Yeah, many of us that grew up in SoCal recall the heist that led to the so called 'assault weapon' ban, it was completely legal to have a long barrel rifle with 30 round magazines in CA prior to that--they could be open-carried if not loaded back then if I recall correctly, too.
This was around the time of the LA riots in the 90s, too... which in my mind all happened at the same time as I recall being a kid sat in front of the TV not far from it all and being shocked at the level of wanton destruction.
California was always a wild place since its inception and before it was ever a part of the US--many who live here don't even realize that California (both alta and baja) pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism by a significant margin.
LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US, so us multi-generationals lived through that and adapted and we are am entirely different breed to the transplants and the rest of the US as fires and earthquakes were also taking place alongside those events, as those didn't stop either.
And while I personally have no desire to live in CA anytime soon, except the occasional visit, I'm glad so many decided to leave since COVID. In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
I grew up in a leafy village in rural UK. But at one point in the early 90s my dad got an offer to move to SoCal and we went out, I remember visiting schools and stuff, but we never actually went ahead with the move.
Apparently while we were there my dad witnessed the car in front of him being robbed at gunpoint, but decided perhaps that was a one off, don't tell the family, perhaps it's fine... then the exact same thing happened the next night at nearly the same spot.
It's sort of funny how you get used to things and normalize them, especially the violence that occurs in the US. I lived in Chicago for nearly a decade, much of it on the near west side, and it was normal to hear gunshots a few blocks away. Violent crime was normal - a pub restaurant I used to take my kids to along with other families, had a brutal murder where someone got their throat slit. And I wasn't living in a "bad" area either, it was filled with affluent middle class families. This was also with two coal fired power plants puffing away right in the middle of the city (this was in the 2000s even, what a joke!). Everyone just accepted these things as normal for living in Chicago. The US can be weirdly dissonant place at times.
Just a point of clarification for those not familiar with the heist, the weapons used were -not- legal in CA or the US. It was also during the time of the Federal Assault Weapons ban. They were not owned nor able to be owned legally during that time.
So to clarify that...the federal Assault Weapons Ban applied to semi-auto rifles with certain ergonomic features, including pistol grips, flash hiders, and folding stocks. (Semi-auto is one bullet per trigger pull, full-auto means you can hold the trigger down and spray bullets.)
The North Hollywood robbers had illegally modified their weapons to enable full-auto fire. Since well before 1997, modifying guns like this has been a federal felony that gets you a ten-year prison sentence. That's a prohibition that predates the Assault Weapon Ban, which had nothing to do with full-auto weapons.
The AWB has since expired, and doing your own full-auto conversion will still get you ten years in the slammer. You can buy a full-auto weapon, but only after an extensive background check and approval of your local sheriff, if your state allows it, and only if the weapon was manufactured before 1986.
The movie Heat, of course, also had its robbers using full-auto. Incidentally, the movie came out before the North Hollywood robbery; many people have actually blamed the movie for inspiring the real robbers, one of whom owned a copy of the movie!
> Just a point of clarification for those not familiar with the heist, the weapons used were -not- legal in CA or the US. It was also during the time of the Federal Assault Weapons ban. They were not owned nor able to be owned legally during that time.
Only semi-correct, they had full-auto AK47s and extended mags, all of which at the time could be purchased and legally owned with a special stamp by the ATF [0]. As a child a friend's father had one he would bring out on new years to only short lived amusement in the neighborhood as we all lived in a densely populated suburb near a major freeway.
But without them, yes, you couldn't just go to a store and buy one off the shelf.
thats right. what it did was giving the police more militarization and most police now carry an ar in their cruisers(used to be shotgun at best) and also lot more military surplus like nraps.
> Yeah, many of us that grew up in SoCal recall the heist that led to the so called 'assault weapon' ban
I always heard it was events in California (and Diane Feinstein being a key player) that created the ban, but I never heard a specific event in SoCal being the catalyst. Wikipedia cites a school shooting in Stockton in 1989 and an office shooting in San Francisco in 1993. Outside of the state, Wikipedia also cites a mass shooting in Killeen, TX.
> LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US
Might be true, but also: the 1980s was near the peak of violent crime certainly nation-wide, maybe worldwide. Lots written and studied on this topic. Theories about lead poisoning and all that. Probably multiple factors. But a lot of the discussion then was on urban crime. People thought that cities were dangerous. I'm glad that the last 20 years or so has largely seen a reversal of that.
Lately there has been a resurgence, especially in the political right, of the cities are dangerous mantra. It seems pretty odd to me.
Reply All Podcast, ep 127/128 seemed to claim it's actually not that much better in NYC now. Instead they claim the way of reporting crimes has changed to make the numbers look better than they actually are
IIRC, the reason the LA heist in the early 90s was so important was that it showed how poorly the police were armed compared to the robbers. That led to a lot of policy changes, I believe.
some cities have been trending upwards in murders over the last decade. Baltimore had almost as many murders in 2019, 2017, and 2015 as it had in 1993, the all time high. the population was significantly larger then, making the 2019 rate the highest it's ever been.
> many who live here don't even realize that California (both alta and baja) pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism by a significant margin.
Alta California was first colonized in 1769, not long before a bunch of British colonies on the other side of the continent that had been settled for quite a while broke off to form the USA; Baja was colonized from 1683. Neither predates British colonization of North America, and the colonization of Alta California only barely predates US independence.
AFAIK Spanish arrived in California around 16th Century, Cortés, Ulloa and Cabrillo led expeditions and created small settlements between 1530 and 1550.
Sir Francis Drake declared English sovereignty over the area of SF bay in 1579 and named it New Albion (New Britain, from Albion, the old Greek name for Britain).
> And while I personally have no desire to live in CA anytime soon, except the occasional visit, I'm glad so many decided to leave since COVID.
> In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
I'm curious what you mean by this. What would change for you to be tempted to go back and what do the people that are leaving since COVID have to do with it?
>And while I personally have no desire to live in CA anytime soon, except the occasional visit, I'm glad so many decided to leave since COVID. In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
A bank robbery every hour?
And I thought my nostalgia for the leaded gasoline and burning asbestos tram breaks smells was odd.
More like a reminder that primitive tendencies can revert Society back to its violent mean really quickly and that in turn instilled a need to want to preserve what we have and build resilient communities to that end as we all felt vulnerable to that ever-present danger.
The fact that no one speaks to their neighbors now is a stark contrast to my childhood in the late 80s and 90s where every kid on the block was a part of the after school 'clique' in one way or another and we looked out for each other so we helped one another in times of need with no real hesitation. It was common to have parents drop off the neighbors kids at different school in exchange for a place to hang out after school and place at the dinner table that night while the parents worked OT etc... This was rotational and we often were at each others homes on different days of the week.
Bi-monthly neihborhood bbqs/potlucks were typical things and were way less tense then some mandated HOA sanctioned community watch meeting where people just snitch on each other and was more a casual event to eat and build bonds share a dish from your families native land with our local neighbors. Many of those people had to leave as things got more and more expensive as time went on and it was a somber experience even to this day.
Then, to me, it abruptly went completely away in the 2000s when ignoring your community completely became normal, and I'm guilty of this, too; I no longer wanted to be a part of the new crowds or integrate into the new ones and sought refuge Online instead as those crowds that were made up of 'less interesting people from somewhere else' so unless we had specific and obvious interests aligned I never bothered, and even then it would be short lived as they were built on very fickle forms of self-interest.
And this persisted until I left CA for the first time.
