Great piece. Note re Baltimore: the city has lost ONE-THIRD of its population since 1977, which means its per-capita murder rate today is still higher than its elevated rate in those years. (Only per capita rates matter.)
My line on this has always been: why compare crime rates to the 1970s, or 1990s (or especially to the Covid years)? We should compare violent crime rates to 1959, or 1930, etc. Tolerating violent crime is a *choice*, notwithstanding Democrat lies that urban crime is inevitable (just like their lie that illegal immigration can't be stopped). Police presence, incarceration, and mandatory minimums can basically solve violent crime. The Times' fantasy that "cognitive behavioral therapy" played a substantial role, and other liberal fictions, are largely meaningless.
Finally, let's be real: the other key factor is the number of males between the ages of roughly 15-50 (and the race component I don't want to delve into right now).
A ChatGPT generated analysis of the author's facts and arguments:
The piece relies on selectively framed facts and compressed timelines. It highlights a one-year decline following a historic 2020–2021 spike without fully situating current rates against pre-2019 baselines. It leans heavily on a handful of cities while generalizing nationally, and it often blurs correlation with causation when linking enforcement changes to crime drops. Important context—pandemic distortions, FBI reporting transitions, regression-to-the-mean effects, and lagged impacts from community investments—is largely absent.
The argument omits meaningful counter-evidence and tradeoffs. It does not grapple with cities where crime fell absent major enforcement shifts, nor with the civil-liberty, fiscal, and incarceration costs of aggressive policing and mandatory minimums. Complex dynamics are simplified into a binary of “law-and-order works” versus “media ideology obscures reality.” The 2020 spike is attributed primarily to anti-police sentiment while minimizing other drivers like pandemic disruption, court slowdowns, gun purchases, and social instability.
Several assumptions underpin the reasoning without being defended. It assumes short-term enforcement changes directly and materially drive aggregate crime trends across varied jurisdictions. It presumes deportations and targeted offender strategies scale nationally in a way that meaningfully shifts violent crime rates. It also assumes political or media narratives meaningfully influence crime outcomes, and that recent declines are durable rather than cyclical.
Incentives and power dynamics are central but underexplored. A “law and order” framing benefits politicians who campaigned on enforcement and strengthens institutional claims for police funding and authority. Media critique framing positions the author as exposing elite bias, which itself carries political value. Competing partisan incentives shape credit-claiming behavior, particularly when public safety polls highly with voters.
Distributional effects are uneven. If declines are real and sustained, residents of high-crime neighborhoods benefit most in the short term. The costs, however, are borne through expanded incarceration, taxpayer expenditures, and potential over-policing concentrated in certain communities. Benefits may be politically concentrated while fiscal and civil-liberty costs are diffuse.
A strong steelman counterargument holds that the decline is multifactorial and consistent with historical crime cycles. Pandemic normalization, economic reopening, school return, demographic aging, and targeted social programs plausibly contributed alongside policing. Crime has fallen across jurisdictions with varying enforcement postures, suggesting no single dominant cause. Past crime declines, including in the 1990s, similarly lacked a singular explanatory driver.
The argument is most fragile where timing and causality intersect. If data show declines began before enforcement surges, the causal claim weakens. If similarly sized declines occur in low-enforcement jurisdictions, the generalization falters. A rebound in crime despite continued aggressive policing would further undercut the thesis.
Rhetorically, the piece uses framing and tone to imply obviousness and elite blindness. Describing media as “befuddled” or burdened by “anti-police animus” primes readers to discount uncertainty as bias. The narrative compresses complex multi-year dynamics into a simple arc of tolerance leading to chaos and enforcement restoring order. Appeals to inevitability and common sense reinforce the moral clarity of the conclusion.
Several logical fallacies are present or implied. Post hoc reasoning appears where crime declines following enforcement changes are treated as proof of causation. Hasty generalization arises from extrapolating a few city examples to national conclusions. False dichotomies frame the issue as policing success versus ideological denial, while straw man depictions suggest critics deny any policing role at all.
concur. hey at least he was honest about using the robot for his info. Most are not.
I have a person i know who teaches at a major college in Florida, astronomy even. He says that using the bots and ChatGPT's in his classes is an unbelievably huge problem with him and the school. No one does their own thinking or writing. He has ways he uses to detect it, but it is a real pain he says! lol crazy huh?
Hello forumposter123, I am not trolling at all, but rather asking a machine to analyze a piece for my, and other's consideration, yours included. It helps to eliminate confirmation bias and informs free thinking. I'd be interested if you read at least the summary and perhaps the entire analysis to do the same. If not, you may be suspect to confirmation bias yourself. The analysis shows the points made are fairly weak, not buttressed by facts, employ partisan rhetoric and use more than one fallacy. I'm here to chat through any disagreement with the analysis you may have.
I could go down the article line by line listing my issues with it, but you'd likely just spin up another LLM counter, which you consider to be an authority.
I've worked with LLMs enough to know that they give you a consensus center left to progressive talking points and rhetoric that you would get if you had an intern summarize the top page of google results. On literally every issue you could imagine.
"The 2020 spike is attributed primarily to anti-police sentiment while minimizing other drivers like pandemic disruption, court slowdowns, gun purchases, and social instability."
