Covid Crime Surge

 Yglesias take a look at Paul Krugman's analysis of the surge in murders during 2020-21. Because America has not centralized standards for reporting crime, murder has to stand-in for all crimes, because you pretty much have to report a dead body. Krugman's point is that crime has fallen a lot since 2020, but that Americans tend not to believe that - for some of the same reasons that they don't believe the good economic news. Republicans tend to think that the economy is terrible when Democrats are president and vice versa, and crime has functioned the same way since 2000 though not before.

Yglesias' argument is that Krugman ignores the impact of the George Floyd protests on increasing crime, because he likes to punch left on certain issues. I've been contemptuous of "Defund the Police" but I think simply saying that the Floyd protests somehow increased crime without really positing a hypothesis seems pointless contrarianism.

So here's my unified theory of why crime spiked from 2020-2021, but has since come back down to normal levels. It was both Covid and the Floyd protests, but it was also the general malignancy of the Trump years. 

One concept I've never seen linked to crime studies in journalism is the idea of legitimacy. If we think that a law in legitimate, then we rarely have to enforce it. Not never, but we don't need a police state to prevent murders, as they are relatively rare. Some communities do see lower rates of property crime, speeding and so on. If there is a large group of people who finally say to themselves, I no longer believe this law to be legitimate, then enforcing it is almost impossible (see Prohibition).

What happened during Covid was a sense that the rules were suspended. Not necessarily delegitimized, but just on lockdown. It started, I believe, on the highways. If you drove anywhere in the spring of 2020, it was insane out there. Police had other shit to do, and traffic stops were pretty far down the list. Most of this was (and frankly still is) just idiotic young male risk taking. "Dude, let's race!" is a stupid idea that I think we can all imagine coming from a 20 year old manboy's mouth.

What happened then was a process whereby once a few rules get suspended then legit sociopaths take notice. A sociopath only follows rules for fear of getting caught; if you aren't going to get caught, then do what you want. Once that happens, then the basic rule based structure gets delegitimized for others. "I'd like to follow the rules, but why should I be the only one? What if THESE are the new rules?"

In the midst of Death Race 2020, you then have the Floyd protests which very much delegitimized policing. This led to shitbird anarchists vandalizing Starbucks, but also just more people saying, "Fuck your rules." Additionally, there's been a strong pattern of police responding to criticism of their behavior by stopping work subtly. It was the actual plan of Daryl Gates during the Rodney King riots 3 decades ago: pull the cops off the street, let people see what that's like and then they will forgive the cops their transgressions in return for public order.

Finally, the corrosive effect of Trump and his disregard for the rule of law - even before January 6th - I think created a corrosive effect on civic virtue. 

The basic idea of civic virtue is that citizens in a republic should subsume their selfish interests, including breaking rules against theft, as part of their duty as citizens. It seems undeniably true that we have a broad breakdown in our sense of shared values as Americans, and Trump was a massive accelerant of that. While he didn't pioneer the idea that there were "Real Muricans" and Democrats, he took the training wheels off that rhetoric and supercharged it. His American Carnage speech or even going back to the his demonizing the Central Park Five represents a next level of contempt of one group of Americans towards another. It didn't take long for it to be hotly reciprocated. 

When (mostly) Democratic politicians and pundits talk about the threat that Trump poses to Democracy, they mostly mean his outright contempt for electoral democracy and the rule of law. Which is a true. There's a more subtle attack on democracy by Trump and the Trumpenproletariat, and that's the idea that we are not all committed to the American experiment. It's the idea that we are a Christian nation first and last, dedicated to White Patriarchal rule. 

When Ron DeSantis promised to be "Trump without the drama" this is what he was saying he would do. No insurrections or blatant corrupt business practices, but rather a continued assault on the idea of a multi-ethnic democracy - a shared civic faith.

Trump broke that down. Then Covid hit and shredded more rules. Then George Floyd delegitimized policing as a broken, corrupt profession (All Cops Are Bastards). So we saw not only young people drag racing on interstates, but we saw the abuse of service industry workers and teachers. There wasn't only a spike in murders but also a broad increase in disturbances in airplanes and restaurants. All of this was the fraying of the fabric of America's shared identity and its adherence to the rules that go along with that. 

UPDATE: It occurs to me that the vitriol over the situation in Israel/Gaza is linked to this, too. It's a legitimately awful situation where the worst people (Hamas and Netanyahu) are calling the shots and dictating what's happening, but that people all over the place are amping it up are engaged in behavior designed to ignore other perspectives.