Astral Codex Ten

George Floyd

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George Floyd

Article

George Floyd is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 13 times across 13 issues between March 01, 2021 and December 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “the officer accused of killing George Floyd will get acquitted of murder”; “He responded to the George Floyd killing by condemning it”; “before being given new life by George Floyd and BLM”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Twitter, New York Times.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 13
  • Issue count: 13
  • First seen: March 01, 2021
  • Last seen: December 10, 2024

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.

Mantic Monday: Scoring Rule Controversy
March 01, 2021 · Original source
This week in Metaculus: 69% chance Polish abortion rate will dectuple by 2030 (why? they seem pretty conservative; is their conservatism that precarious?) 70% chance the officer accused of killing George Floyd will get acquitted of murder. 45% chance Tether will collapse by the end of 2021.
Inline links: 69% chance, 70% chance, 45% chance
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
As far as I can tell this was basically true. He seems to have done relatively well for himself with eg prison reform. He responded to the George Floyd killing by condemning it, signing an executive order pushing police reform, and expressing support for ending chokeholds by police. I'm not aware of any non-immigration race-related policies he pushed that were especially controversial.
Inline links: prison reform, signing an executive order pushing police reform, expressing support for ending chokeholds by police
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
Discussion of feminism plateaued from 2014 - 2016, then declined. Discussion of racism peaked in 2016, then declined - until the George Floyd protests of mid-2020, when it came back with a vengeance. Far from these topics increasingly dominating the discourse, they seem to be in decline - or, in the case of racism, to have been in decline until events intervened. This pattern is surprising enough to deserve further analysis.
I'm not saying there's literally only one thing the Internet gets in fights about at any given time. The Internet fights about lots of things. But intuitively it feels like there's kind of a power law distribution where one topic clearly outstrips the others - maybe not winner-take-all, but at least winner-take-most. I think you could describe the last twenty years of Internet history as going through three phases - one dominated by religion, one dominated by gender, and now one dominated by race. The race phase seems to have peaked in 2018 and started declining, before being given new life by George Floyd and BLM. The Google Trends results raise the tantalizing possibility that racial issues can’t keep increasing forever. They could eventually crash the same way religious and gender issues did (probably to be replaced by something else even more divisive and awful).
Since then it’s become less obvious. After the George Floyd protests, all Google Trends about race shot up, and haven’t fully returned back to their pre-protest trend even now, a year later. The woke stranglehold on corporations, governments, and now the CIA is stronger than ever.
Inline links: the CIA
Highlights From The Comments On Culture Wars
May 18, 2021 · Original source
The video of George Floyd being murdered by a cop. That was international news. It was unambiguous. Now the death of one person from police violence in the abstract is not a worse problem than the deaths of hundreds from inadequate access to healthcare, for example, but socialist causes didn't have a viral video.
I’d treated it as kind of mysterious that the George Floyd protests erupted when they did, as intensely as they did; anti-racism talk was trending down, police had been killing black people in approximately equally bad ways since forever, it seemed weird that this was the spark that ignited a conflagration. I think I figured maybe it was just that everyone was on edge because of the pandemic. But several commenters pointed out that no, the George Floyd video was a new low in terms of obvious, enraging, terrifying police brutality.
Rodney King was just beaten up on camera, not killed. And he was beaten up at a time when #BLM wasn't a thing, when the internet was barely a thing. But *sixty-three people died* in the resulting riots. I don't think all the violence in all the #BLM protests/riots/whatever adds up to even half that. Then Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed, and there was some protesting and rioting but nothing like Rodney King, then we got a dozen or two more incidents that were all over the map in terms of both video quality and egregiousness of injustice and we got levels of protest/rioting that were all over the map but uncorrelated with the cause, then we got George Floyd and for some reason we got more rioting that we'd seen since Rodney King (but not even close to that).
On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
But also: there are several giant murals of George Floyd within walking distance of my house. It sure seems people cared a lot when George Floyd (and Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and…) got victimized. There are lots of statistics, like “US police kill about 1000 people a year, and about 10 of those are black, unarmed, and not in the process of doing anything unsympathetic like charging at the cops”. But somehow those statistics don’t start riots, and George Floyd does. You can publish 100 studies showing how “the Identifiable Victim Effect fails to replicate”, but I will still be convinced that George Floyd’s death affected America more than aggregate statistics about police shootings.
This kind of moderator analysis has gotten some bad press lately, because whenever a replication attempt fails, the original scientist usually says there must be moderators. “Oh, you would have gotten the same results as me, except that I wore a blue shirt while doing the experiment and you wore a red shirt and that changed everything. If only the replication team had been a bit smarter, they would have realized they had to be more careful with clothing color. True replication of my results has never been tried!” I want to make fun of these people, but something like this has to be true with the George Floyd vs. Mary The Single Mother problem.
Somewhere there’s an answer to the George Floyd vs. Mary The Single Mother problem. This doesn’t look like “Scientists have proven that a thing called the Identifiable Victim Effect exists and applies in all situations with p < 0.00001”, nor does it look like “this scientist DESTROYS the Identifiable Victim Effect with FACTS and LOGIC”. Probably at the beginning it will look like a lot of annoying stuff about “moderators”, and if we are very lucky in the end it will look like a new paradigm that compresses all of this in an intuitive way and makes it drop-down obvious why these two cases would differ.
Advice For Unwoke Academic?
March 10, 2022 · Original source
Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach? If you don’t live in a blue state, take it from me - the original George Floyd protests were a weird time. Overnight every one of your neighbors put up Black Lives Matter signs on their lawn, sometimes multiple signs per house. Every business had “Justice For George Floyd” signs on the windows. Sometimes random unrelated apps you used for laundry or something would randomly sprout pop-ups saying “Did you know the police are bad? Here’s where you should donate.” The usual cancel culture intensified by an order of magnitude.
Book Review: San Fransicko
June 23, 2022 · Original source
(source) Looks pretty good until 2019. I don’t expect to gain useful information post-2020; the pandemic and the post-George-Floyd murder surge will make it impossible to evaluate for local variation. What about compared to other places? For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.
Inline links: source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Bg2w!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F18e49c63-16ba-4878-96e6-aec12d7c5953_481x667.png, percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832
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
Although the George Floyd protests in May 2020 were the largest round of Black Lives Matters protests, there had been several previous rounds. Most notable were the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in August 2014, and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in Baltimore in April 2015. If Black Lives Matters protests can cause homicide spikes, we would expect to see one around this time also.
I think the proposed Ferguson Effect and the proposed George Floyd effect mutually reinforce each other. The people who believed in the Ferguson Effect would have predicted that the 2020 George Floyd protests would have been followed by a homicide spike, and they would have been right. The people who attributed the 2020 homicide spike to the protests, if they hadn’t previously known about the Ferguson Effect, could have predicted that it existed, and they would have been right too. I think this is a point in favor of both theories.
Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
Kind of feels like Scott came to his conclusion first and then is now reading the data to support that. But the data doesn’t at all look convincing to me. Clearly there was a spike around May, but the data shows it was starting in the middle of May? Floyd died on May 25, and while protests began the next day in Minneapolis, they really didn’t pick up steam across the country until a few days later. But, for example, the NYC chart shows a clear escalation that starts at the beginning of May.
The black line marks Floyd’s death. I don’t know, this still looks to me like Floyd’s death was the breakpoint and there’s not very much going on before that.
Graham also has a discussion of the legalities of the Derek Chauvin murder case. TL;DR: whether or not Floyd was on drugs or had pre-existing health problems, Chauvin’s actions qualified as felony assault and hastened Floyd’s death. In Minnesota, if you commit a felony that hastens someone’s death, that qualifies as felony murder, even if it was an “accident” or there were other contributing factors.
Inline links: the legalities of the Derek Chauvin murder case
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
16: Freddie deBoer’s Derek Chauvin Defund Challenge asked defund-the-police advocates what their plan was for dealing with Derek Chauvin (the cop who killed George Floyd - presumably someone they think should face consequences, and presumably someone who wouldn’t voluntarily accept those consequences if there were no police to arrest him). The winning entry proposed a slightly modernized version of the medieval Icelandic system - a judge could assign a penalty like community service, and if he didn’t do it, the judge could declare him an “outlaw” and make it legal for any citizen to kill him. I agree this solves the problem, but it seemed more like the answer of a clever mechanism design appreciator and not a typical genuine defund-the-police advocate - I’m still curious what their answer is supposed to be.
Inline links: The winning entry, medieval Icelandic
Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
October 04, 2024 · Original source
I’m in this argument’s target audience. Although I'm mostly atheist, I accept that the modern world has worse aesthetics than its predecessors. I think it's trying as hard as it can to push a bad-things-are-good philosophy down our throat that we might one day choke on. And like everyone else in this category, I'm anti-woke. I do hope the worst is over, but I have continued nightmares about what would have happened if the DEI world had done a better job exploiting the post-George Floyd moment and cemented its advantage forever.
Inline links: worse aesthetics, bad-things-are-good
The Case Against California Proposition 36
October 29, 2024 · Original source
They found an increase in property crimes after 2015, but it was almost all car break-ins, which for some reason seemed especially elastic to the sentencing reform (we’ll come back to these later). Shoplifting may have gone up slightly, but this lasted less than a year – by 2016, rates were back down to 2010 levels. Then they continued to gradually decline until early 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made them really plummet. The current retail theft wave started in the summer of 2021, after the economy re-opened. I'm not going to weigh in on the root cause – it could be a functional police strike in response to the George Floyd protests, lockdown-induced dysfunction that never got better, the decrease in police staffing across California over the past few years, or maybe some combination of the above. But something about the pandemic era emboldened criminals or broke policing. Prop 47 is not to blame.
Inline links: started in the summer of 2021, police staffing
Highlights From The Comments On Prison
December 10, 2024 · Original source
I am a felony prosecutor in a major US metro area—I should probably be prosecuting crimes right now rather than writing this—but I wanted to add […] it is quite correct to hold that the next marginal anti-crime dollar would be better spent on policing than on incarceration. However, that also isn’t an easy solution. Before you can actually do that in a meaningful way, you need to address what has become a generational challenge in much of the country: staffing police departments. The job has always been dangerous and (comparatively) poorly paid. Add in the decline in public esteem for the job—particularly post-George Floyd—and the rate limiting bottleneck to crime reduction in most metropolitan areas has become recruiting enough talented people willing to do that job. We just don’t have enough and you can’t manufacture them with a 5% pay raise or some other token effort.
I’m not an expert but PB’s argument looks sound to me. It also makes sense - he writes “Look at the choices - sit in a nice air conditioned car for 80% of your time, interacting with the soccer moms and nice middle and upper class people you pull over, OR be out in the bad parts of downtown interacting with volatile psychos, shambling fentanyl zombies, and schizophrenic homeless people? Oh, plus writing tickets generates revenue for the city, and doing anything to prevent or investigate actual crime has you interacting with all the psychos and zombies. They are doing easy things because they are easy, and because doing hard things is not only hard in and of itself, but also has much greater reputational risk in our post-Floyd panopticon society.”