On Aug. 7 this year I posted
"A Quick Study" of this same history
of murder rates in New York State. The relatively sudden and very final end to
the great crimewave that started with the ghetto uprisings in the
60's, is a dramatic
example of revolutionary cultural change. It was a very public change of heart that
started the crime wave, that blacks used their new freedoms to reject society,
and an almost completely silent, but equally dramatic change of heart to end it. The question is,
can we figure out what
happened?
The strong systems indicator in
the curve is how it rapidly shifts from high and bumpy to low and dead flat, a
clear change of state. There's really no outside factor yet identified that
matches that timing or finality of change, nor explains the more or less sudden
relief from a long persistent culture of violence. In that post I also commented
that in the studies I'd read it was odd that no one seems to have asked the
people involved what they thought happened. There probably are some scientists
who have done so, but I decided to go ask the question on the streets of NYC
myself, and see what I got. It's good reading. (http://www.synapse9.com/cw/cw_interview_notes_10-22_audio.pdf)
It certainly is only one data
set, but does expose an unheard from inside point of view. I just handed out a
blow-up of the curve asking "were you around here in the 90's", and "do you
remember what happened here", leading them a little until they proposed
something they remembered going on that might have caused it. The file contains
brief notes reflecting 50 good conversations with people, four audio file links,
and my compilation of the reasons people gave. It's always great to get out and
talk to people, and one rarely has something to ask them that is so central to
their own lives and mysterious at the same time. Judge for yourself. Naturally I
described what I could make sense of, but people raised some very interesting
things.
Among the big missing pieces of
data, from a systems point of view, is whether each city of NYS had the same
trend as the aggregate (all of them together), and particularly whether the
turning points for each city were all at the same time, or in sequence. That
would suggest or rule out several paths of causation. One might also ask, did I
bias my findings by possibly asking the questions in a way that determined the
answer I got? People do indeed commonly find what they're looking for because of
that. Well, I found something like I was looking for, but I tried to be careful
about that. I did push people to recall what was going on inside the culture,
events without names, things easily forgotten. From my own experience of living
on West 96th street at the time I thought the turnaround might have had
something to do with those amazing memorial murals that the wild style graffiti
artists made on handball walls all over town for the families and friends of the
victims of the street. I never guessed that when I asked people about that
specifically they would remember but not give it much importance. The timing and
kind of message of those memorials sent is a good match for the timing and kind
of change that occurred though... so who knows. That a huge sudden change in our
local culture of such enormous importance would go essentially unnoticed is
still the most amazing thing.
[1/31/06], I've been looking at
the NY county and NYC precinct trends and finding out which parts act
together are the ones to watch. I can't write about it yet, but thought
I'd mention the very strangest piece of evidence I've found. The pulses of
the crime wave started earlier and lasted longer in the low crime neighborhoods!
To it looks like important evidence, trying to understand what a shiny metal
thing is and discovering that the wheels roll.]
[3/20/06]
Derivative reconstruction
allows a precise location of the turning points, and demonstrates that the low
crime boros achieve that because their collective response to the invading
turmoil began earliest and lasted longest.
US murder rates since 1900 w/ NY & other States
NYC Boro Murder Rates w/ DR
Queens & S.I. Murder Rates enlarged w/ DR
NYC Precinct Murder Rates
Power Point of all the large data curves
