What's going on with Austin murders?

Helobious · January 25, 2022

1 hour ago, gsoda3 said:

two minutes on google and i've found two cases.

case 1

case 2

Case 1 happened in 2020 in Temple though. And when you consider that there’s probably 10k+ people out on bond in Travis county, I think it’s hard to say that “low” bonds are driving this nationwide crime increase.

Its arbitrary and it depends on the crime, but I would say only anything under $50k is a “low” bond. Not a ton of people have more than a spare $5000 lying around to bail out of jail.

gurt · January 25, 2022

What is interesting about it is that it doesn't seem to be pandemic driven, at least not primarily. Other countries saw a decrease of violent crime in 2020 while ours shot up.

Certainly there is an aspect of policing reform at play here in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Whether it is actually due to policy or funding changes, a reaction by police forces to what they perceive as widespread hostility (some real, some imagined) or something that was going to happen regardless is hard to tell.

DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt · January 25, 2022

44 minutes ago, ztejas said:

It's because they're counting deaths WITH murder in the total not just FROM murder.

municipalities are actually getting paid more by the federal government to report deaths as murders and therefore are classifying more deaths as murders.

Brothahorn · January 25, 2022

i don't want to point any fingers but it's the blacks.

Helobious · January 25, 2022

Guns, mental health, police reform, drugs. Here in SA for sure, most murders are drug related. I imagine it’s like that everywhere. Sure random murders do happen but mostly it’s some kind of drug related crime. We also have a pretty absurd road rage problem, that alone was 6 or 7 homicides last year.

I’m not at all opposed to gun ownership, but I think a part of the problem might be that many people have guns that just shouldn’t. And they’re quick to use them. Murders will always happen in any society, but you just have to be a different type of cold to stab someone to death vs shooting them.

MissingInAction · January 25, 2022

Stabbing is a lot more fun. Shooting someone doesn't give you time to revel in their pain and suffering.

TexPx · January 25, 2022

Somehow violent crime in Dallas was down last year which surprised me. At least the city leaders sent a bunch of self congratulatory emails and press releases claiming that.

“Crime is notoriously hard to measure in a reliable way. The statistics are even harder to interpret. Nobody fully understands why crime rates go up or down. But police officials can convincingly point to strong early returns on Chief Eddie Garcia’s crime plan, which was implemented this year and targets high-crime zones. Dallas is bucking a national trend. Murders are up in many large U.S. cities in 2021. Not in Dallas.”

https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2021/12/violent-crime-is-down-in-dallas-in-2021/

Dennis Taylor · January 25, 2022

38 minutes ago, Helobious said:

I’m not at all opposed to gun ownership, but I think a part of the problem might be that many people have guns that just shouldn’t. And they’re quick to use them. Murders will always happen in any society, but you just have to be a different type of cold to stab someone to death vs shooting them.

Holy shit this is truly groundbreaking material here. You may want to come up with a name for this category of people....how about "criminals" ?

texasdago · January 25, 2022

I know Austin is not alone - Houston has been getting worse. As of January 19th, Houston was at 26 murders. Not sure where we are today. I know two police officers were killed in 24 hours and are not part of those stats. Pretty sure there were two more around the 20th and then there's the case of a kid in the Memorial area who may have killed his father (crazy - https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2022/01/25/body-believed-to-be-k-9-stabbing-suspects-father-found-in-garage-of-west-houston-home-police-say/ ) so assuming "that's it", we're at 31 murders as of today. Can't find an accurate count.

StruggleBus · January 25, 2022

4 hours ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

i don't want to point any fingers but it's the blacks.

Well there are a total of seven black people in Austin, and with seven murders so far this year… well you can do the math.

Edited January 25, 2022 by StruggleBus

CooterBrown · January 25, 2022

What is interesting about it is that it doesn't seem to be pandemic driven, at least not primarily. Other countries saw a decrease of violent crime in 2020 while ours shot up.
Certainly there is an aspect of policing reform at play here in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Whether it is actually due to policy or funding changes, a reaction by police forces to what they perceive as widespread hostility (some real, some imagined) or something that was going to happen regardless is hard to tell.