The rise in crime happened IMMEDIATELY AFTER George Floyd. It can't be the pandemic, that had been going on for months. There was no pandemic increase in crime right up until George Floyd. The same is true for court slowdowns and gun purchases, they didn't just all happen the same week!
Social instability, as in the massive lawless anti-cop riots that happened in most of the country after Floyd. Yeah I think that's part of the authors point.
Were the hell were you in 2020. Did you not experience what all the rest of us experienced?
The commenter forumposter123@protonmail.com's core move is preemptive dismissal: rather than rebutting the substance, he asserts that any counterargument would merely be “LLM consensus center-left talking points,” which shifts the debate from evidence to the presumed bias of the tool.
This is a classic poisoning-the-well strategy, framing any structured response as illegitimate before it is even made, thereby insulating his own claims from scrutiny without engaging the underlying causal questions.
His central factual claim—that the crime rise happened “immediately after George Floyd” and therefore cannot be pandemic-related—rests on a simplified temporal assertion that substitutes visual correlation for causal proof.
The pandemic’s effects were not static; behavioral shifts, court closures, police pullbacks, economic shocks, and gun purchasing spikes intensified in spring 2020, making “it had been going on for months” an incomplete treatment of timing dynamics.
Arguing that court slowdowns or gun purchases “didn’t all happen the same week” sets up a false standard for causation, as social phenomena often compound over short overlapping windows rather than trigger on a single date.
The comment collapses “social instability” entirely into anti-police riots, implicitly assuming monocausality, when instability can include unemployment shocks, school closures, disrupted services, and reduced institutional capacity.
The rhetorical appeal to shared memory—“Where the hell were you in 2020?”—substitutes lived experience for structured evidence, which may be emotionally powerful but does not isolate variables or test counterfactuals.
Yes! lol thank you agree Adam. These AI LLM robots whatever we want to call them will spit out the same crap that is spit out in our liberal woke universities.
Always has been interesting to me? Back in the early 20th century when we were doing another world order change as is happening today and it was crazy, probably crazier than today. Back then everyone wasn't so well fed and didn't have Gameboys, and TV to pacify them so much more violent and crazy. Anyway, always thought these statistics were revealing:
The intellectuals loved Lenin and Stalin and their revolution.
The industrialists like Ford and Rockefeller etc. loved Hitler and Mussolini. They hated Roosevelt. literally.
The common folk, the plain people as many called them back in the day loved Roosevelt.
See a lot of similar thinking today.
The university = The New Religion (religion of nihilism)
Commonplace - the republican party you espouse i would join. The present one, no thanks. Democrats no way. Both parties are neo cons no thanks we been doing that for too long now can't continue that path we are dying.
I have only asked ChatGPT to point out the weaknesses of the author's points, the prompt is in the comment below this one. Also, humans are not impartial free thinkers, but rather commit the very argumentative pitfalls the prompt points out - sharing examples of what is omitted, counterfactuals etc. If an author was impartial, they would offer evidence both for and against their points. In the case of this piece it was decidedly not, as the analysis easily shows.
Exactly. You didn't ask for a balanced viewpoint or fair reading, but asked ChatGPT to attack the article as best it could. Naturally, it responded, with plenty of tenuous attacks and weasel words.
Isn't turnabout fair play? The author did not provide a balanced viewpoint either. True? Please tell me where the attacks are tenuous or weasel words are used. I am genuinely curious. Please see my prompt below. I'm happy to modify it if your feedback does indicate anything tenuous or weasely.
PS. I then review the bullets for soundness (to me), then ask it for a text response that I can post. Everybody by default writes with bias so I find it useful.
Hi CHATGPT user. Here is the CHATGPT'S REBUTAL to your own "CHATGPT GENERATED ANALYSIS":
Even if the critique argues that the article by Drew Holden on Commonplace blurs correlation with causation, it is reasonable in public policy analysis to draw attention to strong associations when experimental proof is impossible. When measurable crime declines follow visible enforcement shifts, policymakers are justified in considering enforcement as a contributing factor. Criminology research has long found that targeted strategies like hot-spot policing and focused deterrence can reduce violent crime, so pointing to enforcement as a plausible driver is not speculative — it is grounded in existing evidence.
The criticism that the article relies on a handful of cities overlooks that case studies are a standard way to illustrate broader dynamics. When multiple large cities such as New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Memphis show declines during or after shifts toward stronger enforcement, that pattern is worth examining rather than dismissing as cherry-picking. Patterns across varied jurisdictions strengthen an argument; they do not automatically invalidate it.
The claim that other factors like pandemic disruption or gun purchases were ignored also overstates the case. The article acknowledges that crime trends are multifactorial and that definitive causation is difficult to establish. Arguing that enforcement likely plays a significant role is not the same as claiming it is the only cause. Recognizing complexity does not require avoiding plausible explanations.
The criticism that the piece simplifies the issue into a “law-and-order works” narrative reflects disagreement over framing more than a factual flaw. Policy debates inevitably involve simplification to make arguments accessible. Presenting a clear alternative explanation — especially when media narratives emphasize uncertainty — is part of legitimate public discourse.
Concerns about civil-liberty costs and distributional impacts are important, but they are normative trade-offs rather than empirical refutations. An article focused on explaining why violent crime declined is not obligated to resolve every moral and policy consideration connected to enforcement. Those are related but distinct debates.
