# Is the recent drop in violent crime due to banning lead in gasoline? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 30, 2012, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569 "2012-11-30T14:27:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Bremidon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac91a4/32.png) [@Bremidon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bremidon)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2012, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/41 "2012-12-08T15:02:41Z")
Even assuming a lag time of 20 years, how come the rates spiked in '90 to '95? Leaded gas had been around since 1920. On top of that, why did all age groups spike simultaneously? I would expect lead poisoning to basically accumulate until a standard tipping point; in the given theory: 19 years. You would have to try to find some explanation about the amazing lead resistance of earlier generations. And, that all wore off at the same time. Another problem is that I would expect lead poisoning effects to linger. I would expect to see a tailing effect in the statistics, which is most prominently _not_ the case. Anyone looking for an explanation should not start by looking at why the crime rate dipped, but why it spiked. What kicked in around '88? Or what the heck: what kicked in around '68-'69? Maybe chemicals are at fault, but I’m starting to think it might not be lead… ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2012, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/42 "2012-12-08T16:35:33Z")
In fact, the crime rate started to rise in the late 1950’s, I think. Also, I wonder if we simply don’t have accurate crime rates from early years. I suspect that many crimes were simply never reported or were ignored by the police even if reported. They just considered that “those ignorant lower-class slime” were always robbing and killing each other and there was no point in making note of most of it. ---
**Author:** ![Bremidon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ac91a4/32.png) [@Bremidon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bremidon)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2012, 9:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/43 "2012-12-10T09:52:23Z")
Err, you really feel that murders went undocumented on a mass scale? ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2012, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/44 "2012-12-10T11:42:14Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > No. I’m showing a strong correlation between age and violent crime. I’m using homicide as one of the violent crimes, some might say the most violent. We can’t \* just\* look at homicide, as increases in the success of medical intervention have resulted in stabbings and shootings being more survivable. Article in Saturday’s WSJ on this. Or maybe kids these days are just lousy shots. ---
**Author:** ![levdrakon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@levdrakon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/levdrakon)\ **Post date:** [December 10, 2012, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/45 "2012-12-10T16:58:58Z")
> [@Ruken](#): > > We can’t \* just\* look at homicide, as increases in the success of medical intervention have resulted in stabbings and shootings being more survivable. Article in Saturday’s WSJ on this. Or maybe kids these days are just lousy shots. I read that article too. We’re much better at saving gun shot victims these days. We get so much practice! ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/46 "2012-12-11T04:41:37Z")
How could we get more practice if the number of shootings has actually gone down? ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/47 "2012-12-11T05:03:52Z")
The [article](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324712504578131360684277812.html) is probably paywalled, but, “The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.” ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2012, 5:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/48 "2012-12-11T05:09:11Z")
More specifically: > [@](#): > > After a steady decline through the 1990s, the annual number of \*\*homicides \*\*zigzagged before resuming a decline in 2007, **falling from 16,929 that year to an estimated 14,722 in 2010** , according to FBI crime data. > > At the same time, medical data and other surveys in the U.S. show a rising number of serious injuries from assaults with guns and knives. The estimated number of people wounded seriously enough by **gunshots to require a hospital stay, rather than treatment and release, rose 47% to 30,759 in 2011 from 20,844 in 2001** , according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program. The CDC estimates showed the number of people injured in serious **stabbings rose to 23,550 from 22,047** over the same period. > > Mortality rates of gunshot victims, meanwhile, have fallen, according to research performed for The Wall Street Journal by the Howard-Hopkins Surgical Outcomes Research Center, a joint venture between Howard University and Johns Hopkins University. **In 2010, 13.96% of U.S. shooting victims died, almost two percentage points lower than in 2007**. (Earlier data used different standards, making comparisons useless.) Shootings and knifings have increased, but fewer people die from them. Now there may be a bit of journalistic trickery here, as shootings that required a hospital stay increased. I don’t see anything about ALL shootings. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2013, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/49 "2013-01-03T17:28:39Z")
