Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike

Re:Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike by prepend on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @01:33PM (#26017264)

Good point. I don’t think this is the likely correlation, but I think that whatever is causing more murders is also causing fewer stops.

The author suggests it’s fewer police out and about policing. It might be that.

This is a really card situation to prove causation since it’s retrospective observational. But maybe more researchers can try to isolate variables and find controls, etc.

For me, it’s trying to find a reasonable story so I can stop wondering. I imagine that police waking and driving around arresting people doesn’t stop murders, but fewer police being around doing stuff might result in more violence.

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Re:Explaining the Great 2020 Homicide Spike by enoch_r on Thursday February 04, 2021 @09:04AM (#26025384)

You may be interested in this study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=586405

The authors used changes in the terror alert level (which caused increases in police presence) as a natural experiment, and found that crime dropped significantly in the area when the terror level increased.

I think the explanation here is probably quite simple: an increase in the number of police officers in an area means that calls are responded to more quickly and for any given crime the criminal has a higher chance of being arrested. As we'd expect, a high likelihood of negative consequences deters crime.

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