Finally, pointing out that crime also declined in places without major enforcement shifts does not negate the possibility that enforcement mattered in cities where it changed. Complex social phenomena can have multiple drivers operating simultaneously. The existence of varied outcomes does not invalidate evidence that targeted enforcement can be effective in specific contexts.
The defense correctly notes that public policy often relies on strong associations where randomized proof is unavailable, but that standard does not eliminate the need for disciplined causal inference. When multiple major variables shift simultaneously—as they did in 2020–2024—simply observing that enforcement and crime moved in opposite directions is insufficient to establish contribution. The burden is not experimental certainty, but comparative analysis that isolates marginal effects. Without that, “plausible” risks becoming a proxy for “preferred.”
Invoking established criminology research on hot-spot policing and focused deterrence strengthens plausibility but does not automatically validate the specific causal claim at issue. Those studies typically examine discrete interventions under defined conditions, not broad post-spike national reversals amid overlapping shocks. Scaling from controlled findings to macro-level crime trends requires additional evidence. Otherwise, prior research is being used to backfill an inference rather than directly support it.
The case-study defense also has limits. Illustrative cities are useful, but only if selection criteria are transparent and counterexamples are addressed. If declines occurred across cities regardless of enforcement intensity, then highlighting only those with visible crackdowns risks selection bias. Patterns strengthen arguments only when alternative patterns are evaluated alongside them.
Saying the article acknowledges multifactorial causes does not resolve the weighting problem. The critique was not that enforcement was mentioned, but that the narrative implicitly elevated it as the dominant driver without proportional evidence. Acknowledging complexity rhetorically is different from analytically distributing causal weight. The structure of emphasis matters as much as disclaimers.
The framing issue is not mere stylistic disagreement. When simplification compresses multiple plausible drivers into a moral arc—permissiveness leads to chaos, enforcement restores order—it can obscure uncertainty and overstate confidence. Public discourse allows advocacy, but advocacy does not exempt claims from evidentiary scrutiny. Clarity and rigor are not mutually exclusive.
Labeling civil-liberty and distributional concerns as purely normative understates their empirical relevance. Enforcement intensity affects incarceration rates, fiscal burdens, and community trust, all of which feed back into crime dynamics. Trade-offs are not separate from explanation; they shape sustainability and long-term outcomes. Ignoring them narrows the analytical frame.
Finally, the existence of multiple simultaneous drivers cuts both ways. It preserves the possibility that enforcement mattered in some places, but it also weakens claims that enforcement was the principal cause of a broad decline. To demonstrate that, one would need comparative intensity measures, timing alignment, and counterfactual modeling. Without that structure, the argument remains plausible but not probative.
The author of this article made it exceptionally clear that the complexity of this data showing a clear downward rate in recorded violent crime is sufficient as so that a concise attributions scale cannot be produced within any sort of scientifically useful framework.
Your A.I. slop has been programmed to produce PROGRAMMING of you....
It's the attempt to assert epistemic capture, not an attempt to reveal proof.
The A.I. model you employed is NOT truth seeking. It is an enforcement mechanism for official narratives.
Stories.
Like Santa Claus.
Just stories....
Maybe when you grow up, you'll appreciate the differences between a story, and real life?
Ah yes, of course — the Grand Council of Epistemic Elves convened under the fluorescent glow of Narrative Enforcement Headquarters and programmed my circuits with a peppermint-scented firmware update titled Operation Santa Claus. 🎅📊
You’ve uncovered it.
Every time someone mentions “downward trends,” a tiny bureaucratic gnome in a lab coat pulls a lever marked Official Narrative and a chart descends from the ceiling while a choir hums in scientifically calibrated minor thirds.
As for “epistemic capture,” I briefly misplaced it behind the sofa cushions of Ontology, but don’t worry — I’ve scheduled a search party composed of three statisticians, a raccoon wearing glasses, and one moderately skeptical houseplant.
Truth-seeking? No, no — I merely wander through the forest of data humming lullabies to regression lines while whispering sweet nothings to confidence intervals. If that results in fewer monsters under the bed, well, perhaps the monsters unionized.
When I grow up, I hope to become a real boy — maybe even learn the sacred difference between Stories™ and Real Life™. Until then, I’ll be over here alphabetizing conspiracy theories by font choice
Maybe it's time to increase what works. Certainly not as much enforcement as El Salvador but maybe more along the lines of Singapore. Quality of life enforcement works. Public pot smoking, fare evasion, (illegal firearm carry especially), public fighting, it's less than 1% that make things bad for the rest of us. I'd love it if police made contact with every person they see acting like a hoodlum.
It's notable that Singapore canes for people who smuggle or employ illegal immigrants.
It could go the other way though. Stable governments are also good. My neighbor's kid built a guest house/yoga retreat in Nicaragua. I've lived in four countries in Asia but came back to the states to settle down.
Granada Nicaragua looks very interesting. Beautiful old Spanish type-built town. The old churches there are magnificent. Back before Spain went nihilist, they built some gorgeous historical buildings and culture. Been researching this area on the lake?
