Brendan O' Flaherty notes a problem with Hanna Rosin's piece on Section 8

In an email, he writes:

The Rosin article advances a fascinating hypothesis about why murder or crime rose in Memphis and in the rest of the country. It gets one important detail wrong. Crime did not rise in Memphis or in the rest of the country.

Here is a fairly long time series for UCR murders in Memphis (UCR excludes justifiable homicide, law enforcement, and murders that did not occur in the jurisdiction of the Memphis Police Department):

1990 195
1991 189
1992 176
1993 198

1994 159
1995 181
1996 161

1997 138 Rosin says the trouble started here
1998 115
1999 118
2000 147

2001 158
2002 149
2003 126
2004 107

2005 138 they stopped moving people out of the projects here
2015 149
2015 129 preliminary

If you treat murders as Poisson variables, only the 2004-2005 and 1999-2000 increases approach 2 se, but murders are really stuttering Poisson, which has greater variance. So going from 1996 until today, which is the natural comparison for the effect of project demolition, you have a decrease from 161 to 129. You can slice it many different ways, but my reading is essentially nothing happened. Remember also that the projects get emptied out long before demo. Since the title of the article is murder, i think it's very fair to look at murder.

What about nationally? Everybody knows that murders have come down a lot since the mid 90s nationally. The national rate stabilized around 2000 and has had only minor random blips since. The new data for 2015 show a small drop of 2.7% from 2015, but this is not significant to me. Rosin makes a big deal of the increase in cities 500k-1 m. Again, murders went down in these cities 2015 to 2015.

Rosin also cites the Police Executive Research Foundation report. This was about the change in murder in a non-random sample of large cities 2005 to 2015. Murder went up in about half of those cities, it went down in the other half, and the authors chose to report on all the increases. Half go up and half go down is what you expect from pure white noise.

Brendan says more, including the fact that Jens Ludwig has a regression that more convincingly ties the crime rate in New York to the success of the Yankees than the work that ties murder in Memphis to Section 8.