Explain how police stop murders. Not a one off where a cop was in the right place at the right time but where police actually cause murder rates to decrease at a measurable level.

texasdago · January 25, 2022

"Austin was such a quaint, safe little town in the early 80s... not full of people from California and Adler!?"

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7254996/

January 25, 2022

6 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

Explain how police stop murders. Not a one off where a cop was in the right place at the right time but where police actually cause murder rates to decrease at a measurable level.

Perhaps you're not familiar with the fact that with all these tech companies relocating to Austin, we have been selected as the nation's next Precrime beta test.

texasdago · January 25, 2022

8 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

Explain how police stop murders. Not a one off where a cop was in the right place at the right time but where police actually cause murder rates to decrease at a measurable level.

Third chart on here should be a good point...

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/homicides-on-the-rise-how-austin-compares-to-other-big-cities/

Of the seven cities listed with higher homicide rates, 6 of 7 have a greater number of police officers per capita than Austin. For the 2020-2021 budget year, Austin stood at 1.68 per 100,000. Columbus is more than double Austin's homicide rate and they over the magic 2/100,000 number from Save Austin Now.

texasdago · January 25, 2022

BTW, check out these numbers from 1983 from a New York Times article. Crazy stuff... my mom always talks about how dangerous it is today vs the old days but man the late 70s and 80s were really bad. We just forget and we didn't have social media.

The three killings occurred in February, continuing the homicide rate that in 1982 put Odessa, with 29.8 homicides per 100,000 population, marginally ahead of Miami, with 29.7 per 100,000, as the city with the highest murder rate per capita in the United States. The figures were compiled by the National Coaltion to Ban Handguns from the Uniform Crime Report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 1982.

Three other Texas metropolitan areas were among the 10 with the most homicides per 100,000 population: Houston, third, with 28.2, Longview-Marshall, fifth, with 21.6, and San Antonio, 10th, with 18.5.

Three more Texas cities were among the top 20 metropolitan areas in terms of homicide rates: Odessa's sister city of Midland, 13th, with 18.0 homicides per 100,000; Waco, 14th, with 17.9, and Dallas-Fort Worth, 18th, with 15.9.

New York City ranked ninth among metropolitan areas, with 19.1 homicides per 100,000 population.

Helobious · January 25, 2022

1980s/early 90s homicide numbers were staggering. Crack epidemic and street gangs going nuts a big part of it.

texasdago · January 25, 2022

4 minutes ago, Helobious said:

1980s/early 90s homicide numbers were staggering. Crack epidemic and street gangs going nuts a big part of it.

My mom and I were having a conversation about this... she was adamant that it was so much safer back then and I kept telling her it was "anything but..." but that's pretty much every older person today. The old days were idyllic and today is the apocalypse.

Ghost of LL · January 25, 2022

49 minutes ago, texasdago said:

"Austin was such a quaint, safe little town in the early 80s... not full of people from California and Adler!?"

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/7254996/

28 minutes ago, texasdago said:

BTW, check out these numbers from 1983 from a New York Times article. Crazy stuff... my mom always talks about how dangerous it is today vs the old days but man the late 70s and 80s were really bad. We just forget and we didn't have social media.

The three killings occurred in February, continuing the homicide rate that in 1982 put Odessa, with 29.8 homicides per 100,000 population, marginally ahead of Miami, with 29.7 per 100,000, as the city with the highest murder rate per capita in the United States. The figures were compiled by the National Coaltion to Ban Handguns from the Uniform Crime Report of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 1982.

Three other Texas metropolitan areas were among the 10 with the most homicides per 100,000 population: Houston, third, with 28.2, Longview-Marshall, fifth, with 21.6, and San Antonio, 10th, with 18.5.

Three more Texas cities were among the top 20 metropolitan areas in terms of homicide rates: Odessa's sister city of Midland, 13th, with 18.0 homicides per 100,000; Waco, 14th, with 17.9, and Dallas-Fort Worth, 18th, with 15.9.

