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My sense is that we're in a lull right now. A culture war recession. It's hard to even rank them. I would almost say MeToo is the highest right now but only because of the recent Roe decision, but that turned out to be more of a pop than a bang, didn't it? Maybe the affirmative action case decisions in June will stoke the BLM/CRT set.
One theory is that Blue Tribe turns the burner up or down for purposes of tactical or strategic advantage. Given that they're more or less back in control, what advantage is there on turning the burner back to high?
Thousands of extra black people are being killed per year, compared to five years ago, and this rise correlates neatly with the largest social intervention in law enforcement in living memory. But this is an inconvenient correlation to examine, so it simply goes unexamined, and people mention how it seems like things have chilled out lately. Well, sure. The chillness or lack thereof of our collective environment is entirely determined by Blue Tribe social consensus, and is entirely detached from any actual facts of our physical existence.
BLM was a crisis of the cops hunting black people in the street, not because the cops were actually hunting black people in the street, but because the media and other organs of blue-tribe social consensus generated a collective delusion that it was so. Now black people are actually being killed at rates approximating those delusive rates, but no one cares. This is how it works, and in fact how it has always worked. We've collectively outsourced our cognition to a small cadre of radical utopians, and we dance to their whim.
It will remain so until the existing system ruptures badly enough that the problems become undeniably immediate.
I'm sorry, what? Is this supposed to be a COVID thing? If so, "killed" is a rather questionable word choice.
I want to see a source.
He's referring to the recent spike in homicide rate, which happened disproportionately for black victims / offenders. The claim is that BLM -> less police enforcement -> more murders. Dunno how accurate that is, most convincing evidence for it would look like anecdotes from said criminals, or people involved, attesting to it. "Gangs are more active now that the cops are paying less attention"? idk.
I agree with your implication that criminals aren't in their hideaway saying "cops are gone, let's go nuts!"
Fortunately, there's an easier explanation. Most violent crime is committed by a small minority of people. By arresting and prosecuting a small number of offenders you can reduce the crime rate by a huge percentage. The average person will commit zero violent crimes, but the average offender might commit dozens if left unchecked.
Fail to arrest a person the first time they assault someone, and they can continue to victimize more and more people. Here in Seattle, we joke about needing a "10 strikes and you're out" law for that reason.
My point is that, if that's what's happening, because a 50% increase in homicides is a lot, there will be many anecdotes or sorts of evidence of the form 'our group is getting much less police pressure now, and are able to operate in more parts of the city', or jail occupancy rates for specific severe crimes significantly decreasing, or officers reporting seeing - many times - letting someone go for a mid-tier crime and seeing them commit more crimes, at a rate 50% higher than in 2019.
Just staring at a 'blm graph' and a 'homicide graph' and observing they both go up in 2020 isn't enough to prove that. Nor are a dozen or even a hundred articles about 'X was released after arrest crime Y and then committed crime Z later', because those articles also existed in 2019, and the way media reporting works, the numerical effect of media attention and people sharing articles totally overwhelms any signal in frequency relative to a mere 50% increase.
I disagree that "staring at a 'blm graph'" adequately responds to the argument.
BLM was a social movement that took direct and powerful action to alter our society, ranging from mass protests to large-scale violence to widespread social shaming to a whole spectrum of other activities. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that its touch was felt in every facet of adult life nation-wide. It directly impacted my personal relationships. It changed the content of the sermons I heard at church. It changed the art I'm paid to make. It changed every show I've watched on stream since. It directly caused and then publicly justified large-scale lawless violence and criminality, and attacked the role of police in our society without a modicum of restraint. It was the largest-scale social intervention of my lifetime, powerful enough to cause obviously-connected harmful effects on the other side of the world for no reason but sheer social inertia.
The law-enforcement systems it was directly and unambiguously aimed at experienced the largest-magnitude change ever recorded, almost immediately after these interventions began.
There is clearer causation between the BLM movement and our current murder rate than there is between any social-science intervention and any given result in living memory. If the causation is not clear enough in this case, it is obviously not clear enough in any other case either, and we should admit that statistics don't work and the very concept of "social science" is invalid.
...For the record, I'm making bold claims here because I think the evidence is overwhelming. Can you point to a stronger intervention, or a greater-magnitude result? A shorter timeframe? A closer linkage?
Eh sure, but BLM is just one tiny facet of progressivism. Progressivism/universalism has transformed every facet of adult life, as opposed to touched.
Basically - 'X was very important' and 'Y was very important', together with 'maybe X caused Y', does not prove 'X certainly caused Y'. I agree it's plausible and worth investigating.
why do people make these arguments so much? This is (sort of) true because social science is garbage, not because BLM caused the murder rate. This only works in a sense that it lets you win an argument against some hypothetical interlocutor who likes social science, it doesn't prove anything else.
There's no way BLM was the largest change ever to US law enforcement. Surely something during e.g. the civil war was larger-magnitude. This doesn't address this specific point, but generally your arguments seem to be ... very presentist, making very grand statements about very current politics, instead of understanding things in a way that can be used to affect the systems involved. Yeah, BLM was very significant and not very nice, but what does that tell us about how BLM worked, or why it accomplished what it did, or how we can understand its effects or interact with similar movements in the future? Your claims are quite vague and very nonspecific, compared to the sort of detailed, specific evidence I'd like to see!
Articles like this one (from the Guardian, no less) would point to a pretty direct connection between BLM and overall law enforcement policy (which is even more enduring that personnel shortages, changes in tactics, etc.) You quite literally had DA candidates for one of the biggest metropolitan jurisdictions in the US interacting with BLM activists.
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