r/MapPorn
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u/Mediocre_Macaron_841
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Dec 01 '22
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Race Vs Homicide rate Vs Poverty Rate
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u/jnoone101
Dec 01 '22
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Random dark purple spot in Wisconsin is the Menominee Indigenous Reservation in case anyone was curious!
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u/This_Complex3316 Dec 01 '22
I actually was. Thanks!
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u/VyrPlan Dec 01 '22
i'm right on the border of the chequamegon-nicolet national forest (maybe a half hour north of the reservation) and i had no idea myself
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u/shizzmynizz Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Menominee Indigenous Reservation
What happened there?
EDIT: Thanks for all the replies. I'm from the EU, so I have no idea what happens in Indigenous Reservations.
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u/NoItsBecky_127 Dec 01 '22
It’s where the Menominee people live
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u/shizzmynizz Dec 01 '22
I meant, why the high homicide rate
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u/gusterfell Dec 01 '22
High rate of poverty, according to the third map.
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u/Yoda2000675 Dec 01 '22
High poverty AND a lack of police compared to non-reservation areas
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u/write_mem Dec 01 '22
It’s also possible that this is a very small community. A single homicide could seriously skew crime statistics. Homicides per capita is a great measure until you’re trying to compare a community of a few hundred or thousands to a large city. Then you may need to look at data over time or something else for a more complete picture.
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u/PicksItUpPutsItDown Dec 01 '22
Many indigenous reservations in the US are known for their high crime rate sadly
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u/TooAfraidToAsk814 Dec 01 '22
Can happen even in larger communities when a mass murder occurs. A few years ago Orlando was in the top ten in per capita murders, partly because of the slaughter at Pulse
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u/lorddoa Dec 01 '22
Add in how indigenous women get murdered at disproportionate rates and it can skew the numbers fast
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u/lightning_knight Dec 01 '22
Don't forget all the women that go missing and are never looked for.
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u/porkchopleasures Dec 01 '22
Thanks for bringing that up. Very little known ongoing crisis happening in pretty much all of the Americas right now...
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u/ImportantTerm323 Dec 02 '22
Oh it’s well known. Just not cared about. It’s disgusting. I have started watching Alaska Daily with Hilary Swank and I hope they keep it on. Bring more awareness.
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u/PerfectResult2 Dec 01 '22
No this is just wrong… if you would actually take a second to look at the post, youll notice the data for homicides is over the course of 5 years. Thats more than enough time spread to remove skews like that.
But yes for single year per capita homicide rates this can be the case. But not here.
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u/Meadowvillain Dec 01 '22
A lot of reserves here (Canada but I’m sure the issues similar in the US) are basically “the ghetto” but surrounded by nothing instead of downtown. No access to services, jobs and anyone who could make difference gets the hell out of there the second they can. Obviously there’s way more nuance than that but I’m trying to keep this from becoming any more of a block of text
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u/SohndesRheins Dec 01 '22
It's a Native American Reservation, pretty much all of them have high murder rates (and low population, so a couple murders counts as a high rate), high poverty, high crime rates, lots of alcohol and drug use, no prospects or industry, and of course casinos. If you live in this area, you go up to the rez for the casino and cheap cigarettes, but then you drive right back out the way you came, you don't do anything else in the county at all. Nobody goes on joy rides in Menomonie County if they don't live in it.
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u/yerdatren Dec 01 '22
It’s where the Menominee people live.
J/k, indigenous reservation are notorious for poverty and extremely low quality of life, thus you get crime/addiction/we cetera.
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u/Unsd Dec 01 '22
Also a good time to point out that native women go missing and are murdered at absolutely insane rates. And nobody cares to investigate when it happens. It's sick.
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u/DankHill- Dec 01 '22
There could be many books written on this question, from many different disciplines and perspectives.
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u/KiefRichardson Dec 01 '22
Native American reservations are known for their extreme poverty (on account of how the U.S. has treated them up until relatively recently). And like this map is trying to show, crime is correlated to poverty rather than race.
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u/Aromatic-Mushroom-36 Dec 01 '22
The poverty map is interesting. A few of those locations are where reservations sit I know for a fact.
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u/confettibukkake Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22 •
Now add a school funding map to the mix! Hint: It's probably exactly the same as the poverty map, since schools are funded by local property taxes. Maybe it shouldn't be that way.