New York City ranked ninth among metropolitan areas, with 19.1 homicides per 100,000 population.

I think there are national crime statistics that put the magic year somewhere around 1992 for when violent crime started consistently decreasing. I may be off by a couple years, but it is in the timeframe.

And there are all kinds of interesting theories for that, from the legalization of abortion to the elimination of lead in gasoline to the theory that we just hit a point where we had incarcerated so many people that crime in the non-incarcerated population had to go down.

There's probably some merit to all of those being some factor to some degree.

Samson's Wig · January 25, 2022

12 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

I think there are national crime statistics that put the magic year somewhere around 1992 for when violent crime started consistently decreasing. I may be off by a couple years, but it is in the timeframe.

And there are all kinds of interesting theories for that, from the legalization of abortion to the elimination of lead in gasoline to the theory that we just hit a point where we had incarcerated so many people that crime in the non-incarcerated population had to go down.

There's probably some merit to all of those being some factor to some degree.

Good thing we're criminalizing abortion again, letting criminals out on low/no bail, and putting lead back in our gasoline. Time to buy some firearms!

texasdago · January 25, 2022

25 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

I think there are national crime statistics that put the magic year somewhere around 1992 for when violent crime started consistently decreasing. I may be off by a couple years, but it is in the timeframe.

And there are all kinds of interesting theories for that, from the legalization of abortion to the elimination of lead in gasoline to the theory that we just hit a point where we had incarcerated so many people that crime in the non-incarcerated population had to go down.

There's probably some merit to all of those being some factor to some degree.

Yeah, I don't know where I can pinpoint the reasons as to why crime dropped nationally but I can tell you that when people bemoan how bad it is now, they just don't have any idea (or choose not to remember)

smuggs · January 25, 2022

55 minutes ago, texasdago said:

The three killings occurred in February, continuing the homicide rate that in 1982 put Odessa, with 29.8 homicides per 100,000 population, marginally ahead of Miami, with 29.7 per 100,000, as the city with the highest murder rate per capita in the United States.

Party in the city where the stink is on.

Hunt Bros. Pizza when the haboob is gone.

Welcome to Odessa.

Ghost of LL · January 25, 2022

15 minutes ago, texasdago said:

Yeah, I don't know where I can pinpoint the reasons as to why crime dropped nationally but I can tell you that when people bemoan how bad it is now, they just don't have any idea (or choose not to remember)

If you go back to the movies of the 80s, it's obvious. Go watch Serpico . . . or any of the Dirty Harry movies . . . or even dystopian shit like RoboCop--the general and overriding societal angst with crime just drips off the screen.

I mean, think about it--dystopian movies are a real insight into the societal worries of the day. Today, our dystopian movies are about climate change or authoritarian governments. That's what we're fucking worried about. In the 80s, it was about crime and a post-nuclear survival.

Don't let anybody tell you that people in the 80s weren't freaked the fuck out about crime. For fuckssake--you had two Democrats running for governor (Jim Maddox and Ann Richards) debating one another about who would put more people in prison/on death row. It was a seriously fucked up time.

texasdago · January 25, 2022

1 minute ago, Ghost of LL said:

If you go back to the movies of the 80s, it's obvious. Go watch Serpico . . . or any of the Dirty Harry movies . . . or even dystopian shit like RoboCop--the general and overriding societal angst with crime just drips off the screen.

I mean, think about it--dystopian movies are a real insight into the societal worries of the day. Today, our dystopian movies are about climate change or authoritarian governments. That's what we're fucking worried about. In the 80s, it was about crime and a post-nuclear survival.

Don't let anybody tell you that people in the 80s weren't freaked the fuck out about crime. For fuckssake--you had two Democrats running for governor (Jim Maddox and Ann Richards) debating one another about who would put more people in prison/on death row. It was a seriously fucked up time.

