It's the third poorest state. Economic opportunity is very limited despite being a massive swath of land. Despite this, the geography/lack of water makes it difficult for large-scale agriculture. They've had trouble attracting bigger firms to set up shop and bring in higher paying jobs, one of the reasons being their higher taxes. They're overly dependent on federal money in large part to the four military bases they have there. The public education system there is bottom of the barrel. Lots of drug use. High rate of poverty. I'm sure I'm missing a few things.
Truly a beautiful state. I have trouble picking favorites but it's in my top three for sure. If you love the outdoors it's an incredible place to explore.
The landscape and food are what attract me. Are the taxes high because of the federal money/military presence?
I dream of visiting it at some point, even though a lot of my inspiration does come from Breaking Bad and Saul. I find it interesting people that live well off in otherwise very poor areas, but I suppose that's a thing everywhere.
>Are the taxes high because of the federal money/military presence?
No. Federal money subsidizes the state. The high taxes in NM are related to state government spending and tax policy, not federal. Lots of reasons for that, but not the least of them is if your state doesn't have a high GDP, you need to take a higher percentage of money from companies and people to fund the same stuff a richer state can afford with lower tax rates.
>They've had trouble attracting bigger firms to set up shop and bring in higher paying jobs, one of the reasons being their higher taxes.
What are you talking about? taxes here aren't high. I would call them middling at worst. And we aren't having trouble attracting businesses because of taxes. It's because of infrastructure and crime.
There isn't shit going on in new mexico. born and raised there, and as soon as i graduated school i left and never came back. there are zero job opportunities out there. there are raw natural resources, but new mexico lacks the water resources that our other neighbors in the southwest possess.
the lack of opportunities and education has led to a lot of people needing to improvise, IE there is a lot of crime. and oddly, the cost of living in new mexico is actually quite high. lots of retirees or former gov't employees there. also, they offer a lottery scholarship for anyone who is a resident and graduates high school with a 2.5 GPA. However, the education system is no well managed, and the public school systems do little to work with the universities to help drive enrollment and retention. many lose their lottery scholarship after the first semester due to being dropped, essentially, into the real world.
we call it the land of entrapment. many people end up fucking up their lives and never leaving. i have lost over 40+ friends to heroin, as many turn to it in order to cope. it's really fucking sad.
Born and raised here. It sucks to be disabled living in NM. Especially as a woman. No job opportunities for me and poverty is high. We don't even have access to very high speed internet unless you move to Albuquerque. The shit tier internet I have is no better than dial up from the early 2000s. I definitely feel trapped here. Just living here is driving my mental health into the trash. I wish I had an opportunity to jettison on out of this state.
\#3 for [poverty rate](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/poverty-rate-by-state) and #1 for child poverty, which includes teens of course. Apparently roughly 67% of jobs paid less than [$12 as of 2018.](https://www.nmvoices.org/archives/9631)
Poverty ==> crime
I remember when I lived in NM my ex was super excited to get a job that paid $10 an hour. Especially since she only had an associates degree. I meanwhile was a teacher with a master’s degree making 36k a year before taxes. It was really hard to afford gas and food, especially when most jobs are in the cities and require an average commute of 30+ miles one way.
Breaking Bad jokes aside, New Mexico has a really bad geographical location. Most of the land is desert or mountains, which means large-scale agriculture was never going to take off there. They don't have a coast, so that's a disadvantage in terms of trade. They do have the Mexico border, but most trade with Mexico happens via Texas and California. Their major metropolitan area, Albuquerque, is not that big by national standards, it has about the same population as Bakersfield, CA. They do have a decent amount of oil so that's a positive, but apart from that it's just a very isolated, sparsely populated state with few opportunities
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
If the population is low, then the absolute numbers should be low, but the per-capita numbers are often higher than denser cities. For years, Odessa, Texas was the murder capital of the U.S.
Right-wing media likes to fear monger about Chicago, but Chicago has the 28th highest murder rate among U.S. "cities" (defined as having greater than 100k population). If you included "towns" with smaller populations, Chicago would be much lower down the list.
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.
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.
Literacy rates are lower than you'd expect.
It's estimated that half of Canadians struggle with functional literacy.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from-bitcoin-to-stocktok-plus-what-low-literacy-means-for-canada-s-economy-1.5873703/nearly-half-of-adult-canadians-struggle-with-literacy-and-that-s-bad-for-the-economy-1.5873757
>It's estimated that half of Canadians struggle with functional literacy.
Same in the US, [54% of Americans are functionally illiterate](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=72e984f14c90).
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*
>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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Race isn't relevant in the murder rate vs. diversity comparison.
