According to current San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins, the vast majority of those incidents had not been prosecuted.

“My prosecutors could go into court today even having an eyewitness to an auto burglary, but without having an individual who owns or possesses the car say they locked the doors, could be required to dismiss the case,” Jenkins said.

The city’s roughly 11,000 break-ins in the first half of this year resulted in just 86 felony auto burglary cases, about half of which actually ended in a conviction, Jenkins said. Many of those incidents happened in popular tourist destinations like the Marina District, Fisherman’s Wharf and near Civic Center.

A bill by state representative Scott Weiner would close that loophole (SB 905), something that he had been trying to pass for a few years, and it eventually passed in 2024 as section §465 and was effective starting in 2025.

While car break-ins were a huge concern for San Francisco a few years ago, almost none of the rest of that is true.

Based on numbers from DataSF, most auto burglaries have been, and continue to be, prosecuted under the section of the law that contains the loophole about requiring car doors to be locked—section §459. Over 80 percent were prosecuted in 2021 under that law, and 88 percent were prosecuted in 2025 when the new law passed.

If anything, there’s been a sharp decline in auto burglary arrests since 2019, years before the loophole was closed potentially following a sharp decline in incidence.

A San Francisco Chronicle story noted the sharp decline back in 2024 due to increased police enforcement, although that may not be totally accurate as arrests have been in continuous decline since 2020.

Similar Conviction Rate to All Burglaries

While the number of cases and arrests have plummeted, conviction rates under the old law remain about the same.

If the loophole somehow affected prosecution success—rather than whether charges were brought as Jenkins described—then conviction rates for that statute would ostensibly be low.

But conviction rates under section §459 are almost exactly in line with conviction rates for all types of burglary and robbery that aren’t automobile-related—varying between 40 and 60 percent.

Conviction rates solely refers to total convictions and does not include other potential outcomes in favor of prosecution, such as diversions or pleading guilty to a separate case. But even when considering those other conclusions, auto burglaries have had similar outcomes to other burglaries, and they are regularly prosecuted successfully.

The new law (§465) could certainly improve upon those numbers, although the data currently only shows seven cases to be prosecuted under the new law. As it was only passed in 2025, it’s still early and there is little data available on its effects.

Ongoing Prosecutorial Issues

Besides auto burglaries, the San Francisco district attorney’s office appears to have significant issues with conviction rates for all crimes as well as an increasing number of fugitives.

Robberies and burglaries used to have conviction rates almost twice as high as they currently do. The overall conviction rate used to be around 30 percent rather than current rates around 10 percent.

The number of cases left on hold because the defendant absconded and is now considered a fugitive is now around 12 percent a year when it used to be less than one percent. Then there’s a separate issue of Jenkins dropping narcotics cases.

On May 16th, Cleveland, Ohio voted to stop the $1.6 billion Slavic Village datacenter project from moving forward. The Box Elder datacenter campus in Utah has seen intense backlash, some of it over the confusion about how many acres of land it would encompass.

Criticism of the projects has largely hinged on environmental issues related to the large amounts of water used for cooling, electricity consumption, costs to ratepayers, carbon and heat generation, and their use for A.I.

The scale of the outrage targeted at datacenters appears out of place. While they use large amounts of water for cooling, so do many other industries—factories, farms, golf courses—that generate far less tax revenue for the areas they are located in.

In response, the pro-energy group American Energy Institute (AEI) published a report showing the foreign funding of nonprofits advocating against datacenter development. According to a report from Americans for Public Trust, environmental groups like 350.org and Greenpeace receive substantial sums from foreign investors like the Oak Foundation—headquartered in Switzerland and run by a British citizen Alan Parker—as well as the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss through the Wyss Foundation and Berger Action Fund, the British hedge fund manager Chris Hohn, the UK-based Quadrature Climate foundation, and the Denmark-based KR Foundation.

In February, Nebraska attorney general Mike Hilgers requested the Department of Justice investigate a collection of foreign entities funding U.S. environmental groups under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), some of which like 350.org are actively advocating against datacenters.

But besides 350.org and Greenpeace, many of the environmental groups funded by foreign entities detailed in the AEI report don’t appear to be active in anti-datacenter advocacy.

Interestingly enough another large funder of groups advocating against datacenters is the Schmidt Family Foundation. The 501(c)3 group created by Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt heavily funds the nonprofit Food and Water Watch at the center of the activism and organizer of the letter to Congress.

The irony of course is that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is heavily invested, if not one of the largest American investors in datacenters. Through the Schmidt Family Foundation it appears that they might be funding their own opposition.

Based on 2024 filings, the foundation holds almost $1 billion in Alphabet stock, and it gave at least $3.75 million to the signatories of the 2025 anti-datacenter letter including $1.2 million to the letter’s coordinator, Food and Water Watch along with others like Columbia Riverkeeper, FracTracker Alliance, and Physicians for Social Responsibility. In total, the Schmidt Family Foundation handed out $195 million that year to a larger number of nonprofit groups that could also be advocating against datacenters in other ways.

For example, the Google datacenter in Dalles, Oregon is at the center of a battle over water usage. The Google datacenter there currently uses in the range of 500 million gallons a year, and the city is pushing to fund improvements to the nearby Crow Creek Dam. Resident water bills could potentially double as a result.

But while Google is a large source of the town’s water consumption, the city would likely need to make the improvements no matter what, and Google already paid for a new water storage system and will likely pay millions for further upgrades including the Crow Creek Dam, as well as expenditures for ongoing water consumption.