I remember being more worried about dying in a nuclear war thanks to "The Day After" and "War Games", general conventional war via "Iron Eagle" and "Red Dawn" or being challenged to a breakdancing challenge.

I'm not saying people weren't worried about it then. Remember NY in the 70s and 80s and all the Death Wish movies? I'm saying people today pretend the crime of the past didn't happen and that we all lived in Mayberry.

Deej · January 25, 2022

Wasn't it 1991 that Austin had the Yougurt Shop Murders and McDuff abducting Colleen Reed from the 5th Street car wash and then "using her up" in the same month?

That shit was terrifying. Some drug dealers and gang bangers stepping up their murder rate of each other over the last few years seems quaint by comparison.

Edited January 25, 2022 by Deej

HornOnTheBayou · January 25, 2022

7 minutes ago, Ghost of LL said:

Today, our dystopian movies are about climate change or authoritarian governments. That's what we're fucking worried about.

That's not completely true. Don't Look Up is a pretty popular movie right now and it's just about a meteor hitting the planet with no political message whatsoever. Or at least that's what I was told in the thread about it.

TKthunder2 · January 25, 2022

2 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Explain how police stop murders. Not a one off where a cop was in the right place at the right time but where police actually cause murder rates to decrease at a measurable level.

atomheartbevo · January 25, 2022

1 hour ago, Ghost of LL said:

I think there are national crime statistics that put the magic year somewhere around 1992 for when violent crime started consistently decreasing. I may be off by a couple years, but it is in the timeframe.

And there are all kinds of interesting theories for that, from the legalization of abortion to the elimination of lead in gasoline to the theory that we just hit a point where we had incarcerated so many people that crime in the non-incarcerated population had to go down.

There's probably some merit to all of those being some factor to some degree.

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about abortions in the '70s decreasing crime in the 90s.

And the leaded stuff is an interesting rabbit hole to go down. I had a World Civilization class focused on the Roman Empire era, and the professor discussed theories that Roman society, particularly the upper classes, were victims of lead poisoning thanks to the aqueducts and plumbing, and it was particularly bad in Rome where large numbers relied on plumbing that had lead in it, versus moving out into the rural and frontier areas where water right from the well/spring/river was used.

The lead poisoning led to a lot of violence, degenerate societal views leading to violence between Romans, violence towards criminals/crowds accepting/loving animals tearing people apart, etc. and was perhaps the reason for the batshit Roman emperors. If you study Rome itself, there was crime between residents that was insane compared to what we think of violent crime these days.

Johnny Sack · January 25, 2022

2 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

I think there are national crime statistics that put the magic year somewhere around 1992 for when violent crime started consistently decreasing. I may be off by a couple years, but it is in the timeframe.

And there are all kinds of interesting theories for that, from the legalization of abortion to the elimination of lead in gasoline to the theory that we just hit a point where we had incarcerated so many people that crime in the non-incarcerated population had to go down.

There's probably some merit to all of those being some factor to some degree.

For murders, another factor was just better EMT services and trauma doctors/nurses keeping people who were shot alive. A lot was learned in Viet Nam. And it took some time for it to trickle down. Here is a twenty year old article on the subject that claims the homicide rate would be many times higher but for medical advances.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/

The 80s and 90s had staggering homicide rates in big cities due to the crack epidemic. No doubt the war on drugs, which I disagree with, incarcerating so many people did impact murder rates.

Johnny Sack · January 25, 2022

1 hour ago, Ghost of LL said:

If you go back to the movies of the 80s, it's obvious. Go watch Serpico . . . or any of the Dirty Harry movies . . . or even dystopian shit like RoboCop--the general and overriding societal angst with crime just drips off the screen.

I mean, think about it--dystopian movies are a real insight into the societal worries of the day. Today, our dystopian movies are about climate change or authoritarian governments. That's what we're fucking worried about. In the 80s, it was about crime and a post-nuclear survival.

Don't let anybody tell you that people in the 80s weren't freaked the fuck out about crime. For fuckssake--you had two Democrats running for governor (Jim Maddox and Ann Richards) debating one another about who would put more people in prison/on death row. It was a seriously fucked up time.

