this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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426
‘Migrant Crime Wave’ Not Supported by Data, Despite High-Profile Cases (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
45 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/4CKoY

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 10 months ago (3 children)

All you have to do is think about this reasonably (I know, I know). Undocumented immigrants to the US want to come here so badly that they're willing to do it outside of the law. They know full well that if they get caught just for that, they're in a fuckload of trouble. It is clearly in the immediate, direct, and personal best interest of an undocumented immigrant to stay well clear of law enforcement. This means - wait for it - not breaking any other laws.

Undocumented immigrants have a very strong incentive to be absolutely well-behaved.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 10 months ago

It's even a step further. They also don't want anyone to break the law against them. Who would they turn to? The police will arrest them.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 10 months ago

I'm more afraid of getting shot by a white caucasian male nazi than any of any migrant having no legal papers.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I've had this conversation with a relative. Just look at how high crime is! Well, actually it's rather low lately... well, it's the migrants they are causing the problem! Sure, sure... and this is your number one concern for the future of the country over healthcare, education, and protecting our democratic process?

The rage bait content has a strong distorting effect on perception.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Hyperreality.

In the 1960s postmodernists theorised that in a sufficiently technologically advanced society, it becomes impossible to tell reality from the simulation of reality - the hyperreal you see on tv, social media, etc.

The sad fact is that for politicians reality is less real than the hyperreal. If crimes goes down in the real world it's not necessarily that relevant, because voters will only vote accordingly if the simulated/mediatised version of reality shows crime as having gone down. The hyperreal has more real consequences and becomes part of public perception and even history. Reality often doesn't. Real life events often only have real life consequences, if the simulation of reality presents them as having happened in the way they actually happened.

Further watching: Videodrome (1983), eXistenZ(1999), the Matrix (1999), Paprika (2006), Inception (2010), etc.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Videodrome

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. I remember watching it as a teenager in the 90s and having no freaking clue what was going on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Hypoxicreality

[–] Tb0n3 2 points 10 months ago

Crime is up 30% in New York City this year.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Same as it ever was, Republicans peddle this xenophobic lie every election.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Gee maybe because the media eats this shit up, just like they eat up any kind of copaganda. The media is overly trusting and sympathetic to cops, and conservatives in general.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago

What? conservatives lying about crime!?! But they assured me they weren't! They winked at me and everything!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

"It's not what I expected but then again I wasn't sure what to expect when I came here" - some idiot who really thought the boarder was being invaded by "illegals".

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I wonder if there is some kind of bias that keeps making some cases high profile and not other.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Relevant: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

Texas is SAFER every time an illegal immigrant enters the state.

[–] ZombiFrancis 4 points 10 months ago

Imagine validating obvious bullshit claims enough to do statistical analysis to prove they are, in fact, bullshit claims.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Stories are more powerful than statistics, so sadly this won't convince anyone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

It makes the story of Brexit so great. They actually kicked all immigrants out with great fanfare. Then they discovered a big part of their workers were suddenly gone, so some businesses closed down, production decreased, healthcare couldn't find nurses and that kind of stuff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Conservative-friendly headline: Crime Wave of Illegal Immigrants

"Liberal Media" headline: Um actually, as it happens, sir, the thing is you see that numbers - we did numbers of it, that is a thorough review of words and numbers related to the reality of the situation shows that in fact there does not appear to be a factual or clearly identifiable basis for that being a thing that is which we could maybe be wrong about but we feel pretty good about the numbers even.

Advantage: fascists.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"A few rotten apples spoiled the bunch" is the excuse that many many groups of people including police use to describe the inherent crime that comes with any population.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

"A few bad apples" is also what the police use to handwave away whenever one of their own goes bonkers and kills unarmed civilians

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Looking at they NYC Crime Statistics the headline is...subjective.

Here's the "7 Major Felony Offenses" data from 2001 through 2022.

Here's the most current CompStat data for 2024 and it includes 2023 for reference.

Flipping between those sources shows some different things.

The sum of crimes from all 7 categories does show a negligible increase from 2022 (126,589) to 2023 (126,786) but it doesn't tell the whole story, for that you have to look at the individual categories where Murder, Rape, and Robbery were down small amounts but Felony Assault, Grand Larceny, and Grand Larceny Auto were all up and in some cases the increase was significant.

Comparing 2023 to 2024 we see that Robbery and Felony Assault are up and that's a problem because those two categories represent literally thousands of crimes of the type that your average NYC dweller is likely to experience.

So is the statement "But police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022,..." accurate? That depends entirely on what part of the data you're looking at. Bottom line number? No. Individual categories that impact tens of thousands of people? Yes.

As an aside where you REALLY start to see the problem is if you compare the 2023 data to the 2019 data because holy shit! Aggregate Felony Crime is up 30% since 2019; 95,606 in 2019 vs 126,786 in 2023!

There's no way around it, NYC has absolutely gotten more dangerous when compared to its pre-pandemic self. That doesn't mean its the result of Migrants but since the migrant wave and the crime surge happened at basically the same time as the end of pandemic it's really easy to say that they're related and its really difficult to refute since NYC doesn't gather Citizenship status.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Important footnote on that 2023-24 data

Figures are preliminary and subject to further analysis and revision

Also, from the article,

More than 170,000 migrants have arrived in the city since [April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York], and it is difficult to know what crime statistics would show had they not come. But as the migrant numbers have increased, the overall crime rate has stayed flat. And, in fact, many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.

The monthly number of robberies since migrants began arriving in large numbers has fluctuated. It peaked at 1,730 in July 2022, hit a low of 1,155 in February 2023 and climbed to 1,417 last month.

Grand larcenies have also gone up and down, but the monthly total stood at 4,056 in January, compared with a high of 4,687 in August 2022.

Crime might be up since 2019, but it doesn't look like it is since spring of 2022 when bussing started. Everything appears to have either gone steadily down or just gone up and down a little bit month to month, but there's no sustained increases that correlate with migrants arriving.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Important footnote on that 2023-24 data

It's the only data publicly available so any defects would effect the NYT article as well as my comment. I'm making a good faith effort to explore their conclusion, this isn't meant to be a "Migrants Bad" comment.

Crime might be up since 2019

There is no "might". A straight comparison of all 7 categories from 2019 through 2022 shows a MARKED increase. This isn't even debatable.

...but it doesn’t look like it is since spring of 2022 when bussing started.

You can clearly see by comparing the 2021 and 2022 columns in my first link that crime took a BIG jump in 2022. Then in 2023 we have two big changes in a span of just 45 days; in February NYC removed many of its COVID restrictions and then barely 6 weeks later in April the Migrants started show up by the literal bus load..

The question I have ATM is where can I find a month by month breakdown for 2022, because that will show us when the crime increase actually started and allow us to judge that timing against migrant arrival, and then the same thing for all of 2023 so we can do a direct MtM comparison between the two.

Right now if I had to guess I'd say that much of the 2022 and 2023 crime increase was actually driven by post-pandemic socioeconomic conditions, it just so happens that the the migrant wave happened at the same time making it easy to conflate the two. However the data that's easily available from CompStat doesn't have sufficient resolution to tell for sure.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You also have to take in account police fudging the numbers. I know low crime reporting makes the police look successful, but if crime numbers are higher, they can be used to justify a higher budget. Everyone is aware of how often police lie about encounters.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Good points but I since I'm trying to align with the same data that the NYT used in their article I have to use the sources and statistics that they did.