In the wake of Flint, Michigan’s water crisis (check out this timeline for details), it’s worth noting why lead poisoning is so awful not only for the individual families affected but also for the wider community. Kevin Drum’s 2013 reporting on lead as a driver of crime is more important than ever. His work illustrated that rising lead emission was tightly correlated with the crime spike of the 1960s-80s and that declining emissions were tied to falling crime in the 1990s-present:

In a 2000 paper (PDF) [researcher Rick] Nevin concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Similar correlations hold when the data is analyzed at local levels or across countries. Meanwhile neuroscience research has provided a better understanding of what lead does to the brain:

As [public health professor] Reyes summarized the evidence in her paper, even moderately high levels of lead exposure are associated with aggressivity, impulsivity, ADHD, and lower IQ. And right there, you’ve practically defined the profile of a violent young offender.

It’s not hard to connect the dots: lead addles the brain, and the addled brain is prone to crime. Which means that the Flint water crisis of 2014-2016 is not a self-contained fiasco. The water crisis is a lead crisis and thus it plants the seeds for a potential crime crisis in the 2020s and 2030s. For a city that’s already among the nation’s most dangerous, it’s insult to injury.