Nationally, the clearance rate for arson is typically under 23%, meaning the vast majority of arsonists get away with it.
In general, clearance rates are pretty bad across most crimes. The homicide clearance rate is typically below 62%, clearance rates for non-fatal shootings is typically below 55%, clearance rates for reported rape is typically below 40%, clearance rates for motor vehicle theft is typically below 20%.
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
The last bit sounds like the plot of Minority Report.
I get that being a homicide researcher you're rather working on the assumption that a non-zero homicide rate is a problem that can be solved with a sufficiently clever policy. What if it's just a natural fact, like the laws of gravity? What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
Attacks on cell towers is a very new problem. The 5G conspiracy theories are stupid, but you know, I got into a conversation with some coworkers about them the other day. We all laughed at how dumb these theories are until one guy said his mother believes it and he couldn't find a way to convince her otherwise.
The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle. Communicating with WhatsApp and FB groups of course because of lockdown but people talk in real life too and always will.
The difficulty became apparent when I did a few quick searches for "5g coronavirus theories". The top search results were all attempted debunkings - pretty good. Unfortunately the debunkings themselves were not. I don't think I've ever seen such crap attempts at debunking a conspiracy theory. The top hits were mostly newspapers, and a common theme was "the world is now full of idiots who believe conspiracy theories, like 5G causing coronavirus or that there are cures for COVID" where the latter phrase linked to a doctor selling hydroxychloroquine. Which just yesterday the UK government started buying in bulk in case it turns out to be a cure. The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected) with 5G conspiracy theorists (not normal, not expected).
So this is the first reason why the theories aren't going away - the sort of people who attempt to debunk them keep lumping them together with any skepticism of government policy at all. But most people understand that being skeptical of a global mass house arrest justified via buggy computer model isn't at all irrational, so when they're told 5G theories are just like that, it just makes the problem worse.
For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities. That's why they believe in a massive conspiracy to begin with.
> What possible solution could there be to homicide as a category of crimes beyond literally being able to see into the future or people's brains, a la Minority Report or Black Mirror? Isn't there a risk the mentality of a "war on homicide" (you talk of surrender) is actually more dangerous than the problem itself?
First, I'm going to plant the goalposts. A homicide rate of 0 would be nice, but it's not realistic for any large population. Even in the very well educated, upper-middle class Detroit suburb I grew up in, there was a homicide every 10 years or so (the most recent one was actually done by the dad of one of my friends/a soccer coach of mine; he had a great reputation/was a philanthropist/was president of the local Rotary club, but apparently he was also a pillar of the local S&M community and his wife found out so he had her killed). The goal is to reduce the rate of homicides. And 5 minutes of thought will reveal that that's absolutely possible.
Like many US cities, Chicago is sharply segregated [0]. That link also includes maps of counts of narcotics arrests, homicides, and shootings, and if you cross-reference the narcotics, homicide, shooting, and black residents as a percent of census tract population maps, you'll see they're highly correlated. The vast majority of the violence is in the black neighborhoods. It's an uncomfortable fact, but stay with me. As a liberal, seeing this was initially like a punch to the gut, but it makes sense when you ask the question "why would anyone choose to live in these neighborhoods", and very few choose to live there, rather, most people can't leave. In 2016 (and for the US), the median net wealth of black families was about $17k, while the median net wealth of white families is about $171k, 10x the median net wealth of black families. White people have the funds to climb to better areas with better schools with better economic opportunities and they can afford to buy real estate in good or improving areas which provides those white people with a durable store of value (that has typically appreciated at a compounding rate over the past century), but this increases rents and this pushes black people to areas with lower rents, worse schools, brain-damaging pollution (eg lead paint, lead contaminated water [2][3], air pollution from industry), and much higher rates of violence.
Now to get to the question: what's driving the violence? And it's largely economic. A massive portion of the shootings and homicides are committed by gang members (really neighborhood cliques now, with little or no hierarchy and on the order of 10 members on average) who are in cliques that sell drugs, and from an analysis of cleared homicides and shootings, the shooter and victim are very frequently in geographically adjacent cliques that both sell drugs. In the 1920's, alcohol became a black market good and there was a lot of violence between alcohol traffickers that evaporated when alcohol returned to being a regular market good.
