This piece describes six reasons that the clearance rate for homicides has declined.
None of them mention my guess at a possible reason: a higher proportion of gang/drug-related murders. There were gangs in the 60's; the Mafia was active. But it seems to me there's more conflict among gangs now, fights over territory for selling drugs, etc. Gangs have and enforce the code of silence, and they have more power to intimidate possible witnesses.
Long discussion in Post of the possible causes for increase in murders this year in America (not occurring elsewhere if article is right).
Thinking of a metaphor for human society--as a nuclear reactor, with police as the control rods absorbing or not the excess neutrons, thereby damping or permitting greater interactions.
One might expand the applicability of the metaphor to the pandemic, with the control rods being the vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc.
You'd have to expand the discussion to include the rates of the radioactivity of the alternative materials which could be used for a reactor. (I'd assume that radium, for example, could explode given the right setup.)
Back to homicide--it seems to me one effect of the pandemic likely has been to change the characteristics of the public, those who are active in exchanges with others. During the past year the "public" has become younger and poorer as the old and the better-off have been much better able to reduce their time in public. That might well mean that the remaining "public" is more reactive, somewhat as if the uranium was more highly enriched.
Megan McArdle has a twitter thread going on the rise in homicide rates. (Kevin Drum has pointed out that while homicides have risen, violent crime hasn't.
I'm going to write a longer column on this but I think that the people reassuring each other that the urban crime spike is only homicide, while other violent crime fell last year, should not assume that those trends will keep diverging.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 25, 2021
I offered two comments in twitter, neither totally serious. One was recalling a past discussion on the impact of medical advances on homicide rates--ER's might save more victims. The other was suggesting that criminal gangs were losing revenue from the effects of the lockdown and the legalization of pot, so they might be fighting over a shrinking pie.
I'm wondering how the trends will evolve.