Edit: I know this is a simplification of things. This is a topic I've spent a fair amount of my career examining, and I'm well aware that my statement is not a comprehensive overview of the faults of the American education system, nor of the various ways in which education funding does or doesn't work. The data about school funding is more complicated than one might expect (and any good overview needs to account for what the money is being spent on, where it's coming from, how it's earmarked/limited/controlled/caveated, etc.), and as such it can be spun by both sides in surprising ways. But suffice it to say that (1) it is undeniable that the single biggest macro predictor of student success is average local income; (2) the backbone of public education funding still comes from local sources (though pooling varies state to state); (3) while there is a substantial degree of federal funding for education applied via various channels, based on my not-comprehensive-but-not-insignificant professional experience looking at the data, the federal funding that is currently deployed to theoretically compensate for the local incongruities is not anywhere near what it would need to be to address point #1 and 2 (for a whole host of reasons that admittedly go beyond just the strict amount allocated); and (4) in the small handful of places where adequate non-local funding HAS been raised and properly allocated, massively improved learning outcomes have been seen, in spite of income.
TL;DR: My original comment is trash because it's an oversimplification of a situation that's way complicated (which is probably why the map that I ask for doesn't really exist, because the data would need to be caveated like crazy), but it's actually still a good comment that I stand behind because the point is that education funding is completely fucked and does in fact have a lot to do with why these maps look so similar.
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u/imhereforthevotes Dec 01 '22
Good lord if ANYTHING would be a reasonable start to "fixing" America it would be cutting the link between property taxes and school funding.
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u/Art-bat Dec 01 '22
Meanwhile, instead of there being a large scale, public movement demanding federal funding to even out the differentials between school districts in poor and rich areas, we have hyperbolic screeching about “federal overreach” and calls to “abolish the Department of Education“.
Yeah, things are going to have to get even worse in this country before there’s any chance of them getting better.
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u/Please_do_not_DM_me Dec 01 '22
The screechers are the ones in the high property tax districts. They moved there because the schools are well funded.
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u/dmnhntr86 Dec 01 '22
So fucked up that 2 schools only a few miles apart can have such drastically different funding. You can get all the good stuff, or old stuff in disrepair, all depending on which side of an arbitrary line your parents live on.
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u/TechnicianOk6269 Dec 01 '22
I mean ya. People say “social classes” doesn’t exist in democratic societies but with conception of money and capital, there will always be class division. Only thing we can do is try to alleviate that with taxes.
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u/dmnhntr86 Dec 01 '22
People who say that are either liars or morons.
But yeah, we should be using taxes to alleviate it as much as possible, the problem is that everyone with money wants to keep their tax dollars in their kid's schools because of this myth that they're somehow wealthier only through their hard work and smarts, and that the poor kids don't deserve as good an education as their kids.
I'd like to see a world where I can't guess someone's income level by the condition of their kid's textbooks. Doesn't look like I'll see that anytime soon though, it's fucking depressing.
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u/alvarezg Dec 01 '22
I propose that school funding should be pooled state-wide and all schools funded equally per student.
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u/About400 Dec 01 '22
They do this by county in NJ (so that some more affluent areas end up subsidizing poorer areas) but it doesn’t seem to have too much effect on school quality. They actually spend more per student in some poorer cities than in affluent suburbs- unfortunately academic success is not that easy to solve for.
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u/AdeptAgency0 Dec 01 '22
Because parents and family/friends life are a huge part of academic success, and solving that is incredibly difficult, if not impossible in the short term and would involve massive wealth redistribution, hence it being danced around for decades and decades.
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u/BigTickEnergE Dec 01 '22
This is spot on. Especially the parents part. I live in a small town (technically became a city by population recently) that borders a bigger city. Because of the problems alot of schools are having retaining teachers, I know quite a few teachers who work as teachers there. The stories I hear are absolutely mind blowing. These teachers are literally abused, both physically and mentally. The things that these students do, and the lack of concern their parents and school management shows is utterly ridiculous. A family member was telling us a few stories over Thanksgiving dinner and I couldn't (at first) believe what I was hearing. The lack of respect, discipline, character, and repercussions these kids show borders on fascinating. But she teaches children, not teens. Kids generally are picking up their behavior from their parents, so at that age, you almost can't even blame the kid. Teachers are expected to allow these students to stay in class, allow then to verbally and physically abuse them (literally allow them to hit you in the face while) and the principal allows it. They can't handle dealing with the parents, and are afraid of them. They allow the teachers to get walked all over and expect the teachers to not only deal with it, but to pass these students who can't read, or write, and instead act out in class for attention. If you scold the child, the principal will scold you, and the parents will show up threatening you. And this isn't a case of parents working so much, they don't have time to teach their children. At least half of these parents don't actually have jobs, and just collect their checks every month. They see actively teaching their children that acting like this is ok. Twenty years ago, when I was this age, you would have 1 or 2 students per grade who might mouth off and be disrespectful, but nothing to this extent. Once the other students start seeing the lack of consequences and the attention the "bad kids" get. You end up with even more students acting this way, some of which would never have acted up like this if they had watched their other classmates get punished at school and at home. What makes it so sad is that it's preventable.
