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‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

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Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#191

Post by floe »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #187
codyb wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much think socioeconomic status is more likely a better fit. I have a feeling if you did the same test but instead of “crime” you did “wealth percentile” you’d probably end up with the same results in the United States though unfortunately. Not a lot of well off minority neighborhoods throughout the country and the wealth disparity even with all the poor white people is very real.

> I very much think socioeconomic status is more likely a better fit. Believe it or not, this exact question has been studied pretty intensively for decades. The predictive value of race is much higher than the predictive value of socioeconomic status.

Ah, then you should be able to provide some sources.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#192

Post by fastball »

hinkley wrote: post #188
persistent wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure this isn't just a bias of yours? Urban areas in the United States have a lower rate of fatal injuries due to violence than do rural areas. Perhaps this is not what you meant by "violent crime"? I know the output of these reports is difficult to interpret but see [1]. The top decile of per-capita violent deaths are rural counties, not urban ones. 1: https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m588…

Americans have a real problem with proportions. If you put a million people in a city and 100 of them die of a flu, everyone screams epidemic. You spread those same people out over all the small towns in a state, and 200 of them die, it's just fine. Because, I suspect, we often associate statistics with a location rather than a cross section of society. We think "someone in my town was murdered", not "the murder rate…

I think this is a problem of humanity, not a problem of Americans.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#193

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Bartweiss wrote: post #140
dragonwriter wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear if you are referring to jury nullification here (which is not particular to Texas), to the reduction of murder to voluntary manslaughter by heat of passion (which is not particular to Texas), or to some actual special aspect of Texas law (perhaps some part of the operation of the imperfect self-defense rule under Texas law). Could you provide more detail?

This made me curious too, so I went looking. Texas self defense law seem thoroughly standard for a southern/rural state. It has 'stand your ground' rules and a low charge rate for claims of self-defense, but neither is unusual. There are only two exotic elements I can find. First, Texas permits the use of deadly force to stop some non-violent criminals (e.g. burglars, robbers) from escaping with property. Second, it…

>That last clause is pretty bizarre

It makes more sense if you consider it the other way around. Theft and criminal mischief are considered violent crimes for the purposes of self defense if they happen at night.

The line between theft and burglary is blurry and subjective when you're talking about situations where someone is stealing something from someone's property at night and said theft causes them to be woken up and respond. The law is basically saying that for the purposes of self defense theft can be considered burglary by default in those cases.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#194

Post by jacobolus »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #147
jacobolus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crimes are more common in metropolitan areas due to increased contact Is there evidence for this contact theory? It doesn’t match my understanding of crime patterns. For example there are many very dense cities around the world without much crime, and some sparsely populated rural areas with lots of crime. A Google search turns up http://science.time.com/2013/07/23/in-town-versus-country-it... https://www.cbc.ca/ne…

There are many more variables to correct for than just population density but this study does a pretty good job covering that and then some. In short, yes cities have significantly more crime (both violent and property) than rural areas. https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/86153/IJRC_Ward-eta... There are huge numbers of trends in the crime data depending on you want to look at it, so I'm always open to changing…

> The average number of residents age 14 - 17 for urban counties was 10,879.74 (SD = 25,923.60), far larger than the mean of 987.32 (SD = 760.86) for rural counties. Likewise, the average number of residents age 18 - 24 for urban counties (18,752.97, SD = 41,994.59) was much greater than rural counties (M = 1,625.68, SD = 1,417.78).

If there are literally 10 times fewer young people, it’s not too surprising that the rural counties had fewer crimes per capita. With that big a disparity it’s kind of shocking that the urban crime rate is only 50% higher.

I hadn’t realized that US rural counties have so few young people. It sounds like the population of those places is on the verge of collapse.

If the median age in rural counties is ~40, there are few small children, but only 2.5% of the people are 14–24, it sounds like there must be a pretty large number of 25–40 year olds though. Has there just been a sharp demographic break within the last generation with all of the young people suddenly moving away, or are large numbers of 30-somethings moving from the city to rural towns?

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#197

Post by jcims »

its_the_future wrote: post #180
jcims wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be a bias of mine, but if averaged out over an entire county I don't think these are mutually exclusive. I'm talking about the 'rough parts of town' that are typically dominated by a minority population. Try this: Go find a crime map site, pick a big city and show homicides over the last year. Then go to the racial dot map and see how it compares to the census of that locale. http://demographics.virginia.edu…

Are you sure socioeconomic status is not a better fit and that race is not just a proxy for it?

I’m not saying it’s specific races or some sneaky proxy for them, but the fact that there are different races at all likly plays some role. For example, I firmly believe if we had opposites millenia with regard to race these same patterns would emerge.

Now I have lost track of the exact scope of ‘socioeconomic status’, but i don’t think that being poor/uneducated/financially insecure explains it all either. West Virginia is the epitome of low socioeconomic status, but violent crime is relatively low.

My basic thinking is that these communities do not have a healthy, trusting relationship with law enforcement. The cause for that is complex of course, but the net effect ties back to the OP. If law enforcement isn’t a reliable or trusted resource, a community will fall back to vigilante/mob justice. Without the resources of a court and prison system to remove people from a community, that justice is going to come in the form of violence. This of course creates a negative feedback loop with law enforcement, exacerbating the problem.

On the upside, this problem might actually be easier to solve.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#198

Post by dmix »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #110
kemiller2002 wrote: post #96

So my family actually knew the sheriff from the next county over. He picked up McElroy a couple times for various things. (I think being drunk etc.). Now when this was explained, this was 26-27 years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but he explained that the man was a monster of an individual. (like huge.) The guy could pick up a hog from the other side of the fence and just walk off with it. Dead lifting a few h…

My grandmother in-law relayed a similar story growing up on a farm in Kansas. When she was a little girl there was a gypsy camp up the river. The gypsies would occasionally steal chickens. Her father eventually put a stop to it when they brazenly tried to use a car (I don’t know where they got it) to steal several chickens. Her father got his hands on one of the women and beat her senseless and one of the men engaged…

It probably just means the gypsies didn't want to go to the police over an assault when they were committing a robbery.

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#199

Post by parsnips »

jcwilde wrote: post #186
parsnips wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing urban and rural and using per-capita numbers is a fallacious argument. You must control for land area. For example a square mile that is labeled “urban” vs square mile labeled “rural” the numbers per-capita tilt homicides way in favor of urban areas... and its not even close. https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...

I fail to see how "per capita per square mile" is a useful measure. _Anything_ measured in that way would show densely populated area vastly outnumbering rural areas, perhaps with the exclusion of things that essentially don't exist in cites, such as "number of farms per capita per square mile". The measure appears to be concocted specifically for Lying With Statistics™.

Should proximity to potential assailants not be taken into account?

Re: ‘No One Saw a Thing’: When a Midwest Town Banded Together to Kill the Town Bully

#200

Post by parsnips »

hinkley wrote: post #189
parsnips wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing urban and rural and using per-capita numbers is a fallacious argument. You must control for land area. For example a square mile that is labeled “urban” vs square mile labeled “rural” the numbers per-capita tilt homicides way in favor of urban areas... and its not even close. https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...

I think I'm hung up on the same thing, chief. Why per capita per square mile instead of per capita? Why do the miles enter into it? Because of more interactions? I'd like to see just the numbers per capita. I suspect they're fairly close.

Because violent felonies such as homicide proximity is the requisite factor in victimhood. ie The victim must be located near the killer.

Given 1 homicide in 100k for 100sq miles called "rural" vs 1 homicide in 100k for 5 sq miles called "urban", your odds of being in proximity of a homicide are much higher in the urban area. 20 times more likely.

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