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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Wrote a substack post on how the recent rise in homicide in the US was higher in ‘Democrat-run cities’.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/107605777

  • -11

I reran the data except instead of using the variable "to this point in the year" that was all different dates and a series of arbitrarily selected cities, I used the year-end data for all cities in the top 75 US Cities by population plus Buffalo plus whatever else was in the list you had. Then I got rid of any cities that had fewer than 10 murders in either year because any movement there can be chalked up to random variation and not trends (though the numbers were so low I can add it back in if you want; it won't make much of a difference). I also cut Riverside because Rusty Bailey is an independent and I couldn't tell whether he leaned liberal or conservative (for the few other independents it was pretty obvious that they all leaned liberal, but I can take them out if you'd like; it won't make a difference). Then I used your methodology and I came up with... a 23.58% increase in Democratic cities and a 34.33% increase in Republican cities.

Is there a way you could share your data?

I had to upload it as JPGs but this should be sufficient.

/images/1678579459315192.webp

/images/16785794599119484.webp

Where did you get these numbers from? You have Philly listed as having 201 murders in 2020 (down 24%), when Philly actually had 499 murders in 2020, for an increase of 40%. Similarly, Atlanta had 157, not 59

I got them from City Data because that was the only place that had most of these statistics compiled in one place, though I admit that I double-checked some numbers that looked suspicious and found errors, and some of it was incomplete so I pulled it from city websites and newspaper accounts. If someone has better data or can find any other errors, by all means, let me know. I reran the numbers with your updates (and updated 2019 numbers as well since I assumed the errors weren't isolated) and the new total for D cities is 26.83%, higher than it was, but still significantly lower than the R number.

I'll look into the numbers.

Thank you very much for sharing them, that's very helpful.

Edit:

OK.

I've combined the 2 datasets and gone over all of the numbers for 2019, 2020, and 2021 for all of the cities: D + 46.6%, R + 21%.

                                     D	             R	            I

% Change 2019-2021 46.6% 21.0% 72.5%

See detailed results here:

https://imgur.com/a/kv0GYVG

https://imgur.com/a/Oa3iBte

https://imgur.com/a/nRbUoNj