And Claytie promising to put juvenile criminals in camps to learn the joys of busting rocks.

Gil Bang · January 25, 2022

5 hours ago, Sandman said:

Sound like people are California-ing your Austin. The bumperstickers aren't working, time for Plan B.

Texas' murder rate is higher than CA's and pretty much always has been.

January 25, 2022

^

well, it's obviously because in Texas...we have to deal with false flag murders by the FBI, Antifa, BLM, Lost Tourists, Kathy Griffin...and a Mister Ronan Sinatra.

(sorry I was just watching a video of confused murderers doing murdering and the media is still saying it was no big deal)

It's impossibly to have conversations about crime with some folks, you fucking children.

MaybeACoordinator · January 26, 2022

Houston had periodic runs as murder capital of America going back to the 1940s or maybe earlier....There was a great headline circa 1950: WHY IS HOUSTON SO KILL-CRAZY?

There were a couple of years where it reigned as murder capital of America in the '70s too and I can tell you from experience, going to HS in SW Houston and living deep inside the loop in the Oil Bust (1984-88) years was pretty fucked up. Weirdly, not quite as bad as when the economy was roaring along, but pretty bad. The Geto Boys were not created in a vacuum.

Criminologists used to explain Houston's high rate in boom times as basically the same reason it's always high under such conditions. You have a bunch of people with limited educations pouring into town to work blue collar jobs and they lose their connections to their friends and families back in the Piney Woods or Detroit or wherever. So they are isolated with maybe their nuclear family and living in some thrown together collection of shacks like Aldine or Galena Park or Cloverleaf. Alcoholism and drug problems flourish when community breaks down. So does domestic violence. And then you had all these dudes down at the beer joints settling debts of redneck honor out in the parking lot. Lots and lots of bodies dropped over pussy. The old fashioned system of courtin' was gone and everybody was out in meat markets....Sometimes in ways you might not enjoy: Johnny Bush, composer of Whiskey River, said he was playing at a Ship Channel joint (Harbor Lights, still exists, barely) and a cook came running out of the kitchen and buried a meat cleaver in a waiter's head. Waiter had been fucking the cook's wife.....I am betting the cook got 3-5 if that.

And that was just the White people.

You also had Fifth Ward as America's most violent neighborhood and some hardcore cholos in El Segundo (Second Ward) already by then. So that's one way you get a terrible murder rate: you essentially have Deadwood, sociologically. It takes decades for churches and schools to tame that shit, if they ever do.

Oil Bust was kinda more standard-issue poverty and drugs -- crack, mainly. The 1980s were the only decade Houston has ever lost population -- not during the Civil War or the Depression. So that boomtown shit died way down, but Houston was rough before it was a boomtown, too, and by this time we were a huge city. What's left of the sentimentalist in me whispers there was a "we're in this together" vibe and every now and then there really would be, as anyone who attended Jean-Michel Jarre's Rendezvous Houston will tell you.

Houston is on some new shit now...I think the population is too young right now. This is mostly young men type crap. Drive-bys, love triangles, gangbangin'....it kind of amazes me the shit that barely makes the news there. About six months ago 18 kids were shot on the set of a rap video but hardly anyone noticed, even though the one fatality was the director of the video, a good kid on track to graduate from UH on the honor roll who was hired only for his camera skills and not any kind of gang affiliation.

18 people shot. Yawn.

Armybrat · January 26, 2022

Bring it assholes, I’m ready...

Biff Tannen · January 26, 2022

4 hours ago, texasdago said:

we didn't have social media.

WINNER

Willfully Horn · January 26, 2022

5 hours ago, StruggleBus said:

.

I don’t neg often, but when I do, it’s for shitty jokes about race.

January 26, 2022

28 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Bring it assholes, I’m ready...

Thank you for the illustration of your ante-bellum vasectomy. Very illustrative.

