Astral Codex Ten

Council on Criminal Justice

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Council on Criminal Justice

Article

Council on Criminal Justice is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 29, 2022 and February 18, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Let’s check in with the Council on Criminal Justice”; “both by way of the Council on Criminal Justice”. It most often appears alongside Black Lives Matter, San Francisco, 9-1-1.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 29, 2022
  • Last seen: February 18, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
The nationwide 2020 spike in homicides (source). The spike is small compared to the secular trend from the 1960s through 2000, but large by the standards of the past twenty years. Several people in the comments questioned my attribution, saying that they’d read news articles saying the homicide spike was because of the pandemic, or that nobody knew what was causing the spike. I agree there are many articles like that, but I disagree with them. Here’s why: Timing When exactly did the spike start? The nation shut down for the pandemic in mid-March 2020, but the BLM protests didn’t start until after George Floyd’s death in late May 2020. So did the homicide spike start in March, or May? Let’s check in with the Council on Criminal Justice: Edited to remove the word “pandemic”, which they put in a place suggesting the red line was associated with the pandemic. They meant the faint graph paper effect was associated with the pandemic. The red line is the BLM protests. It very clearly started in late May, not mid-March. The months of March, April, and early May had the same number of homicides as usual. This is the conclusion of most sources I can find. The only dissenter is this Intercept article, which claims the following: Here it looks like there’s a big change in murders through April, with basically no extra increase through July. This definitely contradicts the graph above. What’s going on here? I don’t know the Intercept’s criteria for including cities on their chart, but more than half of the cities in the US with the most murders aren’t even on there, whereas they did choose to include such colossi of crime as Omaha, Nebraska. Either they’re cherry-picking on purpose, or using some kind of inscrutable methodology that coincidentally is giving the wrong result. Of the actually relevant cities on there - New York, Chicago, etc - most of them show the May spike we discussed earlier. From the Financial Times. Notice no difference from the usual trend in March, April, or early May, then a very obvious spike around the time the BLM protests start on May 25. This is shootings rather than murders, for the same reason discussed below, but murders show a similar though noisier pattern. Another surprise on the Intercept’s graph: Minneapolis, the epicenter of BLM protests, saw more of a change in January-April than from May-August. Is this true? Cassell (2020) shows us the data: It looks like maybe this is random variation; there’s so few murders in Minneapolis in the winter that even one or two looks like a very large percent increase. But the raw data show that the summer was a much bigger deal. Since murder is very rare, maybe we can get a better view using assault, a crime similar to murder but much more common: Now the pattern is really obvious, except that it looks like it began about a week before the protests. I’m not sure, but I think this is because the site the paper took this from uses a 7-day rolling average, which smooths the data at the cost of having it be about a week off. A few of the other graphs have this problem as well, but I wouldn’t read too much into it. Nationwide, the spike in murders clearly happened in May, not March. On a city by city level, it’s hard to tell because murders are so rare. But when we look at other crimes that probably correlate with the murder rate, they clearly go up in May, not March. Police Pullback My specific claim is that the protests caused police to do less policing in predominantly black areas. This could be because of any of: Police interpreted the protests as a demand for less policing, and complied.
Inline links: source, Council on Criminal Justice, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Lih5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5a092ece-ffdb-455f-acc3-3385663f4887_784x572.png, this Intercept article, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PxAc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F42182f06-af95-449e-b059-476bd4c8e378_1024x782.jpeg, with the most murders, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!veee!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F02e353e3-1e0d-42e0-a263-176008c18303_700x500.png, Cassell (2020), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EGDj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46ae5619-a8dd-4b28-a4c0-3a98e712c51b_608x488.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VCKB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fae2f05f2-4dff-4561-8222-5446e0f9f9ac_638x475.png
Record Low Crime Rates Are Real, Not Just Reporting Bias Or Improved Medical Care
February 18, 2026 · Original source
The pre-1900 estimates come from Tcherni-Buzzeo (2018); their ultimate source seems to be work by sociologist Claude Fisher which I can’t access. The 1900 - present data come from historian Randolph Roth’s American Homicide and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, both by way of the Council on Criminal Justice. There’s less historical data for property crimes, and the nature of property has changed throughout history in ways that make numbers incommensurable (is it bad if we have a higher grand theft auto rate today than in 1840?) I was only able to get good data since 1960, but here it is: The 1960-2023 data come from FBI Data Explorer via Vital City; the 2024 and 2025 data come directly from the FBI website, with 2025 annualized via incomplete Jan - Oct data. This one may or may not be an all-time low, but it’s pretty good. These data are counterintuitive. Are they wrong? Could This Be An Artifact Of Reporting Bias? People could be so inured to crime that they stop reporting it to the police. Or the police could be so overwhelmed that they stop accepting the reports. Since most crime statistics are based on police reports, this would look like crime going down. There’s some evidence of this happening in specific situations, like shoplifting in San Francisco. Could it be the whole effect? No, for three reasons. The National Crime Victimization Survey is a government-run survey of a 240,000 person nationally representative sample. They find random people and ask whether they were the victims of crimes in the past year. This obviously doesn’t work for murder, but they keep statistics on rape, assault, larceny, and burglary. Their numbers mostly mirror those reported by police and used in the usual statistics about crime rates. But here there’s no extra step of needing to trust the police enough to make a report: the surveyors ask the victims