Is crime growing in America?

[Kael]

This was brought up in another thread. In general we seem to have the feeling that Amercia is getting worse and worse. Constant news headlines keep us in a state of shock as stories get more and more horrific. Compared to 20-40 years ago we can't help but think that the police are failing, society is deteriorating and we are only a step away from becoming the next victim.

But the stats don't suggest this. The police (with the help of a Texan carnival side-show barker named Norma L. McCorvey) have been doing a great job. Following years of significant rises up until about 1990, the crime rate has been dropping ever since.

You can check out the numbers here: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Comparing us to other countries here are the stats from NationMaster (http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us-united-states/cri-crime):

Prisoners: (USA ranked #1 with 715 in 100,000)
#1 United States of America with 715 out of 100,000 people in prison
#2 Russia with 584 out of 100,000 people in prisons
#3 Belarus with 554 out of 100,000 people in prisons

Rape victims: (USA ranked #13 with 0.4%)
#1 New Zealand with 1.3%
#2 Australia with 1.2%
#3 Finland with 1.1%

Assault Victims: (USA ranked #9 with 1.2%)
#1 Saint Kitts and Nevis with 3%
#2 United Kingdom with 2.8%
#3 Australia with 2.4%

Total Crime Victims: (USA ranked #15 with 21.1%)
#1 Australia with 30.1%
#2 New Zealand with 29.4%
#3 United Kingdom with 26.4%

I don't know what to make of this except that the police are doing a great job. We seem to spend a lot of effort on law enforcement, and that seems to work.

[Huzurdaddi]

I don't know what to make of this except that the police are doing a great job.

Steven Levitt and John Donohue took a different angle (http://www.slate.com/id/33569/entry/33571/). I do not know if it has been debunked. Since it would have been big news I guess the answer is no, it has not been debunked.

[Bill]

This was brought up in another thread. In general we seem to have the feeling that Amercia is getting worse and worse. Constant news headlines keep us in a state of shock as stories get more and more horrific. Compared to 20-40 years ago we can't help but think that the police are failing, society is deteriorating and we are only a step away from becoming the next victim.


Wow, I totally don't feel this way--I feel the total opposite. I look at NYC and think about how its demise was being predicted, along with other big US cities, in the early 90's when it had over 2000 murders a year, and how much it has turned around. Twenty years ago NYC was a scary place, now it's Disneyland.

But I don't think it's all from excellent policing, I think the strong economy and low unemployment (until last year) had as much if not more to do with it.

[Kael]

Steven Levitt and John Donohue took a different angle (http://www.slate.com/id/33569/entry/33571/). I do not know if it has been debunked. Since it would have been big news I guess the answer is no, it has not been debunked.

Thats why I credited Norma McCorvey in the first post.

[Jason McCullough]

The abortion theory is interesting, but the data provided is too narrow for me to buy it, just like the lead theory (http://www.google.com/search?q=lead+crime+rate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). There's what, a zillion other variables you could control for?

[RSofaer]

I read a pretty convincing study on how lead levels as adolescents correlate with later likelihood to be arrested. I'm pretty much convinced that the lead thing has at least a little bit of validity.

[Kael]

The abortion theory is interesting, but the data provided is too narrow for me to buy it, just like the lead theory (http://www.google.com/search?q=lead+crime+rate&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a). There's what, a zillion other variables you could control for?

That explains why I feel like Im getting robbed everytime Im at the gas pump.

[cesare]

Yeah, the crime rate in NYC is the lowest it's been since the early 1960s.

[StGabe]

This was brought up in another thread. In general we seem to have the feeling that Amercia is getting worse and worse.

David Brin (http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/davidbrin.blogspot.com) has some really interesting ideas about why people like to pretend to themselves that things are always worse now than they used to be. He also thinks that this is the biggest single obstacle for making political/cultural progress.

Here's one of his articles (http://www.davidbrin.com/realculturewar1.htm)on the subject. I kinda stopped reading him lately because I think he lost his focus a bit but I do think he was on to something with this particular thread of thought.

