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What is the definition of "violence" for that chart? Specifically, does it include self-inflicted violence (suicide) and vehicular homicide (drunk driving)? If so, it is much less surprising.
From CDC: a violent death is defined as a death resulting from the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or a group or community
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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 Virg…
Idk, I’m kind of with you on this. I grew up in an area that was racially diverse and also shared a distrust of the police and legal system. Minorities in the United States are being shot and killed by police at an alarming rate. I’m not convinced that every urban community holistically decides they must take justice into their own hands, but I, anecdotally, grew up in a place where people do take matters into their…
With that, you don’t need to centrally ‘decide’ anything. I think folks would generally observe patterns and come to similar conclusions. Honestly it’s probably the same way the ‘blue code’ develops...theres no meeting, just patterns. It’s not an absolute model, police do get called (and fired) all the time despite this.
Doesn’t really matter what i think at the end of the day and im grossly oversimplifying most of it, but it is a handy framework that explains a lot for me.
> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…
I'm with the mob on this one. As another comment put it, he was tried by a jury of his peers... if the justice system cannot help you then you have to take things into your own hands. Might be hard for all us city slickers on HN to fathom, particularly when these sorts of country towns are frequently mocked or derided by people like us.
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From CDC: a violent death is defined as a death resulting from the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or a group or community
Against oneself, so it includes suicide.
0) http://mentalfloss.com/article/574749/ken-mcelroy-murder-ski...
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I'm with the mob on this one. As another comment put it, he was tried by a jury of his peers... if the justice system cannot help you then you have to take things into your own hands. Might be hard for all us city slickers on HN to fathom, particularly when these sorts of country towns are frequently mocked or derided by people like us.
> if the justice system cannot help you then you have to take things into your own hands Fortunately not many people seem to feel this way, maybe because revenge doesn't work as a criminal defense. People who have been wronged are usually highly emotional and it's hard for them to put themselves outside of their circumstances and view the incident objectively. Justice is supposed to be blind for good reason. If we al…
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Should proximity to potential assailants not be taken into account?
The "murders per capita per square mile" metric really gets to the heart of the question on every American's mind: what percentage of face-to-face interactions are murders?
That is, a dense urban area would have more face-to-face interactions than a sparse rural one. Given two areas with equal levels of per-capita violence, it would then follow that the more sparsely populated one would have more violence per face-to-face interaction, not less.
> frontier justice came for McElroy courtesy of the residents of Skidmore (population 440 at the time of the crime). Shaken by the man’s ability to evade jail even after being convicted of a near-fatal attack on a grocery store owner... Belkin also details Skidmore’s plague of subsequent violence ... the series persuasively contends that these crimes indicate that the McElroy episode taught younger Skidmore generatio…
This is my prevailing theory as to why minority enclaves in metropolitan areas tend to have higher violent crime. It's not socioeconomic as much as it is folks being forced to mete out justice on their own.
In addition, studies like this one (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1745-9125.1...) have found that the relationship between crime rates and undocumented immigrants actually decreases
As someone who came to America undocumented at the age of 5, my personal intuition is that undocumented people tend to be more fearful of authority and therefore more likely to avoid getting in trouble
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The "murders per capita per square mile" metric really gets to the heart of the question on every American's mind: what percentage of face-to-face interactions are murders?
If you wanted to track that you'd need to do the opposite of what GP is suggesting. That is, a dense urban area would have more face-to-face interactions than a sparse rural one. Given two areas with equal levels of per-capita violence, it would then follow that the more sparsely populated one would have more violence per face-to-face interaction, not less.
Murder-hectares per square capita? Murder-capitas per hectare? I'm not actually sure how the dimensional analysis works out.