‘We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence


By Paul M. Barrett
September 2024

Based on a review of more than 400 social science studies, a new HFG-funded report from the  NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights details how social media use can enable or contribute to political strife.

Amid a volatile election season, the report, We Want You To Be A Proud Boy’: How Social Media Facilitates Political Intimidation and Violence, outlines the steps social media companies like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram can take to reduce their contribution to increasing levels of political intimidation and violence across the U.S. and around the world. 

“While social media platforms aren’t solely to blame for increasing political strife, they often contribute to the growing problem,” said Paul Barrett, the report’s primary author and deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

The report is part of HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to understand better and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens.

Read or download the report (PDF)

Government Legitimacy, Social Solidarity, and American Homicide in Historical Perspective


By Randolph Roth
May 2024

The recent rise in American homicide rates did not start in 2020 with a spike during COVID. Homicide actually began to increase in 2015, reversing more than 20 years of declining or stable rates.

In this report, Randolph Roth, professor of history and sociology at The Ohio State University, examines this trend in the context of homicide patterns throughout the history of the United States.  

The factors that correlate most consistently with national and regional homicide rates, he finds, are aspects of nation building, arguing that shifts in citizens’ beliefs about the legitimacy of their government, character of leadership, feelings of affinity for or alienation from fellow citizens, and acceptance or resentment of the social hierarchy affect the frequency with which Americans kill each other.

This report is the first offering in HFG’s Violence, Politics & Democracy initiative, a multi-year project examining how these phenomena interact in mature democracies to better understand and counter political violence and other forces that damage democratic norms and institutions, imperiling the safety of citizens.

Read or download the report (PDF)

Forecasting US Crime Rates and the Impact of Reductions in Imprisonment: 1960-2025


By James Austin and Richard Rosenfeld
September 2023

In the latest of a series of HFG reports forecasting crime trends at the US national level and for selective states and (forthcoming) cities, James Austin and Richard Rosenfeld again created statistical models that retroactively “predicted” property and violent crime rates for past years with great accuracy and then used these models to forecast crime trends in the near future. This report concerns national trends, updating the authors’ national-level HFG report released in 2020, before the social and economic disruptions of the pandemic and civil unrest over police violence interrupted a 25-year declining or flat trend in violent crime.

Austin and Rosenfeld forecast very modest increases in violent crime and then a flattening trend by 2025 as well as a continuation of the longstanding decline in property crime. They also use their forecasting models to project the effect of decreasing the nation’s declining rate of imprisonment by an additional 20%. Such a policy decision, they conclude, would not lead to significantly higher crime rates. 

Read the full report [PDF].

The Future of Crime in Chicago and the Impact of Reducing the Prison Population on Crime Rates


By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin
November 2023

This report examines the effects of a small set of factors on violent and property crime rates in Chicago. The authors find that a statistical model based on the Illinois imprisonment rate and a measure of the cost of living explained past variation in crime rates with minimal error.  The authors then used the model to forecast crime rates through 2025. Both violent and property crime are forecast to drop through 2025. In addition, the report finds that were Illinois to reduce its imprisonment rate by 25%, the effect on Chicago’s rate of violent crime would be negligible. No association was found between imprisonment rates and property crime. 

Read the full report [PDF] here.

The Future of Crime in New York City and the Impact of Reducing the Prison Population on Crime Rates


By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin
November 2023

Employing a small number of predictive variables, the authors of this report created statistical models to forecast violent and property crime rates in New York City. The models estimated yearly changes in New York City’s crime rates from the early 1960s through 2021, estimates that corresponded very closely to the actual rates. The authors then used these models to forecast annual changes in crime rates through 2026. The forecast for violent crime is a slight decrease each year through 2026, while the forecast for property crime shows slight yearly increases. Finally, the projected impact on New York City’s violent crime rate of reducing the state imprisonment rate by 25% would be minimal. No association was found between imprisonment rates and property crime.

Read the full report [PDF] here.

The Future of Crime in Los Angeles and the Impact of Reducing the Prison Population on Crime Rates


By Richard Rosenfeld, James Austin
November 2023

In this report, the authors devised statistical models to “predict” past yearly changes in Los Angeles’s rates of violent and property crime from the early 1960s through 2021, employing a very small set of predictive variables known to be associated with levels of crime. The yearly changes projected for those years corresponded quite closely to the actual changes. The authors then used the models to forecast crime trends through 2026. Violent crime is forecast to decline through 2026, while property crime is expected to rise modestly in the same period. The analysis also finds that if California imprisonment rates were reduced by 20%, the effect on crime in Los Angeles would be minimal.

Read the full report [PDF] here.

Explaining the Past and Projecting Future Crime Rates


By James Austin, Todd Clear, and Richard Rosenfeld
September 2020

The American public, like citizens elsewhere, care about current and future levels of crime and the factors that drive them. But policymakers, who can greatly influence such factors, often lack knowledge from careful studies on the causes and control of crime to guide their decisions. HFG commissioned three leading criminologists to address this deficit by developing a predictive model of national violent and property crime rates.

The researchers identified a small set of demographic, economic, and criminal-justice variables whose changes over nearly four decades closely track trends in crime. As in previous research, they found that higher incarceration is associated with lower crime—but only to a limited degree. And, more important, they found that other factors, such as manufacturing employment or the population’s proportion of young people, combine to have a greater influence on crime than does incarceration.

In addition to accurately tracking past crime rates, this new model can also be used for “what-if” analyses in which predictive variables are changed to obtain estimates of future crime rates. Such exercises show that, using reasonable assumptions about future levels of those variables, the United States can substantially lower its imprisonment rate without incurring an increase in crime.

Explaining the Past and Projecting Future Crime Rates provides a readable and comprehensive account of the findings and implications of this HFG study, an important resource for practitioners, policymakers, and scholars alike.

Projecting Florida Crime Rates and the Impact of Prison Population Reductions


By James Austin, Richard Rosenfeld and Todd Clear
January 2021

Florida has benefited from the national drop in crime that began in the early 1990s. Its growth in incarceration also paralleled the steady national imprisonment rise of the last forty-five years. Florida’s rate peaked around 2010 and has been declining ever since. Policy makers would benefit from defensible projections of future trends in crime, and especially from estimates of the effect that further reductions in the number of people in jail and prison might have on those trends. The authors of this study developed quantitative models—explained here in non-technical language—of the effects of various demographic and economic factors, as well as the imprisonment rate, on Florida’s past crime rates. They then used these models to project crime trends into the 2020s, both with and without the assumption of a substantial reduction in imprisonment. 

Projecting Illinois Crime Rates and the Impact of Further Prison Population Reductions


By James Austin, Todd Clear, and Richard Rosenfeld
November 2020

The Opioid Epidemic and Homicide


By Joel Wallman, Richard Rosenfeld, Randolph Roth
May 2023

The twenty-five-year epidemic of opioid misuse in the United States, which has taken at least 750,000 lives through overdose, has had another lethal toll: violence associated with the street market for these drugs. In this HFG Research and Policy in Brief, Joel Wallman, Richard Rosenfeld, and Randolph Roth present the results of county-level studies that assessed the association between levels of transactions in the illicit market, measured by overdose rates, and homicide. They found that the growth in opioid abuse, arguably a reflection of growth in the illicit market, exerted upward pressure on homicide rates in both the U.S. Black and White populations, but especially in the latter and especially in Appalachia.

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