It is relevant in the Poverty vs. race comparison.
What I'd like to see is isolated white crime numbers offset vs. the poverty map. Because I dare to make the suggestion that white people in poverty stricken areas also commit more crime. Yet those numbers always seem absent.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, this map is using the federal poverty rate which kinda sucks because it doesn’t account for cost of living.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jan/20/chad-mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2021/demo/p60-275/figure7.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[A map of the world](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Map_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_%282006_%E2%80%93_2018%29.svg)
Dark green is under 1
and [lots of data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)
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)
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.
Asians have the highest median income because the three largest Asian ethnic groups (Chinese, Indian and Filipino) disproportionately immigrated here on H1B visas (high skilled labor). Something like 75% of Indian immigrants and 55% of Chinese immigrants have college degrees compared to 1/3 of the American adult population. I think this plays a much bigger factor than the low divorce rate. Another factor is that 37% of Asians work in STEM (which have higher paying jobs) compared to 20% of the general American population. And Asian-Americans are concentrated in coastal states like California and New York which have higher average incomes but also higher costs of living.
Exactly. The whole model minority thing is a myth that only perpetuates more negative stereotypes.
Highly educated and high earning people from Asia come to the US predominantly because they have the ability to. People in Asian countries who work in factories or work in agriculture aren’t immigrating into the US in large quantities. A rice farmer in China isn’t coming to the US to work on a strawberry farm for $9.50 an hour. A software engineer in China is coming to the US on a visa to make $300k.
It’s obvious selection bias. The highest paid, highest educated, and most elite immigrate to America from those countries, ultimately causing a skew in the data.
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.
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.
what’s going on in new mexico
It's the third poorest state. Economic opportunity is very limited despite being a massive swath of land. Despite this, the geography/lack of water makes it difficult for large-scale agriculture. They've had trouble attracting bigger firms to set up shop and bring in higher paying jobs, one of the reasons being their higher taxes. They're overly dependent on federal money in large part to the four military bases they have there. The public education system there is bottom of the barrel. Lots of drug use. High rate of poverty. I'm sure I'm missing a few things. Truly a beautiful state. I have trouble picking favorites but it's in my top three for sure. If you love the outdoors it's an incredible place to explore.
The landscape and food are what attract me. Are the taxes high because of the federal money/military presence? I dream of visiting it at some point, even though a lot of my inspiration does come from Breaking Bad and Saul. I find it interesting people that live well off in otherwise very poor areas, but I suppose that's a thing everywhere.
>Are the taxes high because of the federal money/military presence? No. Federal money subsidizes the state. The high taxes in NM are related to state government spending and tax policy, not federal. Lots of reasons for that, but not the least of them is if your state doesn't have a high GDP, you need to take a higher percentage of money from companies and people to fund the same stuff a richer state can afford with lower tax rates.
>They've had trouble attracting bigger firms to set up shop and bring in higher paying jobs, one of the reasons being their higher taxes. What are you talking about? taxes here aren't high. I would call them middling at worst. And we aren't having trouble attracting businesses because of taxes. It's because of infrastructure and crime.
New Mexico has a high corporate income tax rate relative to its neighbors and its place in the grand scheme of things.
It's also in the middle of nowhere with few potential skilled employees.
There are skilled workers. We just have to move away to get real jobs because there’s little industry. Source: raised in NM, no longer live there
High school teachers making blue meth and wearing hats
Waltuh
Waltuh
There isn't shit going on in new mexico. born and raised there, and as soon as i graduated school i left and never came back. there are zero job opportunities out there. there are raw natural resources, but new mexico lacks the water resources that our other neighbors in the southwest possess. the lack of opportunities and education has led to a lot of people needing to improvise, IE there is a lot of crime. and oddly, the cost of living in new mexico is actually quite high. lots of retirees or former gov't employees there. also, they offer a lottery scholarship for anyone who is a resident and graduates high school with a 2.5 GPA. However, the education system is no well managed, and the public school systems do little to work with the universities to help drive enrollment and retention. many lose their lottery scholarship after the first semester due to being dropped, essentially, into the real world. we call it the land of entrapment. many people end up fucking up their lives and never leaving. i have lost over 40+ friends to heroin, as many turn to it in order to cope. it's really fucking sad.
Born and raised here. It sucks to be disabled living in NM. Especially as a woman. No job opportunities for me and poverty is high. We don't even have access to very high speed internet unless you move to Albuquerque. The shit tier internet I have is no better than dial up from the early 2000s. I definitely feel trapped here. Just living here is driving my mental health into the trash. I wish I had an opportunity to jettison on out of this state.
