I agree, and I’m not necessarily saying that the social tolerance for “manly” fist fights were/are a good or bad thing. I am curious how that relates to street crimes.
If my buddy and I have a disagreement, but today we go to small claims court instead of squaring off in the backyard, how does that affect the burglary rate?
Yeah, if you want to murder a random stranger in another city for kicks, your odds of getting away with are much better than if you murder somebody you know intimately for semi-rational reasons.
Interestingly air-conditioning in poor householdsrose sharplyin the 90’s just when crime started to fall.
Widespread abortions and a reduction in lead in the atmosphere are also considered factors in the declining crime rate.
What is the correlation between the reduction in crime and the increasing prison population? Positive, negative, or none? I seem to recall that there was a slight positive correlation, but not enough to explain the crime drop. I suspect it’s an aggregate of effects. Not to hijack the OP, but what has caused the uptick of crime in some places like Chicago? Power vacuum in the underworld?
Thanks,
Rob
Less aggressive policing is what law enforcement says. There’s always been a tradeoff between crime and civil rights.
Yes, I think all those technologies help. Many people get put away for being on someones cellphone.
Heres a note - wiretapping. What partly helped put away the mafia was the quality of wiretaps (bugs) kept improving so that they could play them for a jury and let the bad guys implicate themselves.
Crime statistics need to be treated with a bit of caution. Whether or not they are reported and counted may depend on other circumstances (e.g., you won’t be able to make an insurance claim without having done so, so property crimes are well reported, but some fair number of assaults and affrays may be treated as a minor scuffle not worth pursuing, or you may be embarrassed to report a rape or sexual crime, so those notoriously went underreported until recently).
But in the UK it’s commonly said that technological change has made car theft more difficult, and created many new opportunities for fraud online.
Interestingly, crime started to fall across the globe regardless of social wealth levels, and where air conditioning had not risen. Back to lead in fuel for a better answer.
Too provincial. It’s not a USA-centric issue.
Combining these two points, the fact that smartphones can be locked down (making them useless to a thief) and traced (making them dangerous to a thief) reduces the crime rate you’d otherwise expect from large numbers of people each carrying a multi-hundred-dollar item in their pockets.
That’s more likely to be a factor for higher levels of organized crime than for the sort of common street crime the OP seems to be addressing. (It’s getting less likely to be a factor anywhere as cybersecurity improves, but that’s a recent development whose effects, if any, remain to be seen.)
Also look at cars.
They are difficult to steal anymore. You cant just open a door with a slim jim and you cant hotwire them. Thieves also used to steal whole engines and you cant do that anymore. At least not quickly.
Technology? You’re looking in the wrong direction. Violent crimes are committed by drunk young men.
Street crimes fall when young men stay at home and play computer games instead of going out.
Anti-theft devices make cars harder to steal, but not impossible. I remember an article in WIRED about how ATD’s can and are defeated by savvy thieves who know the “backdoor” to many ATD’s. The poor car owner has the devil’s own time trying to convince the insurance company that he isn’t pulling a scam.
I think the difference is this: it’s harder to be a successful but not particularly intelligent crook these days. With training, a person without a lot of education could steal a car, just by knowing how to pick a lock and how to hotwire a car.
These days the thief has to do lots of research to figure out how to steal a wide variety of car models… or they commit other crimes (stealing the key fob, intimidating someone into giving up the key fob) which makes it easier for the police to catch them.
Or picture a mugging. I hope I don’t get mugged, because I carry less than $20 on me (at least in an easy-to-find spot), so a really irate mugger might be displeased and show their displeasure with their fists or something worse. While I use cheques at least monthly, they’re at home. I don’t carry bank statements either (or even print them out).
A mugger could still threaten someone into giving up their card and PIN… but the victim could lie about their PIN. The mugger could force the victim into using their card at an ATM and withdrawing the maximum amount… but they have to take more risks and are at greater risk of exposure by doing so. What if the victim says they’ve overdrafted even though they haven’t? What if they lie about their withdrawal limit? What if they bought (or said they bought) an expensive item earlier that day and have (almost) reached their withdrawal limit? Is the crook going to look at the bank screen to confirm these? Aren’t they more likely to put their face on the video camera that way? And they won’t be able to use the card the next day, as I have my card number and phone number at home so I can call the bank as soon as possible and let them know I’ve been mugged.
Or a home invasion, which might net more goods but leaves behind a lot of evidence and could end up facing a SWAT team?