Biff Tannen · January 26, 2022

2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

The lead poisoning led to a lot of violence, degenerate societal views leading to violence between Romans, violence towards criminals/crowds accepting/loving animals tearing people apart, etc. and was perhaps the reason for the batshit Roman emperors.

I really really feel like this makes sense with what we are seeing from the baby boomers. They spent the entire first half of their lives just walking around huffing lead fumes.

Biff Tannen · January 26, 2022

53 minutes ago, Lobo said:

and a Mister Ronan Sinatra.

this will never not be funny

Foosters · January 26, 2022

I'm not sure our society has fully come to terms with what meth is doing to the minds of our mentally ill, homeless, and addicts. As someone who works in this field, its absolutely terrifying. This aint your grandma's meth:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/

Quote

Barrera is a stocky ex-Marine who’d grown up in the L.A. area. The meth he had been using for several years by then made him talkative and euphoric, made his scalp tingle. But that night, he was gripped with paranoia. His girlfriend, he was sure, had a man in her apartment. No one was in the apartment, she insisted. Barrera took a kitchen knife and began stabbing a sofa, certain the man was hiding there. Then he stabbed a mattress to tatters, and finally he began stabbing the walls, looking for this man he imagined was hiding inside. “That had never happened before,” he told me when I met him years later. Barrera was hardly alone in noting a change. Gang-member friends from his old neighborhood took to calling the meth that had begun to circulate in the area around that time “weirdo dope.”

Quote

Something like the opposite of that has happened with P2P methamphetamine. “Meth reminds me of what alcoholics go through,” Matt Scharf, the director of recovery programs at Midnight Mission, a Los Angeles treatment center, told me. “There’s alcohol everywhere. Meth is now so readily available. There’s an availability to it that is not the case with heroin or crack. It’s everywhere.”

Quote

Over the past year and a half, I’ve talked with meth addicts, counselors, and cops around the country. The people I spoke with told me stories nearly identical to Eric Barrera’s: P2P-meth use was quickly causing steep deterioration in mental health. The symptoms were always similar: violent paranoia, hallucinations, conspiracy theories, isolation, massive memory loss, jumbled speech. Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin—it damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe. “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,”

Quote

Susan Partovi has been a physician for homeless people in Los Angeles since 2003. She noticed increasing mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—at her clinics around the city starting in about 2012. She was soon astonished by “how many severely mentally ill people were out there,” Partovi told me. “Now almost everyone we see when we do homeless outreach on the streets is on meth. Meth may now be causing long-term psychosis, similar to schizophrenia, that lasts even after they’re not using anymore.”

Quote

I called James Mahoney, a neuropsychologist at West Virginia University who had studied the effects of ephedrine meth on the brain in the early 2000s at UCLA. The psychosis he saw then was bad, he said, but it frequently appeared to be the result of extended sleep deprivation. In 2016, Mahoney took a job as a drug researcher and specialist in WVU’s addiction clinic. Less than a year later, the P2P crystal meth from Mexico started showing up. Mahoney was inundated with meth patients who came in ranting, conversing with phantoms. “I can’t even compare it to what I was seeing at UCLA,” he told me. “Now we’re seeing it instantaneously, within hours, in people who just used: psychotic symptoms, hallucinations, delusions.”

In community after community, I heard stories like this.

TLDR: we're fucked

Biff Tannen · January 26, 2022

34 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

Bring it assholes, I’m ready...

January 26, 2022

3 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

this will never not be funny

I swear I'm using it less as the board search stats will bear out. I just saw the latest video and realized...the deniers are literally running out of people to blame it on. After you exhaust all the false flag excuses and the disproved conspiracy theories and the shit thrown out of court because it's insanely false...what was once just a throw-away line that guys like you and me laughed at drunk on a Saturday night...is now probably the next chess piece for the criminally stupid.

Okay, back to Austin crime. I have to admit this latest wave is concerning to me.

