On cannabis, mental illness, and (fears of) random crime
Murders have plunged in the United States since 2023, but many people are more afraid than ever. That's no accident. Psychosis-driven violence is scarier than other crime - and it seems to be rising.
Since 2022, violent crime has plunged in the United States.
Murders are down 49 percent this year compared to the same period in 2021 in Chicago. In Philadelphia, the drop is 60 percent (!) year-to-date compared to 2022.
The trend is not confined to the biggest cities. New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore — the troubled, smaller heavily black cities that have long had terrible homicide rates — have seen similar declines.
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(Know what’s not declining? The truth rate of Unreported Truths. And I can’t be this truthy without your help!)
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The fall in murders represents the return of a longer trend that Covid and the defund-the-police/Black Lives Matter movements interrupted, with terrible results, in 2020.
Several factors have driven the gains.
Police technology — including DNA identification, street cameras, and “shot-spotting” that enables officers to quickly track gunshots — has made catching and prosecuting criminals easier. Drug dealing has moved from streetcorners to delivery apps, ending turf wars. Improvements in emergency medicine have saved some people who would have died a generation ago. And even the most woke cities now recognize demonizing police officers is bad for public safety and leads to more crime.
But.
Even though murders are down, public fear of violent crime remains high. Kathleen Kingsbury, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, is as woke as they come.1 Yet even Kingsbury admitted in an email to Times readers today that she runs scared on the subway:
I have ridden the New York City subway almost daily for more than 20 years. I’ve commuted through Times Square for nearly a decade. But in the years since the peak of the pandemic, I’m more nervous doing both. Data would tell me that fear is irrational, and that the city has seen a decline in most major crimes since the start of 2025. I can’t fully quiet those worries regardless.
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(Kathleen Kingsbury. Bet you can’t guess EVERY SINGLE OPINION she has. Oh, wait, you can?)
(ALT: She’s changing her name from Kitty to Karen, she’s trading her MG for a white Chrysler LeBaron2…
ALT ALT: Hello, NPR? I definitely signed up for the free bag offer and I have not received my free bag. And it’s been, I don’t know, months. Actually I do know, it’s been seven weeks exactly. Is there someone I can talk to?)
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But I digress.
The point is except if it truly spirals out of control, the overall murder rate doesn’t matter that much to law-abiding citizens like Kathleen Kingsbury (safe to guess she’s a law-abiding citizen).
In their daily lives, most ordinary people are at very low risk from violent crime. If you’re over 30, not poor, not black, and not a hard drug user or alcoholic, your risk is close to zero. If you’re a woman, it’s even lower.
Crime is geographically, age, demographically, and racially restricted. Even ordinary street crime — robberies or fights — is fairly predictable and easily avoided. With the notable exception of domestic violence, adults who aren’t looking for violence or deeply naive about risk only rarely become the victims of violence.
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And people intuitively know this fact. That’s why the great New York City renaissance began in the 1980s, even as the murder rate soared. It’s why the South has drawn millions of migrants from northern states with much lower violent crime rates. People don’t really think background murder rates affect them. They know they can shield themselves from most violence quite easily.
But there’s another kind of crime.
It’s not purposeful. It’s episodic and psychosis-driven and it almost always targets the truly innocent — the family members of the perpetrator, often including children, and random strangers. The seminal domestic version is the mother who kills her kids. The seminal public version is the man who without a word pushes someone in front of an oncoming subway.3
Unlike ordinary crime, psychosis-driven violence is essentially impossible to stop or even defend against. It cannot be predicted, because it is fundamentally irrational. And it targets the weak.
Psychotic crime is terrifying. It’s the most terrifying kind of crime — more terrifying than terrorism itself. At least terrorism has causes and goals.
Are we seeing more psychosis-driven crime? I cannot prove we are. The United States doesn’t collect good or even decent statistics on what drives individual homicides. To my knowledge, we don’t even have a national database on how many killers are found not guilty by reason of insanity — which would be a very soft measure.
But we sure seem to be.
And it doesn’t take a lot of random stabbings or subway pushes or parking lot shootings to convince people that crime is rising — or at least that it’s a rising threat to them and their families.
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(Spoiler alert. He wasn’t Jesus.)
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The broader crisis in public order is real too,
Big cities, particularly on the West Coast, have seen a massive rise in homelessness, psychosis, and public drug use. Yes, they’ve cracked down some since 2023, but the public health establishment still is focused on “harm reduction” and “meeting addicts where they are” and generally facilitating drug use and antisocial public behavior, whatever the consequences.
And the primary preventable cause of psychosis is drug use — particularly cannabis and stimulant use.
Cannabis, especially the high-THC cannabis available at a retailer near you in legalized states, has become a significant national driver of mental illness and psychosis. Stimulants, including both prescription drugs like Adderall and illicit substances like methamphetamine and cocaine, run second.
As long as we continue to allow for-profit companies and drug legalizers to profit from and encourage the use of chemicals that drive mental illness, psychosis and its attendant violence will rise.
And America will feel less safe, even if the murder rate continues to drop.
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(Great article from 2022 here, if I do say so. Want to read it?)
In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, Kingsbury begged Times reporters to “call or text me immediately” if they saw any opinion piece that gave them “the slightest pause.” Because Heaven forbid the Times publish any OPINION, much less a news article, that N. Hannah Jones did not endorse.
It’s a song. A great song.
Some random stranger murder is driven not by psychosis but by psychopathy. Bryan Kohlberger is a recent example. And those cases receive a disproportionate amount of attention. But are actually rare and seem to be getting rare as police become better at tracking serial killers, thanks to surveillance cameras and DNA. You have to work hard to leave no evidence at or around a murder these days.
First, a modest downtrend in crime since 2020 does not mean we have gone back to pre-COVID/George Floyd levels. Second, a lot of crime now goes unreported because people know the Police will do very little. Taking it to the extreme, DC has been a big topic lately, it only cleared 60% of murders in 2024, and only 52% in 2023. How many auto thefts do you think they made arrests on? You file the report and insurance covers it. I have worked in DC or visited for work since 1995. It was getting safer every year until the COVID and the Summer of Floyd. And now it has regressed to 1995 or worse when you could run into the worst just a block or two from the capitol. Sure, if you know where to go and where not to go, you can avoid most of it. But five or six years ago, even those neighborhoods were much safer and unless it was 2 AM on Sunday morning, you were pretty safe.
I am from NY and my dad, grandfather, and great Aunt were all NYPD. New York may not have the murder rate of the late 80s or early 90s but it has the feel of that era and the look of the 70s in many places (I spent a lot of time in Brooklyn and Manhattan in the late 70s and early 80s, I felt safe because my dad was armed and was a cop). Now, the smell is worse than ever as they have added pot to the odor of garbage and excrement. So to my earlier point and to add to Alex's the legalization of pot has led to lack of enforcement for most drugs at the street level. Acting high or crazy is not enough to get you one stopped on the street these days. Not with the tolerance.
So if you don't bother investigating crimes because of insurance and don't bother enforcing drug or disorderly conduct laws, crime statistics will go down but crime will not. Nobody is going to feel safe with drugged out lunatics living in tents all over the place and defecating on the sidewalk or in the "flower" beds. And the worst part for me, last summer I saw my first squeegee people in forty+ years!
We are also a nation that runs on pharmaceuticals. From being bombarded with televised ads and the burying of the bad side effects for the ssri group of "meds", I still argue that alcohol fuels much of this violence and is the much more dangerous drug over the cannabis plant.