new york times

Drug use and the crime rate?

jonlasser

An article in this week’s New York Times Week in Review section about the difficulty in explaining changes in the crime rate contains the following claim:

The idea that illegal drug use drives up crime is not bolstered by statistics that show that the percentage of those arrested in New York City with illegal drugs in their system has remained more or less flat, Mr. Zimring said.

Now, I may be a simple caveman, but it seems to me that illegal drug use could boost the crime rate without changing the proportion of people arrested who have illegal drugs in their system.

Let’s assume for a moment that drugs in fact do cause crime. I’m not sure I agree with the assertion, but let’s take it at face value for the time being. In a high-drug (and thus high-crime) environment, non-drug-users may commit more crimes. One reason might be that the social norms of a high-crime society might encourage even non drug users to participate; another might be because they engage in and profit from the drug trade without being drug users themselves.

An alternative explanation might involve that the only people tested for drugs in the above scenario are arrestees, people who were caught, or who might not even be responsible for the crime of which they’re expected. I’m guessing that a high percentage of people arrested have drugs in their system, and that might be the reason they’re caught, regardless of any other police work. The preference for arresting drug users over others might account for the relatively constant proportion of people arrested with drugs in their system.

I’m not saying that either of these explanations is the answer here; just that they can explain the presented evidence without challenging the notion that drugs and crime are related.

Boing Boing, Violet Blue, and Web Collage

jonlasser

Now that The New York Times has weighed in on the Boing Boing versus Violet Blue imbroglio, a topic where I didn’t realize I had much to say, I realized that I did have a couple of words.

I think it’s really very good when people reconsider the things they’ve said in conversation. My goodness, you can still find things I wrote on the Internet ten or fifteen years ago, and I certainly don’t think all of the same things now. I think that the evolution of personal viewpoints is normal, and healthy, and should be welcome.

However, I think it’s really bad when you pretend not to have said the things that you previously did. To enforce this kind of ex post facto internal consistency is dishonest. Maybe not to-the-core dishonest, but certainly untrustworthy, and in general not the kind of conversational partner I want to have.

I think that de-publishing is much closer to (but not the same as) pretending you never said something than it is to reconsidering previous viewpoints. It does strike me as uncomfortably Orwellian, even if it is a private group doing it, rather than the government. I mean, how would people feel if the New York Times decided to remove every mention of Monica Lewinsky from their archive due to poor behavior on her part? If Warren Ellis is right, and Cory and Xeni are the “cut and paste editors of the Internet,” then it matters, regardless of whether that job was thrust upon them or one that they willingly embraced.

Finally, wading through blog comments on this whole issue reminds me why it’s a good thing to keep your conversations small in the first place.