Schmidt’s funding of FractTracker Alliance and Frack Action—two of a number of anti-natural gas fracturing nonprofits that signed the letter—is also interesting as Google is invested in numerous datacenter projects connected to natural gas plants sourcing their energy from fracking.

In 2026, Google announced the Goodnight project in conjunction with the Texas’ Crusoe energy for a datacenter in Armstrong County. Crusoe sources much of their energy from methane flaring and hydrologic fracturing, originally as a way to fund bitcoin mining. Google is also connected to other datacenter projects with attached natural gas plants in Illinois and Nebraska.

A previous Investigative Economics story detailed how Google funded the opposition to a nuclear powered datacenter in Georgia despite Google itself involved in nuclear-powered datacenters in other parts of the country.

But the pound was overvalued, and, despite its best efforts, the Bank of England couldn’t prop up its value any longer. Currency speculators swooped in to bet against the pound, with George Soros’ Quantum Fund alone betting an incredible £10 billion on its collapse by borrowing and selling 61 percent of the pounds in circulation at the time (£16.4 billion). That bet would effectively earn him £1 billion in profit—possibly one of the largest single day windfalls in investment history. Britain’s attempt to join the EMS was abandoned and within a month sterling would lose 20 percent of its value.

Campaign to Drive Sterling’s Value

In their efforts to prop up the currency, the Bank of England borrowed at least £5 billion European Currency Units (ECU)—a basket currency that was based on a collection of various European currencies before the Euro—to buy up pounds and keep its value high as well. Soros was quoted saying that the British finance minister was willing to borrow $15 billion to defend sterling. Interest rates would spike to an incredible 27 percent for the day.

Likely due to that debt, total liabilities for the bank would double within a week, topping £10 billion at a time. While some interviews have described the attempts to prop up sterling as completely ineffective, the value against the dollar would rise by 5 percent in the week leading up to Black Wednesday.

But the fervent effort by the bank to prop up the value of sterling was only temporary, and the U.K. would announce its exit from the ERM as the pound went into freefall.

Yet somehow borrowing billions and buying billions of pounds that would lose 20 percent of their value in a matter of days didn’t make much of an impact on the bank’s bottom line. A loss of £1 billion to currency speculators would seemingly stand out in total liabilities. Other anecdotes have put the price at £3.3 billion. But within a month total liabilities were back where they were pre-crisis. It was as if the bank borrowed billions only to immediately pay it right back with no major loss.

Large holdings of currency—whether it be in pounds, ECU, or another currency that the U.K. might have traded for—would ostensibly show up in the total reserves of the bank, but there is no visible sign of billions in debt or reserves left on their books when it was all done.

Devaluation Was Expected

While sometimes Soros’ bet is described as investing genius, the collapse of the pound was not that big of a surprise. Italy and Spain also devalued their currency around the same time when they realized they couldn’t keep up their currency’s value and the ERM was not in their best interests.

For years prior, Britain struggled with the burden of high exchange rates, which made their exports more expensive to the rest of the world. Additionally, high interest rates burdened ordinary borrowers, from local businesses to those trying to buy a house. The idea that Britain would continue to keep their currency value high by raising interest rates even higher just to be a part of Europe comes across as economic suicide.

Some of their strategy was based on the hopes that Germany’s Bundesbank would lower their interest rates, which would in turn cause the pound to be more valuable. But in the days prior to Black Wednesday Germany announced the increase to the country’s interest rates, and it was a measly .25 percentage points for the Lombard rate and .50 percentage points for the discount rate. With that announcement, the collapse of the ERM agreement was all but inevitable.

The recent change was ostensibly an indication of Jenkins’ tough on crime approach to the office: she was still filing charges at a similar rate yet winning more cases.

While all of that was true at the time the article was published, her office has seen a steep drop in the number of narcotics cases charged during her tenure since then. What was a 73 percent prosecution rate for narcotics crimes is now down to 50 percent. In 2023, 408 cases—25 percent of narcotics cases that year—were discharged, meaning charges were dropped before being filed. While that has since gone down, it’s an astounding amount.

Rather than prosecuting new cases, the district attorneys’ office is now more likely to move-to-revoke (MTR) cases—which means revoking a prior probation and moving forward on the prior charges that the probation was set under—or referring charges to other agencies.

The change is likely related to how the police—mainly San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) but also other entities like the county sheriff’s office and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)—were making 983 more narcotics arrests a year in 2025 compared to 2022.

Improving Conviction Rate

Prosecution rates in San Francisco hit a historic low in 2013. While that was under George Gasçon who took the reins in 2011, the trend started under the previous district attorney Kamala Harris who dropped plenty of cases, particularly those related to fraud, theft, and counterfeiting. Under Gasçon is when the trend would reverse itself.

While Gascon took on more cases, he failed to convict on many of them, instead preferring diversions. While Jenkins declines to prosecute many narcotics cases, conviction rates have significantly improved under her tenure.

Essentially, the complete collapse of the DA’s conviction rate largely under Gasçon in favor of diversions has flipped. At a time felony conviction rates barely made it above 55 percent but have since risen above 70 percent.

But maybe the biggest unexplained shift is the large jump in the disabled population. Starting in 2020, an additional 1 million people over 16 would be identified as disabled per year. There are now 6 million more people disabled than there were pre-pandemic. What was once 9 percent of the population would now be almost 11 percent.