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u/VolvoFlexer Dec 01 '22
Well my guess is you'll be labeled either a communist or a groomer then
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u/7573 Dec 01 '22
I mean, that's the way my home state was but without the terrible proposal behind it.
Massachusetts sets the cost per student required for an adequate education, then if a town or city cannot make it through local property taxes the state "level funds" the difference. A town can add additional funding if they wish above this "minimum." Even more reimbursement is sent for students with additional challenges, such as ELL/504s/IEP kids, from the state.
I like this because alva totally forgets that local school boards set most of the curriculum, so they're asking for the state to pick up the tab of local decisions which has no avenue for redress on ridiculous charges. However, setting the minimum level funding guarantees a minimum state curriculum with a unified set of goals and oversight.
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u/JimmySGolden Dec 01 '22
CA is similar. Wealthier areas fund schools through property tax and poorer get more money from the state per pupil. In many cases the wealthier areas don’t have better schools because of the taxes, but because of booster foundations, fundraising, parent involvement, and ability to attract more engaged teachers (not necessarily through salary).
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u/PensiveObservor Dec 01 '22
Yes, an education overlay is critical to avoid less thoughtful people blaming race for violence. How about gun ownership, as well? And maybe regression analysis for such a complex correlation web.
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u/Atwenfor Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22 •
It's an excellent illustration of how the original two-map comparison is a racist dog whistle (as if the in-quotations "diversity" was not enough of a giveaway as is). Namely, the third map illustrates that non-poor minority areas generally don't have an issue with high homicide rates (e.g. central and west Texas); only poverty and homicide rate maps align very closely.
Edit: conversely, eastern Kentucky shows higher-than-average rates for both poverty and homicides, though its population is apparently just as white as that of the rest of the Appalachia and Midwest.
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u/KingKaiSuTeknon Dec 01 '22
Nice.
Also…. WHAT THE FUCK, NEW MEXICO?!?!?
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u/jtaustin64 Dec 01 '22
New Mexico would be the poorest state in the union by far if it didn't have oil wealth.
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u/kalekalesalad Dec 01 '22
Well as of last year we were the 3rd poorest. I think we’re the poorest in child poverty
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u/cuentaderana Dec 01 '22
There is so much poverty in New Mexico. So much. It’s hard to imagine until you’ve lived there. High rates of drug use and alcoholism. Lots of native reservations that are super rural, isolated, and poor.
The state is huge and rural. Outside of the big cities you can drive for a long time without passing a city or town with a grocery store/post office/emergency services. Where I lived was 4 hours from ABQ, and once I left the city I lived in, there wasn’t more than an occasional gas station or reservation/Pueblo. People are left to their own devices in most areas. That leads to lots of crime (either out of necessity or opportunity).
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u/M3taBuster Dec 01 '22
I'd be high all the time if I lived in the fucking desert too.
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u/trifleLORD420 Dec 01 '22
that is exactly what happens out there. i have lost dozens of friends to heroin overdoses, over 40 have passed away. I'm 34.
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u/sebesbal Dec 01 '22
Heisenberg
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u/Rist_R Dec 01 '22
Jesse, we nees to commit homicide
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u/Shouldacouldawoulda7 Dec 01 '22
New Mexico is like Mike Tyson's face after eating a plate of ribs.
"Methy"
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u/wladue613 Dec 01 '22
Solid joke, but meth actually isn't the big problem here in NM, despite the show. It's heroin and fent.
And a shit ton of poverty.
Beautiful landscapes and amazing food though.
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u/a_filing_cabinet Dec 02 '22
A large portion of the state either belongs to the US government and not the state government. Another huge chunk is reservations, which tend to be extremely poor. Funnily enough 500 years of imperialism leaves a mark. Oh yeah, also the state is nothing but mountains and desert.
