Multiple factors can be true at that same time, and they're cumulative. "Poverty", "lack of fathers", "guns", etc. don't necessarily explain crime individually, but start combining them and bad behavior gets tempting for a small but significant enough percentage. Traditional factors don't explain a wave however, especially during times o…
Multiple factors can be true at that same time, and they're cumulative. "Poverty", "lack of fathers", "guns", etc. don't necessarily explain crime individually, but start combining them and bad behavior gets tempting for a small but significant enough percentage. Traditional factors don't explain a wave however, especially during times of historically low poverty and unemployment rates. For that, we can thank social media, police pull back/staffing, prosecutorial discretion changes, the pandemic, and an unhealthy dose of what Thomas Sowell warned about many years ago:
"those promoting visions of cosmic injustices as the cause of all the problems of black Americans have failed to understand the consequences of this vision for young blacks who do not have either the personal experience or the maturity to weigh those words against reality. The net result has been the development of an attitude of hostility to learning or to conforming to ordinary standards of behavior in society".
Multiple factors can be true at that same time, and they're cumulative. "Poverty", "lack of fathers", "guns", etc. don't necessarily explain crime individually, but start combining them and bad behavior gets tempting for a small but significant enough percentage. Traditional factors don't explain a wave however, especially during times of historically low poverty and unemployment rates. For that, we can thank social media, police pull back/staffing, prosecutorial discretion changes, the pandemic, and an unhealthy dose of what Thomas Sowell warned about many years ago:
"those promoting visions of cosmic injustices as the cause of all the problems of black Americans have failed to understand the consequences of this vision for young blacks who do not have either the personal experience or the maturity to weigh those words against reality. The net result has been the development of an attitude of hostility to learning or to conforming to ordinary standards of behavior in society".