As businesses and restaurants reopen, I see less and less social distancing and mask wearing here in my little piece of California. Does that make sense? How does California look compared to the nation as a whole? Like this:

The good news is that our mortality rate is well under the national rate. The bad news is that our decline is very, very slow, which suggests it might be fairly fragile. Keep wearing your masks, Californians.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 6. Brazil seems to have corrected its figures, though I’m not sure anyone trusts them anyway. The US is continuing its decline despite businesses reopening, which is very promising.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This guy does not mince words.Boris Roessler/DPA via ZUMA

Bret Stephens writes today:

We are in the midst of an unprecedented national catastrophe. The catastrophe is not the pandemic, or an economic depression, or killer cops, or looted cities, or racial inequities. These are all too precedented. What’s unprecedented is that never before have we been led by a man who so completely inverts the spirit of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. With malice toward all; with charity for none: eight words that encapsulate everything this president is, does and stands for.

….And at a moment when many Americans, particularly conservatives, are aghast at the outbursts of looting and rioting that have come in the wake of peaceful protests, we have a president who wants to replace rule of law with rule by the gun. If Trump now faces a revolt by the Pentagon’s civilian and military leadership (both current and former) against his desire to deploy active-duty troops in American cities, it’s because his words continue to drain whatever is left of his credibility as commander in chief.

I don’t think this is enough, and that’s not meant as any kind of gotcha. The bigger question is: what kind of party, or ideological movement, ends up nominating a person like this? And not just nominating, but nominating by a landslide against a perfectly competent and ordinary set of conservative opponents. Trump won the nomination with a pure grassroots campaign, during which he lied, insulted people, made up juvenile nicknames, displayed epic ignorance, and just generally acted the buffoon. His supporters knew exactly what they were getting, and they got it.

So what has the Republican Party—Bret’s party—been doing that led it to this point? And what will it do to avoid a repeat in the future? This requires some introspection and some interrogation. It’s not enough to say that Trump is a catastrophe. Anyone who can pour piss out of a boot knows that. But what brought Republicans to this awful point? That’s the more important question.¹

¹And please don’t try to pin the blame on awful Democratic candidates forcing you to vote Republican even if you have to hold your nose. I’m talking about the primary campaign here.

My mother emails: “The heap is asleep!” And indeed they are.

A small fight conversation broke out in my Twitter feed yesterday related to my post about number of cops vs. violent crime rates. For example, in New York City violent crime has declined by nearly 80 percent from its peak in 1990:

Crime had declined by a full third before Rudy Giuliani became mayor. It declined before anyone whispered the words “broken windows.” It declined before Bill Bratton introduced CompStat. It began its decline during a recession; kept declining during the Clinton boom; continued without a hitch during the 2000 recession; and then kept declining during both the Bush recovery and the Great Recession. It’s obvious that both economic conditions and new theories of policing had little to do with it. Was it because New York just put more cops on the street?

Here’s a more detailed look at New York City:

The per capita number of police officers increased by about 10 percent through 2000 and then declined by about 20 percent through 2018. That’s nearly flat over the entire period. Violent crime, by contrast, plummeted 60 percent from its peak in 1990 through 2000 and then declined another 40 percent through 2018. That’s a total decrease of nearly 80 percent between 1990 and 2018.

So this provokes a big question: Why did crime go down so much? One possibility is that it’s because New York kept its number of police officers high and trained them better with tools like CompStat and community policing. Or maybe it was aggressive use of stop-and-frisk? If those are the answers, then you want to stick with a policy that’s working.

But if crime went down because the blood lead levels in kids went down, it means that teenagers today are inherently less violent than they were 30 years ago. If you ease up on the number of cops and the stop-and-frisk and so forth, crime will remain low because kids these days simply nicer and more self-controlled than they used to be.

As it happens, the evidence is massively on the side of lead emissions from automobiles being the big driver of the crime decline in New York City and elsewhere. I wrote an article in 2013 about this, which you can read here. But I’d recommend that instead you read a 2018 update that includes a summary of the original article plus descriptions of all the research that’s been carried on since then. When you read it all, the evidence is so overwhelming that I now consider the lead-crime hypothesis all but proven.

It still hasn’t caught on, of course. The problem is that among criminologists, there’s an aversion to “essentialist” theories—that is, theories that depend on essential characteristics like IQ or race. This is a little odd since crime is well known to depend on age and gender, which are about as essentialist as you can get. But no one wants to get anywhere near IQ and race, so essentialism is taboo.

The second problem is among activists on both left and right who have their own pet theories. On the left, we tend to blame poverty, institutional racism, poor schooling, lousy housing, and so forth. On the right, the favorite targets are the breakdown of the family, too few cops, too few prisons, drugs, the decline of religion, and so forth. There is very little convincing evidence for any of this, while lead poisoning explains everything. But if lead poisoning is the answer, then everyone has to give up their pet theories about what happened between 1960 and 2010. That’s a tough ask.