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u/2664478843 Dec 01 '22
The poorest areas are mostly rural and a lot of that land is state or national parks or part of the BLM. There are also a lot of pueblos and the navajo reservation. The blue areas also have way higher populations than the purple do.
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u/OhRiLee
Dec 01 '22
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The secret ingredient is poverty
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u/badatthenewmeta Dec 01 '22 •
Yeah, it's wild how race doesn't explain the high homicide rates in West Virginia, southern Missouri, or eastern Oklahoma, but the poverty map covers those areas perfectly.
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u/Zoomwafflez Dec 01 '22
Fun fact, McDowell county WV has a functional literacy rate (use a computer, read and write well enough to hold a job) of like 61%, so almost 40% of the population is to uneducated to work. Only 22% of students there are considered proficient in math, 34% in reading. They also have a massive opioid problem.
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u/Flexo__Rodriguez Dec 01 '22
too uneducated*
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u/dopazz Dec 01 '22
Think of it like a toast:
raises glass "To Uneducated!"
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u/onscho Dec 01 '22
And here's me trying to figure out how a toast thinks.
Not sure if I'm too tired or too uneducated or a combination of the two.
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u/-O-0-0-O- Dec 01 '22
Literacy rates are lower than you'd expect.
It's estimated that half of Canadians struggle with functional literacy.
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u/Death_Cultist Dec 01 '22
It's estimated that half of Canadians struggle with functional literacy.
Same in the US, 54% of Americans are functionally illiterate.
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u/HankSpank Dec 01 '22
What an absolutely wild way to frame a country failing to educate and support its young people:
Here's How Much Lower This Made Up Number is Because People Can't Read
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u/kantmarg Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Yeah, it's wild how race doesn't explain the high homicide rates in West Virginia, southern Missouri, or eastern Oklahoma, but the poverty map covers those areas perfectly.
Exactly, or the low homicide rates in bigger cities like NYC or LA, or in e̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶n̶ ̶ central Washington state (according to OP's map), which are all very diverse but have low county poverty rates
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u/badatthenewmeta Dec 01 '22
What? But I was told that big cities were all crime infested liberal hellscapes! How could this be?
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u/nomoreprocrastin8ing Dec 01 '22
Technically there is more crime overall, but there’s less crime when accounting for population
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u/ONEOFHAM Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Some rural counties are definite sleepers as far as crime rate per Capita goes. Josephine county in south-western Oregon is fucking nuts. The cops don't even go a lot of places unless they roll in, like, 10 cars deep because they are scared and underfunded. Most of this crime doesn't even make it to the official statistics because so much of it goes unreported, or is handled by the locals, the usual solution being retaliatory crime.
I've seen the sheriff's out there let a felon with a concealed handgun go before, and they gave him back his gun!
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u/blues_and_ribs Dec 01 '22
Ha, DC cops just got in trouble for something like this; they’ve recently caught felons with illegal guns on them. The police kept the guns, but let the felons go after the stop. It’s crazy.
But why is that county so dangerous? Is it guys protecting their weed farms? I know that’s a thing in some of the bordering CA counties.
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u/ONEOFHAM Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
There is a huuuge marijuana economy. It's the main economy of the whole area. Last year weed dipped to $300-$500 a pound because the cartels pumped out so much volume it affected the entire market. The whole town of cave junction is nothing but pot growers pretty much, and the whole town went into a sort of depression right during harvest last year. Weed is literally probably 90% of the entire economy, no joke. But more than that, it's just been a wild west sort of area for as long as it's existed. People take care of their own problems, which has frequently resulted in mob action and vigilantism. Two of the biggest Cascadian 'hill billy' clans have a major presence out here, and backwoods hill billys will kill in the name of their clan and respect.
EDIT - Cave junction and the surrounding area is so unique, that all of the major motorcycle clubs such as the banditos and hells angels drafted up charters together in the 80s making it against their internal code of conduct to wear colors (their vest that associates them to a particular club) in the whole area. Too much money to be made by 1%er type activities, and they all have their hands so far into in the cookie jar that if a biker war broke out in the area and brought official heat down on all the clubs, they can't as easily make money and have to move all their activities even farther underground. It's bad for business.
