a team from Massachusetts University and Harvard Medical School found that technological developments had helped to significantly depress today’s murder rates, converting homicides into aggravated assaults.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Some thoughts.
1. I give the study a less than 50 percent chance of holding up. The method seems unreliable.
The team looked at data going back to 1960 on murder, manslaughter, assault, and other crimes. It merged these data with health statistics and information on county level medical resources and facilities, including trauma centres, population, and geographic size. The researchers then worked out a lethality score based on the ratio of murders to murders and aggravated assaults.
2. As I understand it, many statistics on crime show a decline, not just murders. This analysis says the opposite, that the rate of violent crime has remained high, and better treatment has reduced murder.
Arnold, you should look for studies about the impact of tech developments on sports players’ recovery from serious injuries.
You might also consider survival rates for wounded soldiers. Though point number 2 remains valid. from Statista
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191231/reported-aggravated-assault-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/
The aggravated assault rate in 2019 is a little more than half what it was in 1990.
I remember reading articles in the aughts about improvements in trauma care that were gleaned from medics’ experience in Iraq.
Yes.
Combat injury survival rates have improved, and since 2002:
“ Injuries caused by explosives increased 26 percent in Afghanistan and 14 percent in Iraq
* Head injuries increased 96 percent in Afghanistan and 150 percent in Iraq
* Survival for critically injured casualties increased from 2.2 percent to 39.9 percent in Afghanistan and from 8.9 percent to 32.9 percent in Iraq
* The case-fatality rate was cut in half from 2001 to 2017 (Afghanistan from 20 percent to 8.6 percent and Iraq from 20.4 percent to 10.1 percent) even as injury patterns and severity increased
Three key interventions (increased use of tourniquets, increased use of blood transfusion, and more rapid hospital transport times, especially in Afghanistan) were responsible for about a 44 percent of the reduction in mortality. The researchers estimate that 1,622 lives were saved from these interventions.
They also found that without these changes in intervention and policy, an estimated 3,600 additional deaths would have occurred between 2001 and 2017.”
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-03-quantifies-injuries-combat-casualty-trends.html
A 2014 study found steadily improving civilian survival rates for gunshot wounds to the brain:
“Conclusions: Aggressive management is associated with significant improvement in survival and organ procurement in patients with gunshot wounds to the brain. The bias of resource use can no longer be used to preclude trauma surgeons from abandoning aggressive attempts to save patients with gunshot wound to the brain.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24055384/
But keeping someone alive in a coma so that you can harvest their organs doesn’t seem like it would increase lifespan all that much.
“converting homicides into aggravated assaults.”
The natural alternative to a murder charge is an “attempted murder” charge vs. the much lesser and more broad “aggravated assault” charge.
I wonder what happens when they re-run the data using attempted murder vs. aggravated assaults.
“Clearly, there is less perceived need to find common cause on gun control if the perception is that severely wounded victims of knives and automatics are routinely ‘repaired’ and back on the streets in no time.”
Yeah, basically no one is killed with automatic weapons. They are just too cumbersome and difficult to find as opposed to a simple handgun. Just ask a gang member.
Good luck with the “common cause” gun controls. What affect will these gun controls have on gang violence, which is driving most homicides?
I’m not sure that’s the case. Many of these murders would have been “felony murder”. That is, murder wasn’t the primary goal, rather there was a death that occurred in the commission of some other crime.
With a death, some variation on murder is pretty much a guarantee as the charge. But without, you could end up with attempted murder, or assault, or…
If the study is saying that ALL the decline in murder is due to better medical care, then it is quite implausible, for reason (2) you mentioned. But if it’s saying that SOME of the decline in murder is due to better medical care, that seems very plausible.
I tried to do a crude replication of their ‘lethality score’, using the percentage of murders relative to murders + aggregated assaults. This percentage was about 5.6% in 1960, 4.6% in 1970, 3.3% in 1980, 2.2% in 1990, 1.7% in 2000, 1.9% in 2010 and 2.0% in 2019.
If you make the assumption that the change in this number is entirely due to medical progress (bad assumption as the ratio increased after 2000) and medical progress is hiding what would otherwise be a higher murder rate, here are the reported murders per 100,000 and adjusted murders (based on a constant 1960 ‘lethality score’):
1960: Actual 5.1 Adjusted 5.1, All Violent 160.9
1970: Actual 7.9 Adjusted 9.7, All Violent 363.5
1980: Actual 10.2 Adjusted 17.3, All Violent 596.6
1990: Actual 9.4 Adjusted 24.2, All Violent 731.8
2000: Actual 5.5 Adjusted 18.4, All Violent 506.5
2010: Actual 4.8 Adjusted 14.4, All Violent 404.5
2019: Actual 5.0, Adjusted 14.3, All Violent 379.4
So we still get the significant reduction in murder since 1990 as expected, but the adjusted numbers remain elevated relative to 1960, which appears consistent with overall violent crime remaining at more than double 1960 levels.
The question is always what the relevant comparison point is.
Is it the total overturn of tradition society that occurred in the second half to the 60s.
Or is it the height of the 1990 crack wars violence wave.
People who want to underplay crime point to 1990 and people who see it in a broader picture lump it in with the 60s social upheaval.
This is an excellent observation.
+1
When it comes to crime, it seems obvious (at least to me) that the historical low water mark should be the relevant comparison point.
Arnold, it looks like the cited study is quite old, from 2002, and seems to cite data from 1997 as recent. Since much of the decline in crime has happened since the late 1990s, this result may not be inconsistent with the multi-decade trend of lower crime.
–“They found that while the murder rate had changed little from a 1931 baseline figure, assaults had increased. The aggravated assault rate was, by 1997, almost 750% higher than the baseline figure.”–
+1
Also, per google scholar the article has only been cited twice since publication in 2002, neither cite in articles addressing the same topic.
Talking about the benefits of increased longevity, read this
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-and-mcconnell-old-sparring-partners-hold-key-to-cooperation-11605052194
I could have referred the article in my comment to yesterday’s post on GG’s outrage. It’s outrageous how the WSJ reporting has been misinforming about the election because of its clear anti-Trump position. Most people may think that WSJ is pro-Trump but some time ago, well before the pandemic, the WSJ reporting and the WSJ Editorial Board took different roads to the point that the WSJ reporting has more opinions than the opinion section in addition to its misinformation on Trump v. Dems.
It’s funny that the referred article’s title for the first time in a long time talks about “the key to cooperation”. The biased reporters never mentioned any possibility of any cooperation at least for a year before the election. It’s a nonsense article because it’s based on the fact that Biden and McConnell know each other as if in the past 4 years there had not been people on both sides that they know each other well.
As I said in my comment on the post on GG’s Outrage, it’s too late for cooperation. The rotten and corrupt D-Party’s Old Guard and their forces are moving ahead regardless of whatever happened in the past (and I mean every minute in the past 4 years and until a minute ago). For them, the past is over. They are fighting for stealing now your future.
If Biden becomes president, and regardless of who controls the Senate, they will go back to the past with a long list of the enemies that have to be eliminated or at least canceled.
As Steve Sailer recently noted, in the 2019 National Crime Victimization Survey, whites said that they reported 37 percent of their violent victimizations to the police versus about 49 percent among other races. Not sure if this has been a steady trend, but demographic changes alone could affect violent crime statistics. Racial scapegoating of whites only reached its current intensity recently so whites may not have been as intimidated about reporting being the victim of violence, especially if the perpetrator was of another race, as today. On the other hand, “violent” seems to have lost any meaning in today’s parlance. But at any rate, the notion that violent assault rate statistics are comparable across decades may be a bit sketchy.