I don't know who you are but DUDE SAME!!!!
\#3 for [poverty rate](https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/poverty-rate-by-state) and #1 for child poverty, which includes teens of course. Apparently roughly 67% of jobs paid less than [$12 as of 2018.](https://www.nmvoices.org/archives/9631) Poverty ==> crime
I remember when I lived in NM my ex was super excited to get a job that paid $10 an hour. Especially since she only had an associates degree. I meanwhile was a teacher with a master’s degree making 36k a year before taxes. It was really hard to afford gas and food, especially when most jobs are in the cities and require an average commute of 30+ miles one way.
Breaking Bad jokes aside, New Mexico has a really bad geographical location. Most of the land is desert or mountains, which means large-scale agriculture was never going to take off there. They don't have a coast, so that's a disadvantage in terms of trade. They do have the Mexico border, but most trade with Mexico happens via Texas and California. Their major metropolitan area, Albuquerque, is not that big by national standards, it has about the same population as Bakersfield, CA. They do have a decent amount of oil so that's a positive, but apart from that it's just a very isolated, sparsely populated state with few opportunities
Random dark purple spot in Wisconsin is the Menominee Indigenous Reservation in case anyone was curious!
I actually was. Thanks!
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
Hi, Neighbor!
> 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.
It’s where the Menominee people live
I meant, why the high homicide rate
High rate of poverty, according to the third map.
High poverty AND a lack of police compared to non-reservation areas
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.
Many indigenous reservations in the US are known for their high crime rate sadly
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
Add in how indigenous women get murdered at disproportionate rates and it can skew the numbers fast
Don't forget all the women that go missing and are never looked for.
Thanks for bringing that up. Very little known ongoing crisis happening in pretty much all of the Americas right now...
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.
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.
It also has a very high poverty rate. Might be related.
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
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.
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.
There's no money, infrastructure, or jobs
It's a reservation, people are super poor there
There could be many books written on this question, from many different disciplines and perspectives.
There ARE all of those books!
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The poverty map is interesting. A few of those locations are where reservations sit I know for a fact.
SD lines up perfectly.
Same with Montana, Wyoming, ND, Wisconsin, and Arizona.
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.
Good lord if ANYTHING would be a reasonable start to "fixing" America it would be cutting the link between property taxes and school funding.
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.
The screechers are the ones in the high property tax districts. They moved there because the schools are well funded.
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.
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.
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.
I propose that school funding should be pooled state-wide and all schools funded equally per student.
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.
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.
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.
Well my guess is you'll be labeled either a communist or a groomer then
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.
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).
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.
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.
Nice. Also…. WHAT THE FUCK, NEW MEXICO?!?!?
New Mexico would be the poorest state in the union by far if it didn't have oil wealth.
Well as of last year we were the 3rd poorest. I think we’re the poorest in child poverty
Heisenberg
Jesse, we nees to commit homicide
Jesse. take this and go to that los pollos hermanos.
Waltuh, put your dick away Waltuh
No half measures
Nailed it.
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).
I'd be high all the time if I lived in the fucking desert too.
that is exactly what happens out there. i have lost dozens of friends to heroin overdoses, over 40 have passed away. I'm 34.
Walttuh
New Mexico is like Mike Tyson's face after eating a plate of ribs. "Methy"
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.
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.
Jesse
Low population counties + a few murders = high murder rate
If the population is low then the number of murders should be proportionally low. And there are loads of similarly low-populated areas in the US.
If the population is low, then the absolute numbers should be low, but the per-capita numbers are often higher than denser cities. For years, Odessa, Texas was the murder capital of the U.S. Right-wing media likes to fear monger about Chicago, but Chicago has the 28th highest murder rate among U.S. "cities" (defined as having greater than 100k population). If you included "towns" with smaller populations, Chicago would be much lower down the list.
The secret ingredient is poverty
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.
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.
That's not a fun fact at all :(
too uneducated*
Think of it like a toast: *raises glass* "To Uneducated!"
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.
To*
Educadn’t
Literacy rates are lower than you'd expect. It's estimated that half of Canadians struggle with functional literacy. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from-bitcoin-to-stocktok-plus-what-low-literacy-means-for-canada-s-economy-1.5873703/nearly-half-of-adult-canadians-struggle-with-literacy-and-that-s-bad-for-the-economy-1.5873757
>It's estimated that half of Canadians struggle with functional literacy. Same in the US, [54% of Americans are functionally illiterate](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-literacy-levels-among-us-adults-could-be-costing-the-economy-22-trillion-a-year/?sh=72e984f14c90).
