No, rural areas tend to have a larger proportion of poverty, as you can see mentioned in the section called Geography of Poverty below (but it’s not a huge difference):
Concentrated, dense, impoverished populations tend to have more crime than dispersed impoverished populations. There are a number of reasons for that, but again, it’s not the political affiliation of who is nominally in charge that makes the difference.
Does the NG have the authority to arrest people? WTF are they gonna do? Oh, right, waste money. We should get Elon on this right away.
History might provide some guidance.
As it says in the articles linked to below, population density by itself has no correlation with crime rates. Poverty does correlate with crime rates. Poor people tend to be both the victims and the perpetrators of crime:
Did you actually read your cite? From the first document:
For the Pacific area there was no significant association between violent and property crime rates and SMSA population density; for the Northeast, significant correlations were found for both property and violent crimes. In the Pacific area, no significant association was found between city population density and property crime rates, while violent crime rate and density showed a significant correlation. In the Northeast cities, violent, but not property, crime rates were correlated with population density. Despite significant relationships between population density and crime rates, these occurred at low levels and were not consistent between the geographical regions or population groupings. Thus, while population density may affect crime rates, there may be other factors which exert a stronger influence on crime patterns. Tabular data, appendixes, and 4 references are provided.
Clearly not so cut and dried as you implied, because in some places there seems to be a relationship.
Also, when you have a politician going “RAOOOORGH! Chicago had 3,000 murders last year” then pointing to a rural county that had maybe 3 said politician is not comparing apples and oranges. In a comparison like that the per capita rate is a better measure. But said politician will continue yelling about the higher number because either he has no comprehension of statistics, or he does but he understands the average person does not.
One would actually expect even the per capita violent crime rate to be proportional to population density, because violent crime is, fundamentally, an interaction between two people, and the number of interactions between people is proportional to the square of the density of people.
There are correlations between density and crime in certain cities in certain regions. Not in all regions and all cities. As it says, there may be other factors that affect where density happens to correlate in some cities and some regions. If you deliberately shove the poor into certain cities and certain regions, there’s where the poverty will be.
Crime is a learned behavior:
It’s like the old joke, “Hey, why do you rob banks?” “Because that’s where the money is!”
People get murdered in cities, because that’s where the people are.
To be fair, it’s always sounded wrong.
This was in response to one of my posts, and so I suppose it can be construed as labeling me as a mainstream pundit (albeit highly amateur).
There are some pretty extreme MAGA takedowns that I do almost totally agree with. Here is an example that you may agree with – even if you have big problems with the author, Andrew Sullivan, on issues not in this link:
What I do try to be careful about (not that I have 100% avoided it) is criticizing Trump and MAGA for speculative misconduct neither yet done nor yet promised. Maybe this is silly, but I think of how a lurker on the edge of becoming anti-Trump might react. They reasonably would wonder why I was making or accepting criticisms for misdeeds he hasn’t done.
It will take a big tent to repair the MAGA, damage, and I don’t mean to throw anyone out of it, left or right.
I don’t see anything in there about the NG arresting anyone.
I wasn’t referring to you as a pundit; I meant the actual pundits on CNN, et al roundtable discussions who are still talking about polling approval ratings and what kind of language and questions Chuck Schumer should use in his next “strongly worded letter” to the White House.
I’m not generally a big fan of Andrew Sullivan even though I think he’s a smart guy and a good writer, but frankly I agree with nearly everything he wrote in that post except that Trump’s ‘Gold Force One’ Qatari jet isn’t going to be up and running by next year (unless he tells the Air Force to not bother with the modifications that are standard on other Air Force One aircraft). And I agree that even if Trump keels over today and Republicans abandon his successor en masse, there is still critical damage that has been done to democratic institution at a rate even greater than the erosion that started post-September 11, 2001, and to our economic strength and foreign influence on politics since the Clinton era. We have been sliding into autocracy for a long time (and some would say it has always been a part of the ‘American Experience’ if you were in the permanent underclasses whose representation has always been fleeting or obstructed) but the re-election of a president who nakedly advocated for election fraud and incited and insurrection laid bare how many Americans feel about competitive elections and democratic norms.
