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William M Briggs's avatar

Necessary correction from Greg Kent, over at the blog:

Briggs, when you created your graph from the FBI CDE’s Expanded Homicide data, you should have notice a disclaimer: “2021 Expanded Homicide Data includes fewer homicides due to an overall decrease in participation from agencies that are not yet reporting via NIBRS.” It turns out the FBI data source changed right in the midst of the BLM effect. The new data source significantly understates the nationwide estimates for 2021 and after in the Expanded Homicide data. The 2021 data covered only about 65% of the population and the 2022 data bout 77% of the population, down from 90%+ in 2020. Therefore, the “Expanded homicide” data you pulled from the Crime Data Explorer is significantly understated in 2021 and 2022. A more accurate nationwide estimate is available via the “NIBRS Estimate” page at https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/nibrs-estimates. The complete data shows 23061 and 21593 murder offenses in 2021 and 2022, respectively, rather than the 16413 and 19200 numbers from the incomplete data source. The difference between the data sources for 2021 has been significant in the political debate about the impact of the 2020 BLM protests. The FBI’s “Expanded Data” (which is the incomplete data source that your plot used) appears to show 2020 as a one time bump that 13% fell back to normal levels in 2021. Unfortunately, the apparent drop in murders in 2021 was purely an artifact of the incomplete dataset. Reality was otherwise. The FBI’s complete data shows that murder offenses increased in 2021 by 22% on top of the 29% increase that occurred in 2020. This result is intuitive. After all, there was a nationwide lockdown in the spring of 2020 and the BLM protests didn’t start until the middle of the year. There was a slight 6% decrease in murders in 2022, as the FBI’s press release reports, but that is rather small and is far from recovering from the huge increases the previous two years. Overall, the FBI’s complete data shows that the rise in murders since the 2020 police pullback has persisted. The three year average for black murder victims has increased 56% (from 7781 for 2017-19 and 12138 for 2020-22), which shows that black lives have not faired very well in this BLM era. It is regrettable that the FBI’s data change has made this reality hard to see. Apparently even for eminent statisticians.

https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/49120/#comment-217077

Kent Clizbe's avatar

Great exposition of the current state of crime in America.

But that final throw-away line is sort of a downer:

"There does not seem to be any acceptable solution, either."

Potential solutions abound! Think positive!

If it's acceptable to propose "reparation" payments to Americans with a drop of African blood in their veins, then it's also acceptable to propose other solutions for dealing with the same population. Remember Liberia! Lots of land in Africa just waiting for industrious, oppressed Africans to build Wakanda!

On a related note, essays comparing America statistics (crime, life expectancy, health, income inequality, etc) to European, or Asian countries--casting America in an unfavorable light--always ignore demographic realities. Extract blacks from life expectancy stats, or health stats, or crime stats, and America is on a par with other advanced countries. And, conversely, American blacks are about the same as their brethren in Africa. The murder rate in Nigeria is 21/100,000 about the same as black America.

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