Oh, hey, new statistics-driven research rabbithole that is going to radicalize me. Neat!
Oh. Hey. New information access conundrum that is going to radicalize me. Fuck.
Here's the thing, there is a lot of REALLY REALLY excellent, interesting information out there that demonstrates trends and patterns that could be used to help people be less manipulable and more effective and could help people to better understand the world they are actually living in and not the world that is being terrifylingly presented to them by like, three corporations that make earthshaking amounts of money off of their fear.
And that information lives on insecure county websites and university databases that haven't been updated since 2009 and is completely opaque and tremendously difficult to verify if you don't have a ton of time and a ton of skills available to throw at the problem.
Long story short:
In 2024, homicide was the cause of death for 5% of the deaths of homeless people in Los Angeles County.
In 2022, homeless people were 20% of the victims of homicide in LA county.
15% of the homicide deaths in LA county from 2018 to 2022 where unhoused people. In that same time period, 14% of the homicide deaths in LA county were women.
Unhoused people are less than a tenth of a percent of the population of Los Angeles County but are somewhere between 15-20% of the murder victims in the county.
PEH Report on Mortality Trends among the unhoused population of LA county from 2015 to 2024.
LA County Public Health table of homicide victims per year 2018 to 2022.
LA County Medical Examiner's 2024 Annual Report.
The article that got me to start digging here - reporting that homicide was the cause of death for 5% of homeless people got me to ask "if homicide is responsible for 5% of homeless deaths in this analysis, what percent of the homicide total for that year was homeless people [15%] and what percentage of the total population were homeless people? [.077186%]"
Anyway.
The way that we report on crime is absolutely bug fuck insane and I'm forever mad about the way that violent crime is framed in our news media.
If you want to reduce the total number of abortions, the best way to do that is to give free birth control to everyone who wants it and to provide as much education about reproductive health to as many people as early as you possibly can.
If you want to reduce the homicide rate, there are lots of things that could help but one big thing could be immediately housing a population that is tremendously vulnerable to being murdered with no questions about sobriety or work requirements or mental illness.
This could be at least partially paid for by the savings from the county policing and medical systems that have resources tied up by the crime and medical emergencies associated with having a large unhoused population.
But when you look at the reaction that people have to these kinds of statistics, it becomes clear that many people don't want to actually reduce the number of abortions or drop the homicide rate, they want a society in which people are punished for behaving in ways that they find distasteful.
Which is not a problem that can be solved by statistics but is also not a problem that I think is impossible to solve.
Anyway. Housing for all, housing forever, housing first!
I posit that this would also immediately drop the number of fentanyl deaths, btw.
“it becomes clear that many people don't want to actually reduce the number of abortions or drop the homicide rate, they want a society in which people are punished for behaving in ways that they find distasteful”
I think this explains a lot of how conservatives think based on conversations I’ve had.
As a leftist who has been yelled at a lot by other leftists for things like "occasionally paying for entertainment" and "not loudly denouncing voting as a concept because it undermines consensus decisionmaking" it is really important for me to emphasize that an impulse toward punishment can be present in most kinds of ideologies needs to be interrogated no matter your political alignment.