I suspect another American president—Republican or Democrat—is going to wield the sword of executive authority with even more performative aggression just to show that they can, and that the Congress and Supreme Court will remain hobbled and compromised for the foreseeable future. But I fear that the people who are actually making decisions within this regime don’t plan to let things go that far even if they have to Weekend at Bernie’s Donald Trump through the mid-terms and then consolidate their power afterward. That may or may not go the way they want but while I see Republicans setting up to make a play for home base, Democrats just seem to be milling about in the midfield, hoping for a pop fly that just lands into the pitcher’s glove while they continue to bash on ‘overly progressive’ elements of the party under the thesis that embracing change will divide them even more than Democrats effectively bending over for Trump haven’t done that already.
Stranger
Leading Texas Republicans are saying that Democrats “can’t be allowed to have power back” and that’s their justification for gerrymandering. The National Guard is being organized as a federal police unit.
I had breakfast this morning with a smart never-Trumper friend who believes this will all blow over. I think concrete actions are being taken to nullify future elections and it can’t get any clearer. My friend won’t get it until January 2027 when the NG prevents new Democratic House members from entering the building.
You asked two questions: do they have arrest powers and WTF are they going to do? As to arrest powers, it’s complicated, but yes, the President can give them arrest powers or they can temporarily detain people and turn them over to police for arrest. As to WTF are they going to do, that is the point of my original post. I think the sky is the limit, from physically blocking access to the Capitol to democratic congresspeople, preventing legitimate protests, to overreacting to perceived threats the way that the NG did at Kent State. The only thing they surely will not be doing is helping to address “ordinary” crime in DC.
Well, we know Trump just lies and gaslights. But he made it sound like they would be acting like regular cops ‘Cleaning up crime in the streets’ (whatever that is).
Well, they came to Los Angeles and put an end to our massive riots (which occupied about a two square block area, and since LAPD plus National Guard outnumbered demonstrators by a wide margin it’s kind of generous to say that they ‘occupied’ even that much).
Trump has no earthly idea how anything actually works, hence his record of driving multiple waterfront casinos into bankruptcy, and just imagines that he can snap his fingers and people will do his bidding. That didn’t work for him very well last time because despite his best efforts he still managed to appoint some competent people who would tell him, “No, sir, I won’t order soldiers to shoot demonstrators in the legs,” but this time around he has ensured that nobody directly around him is defiant or in any way devoted to anything but serving him, and you can imagine Hegseth eagerly issuing illegal and orders even if he knew them to be unconstitutional. So…who knows what is going to happen. Certainly not the National Guardsmen who are caught in the middle of this clusterfuck.
Stranger
I wonder not expectantly how much Americans will accept from this asshole Trump.
Well, enough of them voted for him even after seeing his character on display for four years ending in a petulant refusal to accept the results of a legitimate election and then crown off his term by inciting an insurrection, and even among those who oppose him there wasn’t enough to prevent giving his party a legislative majority of supplicants. If we’re being completely honest we’ll note that a large number of Americans have somewhat fascistic-compliant tendencies and a penchant for hero worship and cults of identity of badly flawed people who do terrible thinks, nakedly lie about it to the public, and then are fêted anyway, and no, I’m not talking about just Dick Nixon (or Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, or any other single figure in presidential history).
Donald Trump is, in a way, the logical end conclusion to the intellectual and ethical slide of an United States that loudly proclaims its moral superiority and indomitable economic prowess and then proceeds to do everything possible to demonstrate how hypocritical and incompetent it can actually be, seemingly with deliberate intent. It’s a kind of performative nihilism complete with the disestablishment of the world’s best disease surveillance and public health research establishment by an ambulance-chasing nutjob that parallels the deliberate ecological destruction and destabilization of any political movement that isn’t aligned with or just happens to be in the way of American interests. Trump threatening Canada, Denmark, and Panama makes total sense in that context, because if you’ll turn on your allies imagine what you’ll do to your enemies. (Embrace them, apparently.)
Everything is so stupid, now, and Trump is the perfect topper on that cake; a rambling, corrupt moron who can’t even make money when the house odds favor him but has scammed tens of millions of people—including billionaires with ‘fuck you’ wealth who can’t be arsed to say “Fuck you!” to Trump—into making him fake rich and giving him plenary authority over the country to do with as he sees fit.
Stranger