directly. Although there could be biases in this methodology too, it would be an extraordinary coincidence if they exactly matched the proposed reporting bias to police. Also, you can use NCVS and police reports to calculate reporting rates directly. Overall, they seem to have increased over time - did you know that the 9-1-1 emergency hotline wasn’t available in most areas until the 1970s? This is especially true for aggravated assault (which will become important later). (source: Baumer and Lauritsen) There’s one caveat - FBI statistics show that crime had a small local peak in 2020/2021, then fell in 2023 - 2025. The most recent NCVS survey, in 2024, shows a smaller fall, leaving us still above 2019 lows. There’s some debate over whether the FBI vs. NCVS numbers are better for the 2022 - 2025 period, but they don’t change the overall trajectory or the fact that we’re at least close to record lows. Murder is almost always reported to and investigated by police; there’s a person who should be alive but isn’t, and people inevitably notice and care about this. Therefore, reported murder rates should be accurate. But murder has decreased at about the same rate as every other crime. Therefore, we should believe that other crimes have gone down too (for the objection that murder statistics are unusually untrustworthy because of improving medical care, see below). And car theft is consistently reported to the police, because insurances require a police report before they will compensate the lost car. So even if the victim doesn’t trust the police to do a good job investigating, they report it anyway. But car theft rates have declined at similar rates to other crimes. This is further evidence that the decline can’t be explained by poor reporting. Could This Be An Artifact Of Improving Medical Care? Good medical care can help victims survive, transforming murders into attempted murders or aggravated assaults (after this: “AM/AA”). If the same gunshot is only half as likely to kill someone today as it would have been in 1960, then a seemingly-equivalent murder rate would correspond to twice as many people getting shot. Could this explain the apparent decline in murders? The argument would go something like: murder is the only crime that we’re completely sure gets reported consistently. But the murder rate is artificially depressed by improving medical care. Therefore, maybe the seemingly-low murder rate is because of the medical care, the seemingly-low rates of other crimes are because of reporting bias, and actually crime is up. We’ve already seen that several parts of this can’t be true: other crimes like car theft are reported consistently, and among the inconsistently reported ones, reports are more often increasing than decreasing. But the part about murder also fails on its own terms. The source for the claim that improving medical care lowers murder rates is Harris et al, which analyzed crime from 1960 - 1999 and concluded that “the principal explanation of the downward trend in lethality involves parallel developments in medical technology”. They found that aggravated assaults rose faster than murders during this time; AAs increased by 5x, while murders “merely” doubled. Under the reasonable assumption that these crimes have similar generators, they suggested that the cause was improved medical care saving the lives of those who would have otherwise died, converting potential murders into AAs. If murders rose at the same rate as AAs, then the true murder rate could be up to 3x higher than reported. Source: FBI UCR But more recent research, especially Eckberg (2014), challenges this story. Eckberg argued the AA vs. murder divergence was caused by two things: first, better reporting of aggravated assault (as discussed above), and second, police being more likely to classify borderline causes as aggravated assault rather than regular assault. He turned to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which escapes reporting bias and police classification flexibility. In these data, AAs and murder rose at about the same rate. He concluded that (my emphasis): Their lethality trend is not compatible with the previous finding [of declining lethality] across 1973 through 1999, remaining stable rather than falling. After 1999, both Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)-and NCVS-based measures indicate increases in lethality. How is this possible, since medical technology has certainly improved? It seems that gun injuries are getting worse over time. Livingstone et al studied changing characteristics of gunshot victims between 2000 and 2011. They found that the proportion of patients with 3+ wounds almost doubled (13% → 22%) during that period (p < 0.0001). Manley et al did a similar study looking at 1996 - 2016 and found a similar result, saying that “wounding in multiple body regions suggests more effective weaponry, including increased magazine size”. A letter by top trauma doctors to the American Journal of Public Health describes: …increases in gunshot injuries per patient, gunshot injuries to critical regions (head, spine, chest), and gunshot injuries to multiple regions. Injury Severity Scores were also higher over similar intervals correlating with lower probability of survival. Despite which …patients surviving evaluation in the emergency department had no significant increase in mortality. Major strides in trauma care have occurred over the last two decades, and nationwide organizational changes have expanded the delivery of these improvements. Sakran et al, studying the 2007 - 2014 period, have an especially vivid portrayal of this pattern: Likelihood of dying before hospitalization - primarily dependent on injury severity - went up. Likelihood of dying in the hospital went down, probably because trauma care improved (although this could also be because more of the sickest patients died before entering the hospital). Cook et al studied gunshot lethality during a slightly different period - 2003 - 2012 - and also found that it stayed the same overall. There are three plausible explanations for gun injuries getting worse over time: Improved weapons technology (e.g. switch to semi-automatics)
Inline links: Tcherni-Buzzeo (2018), Council on Criminal Justice, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!65A0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fecf00f62-79bc-4325-9a24-d6e0979d0496_701x289.png, Vital City, shoplifting in San Francisco, is, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!43la!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7726a00f-8995-4c88-bd7a-62d9a894279c_610x438.png, source, some debate, consistently reported, have declined, Harris et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8FyR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1aa5677-aac7-472f-9c52-7bf0568043bf_583x316.png, Eckberg (2014), Livingstone et al, Manley et al, A letter by top trauma doctors, Sakran et al, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RCq3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2de4bd61-baf8-4226-ae8f-c0a5a29f109d_1280x990.png, Cook et al