One thing that drives me crazy is that when the crime rate goes up, it is screamed from every headline and all TV talking heads go on and on about it. But when the crime rate goes down, it might merit a paragraph on page 12.
It’s somewhat well known, at least among criminologists, law enforcement analysts, and other folks who keep abreast of such things. Crime rates have been falling since the early 90’s, a phenomenon known as the “Great American Crime Decline” (or “Drop,” sometimes). There’s a lot of speculation and discussion as to what the reasons may be, but it’s definitely happening.
Appeared? What does that mean? I can’t access the link so I don’t know what it said, but the one factor that always ties in is jobs. The more jobs, the less crime, violent or otherwise. In fact during WWII the crime rate hit the lowest it’s been.
I’d like to see what they’re basing this on as from other things I’ve read the crime rate has see-sawed back and forth with the economy since the early 80s. Of course it’s completely possible the violent crime rate is at the lowest.
I can’t help but think that it’s tied to the lower crime rate in NYC, as they’re such trend setters. In that case, removing grafitti from the subway is a huge factor.
But I understand that violent crime in Jacksonville is on the rise.
"Criminology experts said they were surprised and impressed by the national numbers, issued on Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and based on data from more than 13,000 law-enforcement agencies. They said the decline nationally in the number of violent crimes, by 5.5 percent, raised the question, at least in some places, of to what extent crime could continue to fall — or at least fall at the same pace as the past two years. Violent crimes fell nearly the same amount in 2009.
“Remarkable,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. “Given the fact that we have had some healthy declines in recent years, I fully expected that the improvement would slow. There is only so much air you can squeeze out of a balloon.”
With budget squeezes at every level, law enforcement has also been cut. With fewer cops on the street, callouts have to be prioritized. If your call isn’t a priority, tough. Fewer calls attended to means fewer cases to address. Few cases on the books means the stats show fewer crimes being recorded. If it’s not recorded, it never happened.
You are like, the King of Cynicism. How do you even get out the door every day with that much cynicism in your veins? I am half appalled and half impressed.
When the police are not going to come or do anything anyway, people stop reporting. The prosecutor here has threatened not to even bother prosecuting theft and violent crime less than serious battery. People here largely just handle their business and move on. If I lived in Happyville, things would be different.
Removing graffiti is nice and all as a quality-of-life thing, but it in no way accounts for the vast decrease in violent crime and homicides since the 1990s. The program happens to coincide with the beginning of the crime decrease. Graffiti on subway cars has been a solved problem since 1999 or before, yet the crime rate in NYC has continued to decline sharply over the past 12 years.
The media likes to report about things that are happening not about things that aren’t happening. Crimes occurring is newsworthy; crimes not occurring is not.
The article in the Times on this reported that crime in NYC is bucking the trend and rising.
The thing that surprises criminologists is that the models all say that crime should increase with increased unemployment. It isn’t. I doubt that police department cuts have gone on long enough for it to change reporting behavior very much.
Maybe the criminals figured out that no one but the rich have anything worth stealing any more.
Perhaps I should have added this to the end of my post —>
In reality, I came up with the comment because of a conversation I had with some local cops last year. We had a vacant house on the street for a while (neighbor walked away from their mortgage). All of us neighbors watched the house. One day I saw two teenagers being teenagers around the vacant house. (Several of us regularly checked out the house front and back and would know if something was amiss.) I called the police. Teenagers left neighborhood. I called the police to report they left. Police arrived about 30 minutes later. They only arrived because it was a slow day for them, otherwise they would not have showed up. Only violent crime gets their attention immediately. Everything else waits, with only actual crimes going on the books. Since the teenagers didn’t break into the house or trash it, it normally would not even get recorded by dispatch. Meaning nothing ever happened and my eyewitness account that something happened that never happened would not have been recorded, either.
A critical problem of not recording everything means the police are not compiling statistics of potential crimes as well as petty crimes. They can’t run the numbers and look for patterns that might lead to the prevention of actual crimes.
Nope, not being cynical. Just offering a view based upon an actual incident, and the subsequent conversation with the police who showed up (late) only because it was a slow crime day for them.
it’s nice to hear that crime is going down overall. In our city it’s definitely going up–a function of growth in population and meth, especially meth-related gang stuff, and fewer police than ever. We’ve had more serious violent crimes in the past six months than I can remember ever before. I don’t worry about my safety or anything, but dude.
Freakonomics attributes it to the availability of abortion from 1973; those unwanted children would now be 38 or younger, and it is overwhelmingly the young and poor that commit violent crimes (and are the victims). Assuming that unwanted children are more likely to commit crimes, it does make sense. Seems a little too pat to me, but there it is.
I’ll call BS on this, the falling crimerates over the last two decades have been pretty widely discussed, reported on and talked about in the media.
Individual crimes are often given a lot of attention, which may make some people feel that crimerates are rising, but there have been a lot of stories on the countrywide decrease.