Again, its probably all survivor bias, and I knew way too many kids in the neighborhood or not far away who died due to gang violence (the shootings at the counter strike internet cafes were particular bad in my area [0]) so I"m not trying to glamorize that aspect. Its just that much like in places with incredibly cold and snowy winters you learn to appreciate one another and their roles in your Life, and since SoCal has perfect weather nearly all year around this was the closest thing that made us see past our superficial differences, and somehow latently knowing it could all go away in a flash gave a stark reminder of how valuable and integral that is to one's quality of Life. You hear this a lot amonst the Korean survivors of the LA riots when the Police abandoned them and left them to fend for themselves, that really hit hard for me and was what made me look past my previously held prejudice of foul smelling kimchi and started eating, cooking and enjoying their cuisine.
> And I thought my nostalgia for the leaded gasoline and burning asbestos tram breaks smells was odd.
I'm a big proponent of EV in a large part because I recall how light headed and nauseating I'd felt riding in the tailgate of a 70s pick up truck on the way to the local to in-n-out or to AM/PM as well as seeing images of the smog of LA would creep in on bad days and the poor air quality all year round was most of my Life as a kid. I don't desire for any of that, despite a large part of my career being tied to the Auto Industry I'm glad we're seeing EV taking over as I remember how orange and brown the sky looked back then.
Regardless of what one thinks of guns, it is technically is still legal to both keep and bear the arms that include a long barrel rifle as well as any amount of ammunition one wants, it is actually the state government in this case that is in gross violation of the Constitution’s law prohibiting the government infringing on the right to keep and bear arms. Just because an illegal law is passed does not nullify and superior law or right; for example, just because CA were to one day decide that freedom is illegal or, inversely, involuntary servitude is now legal, does not only not negate the God given right to freedom, nor does it even negate an inferior amendment to the Constitution barring such an abuse of freedom.
You could be right. The problem is to get there, you’ll need to endure a lengthy court process and enormous legal bills, plus you’ll live a long time in uncertainty.
When pundits --on either side of the pollical spectrum--talk about how bad America is or how things are on the verge of collapse societally, show them stats such as this. By almost every metric, as bad as things may seem, they were objectively worse decades ago. Yeah, it feels like people are angrier than ever, especially online, but Twitter is not real life.
A combination of increased tech surveillance, longer prison sentences, and bank tellers holding very little cash--all of these factors make bank robbery much less lucrative than it was in the past.
It's not just bank robbery. Every crime category is now much lower than it was in 1990, in every jurisdiction of the USA. Even if you take a city that people think is ridiculously dangerous, like Camden, New Jersey, the homicide rate was triple 25 years ago.
Not just in the US. Also in Europe and most of the developed world. Violence peaked in 80's - 90s and then started to decrease dramatically.
Lead–crime connection is the strongest explanation. Past lead exposure functions as a predictor for criminal activity. Crime starts to drop in every country after the use of leaded gasoline is forbidden.
I keep hearing that crime in rural areas has been going up and that now even cake wrangling is a problem liked in old wild west movies. Your general point that on a lawyer scale we are safer than ever stands
Unfortunately, this talking point (one I’ve put to good use over the last 20 years) is on shakier ground recently. Crime rates have have been rising for several years now in many U.S. cities and in some cases they’ve eclipsed the 90s highs.
> When pundits --on either side of the pollical spectrum--talk about how bad America is or how things are on the verge of collapse societally, show them stats such as this. By almost every metric, as bad as things may seem, they were objectively worse decades ago.
Don't forget that you're only looking at LA right now and your claim that things "were objectively worse decades ago" only generalizes to the cities on the West/East Coast. In contrast, rural areas are worse off economically compared to 30, 40 years ago.
Ransomware, hacking, etc. should be counted in those numbers to compare. I'll bet that it is way more lucrative and way easier to get a big payout today than when you had to go there with a gun.
I think prison sentence length has generally been shown to be not very effective as a deterrent? My impression is that for most crimes the marginal effect of increasing the penalty by an additional year in prison is just to remove potential offenders from the free population without much decreasing the risk of any particular person offending. (And the sentences for bank robbery are long enough that by the time you get out you're too old to want to commit again anyways.)
