I previously covered how it is that, when large increases are found in the number of people who are detained or dying, that is indirect evidence that you live under a police state.
How Baselines, and the Rate-of-Change-from Baselines, Matter
The fundamental nature of humans doesn’t change, and that means that in a short span of a decade or two, humans as a species do not change — i.e., they do not, in short spans of time, become “more criminal.”
Somewhere around 1% of a given human population will be found, in all times and in all places, to have violated the rights of other people (to be “criminals”). Cultural change allows for some movement in this baseline or “steady state” level of crime in human societies.
Some cultures may result in somewhere around 2% of the human population being engaged in rights violations. This moves the national baseline but the movement of that baseline takes decades (it requires an entirely new generation to supplant the older one).
Incarcerations may go up very fast, but it is not because crime did. Baseline levels of criminality do not change in short time-spans. If incarcerations go up very fast, it is not because the people changed their behavior, it is because the government changed its behavior.
I covered the six-fold growth in federal incarcerations from 1980 to 2012 in this Substack, showing how it that the US government has become more authoritarian and is approaching being “totalitarian” (e.g., NAZI Germany) — because that rate of change is too fast.
People do not become 6-fold more “criminal” in one generation. The reason that federal prison populations swelled so much and so fast is not because the people changed their behavior, it is because the government did.
Death, too
The same is true for deaths: there is a baseline level or rate for each age group, and it does not change greatly in a short span of a decade or two. If the death rate goes up very fast, it is not because people changed their behavior, it is because the government changed its behavior.
The variation that is typically seen in death rates results in a coefficient of variation (standard deviation, as a proportion of the mean value) of 3.5% to 7%. There is some background or baseline variation there, but it is not large.
This means that death rates will not naturally change very fast, but though death by natural causes cannot change very fast, death by external causes (e.g., accidents, suicides, homicides) can change fast, according to the political environment.
The Evidence of Fast Change, with direction of Change based on Political Affiliation
The non-Hispanic whites in the graph above are all at that range of ages known as “peak earning years” — where, over one’s lifetime, your earnings are the highest. Those at right are the ones getting ready to retire.
This simultaneous decrease in death among Democrats in both age groups, along with the increase in death among Republicans in both age groups, is strong evidence of a police state.
The death gap by political affiliation (holding age and race the same) worsened after 2009, when the Affordable Care Act was implemented. Worrisomely, this trend was found BEFORE the authoritarian COVID measures.
Reference
[BMJ study where largest difference (15% difference) was found was between white Democrats and Republicans] — Political environment and mortality rates in the United States, 2001-19: population based cross sectional analysis. BMJ 2022;377:e069308. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2021-069308 and PDF available at: https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/377/bmj-2021-069308.full.pdf
[National Vital Statistics Report #52] — CDC. National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr52/nvsr52_03.pdf
[National Vital Statistics Report #70] — CDC. National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf