The crime-and-cocooning cycle, and the futility of top-down interventions to halt or reverse crime waves

In a recent discussion at the Red Scare subreddit, the under-40 hip demographic is largely bemoaning casual sex. No surprise to the long-time readers here. I'll get back to that discussion in another post. For now, I want to review my crime-and-cocooning cycle, which casual sex is a part of (risky interpersonal behavior, distinguishing a wild-times zeitgeist from a lowkey zeitgeist).

The model is always relevant, but especially now that crime rates have started skyrocketing for two years in a row, which I predicted back in the early 2010s. Looking at previous crime waves, they lasted about 60 years, roughly 35 years up and 25 years down. The last peak was in 1992, so I figured the down-trend would last through 2017, and trend up after that. So it began in 2020 rather than 2018 -- close enough for vindication. Everyone else either said that crime would only ever go up, or only ever go down, that long-term cycles were impossible. Maybe a one-off shock to the system could touch off a wave, or maybe a one-off technological change could bring crime down -- but no long-term cycles with endogenous boom-and-bust dynamics.

I first began writing about the de-sexualization of youth culture way back in 2007 (for the Gene Expression blog), when I first read about the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which randomly surveys high schoolers every other year for a variety of risky behaviors -- early sex, being promiscuous (i.e. 4+ partners in the past year), drug use, getting into fights, not wearing a seatbelt, and so on and so forth.

The upshot: since the '90s, these behaviors have all been trending *down* among young people -- contra the conservatard propaganda about how debauched we are becoming -- in contrast to their clear rise during the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Ditto for crime rates (violent and property both). At the same time, cocooning has taken root, in contrast to the outgoing mood of the '60s - '80s.

Basically the correlation is between rising-crime and an outgoing mood, and falling-crime and a cocooning mood. And the social mood changes direction first, then the crime rate changes.

To summarize my crime-and-cocooning cycle, start when crime rates are low and people are cocooning. At some point they have only known safe environments, and awareness of the rising-crime times fades away. So they begin to ask what the point of constantly hunkering down is -- what's the harm in being more outgoing? Not just getting out in public more often, but letting your guard down and trusting strangers and the crowd more in these public places. Criminals now have far more easy targets -- people in public not reflexively defending themselves -- so the crime rate goes up. At a certain point, crime rises for so long -- despite all efforts to stop it -- that people conclude there is nothing that can stop it, so they simply retreat into their cocoons, spending less time in public, and spending what time they do in public with their guard up. That removes the easy targets for criminals, so the crime rate plummets. And then the cycle repeats.

The outgoing vs. cocooning mood is the only thing that explains cycles in crime rates, other than changes in the youthfulness of the population (i.e., the younger it gets due to a baby boom, the more crime-ridden it gets due to the overproduction of hotheads). You can forget all the other standard nonsense about incarceration and other top-down interventions. Having a police force only determines the long-term average for crime in that society, and the cycles up and down around that average are entirely unaffected by changes in policing and legal policies.

Crime rates plummeted throughout the entire Western world during the '90s, 2000s, and 2010s -- not just in nations like America that started locking everybody up for minor drug offenses, putting more cops on the street, etc. The closest comparison is Canada, where they are famously non-punitive in their criminal justice system, and where if anything there were *fewer* police per capita at the end of the '90s than the beginning. Also, soaring incarcerations in America began way back in the '70s, whereas the crime rate only peaked in '92 -- terrible delay, if you honestly thought this cause would have that effect.

Most conservatards stuck their fingers in their ears when I laid out all of this evidence, when it was my main topic from 2009 to 2012 (see the archives in the right-hand column). I don't see much of a sign that they have learned anything since then either. It's still largely, "BLM says defund the cops, so ackshually shit-loads of cops and long punitive sentences mean crime goes down". There's no point in debating with them, it's just one of those things they'll never understand, like how libtards can never understand anything about violations of purity and taboo. Their brains are just wired against it.

The simplest way to see it is in their blind insistence that locking up a criminal means the crime rate goes down a tiny bit, with him off the street, so if you lock up more and more, that tiny bit gets multiplied by all those individuals who are removed from the public, ergo the public space gets safer.

But this is an autistic mechanical engineer's view of a social system, which instead requires a model from ecology that has positive and negative feedback loops, stable states, perturbations, and so on. People respond to the top-down interventions -- the interventions are not the final word in the dynamics. So if the cops remove person A from the street, then person B will take his place, fill his slot, play his role. Zero change in the crime rate. If anything, removing A could destabilize the local ecosystem, cause a power vacuum, and lead to more crime as people B, C, and D all compete over who will replace the removed person A. It's like regime change, at a small scale.

