Quote:
Originally Posted by streetscaper
The multiple years-long trend is a decrease, but not a 41% decrease, that's definitely an anomaly relative to the trend. It makes sense to draw a connection to the anomalous Winter we've had.
It's obvious that I was giving an explanation for this one season's suuuuper large decrease and not the more moderate, consistent decreases over the last few years, where the weather argument indeed would make no sense.
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We always, and I mean always, hear about the weather, and it's almost always insufficient. It simply doesn't explain what we're seeing in Philly, for example, which is a precipitous annual drop (with a mild winter) followed by an even more precipitous annual drop (with a harsher winter, but not historical by any means). Meanwhile, the weather's been fine for the last month, and yet we've had a whopping 5 homicides in that time. That's a fairly low number for a week in Philly, historically, let alone an entire month. And this sort of drop is happening in all sorts of places all over the country--places with temperate weather, warm weather, mild weather. Weather just doesn't really seem to be that much of a factor in the end, which to be clear isn't to say that it isn't a factor at all, but you just can't simply point to it and call it a day.
IMO, there's a tendency to latch onto an easy explanation for something that just isn't easily explained. I generally don't buy into the idea of shifts in policing being the cause, because there's simply too many localities all doing their own thing, often 180 degrees from one another. For example, Philadelphia is supposed to be a hellscape with Krasner as DA, per the law and order crowd, and that simply hasn't been the case, not that they will acknowledge that. Political leadership? These trends started under Biden and have continued under Trump.
I think that there's not only not a singular cause, but there isn't even a tidy group of causes you can point to. I suspect it's really a vast constellation of factors small, medium, and large; local, regional, and national; immediate, recent, and long-term, etc. all interacting with one another in complex ways that push these trends in one direction or another.
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