Quote:
Originally Posted by knucklesplitter
Last I saw, violent crime in the US is as low as it was when I was a kid in the early 70's - down like 40% from its peak in the early 90's. It would drop even further if America would give up on our second attempt at prohibition - the long-ago-lost "war on drugs". There is no good correlation between crime and the economy, going back to before the Great Depression.
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We'll have to see, but we are talking decadal-scale lags here, so any type of correlation analysis would essentially have to include large lags as well as specific metrics such as average educational level, average wage level corrected for CPI/Inflation, unemployment, etc. Clearly geography has a lot to do with things, so spatial analysis and examining some of the possible socioeconomic links to crime in the more urban areas and how those translate to the rest of the population is more what I was getting at.
The problem with drawing 1:1 matches is that there are a lot of influential factors (such as government monetary and agency intervention) and also how these stats are tracked.
What I hear in terms of crime rates in this state point to significant increases in areas that were middle-class geography during the bubble. Hear-say, yes. Do I trust "reported" numbers, knowing that methods for reporting are not constant and that there are political reasons for fudging said numbers.......no. The best thing about that is that the internet is (until regulation) ahead of "official" sources.
I agree 100% that attempting to regulate drugs has become more of a crutch for the Justice Industry than anything else......but that's also true for a lot of areas of gov't regulation.