Seven years ago, when Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York City, everyone was worried that he would screw up the highly successful crime programs of his predecessors. I scoffed at that: “Unless Bill de Blasio starts up a city program to seed the clouds with lead dust, he doesn’t really have anything to screw up.” And I was right. He got rid of stop-and-frisk and kept police headcount pretty much flat. And it didn’t matter: crime went down anyway.

I’m willing to bet that a certain amount of downsizing could be done around the country. Every city will push back because they have special needs: LA has always had a fairly small police force, for example, and New York is a racial powder keg that could blow at any time. I recommend ignoring all this special pleading and just looking at the numbers. If there’s been a big crime decline since 1990, the reason is lead. And the good news is that the effects of lead are permanent. Once you have a whole cohort of teenagers that’s grown up lead-free, they’re just not very prone to committing violent crimes.

This is where we are now, and it’s the reason we can experiment with reducing funding for cops and reallocating it elsewhere to see what makes a difference. These reallocations should be rigorously studied to see what works and what doesn’t, because data is power. It’s data that told us lead was responsible for the big crime drop of the past 30 years, and it’s data that has a chance of telling what more we can do going forward.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 5. Brazil reported no deaths on Friday, so their downward spike is just a reporting error. Mexico reported its third consecutive day of huge increases. Nobody seems to know quite what’s going on, but it sure looks like their plan to start reopening this week was ill-timed. Canada is plateauing slightly upward. The US is plateauing slightly downward.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

All four of the police officers involved in the death of George Floyd have been arrested and are being held on bail. But will the charges against them stick? It’s notoriously hard to convict cops, and when officers are charged but not convicted that can further inflame the situation. This is what happened in the Freddie Gray case in 2015 and, more famously, in the Rodney King case in 1992. Which brings me to Thomas Lane. Here’s what we know about him:

He joined the police department as a cadet in February 2019. He didn’t have a history of complaints. Lane had been on the police force for four days when Floyd died.

And here’s the description on the charge sheet against Derek Chauvin, the officer who had his knee on Floyd’s neck:

The officers said, “You are talking fine” to Mr. Floyd as he continued to move back and forth. Lane asked, “should we roll him on his side?” and the defendant said, “No, staying put where we got him.” Officer Lane said, “I am worried about excited delirium or whatever.” The defendant said, “That’s why we have him on his stomach.” None of the three officers moved from their positions….At 8:25:31 the video appears to show Mr. Floyd ceasing to breathe or speak. Lane said, “want to roll him on his side.” Kueng checked Mr. Floyd’s right wrist for a pulse and said, “I couldn’t find one.” None of the officers moved from their positions.

So we have a guy who had just passed his probationary period and was on his fourth day as a rookie police officer. He tried to intervene multiple times but was repeatedly dismissed by a senior officer who not only had 19 years on the force but was Lane’s training officer. Should Lane have tried harder? Or physically intervened? In a perfect world, of course. But in the real world? A jury is likely to find that a much tougher call, especially since Lane had a limited view of what was happening. I don’t think anyone would describe Lane as a hero or anything, but these extenuating circumstances will form a big part of Lane’s defense when he goes to trial.

UPDATE: I’ve added a few words to make clear that “four days” on the force means four days after finishing his probationary period.

Here is Hopper doing one of the things she loves best: flopping down on the patio and rolling around. This is hardly unique to Hopper, of course, and in her case it mostly means she’s begging for a tummy rub. This is why she’s giving me that look. She wants me to put down the camera and rub her tummy.

A new Marist poll is bad news for President Trump:

It’s no surprise the Democrats and Republicans are split on this, but independents are massively on the side of believing that Trump has made things worse. This is crucial for November since turnout will probably be high all over, which means the election will almost certainly be decided by these voters.

On a related note, it’s remarkable that over the course of ten days public support for the George Floyd protests seems to have increased. I’m pretty sure this is unusual, especially when there’s a fair amount of violence and looting associated with the protests. But over the past few days, the looting has faded out and been replaced by gut-wrenching video of police violence, almost all of it for no apparent reason. America’s big-city police departments are making the best case anyone could ever make to persuade white suburbanites that police brutality against black people is as real as black people say it is.

I don’t have a lot to say about this, but in the midst of the campaign to defund the police¹ I got curious about the number of police officers nationwide during the past three decades of declining crime rates. This turns out to be sort of tricky, but Daniel Bier (here and here) has done a pretty good job of estimating the number of local police officers nationally:

The violent crime rate has fallen by half since its peak in 1992, but the number of police officers per capita has stayed nearly flat. This divergence is even more dramatic in places like Los Angeles and New York City, where the crime rate has fallen by about 75 percent since 1992.

As I said, I don’t have any big point to make. I was just curious to see if we had taken advantage of the lead-driven decline in crime to save money on policing. Apparently not.

¹A bit of a misnomer. With a few exceptions, most of the proponents of defunding the police only want to cut police funding, not eliminate it.