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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: 0.197s | 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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1. tptacek ◴[04 Sep 25 01:08 UTC] No.45122284[source]▶
This is why the gold standard violent crime metric is homicides, which are consistently reported everywhere. Homicides in Chicago are sharply down (bears repeating that Chicago is nowhere near the top of the violent crime leaderboard in America --- it's just a lot bigger than people think it is).