Anyway, I think crime's definitely increasing and the wold is slowly becoming a much better place. I think that people are eager to romanticize their youth and the culture at that time and it leads them to exaggerate the still-present problems of today. I also think that, as you mention, the MSM has played a role in playing up and dramatizing modern problems that helps people to keep this delusion afloat. Things like domestic abuse may be much better today than they were before but we're so much more aware of the abuses that still exist that it's easy to lose track of this.

[Huzurdaddi]

Thats why I credited Norma McCorvey in the first post.

LOL, sorry I missed that.

[Sarkus]

Crime has been going down for a long time and we are no where near the historical highs (which were in the 1930s as I recall.) However, it's an easy political issue to use.

On top of that, the national nature of crime reporting combined with the lack of regional distinction anymore contributes to a feeling of immediacy to crime that is happening a long way from home. For example, it's not uncommon for the local news in most major cities to cover big crimes that happen elsewhere, not to mention the attention the major cable news networks give those stories. And when you see the footage, you see architecture, national store chains, and so on that are very familiar. It may be happening thousands of miles away, but it looks like your city. At some level that impacts a lot of people in ways that reading a story in a newspaper never would.

[Kael]

Crime has been going down for a long time and we are no where near the historical highs (which were in the 1930s as I recall.) However, it's an easy political issue to use.

On top of that, the national nature of crime reporting combined with the lack of regional distinction anymore contributes to a feeling of immediacy to crime that is happening a long way from home. For example, it's not uncommon for the local news in most major cities to cover big crimes that happen elsewhere, not to mention the attention the major cable news networks give those stories. And when you see the footage, you see architecture, national store chains, and so on that are very familiar. It may be happening thousands of miles away, but it looks like your city. At some level that impacts a lot of people in ways that reading a story in a newspaper never would.

I always think of this as a conflist with the law of large numbers. When we lived in little villages of 2,000 people it served us well to react to negative stories we hear about the people we know. If Bob Farmer gets mauled by a bear then maybe we should start looking out for bears. If Martha Winer gets raped then we better start protecting our daughters.

That logic doesn't work when we expand it out to 300 million people. We now hear about the worst cases from more people than our mind can comprehend. And we hear it immediately (often while its happening) and often with pictures and video. Its as if we were there. Our tiny bubble now has murders, rapes and assault happening in it just as if we walked by it on the street every day. We try to decensatize ourselves, to push it out and create the feeling of safety we need to even walk out our front door but millions of years of evolution are fighting against us.

So we are increasingly panic stricken, stressed, depressed and fearful. Ironically while modern technology and society make us safer than we have ever been.

[Cubit]

Our local news is the worst at fostering fear in the community, despite overall crime trends going down. It drives me nuts.

Why do you guys think actual crimes are declining? Gun control? I really have no idea.

[RyanMichael]

Crime is growing because they keep making more crap illegal. Actual crimes I'd say are on a mild decline.

[drewl]

Doesn't crime usually go up in hard economic times?
If things don't pick up I'd expect it to rise a little.

[Kael]

Doesn't crime usually go up in hard economic times?
If things don't pick up I'd expect it to rise a little.

I think the popular opinion is that it may be a factor, but not a major one.

Experts: Bad Economy's dont cause crime waves (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97234406)

There are, of course, a million ways to spin this. Maybe its not poverty, but a disparity of wealth that causes crime. Its definitly a complex issue. But there isnt anything as simple as showing crime rise during bad economies and fall during good economies.

[wildpokerman]

There are, of course, a million ways to spin this. Maybe its not poverty, but a disparity of wealth that causes crime. Its definitly a complex issue. But there isnt anything as simple as showing crime rise during bad economies and fall during good economies.

I agree with you on an intuitive level but somehow it doesn't quite ring true since wealth disparity is higher than it's been in the past. Maybe it's that material goods are in super high supply and most wealth now is directed to things that can be experienced?

