Sorry, Indiana
The Mayor and the Murder Rate
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To wit, no matter how you slice it, Chicago is not the “murder capital of the country” nor is the murder rate “much higher under Daley than it ever was under Byrne or Washington.” In 1980 the murder rate per 100,000 people was 29.3 and in 1985 it was 22.2. Under Daley it has risen to a high of 30.6 in 1990 and then 30.0 in 1995, but since those highs it has dropped like a stone coming down in 2000 to 21.8 and most recently in 2005 to 15.6, where it has basically hovered since then (15.6 in 2007) with a slight rise in 2008 to 17.9. And where has Detroit’s murder rate been? In 2007 it was 46 per 100,000—three times the rate of Chicago (but somehow Chicago has a higher murder rate than Detroit in Ben’s mind) and 40.6 in 2008, which is only twice as high as Chicago’s rate!
Edgebrook
ryanwc
I certainly wasn’t faulting Mayor Daley for the high rate in the 1990s. My point was that there are a host of factors at play in the exceedingly complicated issue of the rise and fall of murder rates in big cities. You have to consider birthrates, incarceration rates, unemployment, drug laws, demographic changes, the destruction of public housing, the scattering of poor people to distant communities, and even abortion rates, as Stephen Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner point out in Freakonomics.
If Sarah Beardsley and her readers really believe that feminism is a “done deal,” then how do they respond to the selling out of women’s access to reproductive health care by Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of the “progressive” Democrats who were supposed to represent change? Apparently it’s okay to throw women under the bus to get a bill passed; I wonder if the “progressives” would have done the same thing if the “issue” at hand had been funding for sickle-cell anemia research, prostate cancer prevention, or Tay-Sach’s Syndrome research (to mention just three health issues that “only” affect certain “special” populations).