Potentially the large swing could be some remnant of those affected by COVID-19 or appealing to COVID-19 related benefits, but detailed survey data from the Census shows distinct growth across practically all types of disabilities including hearing, cognitive, and vision difficulties since 2019 to 2020.

Much of that is likely a remnant of the elderly, whose population is rising with generational trends. The majority of population growth in disability happened in those over 64. The pandemic might have simply encouraged those to seek diagnosis during a time when not much else was happening. As a percentage of the population—the prevalence—it actually went down for those over 64.

Instead, one of the largest growing prevalent categories would be those with a cognitive difficulty between the ages of 18 and 34 based on U.S. Census data.

There are now 3 million more people reporting to have a cognitive disability since 2016, with half of those being between 18 and 34—going from 4 percent of the population to 6 percent.

Anxiety, Autism, and ADHD

While the change surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic is unique, the growing prevalence in mental health disorders is nothing new.

Prior stories from Investigative Economics noted the sharp upswing in reported anxiety disorders, particularly in white women in various states like Minnesota.

Based on Social Security data, fewer workers are filing for disability claims for themselves, but significantly more are filing on behalf of their children, particularly for mental health conditions.

Autism Growing On Top of Definitional Change

There has already been an acknowledged growth in certain mental disorders due to revised definitions from the updated DSM V manual, like that of autism and ADHD. But those came out in 2013.

And while rates of autism and ADHD had been rising following those definitional changes, the post-pandemic changes made their prevalence grow even faster, and not by all age groups at once.

Based on sample data from the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), there would be a sharp upswing first in those aged 3 to 5 years in 2020. Then by those 6 to 11 years. And then a few years later kids 12 to 17 years old would show higher rates of autism beginning in 2022 to 2023. Rates for ADHD diagnosis would be similar.

• Senate Report on BCCI

• House Banking Report on BCCI

• The U.K.’s Sandstorm Report on financial audits of BCCI (via Internet Archive), Wikileaks Version

• Declassified C.I.A. Files on BCCI

• False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (book)

Miscellaneous Articles on BCCI (plenty more not included here):

• New York Times

• Foreign Policy

• Washington Post

In 2024, Netflix released the four part docuseries American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders about the mysterious 1991 death of journalist Danny Casolaro and his investigation into the Inslaw/PROMIS affair—a spiraling conspiracy theory that connected every major scandal of the 1980s to a federal software contract dispute.

Even before the Netflix series, the Inslaw/PROMIS affair had been a subject of much theorizing, including books, articles, an off-broadway stage play, and an episode of the TV show Unsolved Mysteries.

The short version is that PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System) was the name of software written in COBOL created by the software company Inslaw in the 1980s for federal prosecutors to keep track of cases winding through the legal system. Eventually, Inslaw fell into bankruptcy, leading to a protracted legal battle between Inslaw and the Department of Justice (DOJ).

During the bankruptcy dispute, Inslaw would accuse the DOJ of an extensive conspiracy that connected the software to everything under the sun—the Iran-Contra scandal, BCCI scandal, the October surprise, drug cartels, Israeli intelligence, etc—which is why it was dubbed “the Octopus.”

One version described the U.S. government of providing a copy of the software to Israel, who then augmented it with spyware and backdoor access and then sold it to intelligence firms across the world.

While there was plenty of speculation about what Casolaro could have unearthed during his investigation via a source connected to Lyndon Larouche, the Inslaw/PROMIS affair might be one of the most researched subjects in U.S. government history with at least five separate federal investigations—including ones from the DOJ, CIA, House Judiciary Committee, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSC)—all of it leading to dead ends. Much of the investigations asked seemingly insignificant questions about whether government agencies used the software or shared it with others.

Compare that to the investigation into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which originally got little attention or scrutiny but would eventually be described by a Senate investigation as an “international financial crime on a massive and global scale.”

Democrats in Congress at the time successfully demanded an independent counsel be appointed to investigate the affair, even though similar attempts at investigating illegal military funding to Iraq around the same time went nowhere.

The DOJ investigation ordered by then-attorney general William Barr would entail interviewing dozens of people related to Inslaw and the DOJ team handling the contract. None of them corroborated Inslaw’s accusations that an employee of the DOJ intentionally targeted the company and aimed to bring them down, steal their software, or add in spyware.

According to the Bua report—named after the DOJ counsel investigating it—Inslaw’s finances fell apart as the grants that originally funded PROMIS via the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA)—a subagency of the DOJ—ended.

Inslaw was originally created as a nonprofit only to later switch to for-profit status, similar to the transformation done by the OpenAI Foundation. As it was funded by government grants, PROMIS was actually in the public domain, and Inslaw had no exclusive rights to it.

Prior to losing its funding, Inslaw received what were called “advanced payments,” wherein they were paid even before their invoices were processed—a unique situation for most contractors. Without government grants, advanced payments, or a unique claim to PROMIS’ intellectual property, Inslaw was unable to privately fund additional work.

Another story of the time detailed how Inslaw was way over their heads for other software projects: unable to complete contracts and far over budget.

In Inslaw’s eyes, the DOJ stole PROMIS and wanted to give it to one of their employees as a gift for their work as part of the Iran-Contra affair. But the DOJ employee, who was also an ex-Inslaw employee harboring a longstanding grudge, had little to do with the project and no known connections to the Iran-Contra affair. More often, government workers are accused of having a positive connection with contracting firms that enable them to receive government contracts.

