What I'm wondering is how much of that fall in the homicide rate from the 1990s to 2015 was due to emergency rooms getting much, much better at saving people's lives, including bullet wounds (and thus, not becoming a statistic). I've heard that much of the decline in homicide rates in recent years is due to this factor alone. I have no w…
What I'm wondering is how much of that fall in the homicide rate from the 1990s to 2015 was due to emergency rooms getting much, much better at saving people's lives, including bullet wounds (and thus, not becoming a statistic). I've heard that much of the decline in homicide rates in recent years is due to this factor alone. I have no way to verify this, but I'm wondering if anyone has looked at the issue and tried to adjust for it in the statistics, or if it's just invisible.
The National Crime Victimization Survey -- which surveys a large random sample and asks whether people have been victims of crime -- shows clearly that there also was a large decrease in non-fatal violence from the '90 on. So it's certainly not the case that it's just people being saved more.
With that said, I certainly do think medical advances must play some role, particularly for long time frames. The time series of homicide rates I plot starts from the early 20th century, a time when not even penicillin was invented. So surely since then medical advances must have some influence.
There are some who have looked into this topic (e.g., Dobson, 2002; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/). They claim that "Murder rates would be up to five times higher than they are but for medical developments over the past 40 years." While I believe there is some effect, this large of an effect seems implausible to me, particularly when it's not observed in non-fatal violence victimization statistics (which should show a large increase).
What I'm wondering is how much of that fall in the homicide rate from the 1990s to 2015 was due to emergency rooms getting much, much better at saving people's lives, including bullet wounds (and thus, not becoming a statistic). I've heard that much of the decline in homicide rates in recent years is due to this factor alone. I have no way to verify this, but I'm wondering if anyone has looked at the issue and tried to adjust for it in the statistics, or if it's just invisible.
The National Crime Victimization Survey -- which surveys a large random sample and asks whether people have been victims of crime -- shows clearly that there also was a large decrease in non-fatal violence from the '90 on. So it's certainly not the case that it's just people being saved more.
With that said, I certainly do think medical advances must play some role, particularly for long time frames. The time series of homicide rates I plot starts from the early 20th century, a time when not even penicillin was invented. So surely since then medical advances must have some influence.
There are some who have looked into this topic (e.g., Dobson, 2002; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124155/). They claim that "Murder rates would be up to five times higher than they are but for medical developments over the past 40 years." While I believe there is some effect, this large of an effect seems implausible to me, particularly when it's not observed in non-fatal violence victimization statistics (which should show a large increase).