Comment

New Music From Pat Metheny: "It Starts When We Disappear"

189
sagehen7/15/2021 8:59:40 am PDT

re: #120 Belafon

There was 462 murders in NYC last year. 30,000 people died of COVID in that same period in NYC.

462 murders in a year sounds like a lot for people with short calendars. But let’s remember NYS’s murder counts in some previous years (85% of which were in NYC):

1988 — 2244
1989 — 2245
1990 — 2605
1991 — 2571
1992 — 2397
1993 — 2420

This provides some context for why the 1994 crime bill seemed like a good idea at the time.

The murder rate has dropped every year since the mid-90’s.

Some blame the crack epidemic, which peaked in the early 90’s. Others blame leaded gasoline, use of which was sharply reduced in the mid-70’s (motherjones.com)

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.