Joel Jacobsen

This time of year always sees retrospective articles about the year in crime.  My local evening paper, the Albuquerque Tribune, today published a package of articles about murder in Albuquerque and its suburbs.  The articles show, among other things, that we had one homicide in June, the least of any month, and 10 in July, the most of any month.

There's no reason for the dramatic difference between the two hottest months of the year.  It just happened - a reminder that short-term changes in crime rates mean very little, for all that mayors and police chiefs like to take credit for every downturn.

Another reminder of random variation is that the ages of the first 6 homicide victims of the year were 18, 17, 18, 18, 18 and 19.  Those are dangerous ages in general, but I don't think there's a reason, other than chance, why the dice should have come up snake eyes that many times in a row.

In Albuquerque in 2006, you were at the greatest statistical risk of being murdered if you were 21 years old (five victims).  The next most risky age was 18 (four victims).  Being less than six months old was inadvisable (three victims), though no more dangerous than being 19 or 27.   Criminal violence is something we visit on our young.

Albuquerque is located in Bernalillo County.  While the Census Bureau reports that Bernalillo County's population is 43.6% Hispanic,  by my count 32 of the 53 homicide victims, or fully 60% of the total, had identifiably Hispanic surnames (though for various obvious reasons surnames are only a rough guide to ethnic identity).  Criminal violence is something our society inflicts on members of minority groups.

The Tribune published a map showing the locations of the homicides.  It won't mean much, by itself, to those who aren't familiar with the city, but you'll notice that the homicides were concentrated in specific neighborhoods, particularly in the southwest and southeast parts of the city.  By contrast, the northeast corner saw no homicides at all, and the northwest only four.

If you follow this link, and scroll to page 21, you'll see a map showing Albuquerque's poorest neighborhoods ("percent of persons below 100% of the federal poverty level").   The correlation is visually striking.  The areas with the lowest number of homicides - the northeast and northwest corners - also have the lowest levels of poverty.

The traditional liberal way of assimilating that information is to conclude that poverty somehow causes violence, even though we all know that's not even close to true: many people are very poor (about 90,000 in Bernalillo County), but very few of them are homicidal, or we'd have a lot more than 53 gurneys trundling into our Office of Medical Investigator.

The real significance of the geographic correlation of poverty and criminal violence is simply this: being poor increases your risk of being victimized.  Increases it by a lot.

A recent AP year-end story about rising homicide rates includes this paragraph:

Among the reasons given: gangs, drugs, the easy availability of illegal guns, a disturbing tendency among young people to pull guns when they do not get the respect they demand, and, in Houston at least, an influx of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

What's striking about this list is the absence of any mention of the government.  (Even the reference to the easy availability of guns refers only to illegal guns, not to laws that encourage packing heat.)  We spend billions on law enforcement, the corrections system/industry, and the judiciary - and the cost is rising much faster than inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.  Yet the AP's list implies that all those billions buy us no power to influence homicide rates.

So what we have here is a significant social problem that causes enormous suffering among the poorest Americans, members of minority groups, and the young.  Our government throws billions of dollars at the problem, and yet we seem to accept that it's all beyond our government's control - even though we all know that other developed countries with different governments have vastly lower homicide rates.

This is cognitive dissonance on a national level.  Which is to say: The disconnect between the facts we know and the belief system we cling to is difficult to explain except in terms of psychopathology.