From The Washington Post: A shaken Washington copes with surging violence: ‘This is not normal’
Stephanie Heishman, a Northwest Washington event planner, knows she may sound almost absurdly cautious as she describes how, after a regular Sunday dinner at a friend’s house five blocks away, she travels by car instead of walking home.
She has her reasons. A year ago, she was awakened by gunfire outside her Adams Morgan apartment building and from her seventh-floor window saw a car speeding away. In August, after a night out with friends, her Uber driver couldn’t reach her building because police had blocked off a street where bullets had just killed two men and fatally wounded a third.
“It’s so ridiculous,” Heishman, 44, said of the precautions she takes to feel safer. “On the other hand, I don’t want to randomly get shot.”
Violent crime has long been a part of Washington life, the worst of it during the early 1990s when drug trafficking propelled the annual homicide toll to nearly 500 and D.C. earned an inglorious reputation as America’s “Murder Capital.”
The volume of carnage these days is not nearly as high, and most D.C. residents are unlikely to ever be a victim of violence. Yet a sharp rise in crime over the past year — punctuated by reports of homicides, brazen shootings, and carjackings by armed teenagers — is rattling a city already struggling to recover from a pandemic that upended its rhythms and ravaged its once-thriving downtown.
That’s the money shot from your quote.Report
“Crime is not nearly as high as the 90s” is one of those things that feels like it’s supposed to be important context, but it doesn’t end up being important context when you sit and think about it.
I did a search on “highest homicide rate in the US”.
It gave the result: “The District of Columbia has the highest murder rate in America, at 49.2 murders per 100,000 people.”
We could easily rephrase that as “99,950.8 per 100,000 people are *NOT* murdered in DC” and make it seem a lot brighter.Report
Um, no, when you think about it, crime trending lower actually is important. Especially when you put it in context.
No matter how many anecdotes you try to cobble together, America is more peaceful and law abiding than in previous eras.Report
I suppose you have to look at “trending lower” in context.
“The trend takes place over 35 years” is a different trend than what you see if you look at this story from last month: D.C. on pace for most homicides in two decades.
Now. Do you feel that it is dishonest and manipulative to look at the last two decades instead of the last three decades?Report
This is where “facts and statistics” collide with perception. My neighborhood could be safer now than 20 years ago, but if I get mugged twice in a month, or someone gets shot on my corner and nothing like that has happened in the 10 years I’ve lived there, I now perceive it as being “less safe”. Both can be true.Report
These stories seem to be showing up in various newspapers for some reason.
Instead of the stories about how it’s not as bad as 1993.Report
Because “it’s not as bad as 1993” gets superseded by “if it bleeds, it leads”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disagreeing with you. I suspect the historical view of the residents is a lot less than several decades. Additionally, in some neighborhoods, it’s likely that a lot of crime isn’t reported as there is no response.Report
I think this is right. Crime is worse and it’s a problem, but it’s also worse mostly in the zip codes and mostly among the demographics where it’s always a problem. We have friends transplanted from the NE who are constantly in a panic about this stuff, and while there’s no way to say upticks in homicides is a positive thing, their personal risk profile probably hasn’t changed at all over the time period in question.Report
Not at all. Periodic spikes in crime are perfectly consistent with a general downward trend.
See your problem is you aren’t able to use statistics (even FBI statistics!) to supporty our overal contention of a society moving to lower trust, so you can only use individual anecdotes and temporary spikes.
I guess the better question is why you have such a deep committment to the narrative.Report
What if the numbers for 2018 were higher than 2017 and the numbers for 2019 were higher than 2018 and the numbers for 2020 were higher than the numbers for 2019 and the numbers for 2021 were higher than the numbers for 2020?
Is that a trend or should we, instead, compare to 1993?Report
Sure.
You just need to construct an overall thesis and support it with nuymbers.
Like, is this a trend across the entire nation, or particular regions, or individual cities?
Does it hold true for all crime, or just violent crime, or just homicide?
Are the statistics corroborated by other empirical facts?
Do recognized experts in the field generally agree with the thesis?
A big theory, which yours is, needs a big document set in order to be persuasive. And your credibility isn’t helped when it becomes obvious you are starting with a conclusion then hunting for data to support it.Report
Now I have to come up with a *THESIS*?
Dang.
Am I allowed to use FBI stats in support of the thesis?Report
Using statistics in support of a thesis you can’t even articulate?