A large source of the accusations that the government added spyware to PROMIS came from Michael Riconosciuto, a computer programmer that admitted to hacking PROMIS. Riconosciuto would be arrested by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) for methamphetamine production shortly after his accusations.

Few of Riconosciuto’s accusations could be verified. The location where he professed to have edited the software was a largely empty native American reservation with no sign of a computer lab or computers in general.

The investigation did confirm one of Riconosciuto’s accusations: that the reservation was the site of a company working with the defense contractor Wackenhut to bid on the development of night vision goggles for the military. While the project to bid on night vision goggles existed, there was no evidence of a lab to develop night vision goggles on the reservation either.

Potentially the reservation was simply used for its status as a reservation as Alaskan or native companies benefit from 8(a) minority and small business preference in government contracting, like that of Wackenhut’s work with the Alaskan company Alutiiq.

An Israeli-Canadian businessman who previously worked for Israeli intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, gave testimony detailing how PROMIS was being sold to governments across the globe, but when interviewed under the Bua investigation he detailed how it was a different version of PROMIS developed by the NSA for signals intelligence, which Israel added backdoors to allowing it access to the systems of banks around the world. In total, the investigation found no basis for his testimony:

After a thorough investigation, the Task Force described Ben-Menashe’s testimony variously as totally lacking in credibility,” “fabricated,” “demonstrably false from beginning to end, “riddled with inconsistencies and factual misstatements,” and “a total fabrication.”

Eventually it was revealed that the DOJ gave a copy of Inslaw’s PROMIS to Dr. Ben Orr, a senior assistant state attorney with the Israeli Justice Ministry who was on an exchange program at the DOJ. When interviewed, Orr detailed that the justice ministry never installed the software as it was foreign-produced and instead contracted with an Israeli company to produce their own version called 2000.

Multiple PROMISs

Much of the confusion surrounding PROMIS was that there were multiple software packages called PROMIS made by different companies. Besides the one developed by Inslaw, another one, Project Management Information System, used by the CIA was developed by Strategic Software Planning Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Accusations that the Canadian government was using PROMIS were based on confusion with the Strategic Software Planning Corporation’s software of the same name.

Then there was another software package used by the NSA called Product Related On-line Management Information System for signals intelligence.

Another package unrelated to government work, the Problem-Oriented Medical Information System, also existed at the time.

Origin of Wild-Eyed Claims

While little evidence pointed to a grand conspiracy surrounding the software, there was some legitimate reason that it might be investigated. The original court filing on behalf of Inslaw accusing the DOJ of a grandiose scheme was made by Elliot Richardson—a prominent D.C. attorney who would go on to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.

Despite little evidence that the DOJ was trying to sabotage their business, one bankruptcy judge did side with Inslaw, finding that the DOJ intentionally harmed their business. That finding was eventually thrown out on appeal.

Many of the accusations seemed like they were plausible and might have parallels in other cases: compromised software and sensitive data, corporate sabotage and abuse of the DOJ.

But many of the original accusations made no sense. They involved coordinated illegal activity by the federal government—”trickery, fraud, and deceit” in the original affidavit—solely to obtain basic case management software and avoid payment on a relatively minor contract.

The accusations that the government would augment software with spyware and sell it to drug cartels implied that drug cartels would want or need legal case management software.

While Inslaw accused the DOJ of trying to steal their software, Inslaw actively avoided providing the government with a copy of the software they paid for, and instead encouraged them to use a newer, shared version of the software from a remote computer—something unique at the time in the mid 1980s.

All software has the ability to be compromised with spyware and backdoors, but the original version of PROMIS would have little ability to be hacked in a time when most computers had no connection to the internet or even other computers, whereas the newer, remote version that Inslaw wanted DOJ to use would not reside on government property and likely have more security concerns.

That doesn’t jibe with numerous anecdotal descriptions of tent cities appearing in cities following the financial crisis in 2008 that ascribe the growth in homelessness to housing affordability and other economic issues. Academic papers were already being written in 2017 about the rise in “tent wards”—large-scale semi-regulated homeless encampments—to deal with the flood of the unhoused showing up in West coast cities.

More so, much of the decline in homelessness that supposedly occurred during that period happened in Florida. The sunshine state went from almost 58,000 homeless— the majority of which were unsheltered, not in a temporary living situation—to 21,000 in less than ten years with no substantive explanation.

That decline accounted for 40 percent of the national decline over that period. Essentially, Florida, which had a substantial homeless issue for years, suddenly resolved most of the issue with little explanation of how.

Based on a report from the Florida Housing Coalition, it’s because the state’s economy turned around and the government started funding housing initiatives:

First, the economy has improved since 2010. Since homelessness is primarily due to a mismatch between income and housing costs, increasing income and employment opportunities result in decreased homelessness.

Second, the Florida Legislature has increased appropriations to preserve and create affordable housing, including housing for those with special needs and very low incomes. Again, because homelessness results from housing costs that are out-of-reach to those with lower incomes, increasing the stock of affordable housing reduces homelessness.

Third, in recent years Florida communities have embraced evidence-based best practices such as Housing First, collaborative case management, and rapid rehousing. Nationwide, these models have proven successful in decreasing homelessness.

None of those make much sense. To the first point, homelessness had been high prior to the economic collapse when unemployment was relatively low. Total non-farm employment in Florida fell by about a million following the financial crisis.

To the second, major funding for housing support disappeared as homelessness declined. They were still collecting hundreds of millions, but they weren’t appropriating any of it to housing.

