often be much easier for politicians than for data scientists to claim a link between crime policies and crime.

Latest Bureau of Justice Statistics' publication on "Criminal Victimization, 2020" suggests violent crime hit historic lows in 2020

One cannot do a google search on any criminal justice issue without seeing lots of pieces about a huge "violent crime spike" in 2020 and beyond.  Indeed, I have blogged more than a few times about various stories and data runs about significant increases in murders and gun assaults in 2020, and many stories talk up the "historic" nature of these crime increases.  We have also seen considerable policy fall out from the perceived significant uptick in violent crime, often in the form of criticisms of past criminal justice reform efforts or of the people seeking to continue to push reforms.

Against this backdrop, I was a bit gob-smacked to see the latest new Bureau of Justice Statistics' publication, titled on "Criminal Victimization, 2020 – Supplemental Statistical Tables "  Here is how it gets started (with some emphasis added):

The prevalence of violent crime in the United States declined from 1.10% (3.1 million) of persons age 12 or older in 2019 to 0.93% (2.6 million) in 2020.  Violent crime includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.  The percentage of persons who were victims of violent crime excluding simple assault also declined during this period, from 0.44% (1.2 million) to 0.37% (1.0 million).

In other words, according to this BJS data report, which is based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, it seems violent crime actually dropped about 20% in 2020 relative to 2019.  In addition, the chart that starts this report suggest that the 2020 violent crime rate in the United States was the absolute lowest that it have been in the last three decades.  In addition, there is. according to this document, good 2020 news on property crime as well (with emphasis added):

In 2020, 6.19% of households experienced one or more property victimizations (burglary or trespassing, motor vehicle theft, and other types of household theft), which was a statistically significant decline from the 7.37% of households in 2016.  The prevalence of burglary or trespassing declined 20% from 2019 (1.22%) to 2020 (0.97%).  There was a statistically significant decline in other types of household theft from 5.53% in 2019 to 5.17% in 2020.  The prevalence rate of motor vehicle theft did not differ significantly from 2019 (0.33%) to 2020 (0.32%).

Of course, as blogged here, back in September 2021, the FBI reported its different metrics of national crimes which indicated that "In 2020, violent crime was up 5.6 percent from the 2019 number. Property crimes dropped 7.8 percent."  (Helpfully, BJS has also recently published this new document titled "The Nation’s Two Crime Measures, 2011–2020," which helps explain a bit crime rate variation from different national metrics.)

Critically, the BJS report on victimization notes that the overall 2020 violent crime decline "was primarily driven by a decline in the prevalence of assault during this period."  Because so many more violent crimes are assaults and so relatively few are murders, we could experience a significant spike in murders in 2020 and beyond and yet still experience a significant overall decline in total violent crime thanks to declines in assaults.   Indeed, the data we have on 2020 murders being way up seems pretty sound, and murder is rightly the type of violent crime that we give disproportionate attention to in thinking through crime and punishment policies and practices.  Still, it is always nice to find some important silver data linings in dark crime data clould.

CCJ releases "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities: Year-End 2021 Update"

Back in summer 2020, I noted here that the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) had launched an importantand impressive new commission titled the "National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice" and headed by two former US Attorneys General.  That commission has produce a number of important works (examples here and here and here), along with an on-going series of accounts of recent crime trends under the heading "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities."  The latest version of this report, titled "Pandemic, Social Unrest, and Crime in U.S. Cities: Year-End 2021 Update," was released this week and can be accessed via this website.  Here is an overview:

This study updates and supplements previous reports by the Council on Criminal Justice on recent U.S. crime trends with additional crime data through the end of 2021. It examines monthly crime rates for ten violent, property, and drug offenses in 27 American cities. The crime data were obtained from online portals of city police departments that provided weekly updates for the period between January 2018 and December 2021.

The largest city in the sample is Los Angeles, with nearly 4 million residents. The smallest is Norfolk, VA, with 245,000 residents. The data are subject to revision, and not all cities reported data for each crime or for each week. Offense classifications also varied somewhat across the cities.

Findings:

• The number of 2021 homicides in the cities studied was 5% greater than in 2020 — representing 218 additional murders in those cities — and 44% greater than in 2019, representing 1,298 additional lives lost.

• Aggravated and gun assault rates were also higher in 2021 than in 2020.  Aggravated assaults increased by 4%, while gun assaults went up by 8%.  Robbery rates increased slightly after dropping in 2020.

• Burglary, larceny, and drug offense rates were lower in 2021 than in 2020, by 6%, 1%, and 12% respectively.  Motor vehicle theft rates were 14% higher in 2021 than the year before.

• Domestic violence incidents increased by nearly 4% between 2020 and 2021. But this result is based on just 11 of the 27 cities studied and should be viewed with caution.

• In response to continuing increases in homicide and serious assaults, the authors conclude that police and policymakers should pursue violence-prevention strategies of proven effectiveness and enact needed policing reforms to achieving durable reductions in violent crime in our cities.