There is just too much, too detailed information for an average person to process. The democracy of the 1800s, or rather the assumption that a voter can even begin to understand the impact of their vote (or apply any basic filter to whom they are about to mimic), does not scale well into 2000s. Subtler feedback loops would be more efficient.
It’s interesting as an older person to realize that Americans born in the 90s and later have no real concept of the amount of crime and violence that was widespread in US.
Also interesting that as a kid born in 1980 at the start of the drug violence epidemic, we were allowed to roam as we pleased as long as we were home for dinner. Contrast that to today's vastly safer world, and kids are not allowed to walk the neighborhood unsupervised.
Whenever the high crime rates in the 70s-90s is brought up I like to remind folks this was likely an aberration with a specific environmental cause (lead), rather than representative of human nature.
This [1] is an eye-opening roundup of ~25 major studies that support the lead-crime hypothesis, including comparisons across countries & cultures. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and certainly changed my perspective on human nature, which for me had previously been influenced by both growing up around the violence in CA in the 80s-90s and the media culture that depicted and sensationalized it.
If you walk away from this thinking 'oh, humans are a lot less violent than I thought they were', you might find other beliefs built on top of that assumption also follow. These types of perspective shifts in life are rare, and very powerful.
Now consider the lead politics hypothesis. If lead exposure lead to brain damage that resulted in the murder rate tripling, what is that doing to civic politics? Because while that generation has mostly aged out of the higher crime demographic. It's smack in the middle of the voter demographic.
Unfortunately, homicide rates in some U.S. cities are nearing (and in some cases eclipsing) their early 90s highs. As I often do, I’ll use St. Louis as an example here, because it’s the city I happen to be most familiar with, but this is happening all over. I completely bought the story you’re telling and never thought we’d ever see homicide rates matching the gang-war carnage of early 90s St. Louis, but we’re blowing past those rates, in fact.
That’s not to say the lead story is bunk, but, sadly, I don’t think you can draw the conclusion that those earlier rates were uniquely aberrant.
My point was that if you baselined how good or bad you thought humans were by the crime rates in the 80s, you'd come away thinking humans were way more violent than they are. I think the same holds for 2020 - if you assess human nature by how people act when they're in the midst of a global pandemic, you'd come to the same incorrect conclusion.
Another way to put it is that much of our behavior is dictated by our environment, and if we create an environment where extreme chemical, biological, psychological, and economic stressors are kept at bay, then humans are just not prone to a great deal of violence.
HARP
This is us. Bank Robbery. And
you're in the bank-robbery capital
of the world--
UTAH
1322 last year in LA county. Up 26
percent from the year before.
HARP
That's right. And we nailed over a
thousand of them. We did it by
crunching data. Good crime-scene
work, good lab work, and most importantly
good data-base analysis. Special agent Utah.
Are you receiving my signal?
UTAH
Zero distortion, sir.
Not that it drastically improves the statement, but the tagline for the article
> a bank was robbed every hour of every day.
But the article itself clarifies they mean "each banking day" and the worst year had about seven robberies a day. Still a shocking amount, but not the 24 a day implied.
The 80s were a crime paradise.--drug gangs, mafia, wall st white collar crime, informercial scams, televangelist and cult scams --you name it, it all thrived in the 80s.
Well... I agree that at least Scientology has died down a little (even though Shelly Miscavige is still missing), but televangelists are as strong as ever, and not just that Kenneth Copeland guy.
> The 80s were a crime paradise.--drug gangs, mafia, wall st white collar crime, informercial scams, televangelist and cult scams --you name it, it all thrived in the 80s.
All of which you saw in a 30 min episode of CHIPS, which aired in the 70s to the 80s, right? I'm not proud of these seedy days, in fact its something I think most of us are ashamed of entirely and would prefer to be solely known for tech, beaches and sunshine. But it isn't true, and it baffles me as a person who lived through that to see many people claiming this the worst CA has ever seen. It's definitely bad, and perhaps underscores why California should be its own Country in my opinion.