Does that make sense to you or anyone here?Report
Oh, I can come up with something, I’m sure.
“There’s been a surge in violence in Washington DC over the last five or six years and we’re on track to have the worst homicide year in a couple of decades”.
Is that a workable thesis?Report
Sure, the motte holds.Report
Oh, good. It’s best to start out with the motte.
It’s the worst when someone runs out into the bailey and starts spouting stuff and then, when cornered, retreats to the motte.
Don’t you think so?Report
That’s definitely not right. DC’s population was about 670k in 2022. To have a homicide rate of 50 per 100k would require about 335 homicides, but it topped out around 225 last year, so that’s more like 33.
This is still higher by far than any state. Granted, it’s just a city, but I’m told that the real violence problem is in small towns, so I don’t think that should be considered a handicap.Report
If you really want to look into weird stuff, consider that Mobile, AL has the highest overall per capita crime rate in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rateReport
That’s a list sorted alphabetically by state and city name. For property crime, Albuquerque is highest. For homicide and overall violent crime, St. Louis. Mobile isn’t in the top 10 for either.Report
Its top overall crime rate per capita. Which is then broken down by type, where you are correct.Report
Albuquerque: 8734.98 total crimes per 100k (#1)
Mobile: 6217.02 total crimes per 100k (#16)
The default sorting is alphabetical by state and then city. This puts Mobile, Alabama at the top. If you see Mobile at the top, none of the numerical columns will be sorted.
I have no particular interest in defending Mobile’s honor. But you’re definitely reading the table wrong.Report
Hey, don’t take my word for it. I pasted *EXACTLY* what I googled for. You can google for it too!
But if you want to see screenshots:
Yeah, I saw it too. I’m saying that that site is wrong. I don’t know how they got it wrong, but they did. I’m looking over their numbers, and it looks like on a per-state basis they’re consistently about 40-50% higher than the homicide rate reported by other sources.Report
Friggin’ Google.
Ugh. Back to going to Wikipedia first…Report
Actually, I take that part about being consistently 40-50% higher back. It says Alabama has a homicide rate of 6.5, which is far too low. Oregon’s is about right. I have no idea how they got these numbers.Report
Real estate arbitrage.Report
Except DC doesn’t have the highest per capita murder rate:
https://www.southwestjournal.com/most-dangerous-cities-in-the-us-2023-a-comprehensive-analysis/Report
DC has the highest per capita murder rate by state. DC is often counted as a state for statistical purposes, and it’s usually at the top of any list because it’s 100% urban, with all the wealth, education, crime, et cetera, that you’d get if you counted any city as a state.Report
I always find it ironically amusing that statistics like get tossed up, when, legally, it’s not a state. DC has no Congressional representation and only limited self governance. But sure, lets look at state level statistics . . .Report
I prefer more data when I can get it, so I’m happy with US = 51 states for statistical purposes. Puerto Rico is big enough that it can affect data, but typically US data doesn’t include the territories. You can get into other strange issues with the territories, such as different sets of laws, and generally only Puerto Rico is big enough to have any impact on a set of numbers.Report
And my other comment aside – DC isn’t listed in CDC statistics for state homicide rates, where my current home of Mississippi tops the rankings:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htmReport
Perhaps they could have included that as well.
The volume of carnage these days is not nearly as high, and most D.C. residents are unlikely to ever be a victim of violence. It’s also not as bad as St. Louis.Report
I happen to be typing this from a hotel in downtown DC. Feels much safer than the first time I came here, and I’ve spent my evenings here walking around on crowded streets full of people who don’t seem particularly afraid, though there is a much larger police presence here than the last time I was here a decade or so ago. The people I’ve talked to who live here seem to really like it.
Murders are up a disturbing amount here, for sure, and the Kias and Hyundais are getting stollen here like they are everywhere, but at least most of the city seems reasonably safe.Report
Yeah. I don’t know why people were complaining about police violence a few years back.
I’ve never found police to be anything but helpful.Report
To Chris’ point, downtown and the tourist areas are fine. Anecdotally to the extent I’ve noticed anything since covid It’s certain areas feeling a lot more empty than they used to during the day, and maybe an increase in homeless camping in some parks I don’t recall seeing it in the past. The murders are mostly a matter of the areas that have always had problems seeing increases in those problems.Report