This is something that has been a long time coming. I've been saying for a million yerars that when you look at a crime map, you find that ALL the crime is done in a very small area.
In 2014, the most recent year that a county level breakdown is available, 54% of counties (with 11% of the population) have no murders. 69% of counties have no more than one murder, and about 20% of the population. These counties account for only 4% of all murders in the country.
The worst 1% of counties have 19% of the population and 37% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 47% of the population and account for 68% of murders. As shown in figure 2, over half of murders occurred in only 2% of counties.
Murders actually used to be even more concentrated. From 1977 to 2000, on average 73 percent of counties in any give year had zero murders. Possibly, this change is a result of the opioid epidemic's spread to more rural areas. But that question is beyond the scope of this study. Lott's book "More Guns, Less Crime" showed how dramatically counties within states vary dramatically with respect to murder and other violent crime rates.
Guess where those places are. Go on, take a stab at it.
Yep. The Clinton Archipelago.
The Phantom
In some of the bigger 'murder counties', I bet all the murders are concentrated in one part of the county. For both Riverside and San Bernardino in California, most of the people are at the Western end of the county (they both have national parks or large wilderness areas in the East), so the Western end is likely where the murders are.
ReplyDeleteIf you go to the link, the author lays it out very well. The concentration is not by population. Within the worst counties, when you break out the maps the concentration gets down to certain blocks. This street, people get wasted daily. One street over, nobody ever gets killed.
ReplyDeleteAgain, wild guess what economic activity is going on in the busy neighborhoods.
None of this is rocket science, right? You count up the murders in New York City, you put a pin in the map for each one. You find that there's a forest of red pins in a ten-block circle, with none for miles outside it. It's the same in every high-crime city/county what have you in the USA. One tiny part of town is a free-fire zone, there's nothing going on anywhere else.
What I find endlessly fascinating is the determination by one political group in the USA to blame -guns- (or racism, or over population, or poverty, or television, or video games...)for what is obviously a government policy. You can't have that much crime going on in one spot without police letting it be that way.
They know where the crime is and they know who is doing it. And they LET THEM. That's the interesting thing here.
I've read claims that in Chicago there are negotiated agreements between gangs and politicians that exchange votes for non-prosecution of crime. I hope it isn't true, but I'm worried it is - that some politicians put re-election ahead of everything else.
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