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Chicago has the most lead pipes in the nation

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102 points Brajeshwar | 1 comments | 31 Aug 25 01:27 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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SilverElfin ◴[31 Aug 25 02:08 UTC] No.45079701[source]▶
I wonder what the accuracy of the data is like. And what do you do about damaged pipes? I read that cities lose a lot of water to leaks. Doesn’t that also mean pollutants can get in? And it won’t matter if your pipe is lead or whatever else.

An aside: lead exposure is thought to lead to increase violence. I wonder if Chicago having the most lead pipes is also a contributing cause of their (reputed) crime problem.

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hedora ◴[03 Sep 25 02:56 UTC] No.45111828[source]▶
Crime’s down in Chicago. 2024 saw a ~6-7% drop:

https://www.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024-CPD-An...

There are pages of tables comparing 2023 and 2024 on page 108. Sadly, they don’t go back multiple years.

Page 112 says there were 9112 aggravated assaults in 2024.

Page 10 of the 2004 report says there were 18,731 that year.

I’m sure you can find someone that’s graphed the trends online. Maybe an LLM can do it. Anyway, there isn’t a violent crime crisis in Chicago.

Reports going back to the 1990’s: https://www.chicagopolice.org/statistics-data/statistical-re...

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throwmeaway222 ◴[03 Sep 25 03:45 UTC] No.45112079[source]▶
Crime is up like crazy. Crime reporting within departments is down
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freen ◴[03 Sep 25 05:16 UTC] No.45112445[source]▶
Why would cops not report on crime?

Seems counter to the incentive structures of police departments.

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nickff ◴[03 Sep 25 06:10 UTC] No.45112699[source]▶
Not parent, and I don’t know about Chicago (I’ve never even visited Illinois), but if the police response is unsatisfying, people just don’t bother to report many crimes to the police. It is common for many ordinary people not to report property crimes unless required by an insurer, and many violent crimes against minorities or troubled people also go unreported due to lack of trust in the police.
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hedora ◴[03 Sep 25 14:08 UTC] No.45116004[source]▶
Almost all of the 2024 report talks about community trust in police. There’s a reason the crime stats start on page 108.

They also have stats on number of times people call or report crimes vs. number of arrests, gun pulls, etc.

Those stats overwhelmingly disprove the theory that trust in the police department has eroded and people are no longer reporting crime.

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1. nickff ◴[03 Sep 25 16:45 UTC] No.45117902[source]▶
Those stats actually indicate to me that many crimes are being under-reported, at least by certain groups. Compare the race & gender distribution of murder and aggravated assaults to other crimes; murders are obviously well-reported, but I highly suspect that the same people who are likely to be murdered are also likely to be robbed, battered, and assaulted, yet certain minorities make up much smaller proportions of reported victims in the 'less-heinous crimes'.

Additionally, while you think that the ordering of the report is in order of police’s priorities, I (more cynically) think it reflects them ‘burying’ the numbers.