But we've been here and done that and to a much worse degree then proceeded to make a place for outsiders to come when it all went well, and they then jacked up the cost of living and made it a worst place to be and raise children only to flee in hard times so many times we should be used to it, but it still sucks to see California like this after all we did.
I've lived and worked all over the Western World, but California in the 90s was a magical place despite all the crazy stuff that actually would instill resilience and problem solving skills out of necessity in me since I was a child just to survive. Skills that I know I would have gotten if I grew up in Zurich, Vienna or Bavaria or some other placid place.
I just hope we get to see it once more as every time I go back it looks further and further away from the place I knew and loved.
I guess you’re a subscriber to the famous quote (from Orson Welles, I believe) that goes something like “Italians saw centuries of wars and pestilence, and produced the Renaissance. The Swiss lived peacefully all that time, and only produced the cuckoo clock.”
> In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour of every day.
> 1992, the worst year of all, there was an almost unimaginable 2,641 heists, one every 45 minutes of each banking day. On a particularly bad day for the FBI that year, bandits committed 28 bank licks
these are not the same statement. 'average ~1 per hour while banks are open' isn't the same as 'minimum 1 per hour', nor is it the same as 'every hour of every day'
Readit News
This was around the time of the LA riots in the 90s, too... which in my mind all happened at the same time as I recall being a kid sat in front of the TV not far from it all and being shocked at the level of wanton destruction.
California was always a wild place since its inception and before it was ever a part of the US--many who live here don't even realize that California (both alta and baja) pre-dates the existence of the US and British colonialism by a significant margin.
LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US, so us multi-generationals lived through that and adapted and we are am entirely different breed to the transplants and the rest of the US as fires and earthquakes were also taking place alongside those events, as those didn't stop either.
And while I personally have no desire to live in CA anytime soon, except the occasional visit, I'm glad so many decided to leave since COVID. In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
Apparently while we were there my dad witnessed the car in front of him being robbed at gunpoint, but decided perhaps that was a one off, don't tell the family, perhaps it's fine... then the exact same thing happened the next night at nearly the same spot.
So that was the end of my potential US childhood.
It was also the inspiration for Heat’s shootout!
The North Hollywood robbers had illegally modified their weapons to enable full-auto fire. Since well before 1997, modifying guns like this has been a federal felony that gets you a ten-year prison sentence. That's a prohibition that predates the Assault Weapon Ban, which had nothing to do with full-auto weapons.
The AWB has since expired, and doing your own full-auto conversion will still get you ten years in the slammer. You can buy a full-auto weapon, but only after an extensive background check and approval of your local sheriff, if your state allows it, and only if the weapon was manufactured before 1986.
The movie Heat, of course, also had its robbers using full-auto. Incidentally, the movie came out before the North Hollywood robbery; many people have actually blamed the movie for inspiring the real robbers, one of whom owned a copy of the movie!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_(1995_film)#Impact
Only semi-correct, they had full-auto AK47s and extended mags, all of which at the time could be purchased and legally owned with a special stamp by the ATF [0]. As a child a friend's father had one he would bring out on new years to only short lived amusement in the neighborhood as we all lived in a densely populated suburb near a major freeway.
But without them, yes, you couldn't just go to a store and buy one off the shelf.
0: https://legalbeagle.com/8731203-class-three-stamp-through-at...
The North Hollywood shootout was in 1997, Heat came out two years prior.
I always heard it was events in California (and Diane Feinstein being a key player) that created the ban, but I never heard a specific event in SoCal being the catalyst. Wikipedia cites a school shooting in Stockton in 1989 and an office shooting in San Francisco in 1993. Outside of the state, Wikipedia also cites a mass shooting in Killeen, TX.