[This article](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline) presents a strong case for a causal link between crime and lead. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2013, 11:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/50 "2013-01-03T23:35:55Z")
> [@74westy](#): > > [Correlation = causation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp%28en%29.svg) You will be shocked to learn scientists are in fact familiar with the difficulty of showing causation rather than just correlation. The [article in the OP](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline) has links to some papers that use various techniques to suggest that the reduction in environmental lead is the cause of crime reduction. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/51 "2013-01-04T03:02:27Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > You will be shocked to learn scientists are in fact familiar with the difficulty of showing causation rather than just correlation. > > The [article in the OP](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline) has links to some papers that use various techniques to suggest that the reduction in environmental lead is the cause of crime reduction. I have to go on the record here and say I’m not convinced. It’s a lot like global warming: we have a trend; we have another trend; now let’s see if we can make them fit nicely together. ---
**Author:** ![Pork\_Rind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pork_rind/32/111_2.png) [@Pork\_Rind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pork_Rind)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/52 "2013-01-04T03:22:52Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > I have to go on the record here and say I’m not convinced. It’s a lot like global warming: we have a trend; we have another trend; now let’s see if we can make them fit nicely together. There’s more than just a single trend though. Crime rates fell in sync with differing national, regional and local timelines for phasing out leaded gas. That’s much more difficult for me to dismiss as simply coincidence. > [@](#): > > If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you’d expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that’s exactly what she found. > > … Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries? > > Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn’t fit the theory. “No,” he replied. “Not one.” The other compelling item was that during the time of lead use, violent crime per capita was higher in urban areas than in rural areas, urban areas being more lead contaminated. After the phase out of lead, per capita violent crime dropped in urban areas to more or less the same level of the in contaminated rural areas. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 3:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/53 "2013-01-04T03:55:20Z")
Australia banned leaded gas 10 years later than North America. There are other countries that didn’t follow in synchronization either. Show me some graphs from those countries that also follow along, and that aren’t attributable to other variants, such as demographics or increased police presence, or better first responder times, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Pork\_Rind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pork_rind/32/111_2.png) [@Pork\_Rind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pork_Rind)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/54 "2013-01-04T04:40:03Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > Australia banned leaded gas 10 years later than North America. There are other countries that didn’t follow in synchronization either. Show me some graphs from those countries that also follow along, and that aren’t attributable to other variants, such as demographics or increased police presence, or better first responder times, etc. The science is a little dense for me, but it looks like that information is in the source paper, graphs and all, [here](http://pic.plover.com/Nevin/Nevin2007.pdf), pages 319 to 324. Again, I quote the MJ article… > [@](#): > > Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn’t fit the theory. “No,” he replied. “Not one.” Indeed, it seems to be very possible that it’s a spurious correlation in any one given region, but since the paper shows that same correlation in seven different countries with seven different lead phase out timelines, well, it seems much less likely that something like police presence would so similarly align with the lead timing in each individual case. And if I understand what I’ve read correctly, that correlation even applies within the US, based on different phase out schedules in different regions. Add to that that modern day crime rates seem to correlate well with regional lead contamination down to the neighborhood level, well, it looks pretty damning to me. ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/55 "2013-01-04T04:46:06Z")
Too late at night for me to digest all of this, but if this theory holds water I’ll be truly amazed. I’ll look on the weekend. So, maybe there was something in the Roman Empire fall and the lead aqueducts after all? ---