EDIT 2 - Just to put how much weed comes out of this area into perspective, and how much weed it took to crash the local market, consider this.there was a cartel warehouse that was busted in Medford last year. That raid alone took something like half a million pounds of marijuana off of the market. The price of a pound didn't fluctuate a single penny afterwords.
Article reporting on aforementioned raid;
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/21/us/oregon-illegal-marijuana-seized/index.html
Edit 3 - Here's an article providing a very one sided and limited prospective into the marijuana economy of southern Oregon;
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/12/oregon-marijuana-illegal-farms-environment
The main picture is literally of an abandoned cartel farm that was like, 2 miles down O'Brien road from where I used to live. There was another cartel farm down the other road right behind our place that got raided and there was a shootout.
Edit 4 - Story time. Omitting names for obvious reasons. I know an ex biker that bought land in the area on a good deal from one of the big local hill billy clans. A native friend of his came over and started flipping out and refused to stay, then left within an hour of showing up because the native dude claimed there was demons bound to this land and it was cursed and that anyone who stays there will also be cursed. Ex biker dude was clearing out a decades old blackberry bramble a few weeks later with his backhoe and pulled up a human ribcage and spine. He just put the ribcage back into the blackberries and moved on. He then found another body while digging a hole for a septic tank. After that he just abandoned the plot and left, still owns it technically. He didn't say anything to the cops because if he rats, the clan comes after him.
Another story. A friend of mine had his and his girlfriends truck stolen like 4 years ago by tweakers. They reported it, but of course nothing came of that. Last year, he saw the truck at a gas station. After making sure it was his, he opened the door, started it up with the universal key the tweakers left on the driver's seat (AKA screw driver), and just drove off. As he was leaving the tweaker ran out of the gas station and then pulled a handgun, but didn't fire in town as my buddy was already peeling outta there, and because other locals would put him down on the spot.
Several years ago, a friend of a friend died in a shootout with automatic weapons after a weed deal gone bad. He was highly regarded by the local community, and the local Chevron put a remembrance on their sign out front for about half a year afterwords mourning his loss. The people he was selling to ended up just, disappearing. Haven't been seen since.
One lady that I knew out there had an issue with the cartel just moving into a piece of land she owned and started growing on it. They would patrol the area with guns and didn't let anyone else around under the very real threat of violence. She called the county sheriff and provided enough evidence for them to raid the farm. They refused to do anything unless she was willing to fund the thousands of dollars necessary to coordinate a raid out of her own pocket. Reasons for this are twofold. 1: The cartels pay off the authorities and have a few farms they sacrifice every year so the headlines can show a raid, and the rest of their farms get left alone. It's purely a numbers game for them. If 3 farms a year get raided and 'disposable' illegal migrant workers get arrested, but 50 more are in full operation and unhindered, they'll gladly make that concession. 2: The local authorities budget and available manpower is laughable in comparison to how much money would be required to adequately deal with all the illegal grows.
Shit like that is a good glimpse into every day life out there.
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u/NickRick Dec 01 '22
That's what I love about this map. They keep telling us we're living in crime, but it turns out putting money into education, and decent jobs prevents a lot of crime.
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u/Dont____Panic Dec 01 '22
But not all poverty. The immigrant poverty like on the Texas border doesn't always lead to homicide.
I wonder if that's because the recent immigrants who are in "poverty" by US standards actually feel like they're doing OK by Guatemalan or rural Mexican standards.
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u/KiefRichardson Dec 01 '22
Also if an American citizen is placed under arrest for petty theft they might spend a night in jail at most. If an illegal immigrant is caught stealing, they'll probably get a free bus ride back to Mexico.
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u/smokeyleo13 Dec 01 '22
I honestly didnt realize how violent that part of Appalachia was, granted i dont know much about up there in general i just knew it was poor
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u/globular_fluster Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
There are parts of Appalachia where 25% of all adults 18-65 are on social security disability because the states don’t have adequate welfare programs. They fake or manufacture injuries to get coverage and billboards for disability lawyers dot the landscape.
That is not a joke or exaggeration.
Of the remaining population, 25% are addicted to methamphetamine and 25% are in jail or on probation. That’s only a little bit of an exaggeration. Thinking about it, that might not be an exaggeration at all.
Crime is rampant but you never hear about it. People disappear. OD’d and dumped in the woods by their “friends”, kidnapped, or just straight up murdered over $10 or less.
Guns are everywhere and law enforcement is scarce.