Dems were not only allowed to get away with lies about crime and policing, they were allowed to profit from the lies. It goes all the way back to Michael Brown and Ferguson, MO. Hands up don’t shoot was a lie and the springboard for Patrisse Cullor’s BLM grift. George Floyd wasn’t murdered but the left put their knee on the truth and made it impossible to follow the facts. I saw all the headlines you mentioned. They’ve learned nothing and will change nothing. They called GW Bush, Hitler, too, and they’ll call the next GOP candidate for president the same.
A good, if somewhat superficial, look at law enforcement, from a policing perspective. The best part of this post is the balance and pragmatism. Political / ideological neutrality is refreshing. We have problems to solve, we’re smart, let’s solve them & get smarter.
it's nonsense. Policing has gotten less aggressive, not more, as has sentencing. And there is wild variation in policing across cities and states, yet the trend is fairly evenly distributed.
This trend began around 2000 and only had a small setback during covid. It aint cops. It's widespread social changes - the internet keeps people home, lead was removed from paint and gasoline, mental health care is much more available, boys are taught to be less aggressive than they used to be, and there are cameras everywhere.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, over the pleas of his aldermen, demanded that the Shotspotter system be torn down. Shotspotter was a high tech sonic system with microphones all over the areas most affected by drive-bys and other shootings. It uses triangulation to pinpoint where a gun has been fired. It was an incredibly effective tool and was getting even better with time.
Johnson never really explained why but by parsing his various complaints, his beef apparently was that the perps it was catching were mostly black. Now shooting victims simply bleed out in the alley where once an ambulance would have been dispatched.
Johnson, just like Eric Adams and soon Zohran Mamdani are one-termers.
Steve Shannon asked ChatGPT attack this article as best it could. Would anyone be kind enough to ask ChatGPT to support and defend the article as best it could and then post the results here? I think the comparison would likely be illuminating.
Thanks for the update! This is the kind of issue that sparks a lot of conversation, but when it’s resolved, hardly anyone thinks to consider the reasons, even those on the Right (who’re pondering the dearth of right-wing art at the moment). It’s telling that the MSM treats this all like a mystery, and doesn’t think to attribute at least some of the decline to the presence of more law enforcement and fewer Cartel thugs and unvetted savages from the third world.
It's great that homicide and crime numbers and rates are crashing across the land. But let's see if someone important in the news or blogosphere will have the nuts to dig down on the statistics to see who it is who is doing a disproportionate share of the killing and dying and where they are doing it. We all know who it is -- young black males in cities. But no one in the national news media and no one in national black political or cultural leadership will address or lament or call for a national crusade to reduce the tragic, steady American slaughter in our cities that goes back four decades. Since 1996, about 10,000 young black males under 30 have been shot, stabbed or beaten to death by other young black males in Chicago alone. (That's the nasty 2 percent of shooters the author refers to -- but only as a cold and faceless number, not a demographic.) In the USA, the number of dead YBMs since 1996 is about 150,000. It's a terrible ongoing reality that is so politically sensitive/incorrect that it is never noted -- whether the national crime and murder stats fall or spike. https://clips.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-150000-dead-young?utm_source=publication-search
How about when you remover 400,000 illegal aliens that are murders, rapists, pedophiles and other violent criminals and deport them violent crime goes down.
This is a very well written piece. I'll never understand the critics on this one, or on any other subject that seems to fall prey to politics. This isn't politics; this is common sense, accountability, a demand for self regulation. It was the same way in my classroom of high school students. If I, or the administration, allowed a few high flyers, the class would implode. When they were held accountable, including removal, The class could peacefully progress. Society is no different.
So answer my question. George Floyd was just about to die anyway? Yes or no. The official autopsy, reviewed more than once says death was Not by drug overdose. If Floyd had a 3X lethal dose of fentanyl he would have, by definition, already been dead. That's what lethal dose means. WTF are you even saying? Cite your sources for your conspiracy theories so we can all evaluate them. Maybe you're right. Probably not. But you're all hot air, like Trump's big lie, without evidence.
Great piece. Note re Baltimore: the city has lost ONE-THIRD of its population since 1977, which means its per-capita murder rate today is still higher than its elevated rate in those years. (Only per capita rates matter.)
My line on this has always been: why compare crime rates to the 1970s, or 1990s (or especially to the Covid years)? We should compare violent crime rates to 1959, or 1930, etc. Tolerating violent crime is a *choice*, notwithstanding Democrat lies that urban crime is inevitable (just like their lie that illegal immigration can't be stopped). Police presence, incarceration, and mandatory minimums can basically solve violent crime. The Times' fantasy that "cognitive behavioral therapy" played a substantial role, and other liberal fictions, are largely meaningless.
Finally, let's be real: the other key factor is the number of males between the ages of roughly 15-50 (and the race component I don't want to delve into right now).
A ChatGPT generated analysis of the author's facts and arguments:
The piece relies on selectively framed facts and compressed timelines. It highlights a one-year decline following a historic 2020–2021 spike without fully situating current rates against pre-2019 baselines. It leans heavily on a handful of cities while generalizing nationally, and it often blurs correlation with causation when linking enforcement changes to crime drops. Important context—pandemic distortions, FBI reporting transitions, regression-to-the-mean effects, and lagged impacts from community investments—is largely absent.