> LA in the 80s was also Ground Zero for Gang warfare in the US
Might be true, but also: the 1980s was near the peak of violent crime certainly nation-wide, maybe worldwide. Lots written and studied on this topic. Theories about lead poisoning and all that. Probably multiple factors. But a lot of the discussion then was on urban crime. People thought that cities were dangerous. I'm glad that the last 20 years or so has largely seen a reversal of that.
Lately there has been a resurgence, especially in the political right, of the cities are dangerous mantra. It seems pretty odd to me.
Urban violence (such as in Chicago and Minneapolis) might have something to do with it.
[0] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-police-homicides-murder-repo...
[1] https://www.startribune.com/staggering-surge-in-violent-carj...
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34
Alta California was first colonized in 1769, not long before a bunch of British colonies on the other side of the continent that had been settled for quite a while broke off to form the USA; Baja was colonized from 1683. Neither predates British colonization of North America, and the colonization of Alta California only barely predates US independence.
Sir Francis Drake declared English sovereignty over the area of SF bay in 1579 and named it New Albion (New Britain, from Albion, the old Greek name for Britain).
Deleted Comment
> In a decade or two it may look like and feel as it did when I was a kid in the 90s and I may be tempted to go back.
I'm curious what you mean by this. What would change for you to be tempted to go back and what do the people that are leaving since COVID have to do with it?
A bank robbery every hour?
And I thought my nostalgia for the leaded gasoline and burning asbestos tram breaks smells was odd.
More like a reminder that primitive tendencies can revert Society back to its violent mean really quickly and that in turn instilled a need to want to preserve what we have and build resilient communities to that end as we all felt vulnerable to that ever-present danger.
The fact that no one speaks to their neighbors now is a stark contrast to my childhood in the late 80s and 90s where every kid on the block was a part of the after school 'clique' in one way or another and we looked out for each other so we helped one another in times of need with no real hesitation. It was common to have parents drop off the neighbors kids at different school in exchange for a place to hang out after school and place at the dinner table that night while the parents worked OT etc... This was rotational and we often were at each others homes on different days of the week.
Bi-monthly neihborhood bbqs/potlucks were typical things and were way less tense then some mandated HOA sanctioned community watch meeting where people just snitch on each other and was more a casual event to eat and build bonds share a dish from your families native land with our local neighbors. Many of those people had to leave as things got more and more expensive as time went on and it was a somber experience even to this day.
Then, to me, it abruptly went completely away in the 2000s when ignoring your community completely became normal, and I'm guilty of this, too; I no longer wanted to be a part of the new crowds or integrate into the new ones and sought refuge Online instead as those crowds that were made up of 'less interesting people from somewhere else' so unless we had specific and obvious interests aligned I never bothered, and even then it would be short lived as they were built on very fickle forms of self-interest.
And this persisted until I left CA for the first time.
Again, its probably all survivor bias, and I knew way too many kids in the neighborhood or not far away who died due to gang violence (the shootings at the counter strike internet cafes were particular bad in my area [0]) so I"m not trying to glamorize that aspect. Its just that much like in places with incredibly cold and snowy winters you learn to appreciate one another and their roles in your Life, and since SoCal has perfect weather nearly all year around this was the closest thing that made us see past our superficial differences, and somehow latently knowing it could all go away in a flash gave a stark reminder of how valuable and integral that is to one's quality of Life. You hear this a lot amonst the Korean survivors of the LA riots when the Police abandoned them and left them to fend for themselves, that really hit hard for me and was what made me look past my previously held prejudice of foul smelling kimchi and started eating, cooking and enjoying their cuisine.
> And I thought my nostalgia for the leaded gasoline and burning asbestos tram breaks smells was odd.
I'm a big proponent of EV in a large part because I recall how light headed and nauseating I'd felt riding in the tailgate of a 70s pick up truck on the way to the local to in-n-out or to AM/PM as well as seeing images of the smog of LA would creep in on bad days and the poor air quality all year round was most of my Life as a kid. I don't desire for any of that, despite a large part of my career being tied to the Auto Industry I'm glad we're seeing EV taking over as I remember how orange and brown the sky looked back then.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/02/usa.duncancamp...
