It’s a challenging problem, but the way things are currently going, do you want a 70’s NYC in 2020+?

We only use lead in aviation fuels now.. so probably not.

In case anyone misses this reference, there is a claim that the cause of all of the violence was exposure to lead on a society wide scale.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...

I'm of the impression that NYC experienced steeper decreases than other cities? I'll have to look into this more. Do you have any resources to recommend? (thank you for distinguishing between "did it work" and "was it ethical"--it's so tedious when these are conflated).

Which other cities are you referring to in particular?

Literally every city in America, regardless of their approach to policing, has experienced a massive drop in crime rates from 1990 forward. This tends to undermine arguments that broken windows or stop-and-frisk are effective policies.

https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/

> Literally every city in America, regardless of their approach to policing, has experienced a massive drop in crime rates from 1990 forward.

I've never heard of anyone arguing that policing did not increase nationwide in the 90s. All of the data we have suggests otherwise, and pushing back on that is basically the entire point of the recent BLM protests.

One simple way we know crime was more aggressively enforced in EVERY city beginning in the early 90s is because so many more people were locked up during that time period (just review the incarceration rates).

I'm not sure that your conclusion of universality can be supported by the evidence. For example Middlesex County, Massachusetts has had roughly flat incarceration rate for decades.

https://github.com/vera-institute/incarceration_trends

The median household income in Middlesex is over $100K (that's where Harvard is located, right next to MIT). Incarcerations were also flat in Martha's Vineyard, but so what?

My priors say Middlesex wouldn't show increased rates of incarceration regardless of the amount of policing, the passage of three-strikes laws, the passage of the Clinton crime bill, etc. due to the demographics of the area. What do your prior's say?

Universality (to me) means "more criminals were incarcerated everywhere we expected them to be (based on demographics) and regardless of changes in local policies or funding, because there was a nationwide push to increase incarceration rates in the 90s." Do you mean something else by "universality"? Maybe we just disagree over definitions or something.

And yet, the crime rate in that county (and in Cambridge and Lowell) reflects the same plunging nature as the rest of the state and nation, since 1990 peak.

Take the big CSV from the github I posted, combine it with the FBI UCR data, and try to find a correlation between incarceration rate and crime rate.

I have, it's the main topic I study. I've just never met anyone with the view that increased incarcerations rates are not associated with decreases in crime (specifically, violent crime), and I don't think the data supports that either. I literally have no idea how you came to that conclusion given the stats available to researchers over the last 40 years.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't other ways to decrease crime besides incarceration, there are many possibilities. But I don't think there's any data showing that incarcerating criminals doesn't reduce (violent) crime.

So I'll just assume we agree in general, and that our definitions are different somehow, since we seem to be looking at the same datasets.

It’s clear that incarceration rates are associated with falling violent crime, to the extent that one went up and the other went down, but the existence of large jurisdictions that enjoyed the latter without the former casts doubt on the idea of causation.