I can guarantee you can go back into any “holler” in some parts of Kentucky and West Virginia and kick in a door and find an emaciated toddler with evidence of sexual abuse alone in a trailer.
It is a nightmare. Escaping eastern Kentucky and his family by joining the army was the greatest thing my father ever did.
Edit: seriously the disability thing is not a joke https://www.mathematica.org/dataviz/state-disability-maps 25%+ of the entire adult population of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia just sits at home doing drugs and collecting a “it’s not welfare, that’s for black people I’m disabled” check. And they’re all white.
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u/throwaway-boxer Dec 01 '22
People disappear.
That people just disappear is really the wild part, because the violence rate is high if you look at just what's recorded as violence, but when you include disappearances and other stuff that is usually brushed under the rug, then it gets even worse.
Rural Canada is infamously bad for this, and especially for indigenous women. They just disappear all the time. Whether they're dead because they're murdered or dead from exposure, it's a violent way to live.
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u/throwaway-boxer Dec 01 '22
Its an absolute recipe for 'taking care of things yourself' as a culture
That's what annoys the piss out of me when people talk about rural crime in general.
Yes crime is lower, but there's a lot of crime that goes down when people take things into their own hands in response to people doing crime, so it's not really that much lower.
I don't buy the idea that if a guy gets jumped in detroit then it's assault and a mark against the city, but if a guy gets jumped in mobile, alabama, then it's just how things are done in the country and acceptable.
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u/USSMarauder Dec 01 '22
These stats are what made the far right HATE J. D. Vance when he published 'Hillbilly Elegy'.
Because he showed all the drug use and crime and poverty in Appalachia, making poor white people look about the same as poor black people. I think the far right used the term 'slander of the white race'
It wasn't until Vance flipped from Never Trump to pro Trump that they forgave him.
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u/SubstationSteel Dec 01 '22
People on both ends of the political spectrum hated JD Vance, because he just kinda sucks.
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u/Annjuuna Dec 01 '22
My mother took a similar route out of WV through the Navy.
Hulu has a doc called Hillbilly. Good watch.
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u/vainamo- Dec 01 '22
I'm from that worst area of Southern Missouri. It's definitely poverty. It's the cause of that area's low education, high drop-out rate, low income for county services, higher rate of drug and alcohol abuse. It's all related to this pervasive poverty that it's so hard to climb out of.
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u/HondoSam1969 Dec 01 '22
Yeah. All of our teachers were on food stamps in the late 70's and early 80's there. Seemed like the only teachers that would come there were brand new out of school or not very good. Depressing place back then
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u/PercentageWide8883 Dec 01 '22
Also I feel like the the race map is at least somewhat misleading.
Per the key, there are very few places that aren’t majority (< 70%) white (shown in yellow). So the rest of the key just shows what the predominant minority race is for places that are between 70 and 85% white.
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u/BanksysBro Dec 01 '22
It's called a "lurking variable". Two variables can be correlated and laymen may assume a causality, but the real causality may actually come from a third variable they're not considering.
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u/Skittle65 Dec 01 '22
That's the only real metric needed, race is irrelevant
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u/NotForMeClive7787 Dec 01 '22
Not irrelevant but more of a side note identifying who is trapped by poverty
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u/chicheka Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 02 '22
The poverty and homicide rates are almost identical, but the race map has exceptions: Hawaii and Texas are less impoverished and Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia are poorer than other "white states".
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u/tiptoemicrobe Dec 01 '22
I grew up in rural TN and none of this is surprising to me at all. Multiple destroyed cars or washing machines were classic features of a lawn, but I had to go to other parts of the state to see anyone who wasn't white.
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u/jtaustin64 Dec 01 '22
I grew up in NW TN. Our homicide rate is in the highest category, yet our poverty rate is in the middle. We always blamed our high homicide rate on our proximity to Memphis, but I don't know really know why it is so high.
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u/BS9966 Dec 01 '22
It is the I-55 corridor.
It stretches from New Orleans to Chicago and goes through Jackson, MS, Memphis, St Louis, and Springfield, IL.
These are some of the most dangerous cities in the nation. All of them also happen to be tied deeply to the after-maths of the civil war.
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u/jtaustin64 Dec 01 '22
My hometown is also on the future I-69 corridor. Once that road is finished, it will serve as the main interstate from Mexico to Canada as far as shipping goes. I expect that it will bring a lot of drug traffic too.