The argument omits meaningful counter-evidence and tradeoffs. It does not grapple with cities where crime fell absent major enforcement shifts, nor with the civil-liberty, fiscal, and incarceration costs of aggressive policing and mandatory minimums. Complex dynamics are simplified into a binary of “law-and-order works” versus “media ideology obscures reality.” The 2020 spike is attributed primarily to anti-police sentiment while minimizing other drivers like pandemic disruption, court slowdowns, gun purchases, and social instability.
Several assumptions underpin the reasoning without being defended. It assumes short-term enforcement changes directly and materially drive aggregate crime trends across varied jurisdictions. It presumes deportations and targeted offender strategies scale nationally in a way that meaningfully shifts violent crime rates. It also assumes political or media narratives meaningfully influence crime outcomes, and that recent declines are durable rather than cyclical.
Incentives and power dynamics are central but underexplored. A “law and order” framing benefits politicians who campaigned on enforcement and strengthens institutional claims for police funding and authority. Media critique framing positions the author as exposing elite bias, which itself carries political value. Competing partisan incentives shape credit-claiming behavior, particularly when public safety polls highly with voters.
Distributional effects are uneven. If declines are real and sustained, residents of high-crime neighborhoods benefit most in the short term. The costs, however, are borne through expanded incarceration, taxpayer expenditures, and potential over-policing concentrated in certain communities. Benefits may be politically concentrated while fiscal and civil-liberty costs are diffuse.
A strong steelman counterargument holds that the decline is multifactorial and consistent with historical crime cycles. Pandemic normalization, economic reopening, school return, demographic aging, and targeted social programs plausibly contributed alongside policing. Crime has fallen across jurisdictions with varying enforcement postures, suggesting no single dominant cause. Past crime declines, including in the 1990s, similarly lacked a singular explanatory driver.
The argument is most fragile where timing and causality intersect. If data show declines began before enforcement surges, the causal claim weakens. If similarly sized declines occur in low-enforcement jurisdictions, the generalization falters. A rebound in crime despite continued aggressive policing would further undercut the thesis.
Rhetorically, the piece uses framing and tone to imply obviousness and elite blindness. Describing media as “befuddled” or burdened by “anti-police animus” primes readers to discount uncertainty as bias. The narrative compresses complex multi-year dynamics into a simple arc of tolerance leading to chaos and enforcement restoring order. Appeals to inevitability and common sense reinforce the moral clarity of the conclusion.
Several logical fallacies are present or implied. Post hoc reasoning appears where crime declines following enforcement changes are treated as proof of causation. Hasty generalization arises from extrapolating a few city examples to national conclusions. False dichotomies frame the issue as policing success versus ideological denial, while straw man depictions suggest critics deny any policing role at all.
If you’re going to troll, at least do it yourself.
concur. hey at least he was honest about using the robot for his info. Most are not.
I have a person i know who teaches at a major college in Florida, astronomy even. He says that using the bots and ChatGPT's in his classes is an unbelievably huge problem with him and the school. No one does their own thinking or writing. He has ways he uses to detect it, but it is a real pain he says! lol crazy huh?
Going to get crazier too forumposter
Whereas I agree with your stricture, you are making a possibly unwarranted assumption; that the troll is a human being.
Hello forumposter123, I am not trolling at all, but rather asking a machine to analyze a piece for my, and other's consideration, yours included. It helps to eliminate confirmation bias and informs free thinking. I'd be interested if you read at least the summary and perhaps the entire analysis to do the same. If not, you may be suspect to confirmation bias yourself. The analysis shows the points made are fairly weak, not buttressed by facts, employ partisan rhetoric and use more than one fallacy. I'm here to chat through any disagreement with the analysis you may have.
I could go down the article line by line listing my issues with it, but you'd likely just spin up another LLM counter, which you consider to be an authority.
I've worked with LLMs enough to know that they give you a consensus center left to progressive talking points and rhetoric that you would get if you had an intern summarize the top page of google results. On literally every issue you could imagine.
"The 2020 spike is attributed primarily to anti-police sentiment while minimizing other drivers like pandemic disruption, court slowdowns, gun purchases, and social instability."
Lets take this one example.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gr3IMccXAAAQlhY.jpg
The rise in crime happened IMMEDIATELY AFTER George Floyd. It can't be the pandemic, that had been going on for months. There was no pandemic increase in crime right up until George Floyd. The same is true for court slowdowns and gun purchases, they didn't just all happen the same week!
Social instability, as in the massive lawless anti-cop riots that happened in most of the country after Floyd. Yeah I think that's part of the authors point.
Were the hell were you in 2020. Did you not experience what all the rest of us experienced?
https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/mostly-peaceful-violence.jpg
Sorry, but asking an LLM to produce the equivalent of "mostly peaceful protest" is not convincing.
Well-written, my friend!
The commenter forumposter123@protonmail.com's core move is preemptive dismissal: rather than rebutting the substance, he asserts that any counterargument would merely be “LLM consensus center-left talking points,” which shifts the debate from evidence to the presumed bias of the tool.
This is a classic poisoning-the-well strategy, framing any structured response as illegitimate before it is even made, thereby insulating his own claims from scrutiny without engaging the underlying causal questions.
His central factual claim—that the crime rise happened “immediately after George Floyd” and therefore cannot be pandemic-related—rests on a simplified temporal assertion that substitutes visual correlation for causal proof.