What I mean is that there is a huge surplus of manufactured goods, at least compared to my parents generation. You can have books and computers and card and games stacked up to the ceiling on a modest middle class income.

It's the things like a beach house in Rhode Island or a vacation to France or eating at a five star restaurant that the wealthy people spend their money on, 'poor' people have big screen TVs and home theaters that would make the wealthiest men from 1980 envious. The things that wealthy people buy aren't possible to steal, in the traditional blue collar rob a store sense.

Stores don't even take cash anymore, they give it to people who ask for cash back with their debit purchases and it's a waste of time to mug random strangers outside the bar on payday, they're carrying credit cards and $15 in cab fare.

So I'm guessing that standard issue violent crime is disappearing. New criminals are going to have to be tech savvy and smart. Which unlike old school violent criminals makes them highly employable and thus unlikely to be criminals in the first place.

I predict what we'll see in the future is a very small number of very smart criminals committing fraud and identity theft and a very small group of people that are socially deviant committing violent crimes.

I hope in response as a society we will back a bit off the heavy drug enforcement and back a bit off the prosecutorial overreach but I'm skeptical that we won't just declare new social ills to keep the prisons full.

[Robert Sharp]

Well, if traditional crimes are down, then you have to fill the prisons somehow! So you have to get stricter drug enforcement, to justify having so many police and such. Can't have people out of work just because other people don't want to commit crime as much anymore.

[McKertis]

I don't know what to make of this except that the police are doing a great job. We seem to spend a lot of effort on law enforcement, and that seems to work.
When is the next school shooting scheduled ?

[Kael]

When is the next school shooting scheduled?

As horrible as those are I don't think its reasonable to expect that good police = 0 crime. We can still have police doing a great job, crime stats dropping and have horrible events like the school shootings.

Which is the problem with anecdotal evidence. Its hard to appreciate that things are getting better when we only hear these horror stories as I mentioned in the 12th post.

[Pogo]

Yeah I voted "No." Crime has been steadily declining in some areas, rising in others. But I'm also a person that realizes when media reporting of crime influences mass perception. I think Bowling for Columbine did a great job of breaking that down for us.

[Jason McCullough]

I agree with you on an intuitive level but somehow it doesn't quite ring true since wealth disparity is higher than it's been in the past. Maybe it's that material goods are in super high supply and most wealth now is directed to things that can be experienced?

That, and a lot of it goes into goods that are newly positional. The quality of your school and health care is now amazingly correlated with income; it didn't used to be that way.

[Omniscia]

I voted "No" based mostly on generally declining crime rates as reported in the UCR (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_01.html). The burglary rate seems to have ticked up a bit, but the other categories have been trending downwards over the past few years, it seems.

[wildpokerman]

When is the next school shooting scheduled ?

Interestingly enough there are few accounts of police stopping incidents like this and since they usually end up with the shooters killing themselves I don't see how any kind of law enforcement can prevent or curb these kind of crimes.

[wildpokerman]

That, and a lot of it goes into goods that are newly positional. The quality of your school and health care is now amazingly correlated with income; it didn't used to be that way.

Exactly my point. One of the perks of being wealthy is having health care taken care of, however there's no way to steal being first in line for the liver transplant from Mr. Jobs unless you steal his identity. There's just no way to steal what makes people wealthy anymore unless you do it electronically now.

[Janster]

It could very well be that turns in economy isn't felt immediately, and you get delayed effects.
However I think the gap between rich and poor is the key reason for crime more than anything, if you are talking generic burglaries and theft. Brasil specifically is very indicative of that.

Btw we had Michael Scagnelli over here in Norway teaching us how to fight crime, he particularly was adamant that we should keep accurate statistics.
My mind then wandered to The Wire. I loved their quote on the subject.
"We juke the stats so that police chiefs gets their promotions and mayors become governors"(hm I can't remember the line properly :( )