The state collects hundreds of millions a year for its housing trust fund based on the 1992 Sadowski Housing Act, which funds programs like the State Housing Initiatives Partnership (SHIP) and the State Apartment Incentive Loan (SAIL) through the documentary stamp tax—a tax on real estate document filings.

But starting in 2009 and through 2014, much of that money got swept into the state’s general fund to plug other budgetary holes. In 2012 and 2014, 100 percent of the housing trust fund was used to plug the budget and none of it got spent on housing—right smack dab in the middle of Florida’s supposed rehousing initiative.

Other metrics, like the count of sheltered homeless barely budged during this period as well, showing no indication that the homeless were being moved into temporary housing, like homeless shelters.

Previously, when the housing programs were receiving and appropriating millions—over $600 million in 2006 alone—it had little affect on homelessness as the point-in-time estimates kept climbing into 2010.

The increase in incarceration may have caused a decrease in crime, but the magnitude is highly uncertain and the results of most studies suggest it was unlikely to have been large.

Crime rates exploded in the 1960s, a lot of it related to the proliferation of heroin and guns against a background of civil strife, some related to deinstitutionalization—the shift away from hospitals and asylums for treatment of mental health and towards independent treatment and prescription drugs.

Within ten years, murder and assault rates doubled. Robbery rates tripled. Drugs were considered the major culprit. In 1970 Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which created the illegal drug scheduling system, to limit access to pharmaceutical drugs that can be abused.

Once it was revealed that 10 to 15 percent of servicemen in Vietnam were now heroin addicts, president Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1971. In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Agency was established. Other measures like the Rockefeller drug laws in New York would have a similar effect at the state level. The percentage of state and federal inmates received annually for drug law violations would go from 2.5 percent in 1940 to 9.3 percent by 1980. That would add to the overall incarceration rate, which would grow four-fold between 1970 and 2000.

Yet crime rates stayed elevated into the 1990s as various American cities battled for the title of global murder capitol. It was only in the early 1990s that crime rates would drop significantly, first in New York City, but then suddenly across the country in 1994, particularly for homicide.

Various inconclusive theories have attempted to explain the sudden drop, from lead exposure to abortion laws, cocaine markets, three strikes laws, and the elimination of discretionary parole.

But while the drop in crime in the 1990s was sudden and seemingly inexplicable, the overall crime rate had been slowing down going back to the mid-1970s following the war on drugs and start of mass incarceration based on data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting program and prisoner data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Crime rates might not have declined significantly right away, but the upward trajectory stopped and the overall the trend was downward beginning in the mid-1970s, particularly for homicide and robbery.

Crime Rates Stopped Growing

Crime didn’t immediately come to a halt, but the sharp growth in crime plateaud—whether by way of incapacitation, intimidation, or simply by coincidence—a few years after more people were being thrown in prison en masse.

Prior to 1975, the total crime rate increased annually by about 1 per 10,000, doubling over the course of ten years. Ten years later, by 1985, the prison population had doubled and the crime rate stopped growing altogether.

Homicide Rates

After growing year over year through the 1960s, the homicide rate dropped in 1976—the first time in 14 years and only a few years after prison rates started growing—trending downwards after that.

If the murder rate kept going as it had been in the 1960s, by 1994 it would have been twice as high as it was—not a weak effect.

Decennial Trend

Because crime rates are somewhat volatile—they can vary from year-to-year—it’s better to look at crime trends over the course of a decade. And there it’s easily visible how the average annual crime rate over the course of a decade initially started declining in the 1970s.

Prison Rate Eventually Followed Crime Rate

While the 1970s is considered the beginning of mass incarceration, when considering the ratio of prisoners to crimes, it was at a relative nadir. That is, what might be considered large-scale incarceration existed prior to the 1960s. When crime grew in the 1960s, the incarceration rate just didn’t keep up.

With increased imprisonment, the ratio of prisoners to total crimes in the 1990s was effectively the same as what it was in the early 1960s before crime rates exploded.

If that doesn’t seem right, you’re not alone. The Richmond Federal Reserve noted how that doesn’t seem to comport with reality in a November 2025 post showing a considerably high vacancies-to-unemployed ratio (V/U rate) of .98. And only a few years prior it was twice that.

Is something fishy going on with job openings? With 7.2 million job openings as of August 2025, vacancies seem high, especially relative to the five-year pre-pandemic average of 6.4 million. Vacancies also seem high relative to unemployed workers.

Another post from the Saint Louis Federal Reserve asked a similar question. If the labor market is so tight, why aren’t wages higher? If workers are in such high demand, then they could demand more money.

All of this is relatively new. Prior to the financial collapse, the V/U rate barely ever got above .7. But beginning in 2010, post-financial collapse, the economy has been continually creating millions of jobs that are not getting filled.

Not only are they not getting filled, they might be sitting around unfilled for years. Even as the economy adds jobs that get filled, the number of job openings rarely goes down even as more and more employees are hired.

Ghost Jobs Aplenty

But there’s good reason for skepticism as many of the openings are likely ghost jobs—fake postings intended for some other purpose besides actually filling a role. Sometimes it’s meant to collect resumes for a job that doesn’t exist just yet. Sometimes it’s done to create a façade of growth for a flailing company.