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u/zumbaiom Dec 01 '22
It seems like the poor areas are black, native and Appalachian
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u/76pilot Dec 01 '22
Well, this map is using the federal poverty rate which kinda sucks because it doesn’t account for cost of living.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2021/demo/p60-275/figure7.pdf
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u/VeilsAndWails Dec 01 '22
I noticed that while almost all >20% black and most >20% Hispanic counties have elevated crime rates, the ones that are >20% for both have crime rates that are lower or even with the surrounding area.
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u/jasperchicken Dec 01 '22
This post won’t last until the morning
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u/Yamcha17 Dec 01 '22
I was here before it is removed !
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u/Necozuru Dec 01 '22
Ima scroll down or go under controversial, before to many of them are removed.
Ready up your hazmat suits we going down
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u/BILLCLINTONMASK Dec 01 '22
It's a pretty poorly thought out post, but I think the OP's point is that homicide relates to poverty more than any particular racial group.
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u/rustafarionm Dec 01 '22
poverty and inequality absolutely drive homicides. Its well understood.
If someone looks at this map and thinks diversity=more crime they are a Grade-A dunce. I feel sorry for anyone who has that take-away from this map.
And its obvious that many of the high crime areas arent very diverse at all. It also shows low crime areas for minorities with low diversity.
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u/Nkorayyy Dec 01 '22
Why would it be removed?
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u/Quattron Dec 01 '22
I believe it'll be locked instead of removed.
So I'm taking my seat here
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u/Drewfro666 Dec 01 '22
The real struggle is not white vs. black but rich vs. poor.
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u/SantaMonsanto Dec 01 '22
The real struggle is for the colorblind
None of these maps are readable. Homicide specifically the most extreme and least extreme colors are basically the same to me.
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u/Kilmonjaro Dec 01 '22
I feel the same on a lot of these posts, and r/DataIsBeautiful posts, like why the fuck is everything the same colors just different shades ? The top map is actually somewhat readable to me tho since they use different colors.
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u/Roving_NaturalistWI Dec 01 '22
Yup. The poverty map is the same blob of color to me. Can't enjoy my porn if I can't see it!
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u/VoltageHero Dec 01 '22
I almost feel that it's why OP included the second map. The first one by itself could easily just be seen as an attempt to be racist, while the second is moreso linking poorer areas to higher rates of homicide.
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u/_The_Arrigator_ Dec 01 '22
It always has been, but those in power have gotten real good at deflecting blame from themselves to the "others" in society.
"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." - LBJ
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u/manofsleep Dec 01 '22
All those Buddhist and Muslims in Ladakh, India murdering each other because they’re poor. It’s a bit more complex than $$ - it also has to do with culture and values: and what people value as wealth.
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u/VascoDegama7 Dec 01 '22
why is diversity in quotes
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u/SyriseUnseen Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Different explaination: The map doesnt show diversity (that would be assigning a score based on how even the amount of people from different races in that county is), it shows the majority ethnic group.
A 95% black/hispanic county is not diverse, therefore diversity should be in quotes.
But the author might as well have had... ulterior motives
E: word
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u/Fear_mor Dec 01 '22
It doesn't even show the majority ethnic group, the criteria for white counties is 85% and the criteria for all other ethnic groups is >20%
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u/rock_gremlin Dec 01 '22
EXACTLY. No one else mentioned this yet, it is such a biased shit map. Someone definitely had an agenda making this.
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u/Apologetic-Moose Dec 02 '22
I think whoever made the first map correlating homicide and diversity did it to try to prove that other ethnicities cause violence, and whoever added the second map plotting the poverty rates did it to point out that race has nothing to do with it.
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u/Bluejay9270 Dec 01 '22
I doubt it's coincidence that red was used for both blacks and homicide, as though that is the implied correlation. And blue as the cooler/calmer color representing whites.
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u/abraxasisall Dec 01 '22
That was the first thing I noticed, it’s 100% intended to create a racist narrative about homicides
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u/WurthWhile Dec 01 '22
A 95% black/hispanic county is not diverse, therefore diversity should be in quotes.
Years ago I remember a local newspaper being made fun of because they were advertising that they're writing staff was 100% diverse. It was like 18 blacks and 4 Mexicans, not even Hispanics in general, plus all women.
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u/CreeperTrainz Dec 01 '22
Because whoever made the original maps was mocking the idea of diversity by saying "see, minorities bad".