**Author:** ![Pork\_Rind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pork_rind/32/111_2.png) [@Pork\_Rind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pork_Rind)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/56 "2013-01-04T04:56:40Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > Too late at night for me to digest all of this, but if this theory holds water I’ll be truly amazed. I’ll look on the weekend. > > So, maybe there was something in the Roman Empire fall and the lead aqueducts after all? I don’t see why the conclusions are so astonishing. Given that we know independently that lead preferentially damages structures of the brain responsible for executive functions, it’s not hard to draw the connection to young adults with, shall we say, _poor impulse control_ among other things, no? ---
**Author:** ![Leaffan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/leaffan/32/299_2.png) [@Leaffan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaffan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/57 "2013-01-04T05:18:01Z")
> [@Pork\_Rind](#): > > I don’t see why the conclusions are so astonishing. Given that we know independently that lead preferentially damages structures of the brain responsible for executive functions, it’s not hard to draw the connection to young adults with, shall we say, _poor impulse control_ among other things, no? If you used to live in a leaded smog-filled hell hole maybe. I’ve never lived in a smog-filled hell hole and crime rates have dropped similarly. The air in a lot of Canadian cities, and especially rural places where crime has also dropped has never been an issue. It looks like a very specious theory to me. ---
**Author:** ![Pork\_Rind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pork_rind/32/111_2.png) [@Pork\_Rind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pork_Rind)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/58 "2013-01-04T05:36:02Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > If you used to live in a leaded smog-filled hell hole maybe. I’ve never lived in a smog-filled hell hole and crime rates have dropped similarly. The air in a lot of Canadian cities, and especially rural places where crime has also dropped has never been an issue. It looks like a very specious theory to me. I don’t think anyone’s posited that you had to have lived in a smog-filled hellhole to have been exposed to too much lead in the 50s-70s. Blood test levels of children everywhere were too high in that era. It doesn’t take much exposure, and unless one lived a Grizzly Adams lifestyle, there was plenty of opportunity to be exposed to automobile exhaust at unhealthy levels. And, as the article and paper both point out, violent crime has dropped much, much less in rural areas as compared to urban areas. The trend has been for urban crime rates to drop to parity with rural crime rates, not for both to sink in parallel. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 12:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/59 "2013-01-04T12:30:06Z")
> [@Leaffan](#): > > It’s a lot like global warming: we have a trend; we have another trend; now let’s see if we can make them fit nicely together. It’s not just trend-fishing. In both cases, very basic science tells us that changes in one variable should lead to changes in another. Just like we know that CO[sub]2[/sub] has a warming effect (we’d be dead on an icy snowball earth if not for it), we know that lead has certain effects on the brain. We then make predictions and see if the available data support them. There are some issues with the methodology. The author had to rely on others’ models to estimate lead exposure where blood data are not available. (Gilsinn, J., 1972. Estimates of the Nature and Extent of Lead Paint Poisoning in the United States. US Department of Commerce, National Bureau of Standards [now NIST].) The author points out when and why these estimates fuzz the picture. Mielke and Zahran focused on US cities and neighborhoods where we have good data going back to the 50s, and those data support the conclusion as well. Remember that we’re looking at childhood lead levels. Not exposure in adults. This entire thread is an excellent example that we can link to when people ask whether we should still teach science to children. ---
**Author:** ![davidm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidm/32/225_2.png) [@davidm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/davidm)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2013, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569/60 "2013-01-04T15:34:51Z")
An article in _Mother Jones_ makes a persuasive argument. > **[America's Real Criminal Element Is Lead](https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/)** > > The hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and the maybe even the ADHD epidemic. > [@](#): > > But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too? > > That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn’t paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted. > > Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years. > > So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he 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. It goes on to talk about how the same correlation occurs in other countries, how the crime rates were higher in areas with greater automobile traffic, and how higher lead levels in individuals correlates with higher incarceration rates. Here’s a link to a PDF of Nevin’s 2000 paper: [http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin\_2000\_Env\_Res\_Author\_Manuscript.pdf](http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2000_Env_Res_Author_Manuscript.pdf) Is the science good? Does it make the case? Are there counter-arguments? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-recent-drop-in-violent-crime-due-to-banning-lead-in-gasoline/642569.md?page=4)