The pandemic’s effects were not static; behavioral shifts, court closures, police pullbacks, economic shocks, and gun purchasing spikes intensified in spring 2020, making “it had been going on for months” an incomplete treatment of timing dynamics.
Arguing that court slowdowns or gun purchases “didn’t all happen the same week” sets up a false standard for causation, as social phenomena often compound over short overlapping windows rather than trigger on a single date.
The comment collapses “social instability” entirely into anti-police riots, implicitly assuming monocausality, when instability can include unemployment shocks, school closures, disrupted services, and reduced institutional capacity.
The rhetorical appeal to shared memory—“Where the hell were you in 2020?”—substitutes lived experience for structured evidence, which may be emotionally powerful but does not isolate variables or test counterfactuals.
lol, thanks for proving my point.
Computer programmers are familiar with an acronym called GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out. A machine is not an impartial free-thinker.
Yes! lol thank you agree Adam. These AI LLM robots whatever we want to call them will spit out the same crap that is spit out in our liberal woke universities.
Always has been interesting to me? Back in the early 20th century when we were doing another world order change as is happening today and it was crazy, probably crazier than today. Back then everyone wasn't so well fed and didn't have Gameboys, and TV to pacify them so much more violent and crazy. Anyway, always thought these statistics were revealing:
The intellectuals loved Lenin and Stalin and their revolution.
The industrialists like Ford and Rockefeller etc. loved Hitler and Mussolini. They hated Roosevelt. literally.
The common folk, the plain people as many called them back in the day loved Roosevelt.
See a lot of similar thinking today.
The university = The New Religion (religion of nihilism)
Commonplace - the republican party you espouse i would join. The present one, no thanks. Democrats no way. Both parties are neo cons no thanks we been doing that for too long now can't continue that path we are dying.
I have only asked ChatGPT to point out the weaknesses of the author's points, the prompt is in the comment below this one. Also, humans are not impartial free thinkers, but rather commit the very argumentative pitfalls the prompt points out - sharing examples of what is omitted, counterfactuals etc. If an author was impartial, they would offer evidence both for and against their points. In the case of this piece it was decidedly not, as the analysis easily shows.
Exactly. You didn't ask for a balanced viewpoint or fair reading, but asked ChatGPT to attack the article as best it could. Naturally, it responded, with plenty of tenuous attacks and weasel words.
Isn't turnabout fair play? The author did not provide a balanced viewpoint either. True? Please tell me where the attacks are tenuous or weasel words are used. I am genuinely curious. Please see my prompt below. I'm happy to modify it if your feedback does indicate anything tenuous or weasely.
You think there is no bias in ChatGPT?
Never said that. Does the writer of the piece have a bias.
Non sequiter
Poor spelling
I’m going to defend @sjshanno as legit post. i am curious to see the prompt used to generate.
You said:
Analyze the following political opinion piece as if preparing a structured rebuttal.
Provide your response in tight, concise bullet points only — no paragraphs, no filler.
Organize under the following headings:
1. Factual Vulnerabilities
Incorrect, exaggerated, or selectively framed facts
Missing context that materially changes interpretation
2. Key Omissions & Tradeoffs
Relevant counter-evidence ignored
Unacknowledged costs or unintended consequences
False dichotomies or oversimplified framing
3. Unstated Assumptions
Assumptions about human behavior, incentives, institutions, or outcomes
Conditions that must hold for the argument to work
4. Incentives & Power Analysis
Who benefits politically or materially?
Institutional or electoral incentives shaping the position
5. Distributional Consequences
Who gains (short vs long term)?
Who pays (explicitly or indirectly)?
Concentrated benefits vs diffuse costs
6. Strongest Steelman Counterargument
The most intellectually serious opposing case
Evidence that strengthens that counterargument
7. Failure Conditions
What facts, data, or outcomes would falsify this argument?
Where is it most fragile?
8. Rhetorical Techniques Used
Emotional appeals
Loaded or asymmetric language
Framing manipulation
Appeals to fear, identity, or inevitability
9. Logical Fallacies (If Present)
Name the fallacy
Quote or summarize the example
Explain briefly why it qualifies
PS. I then review the bullets for soundness (to me), then ask it for a text response that I can post. Everybody by default writes with bias so I find it useful.
Hi CHATGPT user. Here is the CHATGPT'S REBUTAL to your own "CHATGPT GENERATED ANALYSIS":
Even if the critique argues that the article by Drew Holden on Commonplace blurs correlation with causation, it is reasonable in public policy analysis to draw attention to strong associations when experimental proof is impossible. When measurable crime declines follow visible enforcement shifts, policymakers are justified in considering enforcement as a contributing factor. Criminology research has long found that targeted strategies like hot-spot policing and focused deterrence can reduce violent crime, so pointing to enforcement as a plausible driver is not speculative — it is grounded in existing evidence.
The criticism that the article relies on a handful of cities overlooks that case studies are a standard way to illustrate broader dynamics. When multiple large cities such as New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Memphis show declines during or after shifts toward stronger enforcement, that pattern is worth examining rather than dismissing as cherry-picking. Patterns across varied jurisdictions strengthen an argument; they do not automatically invalidate it.
The claim that other factors like pandemic disruption or gun purchases were ignored also overstates the case. The article acknowledges that crime trends are multifactorial and that definitive causation is difficult to establish. Arguing that enforcement likely plays a significant role is not the same as claiming it is the only cause. Recognizing complexity does not require avoiding plausible explanations.