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u/Suspicious-Jello4409 Dec 01 '22
I’m surprised Texas is the outlier of the south
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u/Mispelled-This Dec 01 '22
Texas has substantial fossil fuel deposits and four large metro areas with wealthy suburbs and a relatively low cost of living.
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u/GooseMantis Dec 01 '22
Not sure why that would be surprising. The deep south has always been a bit of a backwater, while Texas is an agricultural and oil superpower (and increasingly tech and finance too)
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Dec 01 '22
The scale on the diversity maps makes no sense to me. It has greater than 85% white versus greater than 20% African American. That could be written greater than 85% white versus greater than 79% white - a 6% difference and far less misleading than the map is trying to be. A casual look would make you think that the South East is all black when that is not true at all.
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u/Captain_Tismo Dec 01 '22
I think the point of that is to illustrate where minority groups are more common than average. If that map just told us which racial group was most common in each county, practically the entire map would be blue, which is a useless map. I think the makers of this map could have made it more clear tho by including lighter shades of the colors to go in more detail about racial percentages. The point of including race at all is just to show us it’s connection to poverty and how that leads to violence
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u/thrilldigger Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Homicide rate scale is weird too. There aren't consistent steps - goes from >10.1 to >7.3 (delta is 2.8), to >5 (delta is 2.3), to <5(??), to <4.3 (delta is 0.7!), to <2.9 (delta is 1.4).
No rationale or explanation that I see, which leaves me suspicious about whether this is an honest post.
Edit: really ought to address population density too.
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u/0ver_Easy Dec 01 '22
Whoever made the diversity map is intentionally trying to be misleading. They mix up the scales to create their own narrative. White is the largest group in an overwhelming majority of US counties but for some reason they only call that out in the areas with low homicide rates. I’ll let you guess why.
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u/GAL3007 Dec 01 '22
What even are the percentages tho
20% Indigenous 20% Asian
Why did they write it out like that
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u/TankSparkle Dec 01 '22
Didn't know Appalachia had a homicide problem to go with it's poverty problem.
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u/boringdude00 Dec 01 '22
There are less people in Central Appalachia than in Chicago or Los Angeles, so it doesn't get the same press when 10 people are killed in a weekend. Just spread over a much wider area with mostly white people. The formula is the same: poverty, drugs, and guns. Having grown up in Appalachia and lived in Baltimore, the similarities are unmistakeable. There's basically no difference but skin color between the low-rent trailer park down the road or the ghetto a few blocks over. Its just a bit easier to overcome when you're white.
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u/jdeeebs Dec 01 '22
What I'm getting from this is that poverty correlates with homicides a lot more than race does lol
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u/crunchygrass Dec 01 '22
What I got was that racialized people are disproportionately represented in poverty. It's unfortunate but the reality of poverty is that they will be exposed to more dangerous situations because of their economic situation.
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u/AnCearrbhach Dec 01 '22
A “very low” homicide rate of 2.9 is higher than all but two EU countries. For comparison France and UK which many in Europe would think might be high are 1.3 and 1.2 respectively.
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u/NikD4866 Dec 01 '22
Soooo. Poor desperate people commit more crime than well to do folks. No surprise there.
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Dec 01 '22
Not having both parents at home is a better indicator of both homicide and poverty than race. This is why Asians have the highest median income of any US racial group, they have the lowest divorce rate and almost all kids are raised by cooperating parents invested in their upbringing. Same with Jews.
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u/Creme_Bru-Doggs Dec 02 '22
Wow it's like all those alt-right people are crazy idiots and violent crime is linked to poverty and not race.
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u/whodo-i-thinkiam Dec 01 '22 edited Dec 01 '22
Looks like poverty is the problem. Have the poors tried not being poor? Have they tried pulling themselves up by their bootstraps? Because that's how we deal with poverty in America.
Edit: ok, I guess I need to add that this is sarcasm because apparently I didn't lay it on thick enough.
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u/adeadlobster Dec 01 '22
There's a lot more layers to look at here. You can look at high school graduation rates, area median income, and prison recidivism rates. They're all gonna be bad.
I'd love to see a breakdown of where their tax money goes. Odds are that those highly crime-ridden areas hemorrhage taxes into the more well-off areas.
Then compare that to a map of the voting districts.
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u/atTheRealMrKuntz Dec 01 '22
alaska has very high homicide rate?
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u/SilverDesperado Dec 01 '22
what’s going on in new mexico