Social work may be playing key role in our low murder rate this year

And? Prevention is still the better way to, well, prevent deaths.

I have known and still know a lot of ER and EMT folks - not a one of them would prefer to have plenty of work saving mangled people if mangled people can be not mangled.

They do incredibly important work, it's true! But I don't think there's been a sudden increase in their number, skill, or availability that would explain such a large drop in the murder rate. Rather, isn't there an *understaffing* problem?

(I'm using 6 because of the numbers in the article, but in fact you'd want to look at how many standard deviations out that number is, and on a per capita basis, or something like that.)

That part of what social workers do is connect people with employment opportunities?

In regards to gun ownership, it's never been easier to obtain a firearm, legally or illegally in MA.

For legal ownership, the police can't reject an application unless the person has a criminal record. After a recent SCOTUS ruling, the police can't consider your rationale for wanting a weapon. (You don't need to claim it's for sport or protection.)

For illegal ownership, given other states keep reducing or eliminating the buyer restrictions, it's trivial for someone to buy a gun elsewhere and keep/sell it in MA.

The economic fundamentals explain the reduction in violence better than anything else. Keeping people gainfully employed is the best violence prevention.

Just adding a factor that's not so much an on off switch as something that's been changing for a few years now...

It would be interesting to run a regression between gun violence and weather, although I'm not sure there's really a rich enough data set and I bet there's way too much noise. It's been a bit cooler this year than the past couple of years, but that's probably only a small part (plus it was a good deal warmer in Jan/Feb/Mar and shootings were down then, too). Based on the data Adam has going back to 2013 (although the 2013 data seems to have dropped off the site)), there are more murders in summer (May-Oct) than winter (Nov-Apr), 56% during the summer months. But even over 10 years it's a small data set.

Overall crime (counting all Part 1 crime equally) is flat because of a rise in "other larceny" which is up and is the largest category. Luck has something to do with it; murder is down 83% while shooting incidents are only down 37% and shooting victims down 48%, which are still quite significant. There have been 26 shooting incidents this year, slightly more than one per week.

The other thing to add to the list above would be a low baseline. Boston has had a relatively low murder rate, compared to many other cities its size, for a while. A lot of that due to the factors above.

I have access to more recent data (can't share it) but I'm not seeing any such "explosion" in Boston. Opioid-related EMS events dropped substantially in Q4 of 2023 and the drop is continuing.

Public release data here:
https://www.mass.gov/lists/current-overdose-data
Dashboard here: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/ems-regional-opioid-related-incident-d...

Nobody Left To Kill In Smoking Ruins Of Socialist Democratic City

"liberals putting hard working gun manufacturers out of business"

Average 1980-1991 was 98, and 1989-1991 119.

Average in 1992-2000 was 62, average 1998-2000 35.

So, yes a big drop, with a lot of potential explanations.

Data from here for 1980-2000 and elsewhere for more recent years with some slightly less robust data: a 7-year rolling average for the since 1986 (for previous 7 years, inclusive, 7 picked completely arbitrarily):

1986 — 92.7
1987 — 90.4
1988 — 89.4
1989 — 90.7
1990 — 98.3
1991 — 102.7
1992 — 100.7
1993 — 99.7
1994 — 101.0
1995 — 101.4
1996 — 95.3
1997 — 81.0
1998 — 69.7
1999 — 63.7
2000 — 55.3
2001 — 52.6
2002 — 47.4
2003 — 44.6
2004 — 47.1
2005 — 52.7
2006 — 59.0
2007 — 62.7
2008 — 62.1
2009 — 60.3
2010 — 64.7
2011 — 65.0
2012 — 62.6
2013 — 58.3
2014 — 56.3
2015 — 53.1
2016 — 53.3
2017 — 51.1
2018 — 50.1
2019 — 47.9
2020 — 49.6
2021 — 47.7
2022 — 47.9
2023 — 45.7

(If someone can point me to good numbers since 2000 … I'm sure they exist somewhere!)

So, yeah, there was an uptick in the early 2000s and then a slow downward trend. Last year was the lowest since 1999 and the second lowest on record (at least … in a long while, probably a century). The disappearance of the mob probably doesn't hurt, either. The question will be where this year winds up. 31 is the previous low, right now on track for 9.

(I'd be surprised if there's not some regression to the mean, but if we averaged the June-Dec median for the past 10 years the rest of the year, we'd be around 32. In the past calendar year there have been 22; last year was pretty normal until mid-May and then other than a bloody July was way below.)