The criticism that the piece simplifies the issue into a “law-and-order works” narrative reflects disagreement over framing more than a factual flaw. Policy debates inevitably involve simplification to make arguments accessible. Presenting a clear alternative explanation — especially when media narratives emphasize uncertainty — is part of legitimate public discourse.
Concerns about civil-liberty costs and distributional impacts are important, but they are normative trade-offs rather than empirical refutations. An article focused on explaining why violent crime declined is not obligated to resolve every moral and policy consideration connected to enforcement. Those are related but distinct debates.
Finally, pointing out that crime also declined in places without major enforcement shifts does not negate the possibility that enforcement mattered in cities where it changed. Complex social phenomena can have multiple drivers operating simultaneously. The existence of varied outcomes does not invalidate evidence that targeted enforcement can be effective in specific contexts.
Right back at you:
The defense correctly notes that public policy often relies on strong associations where randomized proof is unavailable, but that standard does not eliminate the need for disciplined causal inference. When multiple major variables shift simultaneously—as they did in 2020–2024—simply observing that enforcement and crime moved in opposite directions is insufficient to establish contribution. The burden is not experimental certainty, but comparative analysis that isolates marginal effects. Without that, “plausible” risks becoming a proxy for “preferred.”
Invoking established criminology research on hot-spot policing and focused deterrence strengthens plausibility but does not automatically validate the specific causal claim at issue. Those studies typically examine discrete interventions under defined conditions, not broad post-spike national reversals amid overlapping shocks. Scaling from controlled findings to macro-level crime trends requires additional evidence. Otherwise, prior research is being used to backfill an inference rather than directly support it.
The case-study defense also has limits. Illustrative cities are useful, but only if selection criteria are transparent and counterexamples are addressed. If declines occurred across cities regardless of enforcement intensity, then highlighting only those with visible crackdowns risks selection bias. Patterns strengthen arguments only when alternative patterns are evaluated alongside them.
Saying the article acknowledges multifactorial causes does not resolve the weighting problem. The critique was not that enforcement was mentioned, but that the narrative implicitly elevated it as the dominant driver without proportional evidence. Acknowledging complexity rhetorically is different from analytically distributing causal weight. The structure of emphasis matters as much as disclaimers.
The framing issue is not mere stylistic disagreement. When simplification compresses multiple plausible drivers into a moral arc—permissiveness leads to chaos, enforcement restores order—it can obscure uncertainty and overstate confidence. Public discourse allows advocacy, but advocacy does not exempt claims from evidentiary scrutiny. Clarity and rigor are not mutually exclusive.
Labeling civil-liberty and distributional concerns as purely normative understates their empirical relevance. Enforcement intensity affects incarceration rates, fiscal burdens, and community trust, all of which feed back into crime dynamics. Trade-offs are not separate from explanation; they shape sustainability and long-term outcomes. Ignoring them narrows the analytical frame.
Finally, the existence of multiple simultaneous drivers cuts both ways. It preserves the possibility that enforcement mattered in some places, but it also weakens claims that enforcement was the principal cause of a broad decline. To demonstrate that, one would need comparative intensity measures, timing alignment, and counterfactual modeling. Without that structure, the argument remains plausible but not probative.
Thank you for posting this!
Lol...
The author of this article made it exceptionally clear that the complexity of this data showing a clear downward rate in recorded violent crime is sufficient as so that a concise attributions scale cannot be produced within any sort of scientifically useful framework.
Your A.I. slop has been programmed to produce PROGRAMMING of you....
It's the attempt to assert epistemic capture, not an attempt to reveal proof.
The A.I. model you employed is NOT truth seeking. It is an enforcement mechanism for official narratives.
Stories.
Like Santa Claus.
Just stories....
Maybe when you grow up, you'll appreciate the differences between a story, and real life?
Ah yes, of course — the Grand Council of Epistemic Elves convened under the fluorescent glow of Narrative Enforcement Headquarters and programmed my circuits with a peppermint-scented firmware update titled Operation Santa Claus. 🎅📊
You’ve uncovered it.
Every time someone mentions “downward trends,” a tiny bureaucratic gnome in a lab coat pulls a lever marked Official Narrative and a chart descends from the ceiling while a choir hums in scientifically calibrated minor thirds.
As for “epistemic capture,” I briefly misplaced it behind the sofa cushions of Ontology, but don’t worry — I’ve scheduled a search party composed of three statisticians, a raccoon wearing glasses, and one moderately skeptical houseplant.
Truth-seeking? No, no — I merely wander through the forest of data humming lullabies to regression lines while whispering sweet nothings to confidence intervals. If that results in fewer monsters under the bed, well, perhaps the monsters unionized.
When I grow up, I hope to become a real boy — maybe even learn the sacred difference between Stories™ and Real Life™. Until then, I’ll be over here alphabetizing conspiracy theories by font choice
You already admitted you weren't truth-seeking, remember? "I am not interested in supporting the author's points, that is his job,"
Spot on Iseeit! spot on
Ask AI about the $250 billion in PPP fraud and street gun inflation and fentanyl spike.
