America’s safer streets: why is elusive

[Bill Moore]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknap...rime-epidemic/

How Lead Caused America's Violent Crime Epidemic

All of it points to one simple idea: violent crime rose as a result of lead poisoning because of leaded gasoline. It declined because of lead abatement policies.

There are three basic reasons why this theory should be believed.

Identified in the article

This quote is relevant to the Effects Based Operations crowd and their faith in measuring observables:

In particular, it’s important because this is precisely the kind of problem that people are uncomfortable about believing. It’s hard for us to see the link between cause and effect when there’s a 20+ year gap between one and the other. Additionally, none of us like thinking that our autonomy as human beings can be destroyed by forces beyond our control that we can’t even see.

But such time lags between cause and effect do exist.

Lot of interesting links at the article below. The article that kicked this off was in Mother Earth News

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...crime-linkfest

Lead and Crime: A Linkfest

Baselines vs. crime waves. Lots of things contribute to baseline levels of crime. But lead is uniquely able to explain why there was such a huge rise of crime above the baseline during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, followed by an equally huge reduction back to the baseline in the 90s and aughts.

Big cities vs. small cities. Surprisingly, it turns out that once you reduce exposure to gasoline lead, big cities aren't really all that much more dangerous than small ones after all

.

[ganulv]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknap...rime-epidemic/

How Lead Caused America's Violent Crime Epidemic

Interesting! But I do wonder if the author has shown that the drop is basically unicausal as opposed to being due to policy changes of which the phasing out of leaded gasoline was but a part? My grasp of statistical methods is too poor to evaluate the findings at that level.

[Fuchs]

Lead poisoning was quite widespread after the early canned food appeared.

A possible test to see if the correlation may point at a causality would be to look up if there was a crime wave 20+ years after introduction of canned food.
More specifically, crime amongst sailors (who ate much canned food AFAIK) should be well-documented (Royal Navy archives go back centuries in amazing detail).

[Bill Moore]

Interesting observation on the canned food. From a futures perspective I wonder if we'll an upward trend in China and other developing nations that have a growing pollution problem (assuming lead is part of that equation)?

[davidbfpo]

The exchange on lead in petrol, tins etc made me think of a new thread 'What's lead got to do with it?'

Fuchs - don't worry a new thread is not coming.

[davidbfpo]

A different way of looking at criminal justice and more in the USA, a left-leaning UK think tank has published a short paper to impact policies in the UK. It has some amazing statistics and quotes. This one is a stunner, even if the question "Are you on parole or probation?" features in some of our TV diet of US cops shows here:

The overcriminalisation of America has exacted a stunning toll: when you add those who are on probation or parole to the total number of prisoners, one of every 32 adults is under government control. That is a startlingly large swathe of our population to place in the hands of the government.

Link:http://www.ippr.org/images/media/fil...2013_10616.pdf

[Bill Moore]

I think our legal system is trending downwards, especially when we detain people for using drugs and have privatized prisons. Selling drugs and the associated violence is a crime, but using drugs is just stupid, and we confuse being stupid with being a criminal and stress our justice system by doing so. For profit prisons equate to a profit incentive to keep people in jail that gains political power over time when those companies that run these prisons gain greater lobbying power with Congress.

However, all that said I think the rate of violent crime based on percentage of the population is higher in both Australia and England than the U.S.? We have a serious and growing problem with gangs, and while arresting and detaining these gang members may by us time, ultimately we have to find a better way to effective intervene and reduce this threat to civil safety. More prisons would indicate to me that we're failing on a deeper level.