America’s safer streets: why is elusive

[ganulv]

I cannot confirm this is legit

The journal is published by the AMA and is considered perhaps the flagship U.S. psychiatric journal. That does not necessarily, of course, insure lack of issues in research design, the usual problems inherent in the peer review process, or lack of intellectual integrity on the part of the authors, but I would say it qualifies the article as legit.

[M]akes the whole war on drugs look more like a race war that replaced segregation nation-wide than like actual policing.

False dichotomy!

I have not read the article, but I do wonder how the numbers breakdown by locale. For example, does anyone know if drug-related arrests take place at a higher rate in urban vs. rural areas?

[Fuchs]

False dichotomy!

Add a "to me" at the end and it'll be impervious to such criticism.

[davidbfpo]

A catchy title from the NYT (thanks to a Twitter alert). Which opens with:

Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?

In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?

Link:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/ny...pagewanted=all

Lots of links to explore.

Personally I wonder if crime and the better criminals have realised street crime is just too dangerous and not so profitable - fraud & forgery for example are generally safer for the criminal. Secondly, by jailing fewer NYC has reduced the educational impact of being in jail.

[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)?