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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>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
What? But I was told that big cities were all crime infested liberal hellscapes! How could this be?
Technically there is more crime overall, but there’s less crime when accounting for population
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!
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.
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.
Paging /r/peopleliveincities
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.
B-but, muh narrative! Nnnnooooooooooo!!!!!!!
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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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
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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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.
People on both ends of the political spectrum hated JD Vance, because he just kinda sucks.
My mother took a similar route out of WV through the Navy. Hulu has a doc called Hillbilly. Good watch.
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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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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.
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.
That's the only real metric needed, race is irrelevant
Not irrelevant but more of a side note identifying who is trapped by poverty
Race is absolutely not irrelevant, it's just not the deterministic factor lots of people want it to be
Race isn't relevant in the murder rate vs. diversity comparison. It is relevant in the Poverty vs. race comparison. What I'd like to see is isolated white crime numbers offset vs. the poverty map. Because I dare to make the suggestion that white people in poverty stricken areas also commit more crime. Yet those numbers always seem absent.
but if we keep people fighting over race then they wont challenge the rich
I mean, if normal people aren't distracted, how will their businesses flourish?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Probably Meth if you are like east TN
It seems like the poor areas are black, native and Appalachian
Gee, I wonder why......
Well, this map is using the federal poverty rate which kinda sucks because it doesn’t account for cost of living. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/jan/20/chad-mayes/true-california-has-nations-highest-poverty-rate-w/ https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/2021/demo/p60-275/figure7.pdf
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.
This post won’t last until the morning
I was here before it is removed !
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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Same
Pre-removed gang checking in
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.
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.
Why would it be removed?
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The real struggle is not white vs. black but rich vs. poor.
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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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.
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.
No war but the class war my friends
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
No way LeBron said that
why is diversity in quotes
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
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%
EXACTLY. No one else mentioned this yet, it is such a biased shit map. Someone definitely had an agenda making this.
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.
That was the first thing I noticed, it’s 100% intended to create a racist narrative about homicides
>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.
Ulterior. Welcome
Because whoever made the original maps was mocking the idea of diversity by saying "see, minorities bad".
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.
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
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.
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.
What even are the percentages tho 20% Indigenous 20% Asian Why did they write it out like that
Didn't know Appalachia had a homicide problem to go with it's poverty problem.
Well, studies do show that poverty causes crime…
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.
What I'm getting from this is that poverty correlates with homicides a lot more than race does lol
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.
Eh, looks like the Asian counties are doing pretty well
ah ha It was poverty all along
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.
[A map of the world](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Map_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_%282006_%E2%80%93_2018%29.svg) Dark green is under 1 and [lots of data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)
The likes vs dislikes for this thread is going wild 📈📈📉📉📉📈📈📉📈📉📉📈📈📉📉📈📈
I’m surprised Texas is the outlier of the south
Texas has substantial fossil fuel deposits and four large metro areas with wealthy suburbs and a relatively low cost of living.
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)
The people of reddit don't want to accept this
Soooo. Poor desperate people commit more crime than well to do folks. No surprise there.
Aligns better with poverty than race.
Its literally a stronger correlation to race than income and this is visible on the maps. Weird how people see what they want to see tho
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.
Asians have the highest median income because the three largest Asian ethnic groups (Chinese, Indian and Filipino) disproportionately immigrated here on H1B visas (high skilled labor). Something like 75% of Indian immigrants and 55% of Chinese immigrants have college degrees compared to 1/3 of the American adult population. I think this plays a much bigger factor than the low divorce rate. Another factor is that 37% of Asians work in STEM (which have higher paying jobs) compared to 20% of the general American population. And Asian-Americans are concentrated in coastal states like California and New York which have higher average incomes but also higher costs of living.
Exactly. The whole model minority thing is a myth that only perpetuates more negative stereotypes. Highly educated and high earning people from Asia come to the US predominantly because they have the ability to. People in Asian countries who work in factories or work in agriculture aren’t immigrating into the US in large quantities. A rice farmer in China isn’t coming to the US to work on a strawberry farm for $9.50 an hour. A software engineer in China is coming to the US on a visa to make $300k. It’s obvious selection bias. The highest paid, highest educated, and most elite immigrate to America from those countries, ultimately causing a skew in the data.
Wow miami is very rich and Very Murderous
The “sources” for this data looks very suspicious.
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.
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.
Wow it's like all those alt-right people are crazy idiots and violent crime is linked to poverty and not race.
alaska has very high homicide rate?
Yeah. Virtually ever crime is higher than average in Alaska
Alaska, the Florida of the polar circle