Various estimates have put the number of ghost jobs between 20 to 40 percent of all jobs or at least 2 million, which is the minimum number of job openings in Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data that never seem to go away. Besides misleading applicants, ghost job openings skew the labor market, making it appear that the economy is more robust and flush with jobs than it is, that wages should be higher, and that there isn’t enough skilled labor to fill the gap.

But there’s good reason to believe that the number of ghost job openings could be much higher, or at least that the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) that the number is based on, is significantly flawed.

That’s because the number of added job openings is unrealistically high. Since 2010, the economy has almost continually added more employment—an average of 2 million jobs added each year—yet the number of job openings keeps going up. What was 2.8 million job openings in 2009 is now regularly over 8 million.

Assuming that every added job—e.g. net hires, or total hires minus total separations—had a job opening, that means that for every job filled there is a new job opening to replace it plus a few more to account for the increasing number of openings.

That works out to a seemingly impossible 193 million net job openings added since 2000—an average of 7.7 million net job openings added per year. Considering that there are currently 156 million jobs in the economy, it would mean more than one job opening added for every job in the economy.

More Reasonable Pre-Crisis

Job opening numbers were not as specious prior to 2010. Before then, the potential number of added or removed job openings varied between plus or minus 5 million a year. That’s because the number of job openings actually declined at various points when people got hired.

If the current number of job openings was similar to what it was back then—around 5 million rather than 10 million—then the V/U rate would also be similar to what it was —about .5. Not a considerably tight labor market.

A grand undertaking, it involved digging a giant underground rainbarrel and a 2.4 mile long tunnel along the river that would ingest thousands of gallons of sewage and stormwater runoff and direct it to the city’s nearby wastewater treatment plant. It would halt the pollution from combined sewage overflows (CSOs)—when excess rainfall overwhelms the sewer system and the overflow goes straight into the river. CSOs are estimated to be the largest contributor to fecal coliform bacteria in the water like Escherichia coli, otherwise known as e.coli.

DC has already borrowed $3 billion for the complete Clean Rivers project through bond offerings, with $253 million spent on the Anacostia River section alone and the tunnel boring machine, nicknamed “Nannie”, costing $25 million.

The vast majority of the Anacostia tunnel was completed in 2018 and is considered a success for preventing 90 percent of CSOs from entering the river, including 19.5 billion gallons of wastewater and 12,265 tons of trash.

Yet despite its success on CSOs, the Anacostia river now shows e.coli levels in the river surpassing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards sometimes two to five times more often than before the tunnel was available based on data from D.C.’s Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE)’s water quality reports to the EPA. The upper Anacostia is now out of compliance a full 92 percent of the time with respect to e.coli when it used to be within range under 40 percent of the time.

Water quality measurements are done across a range of times and locations to avoid bias from isolated, short-term affects like rainstorms and then averaged using a geometric mean. Not all Anacostia measurement locations provided data for the 2018 to 2023 report.

How that is possible despite the cessation of sewage overflows is an open question. The tunnel project appears to have generally improved other metrics of river health like turbidity, dissolved oxygen, and pH.

Potentially Failing Pipes

A 2022 report from Anacostia Riverkeeper gives a different perspective based on their own independent sampling:

For the single sample primary contact standard, Kingman Island (AR3), Buzzard Point (AR-6), and The Washington Channel (AR-7) passed 90% of the time or more. Given their high passing rates, these sites could be good locations to promote recreation.

But at the end of the report, it also admits what might be the source of the problem outside of CSOs:

The high bacterial loads in some of these streams on wet days could indicate more than overland contamination - perhaps a sewer line has been improperly connected to the storm system.

Similarly, the DOEE reports don’t particularly highlight the problem of growing e.coli in the Anacostia, but it is buried in the text:

Chronic E. coli percent exceedances continue to be a problem for the majority of the District’s waterbodies. Fluctuations in these constituents are due to various factors, such as weather and subwatershed activities and conditions, including failing sewer pipes and illicit discharges.

A failing pipe is also what led to the recent breakdown of the Potomac Interceptor, a large junction for wastewater near the Potomac River near Washington, DC. The ensuing spill released 240 to 300 million gallons of untreated sewage into the river and is potentially one of the worst sewage spills in U.S. history.

An NPR story from 2023 detailed how ten years later many in the city lamented the closings, and residents are now forced to deal with fewer opportunities while many of the buildings lay empty.

But data from Chicago Public Schools shows the total number of locations only declining by 30 since 2013, and it happened slowly, not all in one year. And the number of closings was relatively minimal considering that there was a growth of 41 schools in the six years prior.

Even more schools may have been added before that.Based on Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, Chicago’s District 299 added 40 schools since the late nineties. Some schools may have closed since 2013, but the net result was actually more schools.

Ostensibly the school shutdown was intended to save money and plug that $1 billion budget hole, but the school budget has only grown since 2013. What was then a $5.3 billion budget ($7.5 billion in current dollars) is now $10.25 billion based on city budget documents.

According to data from NCES, the number of full-time equivalent teachers in District 299 has only gone up. What was 22,951 in 2003 is currently 23,532. Student-teacher ratios went from 18.93 to 13.77.

Some of this is already well known. Under then-CEO Arne Duncan, who went on to become Secretary of Education under Obama, CPS went on a public charter school creation spree in the early 2000s, while also closing a few traditional schools.

When they started closing schools after 2013, the majority were charter schools and many were only recently created. Of 47 schools that no longer appear in CPS data, 35 didn’t exist in 2007, 21 were charters, and 5 were contract schools.