So, do I have to be an omniscient precog from Minority Report to know that [legalizing drugs, eliminating lead exposure, and improving the economic opportunities for black youths by improving the quality of education in all neighborhoods to the level white people enjoy] would drastically reduce the homicide rate? No. Those are obvious steps.
> The source wasn't YouTube. It was just her social circle.
That's kind of like saying "guns don't kill people, blood loss kills people". How do the ideas initially get into the minds of people in her social circle? Per Facebook, a lot of misinformation is financially motivated [4] or geopolitical (from a certain malicious surveillance state that wants time to catch up on 5G development) [5] and spread widely through public groups. If the misinformation was stopped from spreading publicly, it would reach the last leg of the trip to the private group/WhatsApp group phase far less frequently and lead to far less destruction.
> The article also lumped people protesting against lockdown (normal, expected)
No, it's not normal, and the protests have been very small and sparsely attended, but they've been massively amplified by the media [6]. As of May 7th, 68% of Americans (10957 people surveyed) were more worried about restrictions being lifted too early vs 31% that were worried about the lifting too late. And saying you're more worried about the economic harms than the virus is way more normal than actually going into public and gathering in a group with other people who are all intentionally rejecting safety recommendations.
> For these conspiracy theories to be successfully debunked will require the debunkers to stop arguing from authority. People don't trust the authorities.
Yeah, it's not possible to change a conspiracy theorist's mind with facts, because any inconvenient fact can just be interpreted as another part of the conspiracy. To those susceptible to conspiracy theories, there is no known cure to the infection. The only way to avoid outbreaks is to stop transmission.
> If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
Education is the preventative solution. Censorship is just security through obscurity.
It's a possible preventative solution, but when designing anything, you should never forget that you are not the user. You have to design for the user.
How does the ignorant person who is seeking education know which source to believe? Educated or uneducated, when people don't have the time or prior knowledge to evaluate claims on their own, they look to the sources they already trust, especially when they're scared. In the US, tens of millions of people deeply trust Trump, and many people are afraid of dying from COVID-19. Trump has been regularly praising hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure ever since an attorney/blockchain enthusiast named Gregory Rigano misrepresenting himself as a Stanford Med School Advisor on Tucker Carlson's show [0] (see too_much_detail below) and misrepresented a bad study to assert hydroxychloroquine had a 100% cure rate. Trump has been telling people to take this drug constantly, claiming he's taking it personally. However, in a study by the VA of hydroxychloroquine's effect on 368 COVID-19 patients, the hydroxychloroquine-only group was associated with increased overall mortality (Rates of death in the HC, HC+AZ, and no HC groups were 27.8%, 22.1%, 11.4%, respectively) [3]. Considering
Many people will die because Trump and the GOP are miseducating people. Why shouldn't YouTube improve the quality of the content on their platform by removing lethal misinformation? YouTube and FaceBook were able to greatly limit the spread of the ChristChurch mass murder (by rejecting video's with matching hashes, looping in human reviewers, and other means) such that I never saw the video, so it's not a technological issue.
too_much_detail: {where he falsely presented himself as a "Stanford Univ Med School Adviser" [1] and claimed a "well-controlled [false], peer-reviewed [false] study carried out by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world Didier Raoult MD Ph.D. ... enrolled 40 patients, again a well controlled study [still false, no randomization, no blind, treatment group was from one hospital in Marseille (mean age 51.2), while the control group was from hospitals in southern France (mean age 37.3) [2]] peer-reviewed [still false] study, showed a 100% cure rate [false, 100% of the people who were swabbed every day, which excluded 1 patient that died and 3 that went into the ICU [2]]. The study was released this morning on my Twitter account."}
And the actual clearance-by-arrest rates are lower than those values.
And conviction rates are even lower. (*edit: relative to the total number of crimes. Conviction rates are pretty high for the cases that State's Attorneys or prosecutor's offices accept and agree to prosecute)
The standard of proof for State's Attorneys/prosecutors to accept a case from Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) is pretty high, and it's expensive to build and prosecute cases. Clearance rates would be higher if law enforcement agencies had high definition surveillance camera networks covering all public spaces, but I think people would also find that solution unappealing.
I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago and I've come to the conclusion that the legal system will never be able to solve or even make a significant dent in the homicide problem, and taking a "law enforcement only" approach is the same as just surrendering to the problem forever. If you want to solve crime problems, you have to explore preventative solutions, namely give people better paths and eliminate paths that empirically lead to only bad destinations.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...