TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 2025
Not that it actually matters: As we noted this morning, there's no such thing as a real discussion in this, the most degraded of all possible worlds.
Also, when various people speak these days, there's no such thing as a fact.
This morning, we mentioned some of the misstatements which took place yesterday morning and afternoon in the Oval Office. Concerning crime in Washington, D.C., Mediate reports that CNN's Daniel Dale rose with an instant fact check.
We join his fact check in progress:
DALE (8/25/25): On the subject of D.C. crime, he said that it was an all-time crime high when he took office. He said the worst day was the day he came back.
Not even close to true. D.C. has not been even close to the all-time highs of the early 1990s.
Now, I know he’s raised questions, as the D.C. Police Union has, about the validity of some D.C. crime stats. But let’s just look at murder as an example, the least falsifiable kind of crime.
D.C. had 187 homicides in 2024. It was over 470 in a couple years in the early ’90s. So no, nowhere close to an all-time peak.
Is homicide "the least falsifiable kind of crime?" Ot's generally regarded as the most reliable crime statistic. It's assumed that the vast majority of homicides end up getting reported or discovered—and it's hard to reclassify a dead body, turning an actual homicide into some lesser offense.
Full disclosure! Over the weekend, we gathered homicide numbers, then and now, for some of the cities which have been getting mentioned of late. We'll start with D.C., then and now.
According to Wikipedia, here's how some of those numbers look:
Washington D.C. homicides:
1991: 482 (80.2)
1992: 443
1993: 454
1994: 399
[...]
2022: 203
2023: 274
2024: 187 (25.5)
We're starting at 1991 because that's where some of our other data sets start. The numbers in parentheses are homicide rates—number of homicides per 100,000 residents.
(Full disclosure! In 1991 and the like, we often walked to our car, late at night, after performing at the Washington Improv. On Saturday nights, we sometimes made double trips, after midnight, lugging cartons of objets. We don't remember ever thinking about the very high homicide rates; in fact, we don't think we ever did. We offer this as a way to put some of the more hysterical claims you might have heard about "roving gangs" into a type of context.)
Today, Washington's homicide rate seems to be less than one-third what it was back then. (It's still very high compared to homicide rates in other developed countries.) As with other cities, Washington's numbers are recovering from what happened in the Covid years. In most of the cities presented here, the homicide numbers are currently down again from where they were last year.
What about the nation's three biggest cities? Unless you're watching the Fox News Channel, where Gotham is persistently pictured as a dystopian hellhole, New York City has enjoyed the most striking statistical change. We'll offer homicide rates where Wikipedia does:
New York City homicides:
1991: 2,154
1992: 1,995
1993: 1,946
1994: 1,561
[...]
2022: 436
2023: 391
2024: 377
Los Angeles homicides:
1991: 1,025
1992: 1,092
1993: 1,077
1994: 850
[...]
2022: 382
2023: 327
2024: 280
Chicago homicides:
1991: 929 (33.3)
1992: 948
1993: 867
1994: 932
[...]
2022: 715
2023: 621
2024: 581 (21.4)
In New York City and L.A., the numbers are way down—unless you watch the Fox News Channel, where the various messengers routinely swear that they're barely able to fight their way to the studio.
The president may be coming to Baltimore. Forty miles north of D.C., here's how our numbers look:
Baltimore homicides:
1991: 304 (40.6)
1992: 335
1993: 353
1994: 321
[...]
2022: 333
2023: 261
2024: 201 (34.3)
Way up the coast, there's Boston! For whatever reason, there were 47 homicides there in 1991, 24 last year.
There you see a bunch of reasonably accurate statistical facts. We have more to suggest about the way these homicide numbers are being debated. For now, we leave you with a warning:
At present, facts play almost zero role in the American "discourse!" As our warring tribes war on, the facts you may occasionally hear tend to be what we make them.
Now show us the rates, per 100,000 residents, in Republican-voting rural areas.
ReplyDeleteWhat percentage of men elected to president have been convicted of 34 felonies? Does that experience provide a unique qualification for dealing with crime? Why is Trump avoiding the job of president while trying to take over the jobs of mayors and police chiefs in blue cities? If troops reduce murders are we prepared to become a police state in exchange for lower crime, given that we can use other methods (ss shown by Somerby’s decreases)? And if we don’t want the military around in our cities, why are they there (against the wishes of govs & mayors who never asked for them)?
ReplyDeleteThese are all good and obvious questions that persons who don't want to wake up and find they are living in East Germany (1962) or North Korea (the president greatly admires Kim Jong-un). Unfortunately we are well on our way, because there are a lot of people in this country who don't object to fascism.
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