It’s an important point to make since Chicago’s population has been in stark decline for the last few decades. As families leave the city, the school system has been hemorrhaging students. Over 100,000 school-age residents left the city since 2010 based on U.S. Census data. Average daily attendance is down over 100,000 according to NCES data, possibly indicating some are leaving for private schools.

With little else changing—more schools, similar number of teachers, yet a lot fewer students—it means the teacher-student ratio and spending-per-student ratio has doubled.

While being flush with cash and resources could have been an opportunity for the city’s educational system to turn itself around, Chicago’s education system still struggles. According to the independent research site Wirepoints only 29 percent of Illinois students can read at grade level. There are school districts with 7 percent proficiency in math, while employees earn hundreds of thousands.

For Douglass High School in Chicago’s West side, despite having almost no students—35 out of a capacity of 912—and 1.6 teachers per student and spending $68,203 per student, zero students were proficient in reading in 2023.

SOMAH provides incentives for solar panels on multifamily housing paid for by cap and trade funds. California Governor Newsom’s office has denied that any partisan activity was funded through the program.

Some of those accusations are false. SOMAH couldn’t have given that much to nonprofits since the project hasn’t spent most of the money it’s been allocated yet.

But part of the accusations are true. SOMAH does fund community-based organizations like the California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) and the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) as part of its marketing budget to promote incentives for rooftop solar. Those groups are often activist organizations also involved in separate get-out-the-vote operations that can walk a thin line between non-partisan philanthropy and partisan political action. For example, besides promoting alternatives to fossil fuels, CEJA lists “[conducting] civic engagement activities to strengthen the [environmental justice] voter bloc across California” as one of their main activities in IRS filings.

Yet totals for community-based marketing in SOMAH’s budget are less than $5.5 million since 2020 on a $1 billion project. It’s a significant amount for funding a nonprofit’s get-out-the-vote campaign, but not a financial drain on a major energy project.

The funding of community organizer groups part of the budget isn’t what’s burdening solar installation. Rather the major financial burden comes from paying out $10 to $15 million a year in rebates to subsidize property owners for solar installations. And rooftop solar is expensive to install.

The Inefficiency of Rooftop Solar

Based on reports, the cost of completed solar panel installations under SOMAH so far is $84 million for 41.942 megawatts of capacity. That works out to $2 million per megawatt of solar capacity.

That’s not too far removed from other common estimates of cost per capacity of solar. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at $1,588 per megawatt for all solar types (e.g. utility-scale or rooftop). The Department of Energy estimates an average of over $2.5 million to $3 million.

SOMAH data on individual installations shows a median cost of $560,000 per megawatt just for the panels alone.

But the issue isn’t just the capacity, but the actual amount of energy generated, especially for solar. Solar panels don’t produce energy when the sun isn’t shining, and their actual generation can stray far below their potential capacity, especially for rooftop solar.

Generation numbers for rooftop solar are usually more difficult to come by because of the distributed behind-the-meter nature of rooftop solar. But SOMAH reports for Q1 to Q2 of 2025 give a glimpse behind the meter.

The program tracked 22.9 gigawatt-hours of energy produced in the first half of 2025—45.8 gigawatt-hours annually—based on 39.4 megawatts of capacity. That works out to a solar efficiency rate of 13.2 percent—less than average solar efficiency rates, which hover around 15 to 20 percent.

If the SOMAH program spent $84 million for 41.942 megawatts of capacity, with an efficiency of 13.2 percent, that works out to a whopping $1,730 per megawatt-hour of actual generation annually, easily one of the most expensive sources of energy, even before including other costs like ongoing maintenance, cost of capital, and replacement costs.

Most levelized costs of energy (LCOE) calculations list utility-scale sources with rates below $100 per megawatt-hour. EIA shows nothing above $200 per megawatt-hour. Department of Energy has a larger scale of estimates that includes lifetime costs, but even that tops out at $600 per megawatt-hour.

While solar is commonly promoted as one of the cheapest energy sources because of declining photovoltaic panel costs subsidized by China, that only applies to utility-scale solar where thousands of panels are installed at scale and panels are attached to motors that track with the sun. Rooftop solar, where solar tracking is rare and installation costs are higher, is substantially more expensive.

It’s likely the most accurate survey of how many are considered homeless at one time—either living on the street (unsheltered) or in some kind of temporary housing (sheltered).

When the pandemic hit in 2020, COVID restrictions hampered the survey out of concern for public health. As a result, data on total unsheltered homeless population in 2021 would show an enormous drop, almost 200,000, from a lack of reporting.

Fifty percent of that drop was because of a lack of reporting in California alone. Not just because California as a state is large, but it also has an outsized homeless population—27 percent of national total in 2020—and it limited its homeless survey the most in 2021. Plenty of other states—Alaska, Delaware, Virginia, and Rhode Island among others—surveyed their homeless population in 2021 with no issue related to COVID and saw little to no change in their numbers.

According to a report from California, homelessness likely declined during the pandemic in California as the state actively arranged to house individuals through Project Roomkey—a temporary measure to give housing to anybody who tested positive for COVID or similar health concerns, or over the age of 65.

Supposedly 62,000 individuals were given temporary housing as part of the program, with a peak of 16,000 committed hotel/motel rooms in use. Over 12,422 were housed in Los Angeles County alone, which is actually relatively low considering that Los Angeles has the highest homeless population in the U.S. and represented around 40 percent of California’s homeless (69,144) at the time—although the Project Roomkey estimate puts it at a higher 91,145 total homeless (65 percent)—yet L.A. represented only 20 percent of Project Roomkey participants.