Dead Comment
A combination of increased tech surveillance, longer prison sentences, and bank tellers holding very little cash--all of these factors make bank robbery much less lucrative than it was in the past.
Lead–crime connection is the strongest explanation. Past lead exposure functions as a predictor for criminal activity. Crime starts to drop in every country after the use of leaded gasoline is forbidden.
New evidence that lead exposure increases crime https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/06/01/new-evide...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
Best source short googling could find: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nothing-but-you-and-the-cows-an...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/computers-soft...
Don't forget that you're only looking at LA right now and your claim that things "were objectively worse decades ago" only generalizes to the cities on the West/East Coast. In contrast, rural areas are worse off economically compared to 30, 40 years ago.
This [1] is an eye-opening roundup of ~25 major studies that support the lead-crime hypothesis, including comparisons across countries & cultures. The evidence is pretty overwhelming and certainly changed my perspective on human nature, which for me had previously been influenced by both growing up around the violence in CA in the 80s-90s and the media culture that depicted and sensationalized it.
If you walk away from this thinking 'oh, humans are a lot less violent than I thought they were', you might find other beliefs built on top of that assumption also follow. These types of perspective shifts in life are rare, and very powerful.
[1] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
Not just voters, large portions of our representatives are also from that demographic.
That’s not to say the lead story is bunk, but, sadly, I don’t think you can draw the conclusion that those earlier rates were uniquely aberrant.
https://www.officer.com/command-hq/technology/computers-soft...
Edit to add this link: https://www.vox.com/2020/8/3/21334149/murders-crime-shooting...
Don’t get too focused on St. Louis, in other words; as I said, homicide rates are up all over the country.
Another way to put it is that much of our behavior is dictated by our environment, and if we create an environment where extreme chemical, biological, psychological, and economic stressors are kept at bay, then humans are just not prone to a great deal of violence.
In 2020. Year of infamy.
> a bank was robbed every hour of every day.
But the article itself clarifies they mean "each banking day" and the worst year had about seven robberies a day. Still a shocking amount, but not the 24 a day implied.
Well... I agree that at least Scientology has died down a little (even though Shelly Miscavige is still missing), but televangelists are as strong as ever, and not just that Kenneth Copeland guy.
Afaik Canada saw a comparable drop in crime, over the same time-period, without starting to mass incarcerate people [0]
[0] https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I (Relevant stats and discussion start around 6:45, but the whole talk is rather worthwhile to watch)
We had Miami Vice, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica back then.
And homes were still affordable places to live in.
All of which you saw in a 30 min episode of CHIPS, which aired in the 70s to the 80s, right? I'm not proud of these seedy days, in fact its something I think most of us are ashamed of entirely and would prefer to be solely known for tech, beaches and sunshine. But it isn't true, and it baffles me as a person who lived through that to see many people claiming this the worst CA has ever seen. It's definitely bad, and perhaps underscores why California should be its own Country in my opinion.
But we've been here and done that and to a much worse degree then proceeded to make a place for outsiders to come when it all went well, and they then jacked up the cost of living and made it a worst place to be and raise children only to flee in hard times so many times we should be used to it, but it still sucks to see California like this after all we did.
I've lived and worked all over the Western World, but California in the 90s was a magical place despite all the crazy stuff that actually would instill resilience and problem solving skills out of necessity in me since I was a child just to survive. Skills that I know I would have gotten if I grew up in Zurich, Vienna or Bavaria or some other placid place.
I just hope we get to see it once more as every time I go back it looks further and further away from the place I knew and loved.
> 1992, the worst year of all, there was an almost unimaginable 2,641 heists, one every 45 minutes of each banking day. On a particularly bad day for the FBI that year, bandits committed 28 bank licks
these are not the same statement. 'average ~1 per hour while banks are open' isn't the same as 'minimum 1 per hour', nor is it the same as 'every hour of every day'