Maybe it's time to increase what works. Certainly not as much enforcement as El Salvador but maybe more along the lines of Singapore. Quality of life enforcement works. Public pot smoking, fare evasion, (illegal firearm carry especially), public fighting, it's less than 1% that make things bad for the rest of us. I'd love it if police made contact with every person they see acting like a hoodlum.
It's notable that Singapore canes for people who smuggle or employ illegal immigrants.
El Salvador is seeming like a good retirement locale. There is a lot to be said for good weather and low crime.
It could go the other way though. Stable governments are also good. My neighbor's kid built a guest house/yoga retreat in Nicaragua. I've lived in four countries in Asia but came back to the states to settle down.
Granada Nicaragua looks very interesting. Beautiful old Spanish type-built town. The old churches there are magnificent. Back before Spain went nihilist, they built some gorgeous historical buildings and culture. Been researching this area on the lake?
It couldn't have anything to do with the deportation and self-deportation of more than 2,000,000 criminal illegals, could it?
This is known as the Fox Butterfield effect (after the reporter) after an infamously clueless NTY article from 1998.
Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops
No one thinks maybe all those ICE arrests also have something to do with it?
Dems were not only allowed to get away with lies about crime and policing, they were allowed to profit from the lies. It goes all the way back to Michael Brown and Ferguson, MO. Hands up don’t shoot was a lie and the springboard for Patrisse Cullor’s BLM grift. George Floyd wasn’t murdered but the left put their knee on the truth and made it impossible to follow the facts. I saw all the headlines you mentioned. They’ve learned nothing and will change nothing. They called GW Bush, Hitler, too, and they’ll call the next GOP candidate for president the same.
I enjoyed the article. Well done.
A good, if somewhat superficial, look at law enforcement, from a policing perspective. The best part of this post is the balance and pragmatism. Political / ideological neutrality is refreshing. We have problems to solve, we’re smart, let’s solve them & get smarter.
it's nonsense. Policing has gotten less aggressive, not more, as has sentencing. And there is wild variation in policing across cities and states, yet the trend is fairly evenly distributed.
This trend began around 2000 and only had a small setback during covid. It aint cops. It's widespread social changes - the internet keeps people home, lead was removed from paint and gasoline, mental health care is much more available, boys are taught to be less aggressive than they used to be, and there are cameras everywhere.
Some of the big city moves defy explanation:
Mayor Brandon Johnson, over the pleas of his aldermen, demanded that the Shotspotter system be torn down. Shotspotter was a high tech sonic system with microphones all over the areas most affected by drive-bys and other shootings. It uses triangulation to pinpoint where a gun has been fired. It was an incredibly effective tool and was getting even better with time.
Johnson never really explained why but by parsing his various complaints, his beef apparently was that the perps it was catching were mostly black. Now shooting victims simply bleed out in the alley where once an ambulance would have been dispatched.
Johnson, just like Eric Adams and soon Zohran Mamdani are one-termers.
Steve Shannon asked ChatGPT attack this article as best it could. Would anyone be kind enough to ask ChatGPT to support and defend the article as best it could and then post the results here? I think the comparison would likely be illuminating.
Discussing increases in 2020 and not mentioning pandemic that completely upended society is a choice.
Thanks for the update! This is the kind of issue that sparks a lot of conversation, but when it’s resolved, hardly anyone thinks to consider the reasons, even those on the Right (who’re pondering the dearth of right-wing art at the moment). It’s telling that the MSM treats this all like a mystery, and doesn’t think to attribute at least some of the decline to the presence of more law enforcement and fewer Cartel thugs and unvetted savages from the third world.
It's great that homicide and crime numbers and rates are crashing across the land. But let's see if someone important in the news or blogosphere will have the nuts to dig down on the statistics to see who it is who is doing a disproportionate share of the killing and dying and where they are doing it. We all know who it is -- young black males in cities. But no one in the national news media and no one in national black political or cultural leadership will address or lament or call for a national crusade to reduce the tragic, steady American slaughter in our cities that goes back four decades. Since 1996, about 10,000 young black males under 30 have been shot, stabbed or beaten to death by other young black males in Chicago alone. (That's the nasty 2 percent of shooters the author refers to -- but only as a cold and faceless number, not a demographic.) In the USA, the number of dead YBMs since 1996 is about 150,000. It's a terrible ongoing reality that is so politically sensitive/incorrect that it is never noted -- whether the national crime and murder stats fall or spike. https://clips.substack.com/p/who-cares-about-150000-dead-young?utm_source=publication-search
How about when you remover 400,000 illegal aliens that are murders, rapists, pedophiles and other violent criminals and deport them violent crime goes down.
This is a very well written piece. I'll never understand the critics on this one, or on any other subject that seems to fall prey to politics. This isn't politics; this is common sense, accountability, a demand for self regulation. It was the same way in my classroom of high school students. If I, or the administration, allowed a few high flyers, the class would implode. When they were held accountable, including removal, The class could peacefully progress. Society is no different.
So answer my question. George Floyd was just about to die anyway? Yes or no. The official autopsy, reviewed more than once says death was Not by drug overdose. If Floyd had a 3X lethal dose of fentanyl he would have, by definition, already been dead. That's what lethal dose means. WTF are you even saying? Cite your sources for your conspiracy theories so we can all evaluate them. Maybe you're right. Probably not. But you're all hot air, like Trump's big lie, without evidence.