Why does A get replaced by someone else, instead of the system just tolerating or accepting the absence of A forever? Because there was some kind of "demand" for A, not in a good way of course, just that he was getting rewarded, making a living, earning status, getting chicks (perhaps by force, if the role were "rapist"), or whatever else made it appealing to A. Just because that particular occupant of the role gets removed, does not remove all of those appealing aspects of his role -- therefore someone else will fill his empty slot. Again, if anything several people will be competing for his vacant spot.

The easiest way to think of it is removing someone from their "turf" -- well, either an existing criminal is going to take over their turf, or an upstart is going to take it over. Either way, *someone* is taking over that turf and doing those activities, which means the crime rate stays the same, it's only being done by someone other than the original turf-lord.

Drug dealer A gets locked up, then existing drug dealer B expands his turf, or upstart dealer C enters the game in A's place.

Rapist A gets locked up, now his prowling grounds are uncontested for existing rapist B to expand into, or for local upstart C to get into the role.

Hothead A who picks fights at a bar gets locked up, now the next-most hotheaded regular at that bar becomes the one who is always beefing with others.

Thief / robber / carjacker A gets locked up, now all those homes, cars, and wallets inside his turf are going unstolen -- so existing thief B will expand his turf to take advantage of A's absence, or upstart C will decide now is the perfect time to get into the role.

And so on and so forth.

During rising-crime times, it used to be common knowledge that cops were powerless to halt, let alone reverse, a crime wave. They always got to the scene of the crime too late. At best they could interview witnesses (the only thing they do that statistically helps to close a case -- forensic evidence rarely helps without witnesses and interviews, another classic autistic delusion by the NCSI-watching nerds from falling-crime times). Closing a case may provide epistemic and moral closure, and locking the criminal up can be a kind of just punishment for his offense -- but closing cases does not drive down the crime rate. It is not an intervention that can change how the system is behaving.

All of the cops-and-robbers movies from the '80s show the police as bumbling, ineffectual, outsmarted, or outright dismissing the complaints from the citizenry. ("Yeah right, buddy, a masked robber is breaking into your house -- what do you think this is, the movies? Is he wearing striped pyjamas, too? Go bother somebody else with your fairytales.")

And please, don't start with the techno-utopian bullshit. "Sick of rising crime? -- there's an app for that!" The nerds couldn't even make that happen when they built real physical machines like the ED-209 from RoboCop -- and QE-funded boondoggles that run on your smartphone are capable of even less. Christ, just imagine how much more dystopian the outcomes could be, with wunderkind Elon Musk tasked by the central bank with manufacturing the human-free police force and their equipment! "Woah bro, check it out, I call it the EM-42069..."

I'm not beating up a straw man -- leading theories about the falling-crime trend since the '90s were techno-utopian. We removed lead from the water / gasoline / etc. We started using steering wheel locks. We started having cell phones everywhere (this was offered during the dumbphone era, as well as the smartphone era). THE INTERNET. Just the most mind-numbingly moronic things you could think up, and all of them adhering to the autistic orthodoxy of "no long-term cyclical dynamics in crime". It had to have been some novel, exogenous shock to the system, whose crime levels would have otherwise kept on getting worse, or at best remained at the same awful level, were it not for the external shock.

This is not to say that this crime wave will be a perfect repeat of the last one. They never perfectly repeat, because of how they interact with other cycles. Our last one was not taking place amid the backdrop of imperial decline and de facto national fragmentation. Only the '80s leg of the wave was during the neoliberal era, while the '60s and '70s legs were during the New Deal era.

The point is, a lot of the big-picture outcomes will look like they did all the other times that crime has risen for decades.

I'm setting all of this down, not because convincing people or winning an intellectual debate will affect crime rates or social behaviors -- that's idealism. It's purely for its own sake, to get the model right, and to preserve the fundamental truth against an onslaught of clever-silly faggotry.

NB: This topic is a perennial attractor of dumb arguments, objections, and nitpicking. So unlike usual, I'm not going to just approve any old comments. If you reiterate an objection I have already dealt with in the OP, or try to develop a variation on that theme, or pick another member of an entire family that has been dealt with, I'm not going to rehash things in the comments.

If you're going to make a substantial point, at a minimum it had better apply to the entire Western world during both the recent rise in crime from the '60s - '80s, as well as the decline from the '90s - 2010s. Anything less than that is narrow, nitpicking, ad hoc stuff that does not explain the big picture. Even better if you deal with the previous crime wave, rising from ca. 1900 to '33, and falling during the rest of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. Good observations and models apply broadly, not narrowly.