The state saw no real change in the sheltered population—the kind that would fall under the housing provided by Project Roomkey and wasn’t affected by COVID limitations. There were less than 33,000 sheltered homeless in the state at the time anyhow so growth by 62,000 would certainly show in the numbers somehow.

The project ended in summer of 2022 and all temporarily housed individuals since left where they were staying. The HUD PIT survey is all done in January, so even if a few thousand housed individuals were still there, that would likely show up in the 2022 estimates for unsheltered, but no such decline is apparent.

But it’s unlikely that they are handling that much, or if they are, they are not getting paid for it.

For example, the annual report for 2024 shows an operating revenue of $978 million based on water and sewer services for D.C. and just wastewater services for nearby Maryland and Virginia.

Based on recent charging rates posted on their site for just handling wastewater of $16.14 per 1,000 gallons for residential, that would put the daily wastewater usage at 166 million gallons as an upper estimate—about half of what DC Water is estimating. And that’s without factoring in all other sources of revenue besides wastewater usage (e.g. treated water, fees).

DC Water’s water delivery numbers don’t really add up either. From 2015 to 2020, the utility reported delivering millions of gallons less per day on average when D.C.’s population was consistently growing by tens of thousands.

When the pandemic hit and D.C. saw a sharp population drop, water usage somehow grew as if fewer people started suddenly using more water.

Sewage Spill, Sewage Overflows, and Clean Rivers Project

Currently DC Water is the focus of what might be the largest sewage spill in U.S. history as a major pipe called the Potomac Interceptor broke in January spilling millions of gallons of sewage into the Potomac river.

While the details of the break are still being investigated, DC Water is being scrutinized for how it was spending money.

DC Water was in the midst of repairing the pipe close to where the break occurred as part of various system improvements, including the large scale Clean Rivers project. The latter is a $3 billion initiative to create multi-mile tunnels that can absorb combined sewage overflow (CSO)—sewage that gets sent into the Potomac or Anacostia rivers during periods of high rain because there is too much volume at one time for the system to handle.

CSO was already responsible for millions of gallons of sewage flowing into those rivers on an annual basis. The first part of the Clean Rivers project to tunnel underneath the Anacostia was completed in 2016 and the next portion dealing with the Potomac began in 2019.

Bond Pre-Funding and User Fees

DC Water is funding the project largely through bonds, but then paying back the bonds through the Clean Rivers Impervious Area Charge (CRIAC) on customer bills, which now is on the order of $24 per equivalent residential unit. While the Potomac portion has just started, DC Water already made over $3 billion in bond offerings—likely a pre-funding of the project in advance—and is paying $146 million a year in interest payments—26 percent of its expenses for the year.

Altogether, with the CRIAC fee, DC Water bills now average around $147 per month for consumption of 4,024 gallons. While that is likely extremely high for the U.S., DC Water shows it as being average considering the high average income for the D.C. area. Yet customers are substantially further behind on payments—customer receivables, net of allowance for doubtful accounts—which was $49 million ten years ago now stands at $114 million.

Even with the high user fees, DC Water has made little headway in paying off the debt. The most they paid down was in 2024 when liabilities decreased by $123 million—slightly less than their annual interest payments for the year. Since 2014, they have taken on about $200 million in debt a year.

Similarities to Jackson, MS

The story of a public water utility potentially falsifying numbers in the midst of sewage leaks and system repairs in very similar to that of Jackson, Mississippi.

In that city, records for water usage suddenly plummeted to a fraction of what they previously were following changes to the billing system. Similar to D.C., water usage didn’t follow distinct population trends.

In Jackson, the city was hemorrhaging residents, potentially related to sharp increases in water bills needed to help fund the ailing system, but the statistics kept showing high water use as if nobody had left.

With fewer residents to pay the bills, the system wasn’t bringing in enough revenue to pay for necessary repairs, leading to the complete collapse of its treatment plant and a citywide boil advisory for days in 2022.

Previously, Medicaid spending data was aggregated to totals that don’t give details about which providers are receiving the spending. This new data provides a much more granular view of how Medicaid funds are really being spent.

And without much effort it’s easy to see how egregious some of the charges are. Not just a couple standard deviations outside the median but ten and twenty times the average.

For example, the average spending to a provider for syringes (HCPCS code:A4657) in a month is less than $10.

Yet in 2018 Medicaid gave U.S. Renal Treatment Centers, Southeast over $4.7 million for syringes for 22 recipients—an average spend of $215,314 per recipient.

For nursing care (HCPCS: S9124), the average spend per beneficiary per month is $9,029. Yet Quality One Care Home Health in Silver Spring Maryland was spending $288,058 per beneficiary per month.

Miscellaneous dialysis charges (HCPCS: 9099) rarely top $3,000 per person per month, but somehow U.S. Renal Care in Kapolei, Hawaii was charging Medicaid over $200,000 per person.

While the data release to the public is new, none of this is likely new to HHS. All of these providers are listed in an HHS Flagged Service Providers data sheet for exactly what you would expect: charges far beyond average costs.

U.S. Renal Treatment Centers was prosecuted under the False Claims Act by the Justice department for Medicaid overcharging related to dialysis medicine, but that was back in 2013. All of the recently released is after 2018.

Excess spending in the data does not necessarily imply fraud or misconduct but could simply be issues with the data and how it is reported.