The Floyd Effect

With elections a few days away, crime statistics are finally being widely discussed in the press. So…I’m not going to pass up one last chance to deluge you with new graphs based on the CDC’s WONDER database of causes of death.

Democratic politicians have been flailing about looking for a way to get off the hook for the historic increase in murder and car crash mayhem ever since our respectable class’ leaders declared “the racial reckoning” was at hand following the unfortunate expiration of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

For example, New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, suddenly finding herself in a tight race with Lee Zeldin largely over the crime surge, kvetched to Zeldin in a debate about crime, “I don’t know why that’s so important to you.”

She then declared on Rev. Al Sharpton’s show this week that Republican complaints about rising crime are a conspiracy theory:

These are master manipulators. They have this conspiracy going all across America trying to convince people in Democratic states that they’re not as safe. Well, guess what: They’re also not only election deniers, they’re data deniers.

Before getting to the red state vs. blue state issue that everybody wants to talk about, let’s look at the national murder trend, which has been jaw-dropping.

The Centers for Disease Control maintains a useful WONDER database of causes of death that anybody can use to look up, say, homicide victimizations or motor vehicle fatalities by race or any other trait they care to know about. The time period covered by the CDC is January 1999 until six months ago, which at the moment extends through March 2022.

I’ve graphed homicide victimizations by month:

As you can see, the black homicide victimization rate reached levels previously unknown in this century during the racial reckoning and has stayed highly elevated ever since.

The Floyd Effect has been immense by historical standards. In contrast, you can clearly see the Ferguson Effect caused by the first time in 2015–16 that the Great and the Good hyped the misnomered Black Lives Matter movement. But the Ferguson Effect is subtle compared with our ongoing Floyd Effect.

You’ll also note how seasonal black homicide is (and, of course, the vast majority of these black deaths were at the hands of another black). This time, I adjusted for the number of days in each month. But even so, February remains the usual low point in the black murder year, with July being the typical peak. Blacks were killed about 22 percent more in June to August than in December to February. For Hispanics, the seasonal gap was 18 percent, and for whites only 7 percent. Apparently, winter depresses people who evolved without much winter, which can be a good thing.

Something that stands out with the Hispanic trend line is how much the Latino homicide rate improved after the popping of the Housing Bubble in 2008. Perhaps there was a big outflow back to Mexico of the least employable Mexicans? Are we returning your worst?

While the Hispanic homicide rate didn’t grow as fast as the black rate in 2020, Latino criminals appear to have gotten adjusted to the New Normal in 2021, unfortunately, and are back to Housing Bubble levels of killing and being killed.

Why have blacks been shooting each other in such remarkable numbers over the past couple of years? The conventional wisdom is that this must be due to Covid, although nobody seems to be able to explain why.

Perhaps the most plausible Covid-related theory is the least popular: that all the economic stimulus stimulated more Deaths of Exuberance, such as murders and car crashes.

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