Official crime statistics are slow to confirm what common sense tells us is likely to happen and what anecdotal evidence tells us is happening. There is a lag between cause and effect and another lag between effect and the official statistics. But eventually the facts, "stubborn things," do come in.
Devlin Barrett has this article in the WSJ, with the above headline in the print version (slightly different online).
Devlin Barrett has this article in the WSJ, with the above headline in the print version (slightly different online).
Murders rose 6.2% in the first half of 2015, according to preliminary crime data released Tuesday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, figures that are likely to further fuel the current political debates about crime, policing and sentencing.
Violent crime overall increased 1.7%, the FBI found, while property crimes decreased 4.2%, compared with the first six months of 2014. Police chiefs from around the country had warned about an apparent surge in recent months.
* * *[FBI Director James Comey] blamed a "chill wind'' blowing through law enforcement in cities like Sacramento, Calif., and Washington, D.C. "In today's YouTube world,'' Mr. Comey asked, "are officers reluctant to get out of their cars and do the work that controls violent crime?"
White House officials and civil rights groups have dismissed speculation about such an effect as unfounded. Others have suggested that the heroin trade is fueling more crime, or that crime rates had gotten so low they were bound to bounce back up at some point.
It is true that when a statistic has had an unusual movement in one direction it tends to go back toward its historical average, an effect known as "reversion to the mean." I think it is far-fetched to blame the current spike in violent crime on that effect, though. Crime rates have been declining for two decades, and a sudden spike this large in the last year following the successes of the pro-criminal crowd is too much of a coincidence.
About that lag in the numbers:
Senior FBI officials say they are pushing to modernize their crime-reporting system to give officials something closer to complete real-time data. The current data have been criticized by law-enforcement officials and academics as slow, with significant gaps that prevent policy makers from making decisions quickly to counter changes in crime patterns.
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