Good news is, like most of time in America...the greatest country ever that's so safe unlike the Third World---you now only need to pack two weapons at a time whilst sleeping---most murders (the vast, vast majority) are still happening between people that know one another. Could be drug dealing associates, jilted lovers, domestic violence, childhood beefs coming to fruition in adulthood, et. al. So to use an phrase I hear from a lot of folks I know in Texas, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you ain't got nothing to be worried about..." Having said that, again the criminally stupid...there have been a few as of late that do seem random. And that gives me great pause. You can give the police all the recreational vehicles they want (RIP, Theo)...some of this shit has been doing on for awhile in Texas...and doesn't seem to be slowing down for any fucking side of the aisle.

StruggleBus · January 26, 2022

14 minutes ago, Willfully Horn said:

I don’t neg often, but when I do, it’s for shitty jokes about race.

atomheartbevo · January 26, 2022

40 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I really really feel like this makes sense with what we are seeing from the baby boomers. They spent the entire first half of their lives just walking around huffing lead fumes.

I've seen arguments for and against it when it comes to Rome, but everybody agrees that they had extremely high levels of lead (much higher than what is allowed here in the US as far as exposure) and the water was flowing through it, was sitting in it, they were using lead-lined cups to drink from, etc., and they were cooking in lead containers/pots/pans.

JimmyJames · January 26, 2022

There were 2245 murders in NYC in 1990. Last year there were 488, about the same number they had in 1961.

Anyone who thinks crime is spiraling out of control just doesn’t remember or never knew the 70s and 80s.

JimmyJames · January 26, 2022

4 hours ago, Deej said:

Wasn't it 1991 that Austin had the Yougurt Shop Murders and McDuff abducting Colleen Reed from the 5th Street car wash and then "using her up" in the same month?

That shit was terrifying. Some drug dealers and gang bangers stepping up their murder rate of each other over the last few years seems quaint by comparison.

Yep. Car wash is still there too. Different name. Although now somewhat ironically it’s now a “touch less” car wash.

Cops still haven’t solved the yogurt shop murders either for some reason. FBI has a potential DNA match but is withholding it for “privacy” reasons. Uh huh.

This town can be fucked up sometimes.

Shaggy3.0 · January 26, 2022

7 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Explain how police stop murders. Not a one off where a cop was in the right place at the right time but where police actually cause murder rates to decrease at a measurable level.

You doubt Law & Order SVU? Stabler would like to have a word with you.

Stunns38 · January 26, 2022

There were 2245 murders in NYC in 1990. Last year there were 488, about the same number they had in 1961.
Anyone who thinks crime is spiraling out of control just doesn’t remember or never knew the 70s and 80s.

Yep, however Chicago’s murder rate is creeping toward its record high(970 in 1974). That’s with advanced medical technology and more people locked up. NYC will be ok, Chicago is fucked as crime is widespread even in good areas now. Back in the before the late 90s, it was concentrated in certain areas. I know one cause was the Housing Projects being torn down and those residents dispersing.

That said, agreed that crime is no where as bad as the period ending in the late 90s but there is some concerning increases nationwide.

Ghost of LL · January 26, 2022

32 minutes ago, Shaggy3.0 said:

You doubt Law & Order SVU? Stabler would like to have a word with you.

I think this point is that that's crime-solving. But more police don't do much to prevent crime. That is, unless you hire an absolute absurd number of cops and have one literally on every street corner.

But that's the stupid point about the supposedly magical 2/100,000 number that is thrown about (not just in Austin, but also in Dallas). That isn't near enough cops to actually do much to prevent crime. And the increase is so marginal as to render any improvement in crime-solving statistical noise. So it's really nothing more than just a fop to the police unions, who always want more cops.

As an aside, and nocr--it's always amazing to me that people who are uniformly anti-labor always find that one union that they support unquestioningly.

Onboard 2.0 · January 26, 2022

Murder is up every fucking place every major and not so major city in America right now

jimmyjazz · January 26, 2022

20 hours ago, crash_davis said:

it's an apartment complex, ATX North Apartments, across the street from the LA Fitness.

? Neither are on Burnet. It's the Taco Bell & Bassett Furniture parking lot.

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