The Economy and Its Affect on America's Crime Rate - Past and Future

In the 1990s the crime rate in the U.S. dropped dramatically in all significant categories, including violent crime and property crime. Some experts attribute this drop to the strong economy that existed throughout most of the decade, when the per capita income increased by as much as 30% and the unemployment rate dropped by 2%[1]. These numbers have pushed many experts in the field to speculate on the potential effects that today's recessed economy will have on the crime rate for the foreseeable future.

There is no doubt that a strong economy encourages a lower crime rate, for many reasons. While many experts could not directly attribute the drop in violent crime to the increase in economic strength seen in the 1990s, they did attribute it to additional state funding for police departments and crime prevention measures. The drop in property crime, specifically theft, was directly relational to the increase in economic prosperity[2]. The indications of this study show that when citizens have the resources to provide for their needs they are less likely to turn to crime as a way of providing for themselves and their families, and those individuals who are more likely to commit violent crimes are often deterred or caught in the act through increased intervention by law enforcement made possible by sufficient financial resources.

Studies have also shown that children who grow up in homes whose annual income is at or below poverty level are also more likely to engage in criminal activity as teens and adults, and a recent study done by the Christian Association for Prison Aftercare discovered that over 53% of those individuals who are currently incarcerated had an average income of $10,000 or less[3]. Despite the controversy that these studies have sparked, there is little question in anyone's mind that a recessed economy, accompanied by the dramatic rise in unemployment and drop in per capita income that accompany the recession, will ultimately lead in an increase in crime rate if proactive measures are not taken.

The economic stimulus plan that is going into effect under President Obama may offer a solution to the threatening increase in crime. Through his development plan steps will be taken to provide for those living in poverty, including children and senior citizens, increasing federally funded health care coverage and tax cuts and creating a number of federally funded jobs that are expected to have a dramatic impact on the unemployment rate and begin to repair the damage that the economic recession has wrought[4].

One can only hope that these steps will also serve to head off any notable increase in crime rate as well.

[1] Levitt, S. (2004). Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s: Four factors that explain the decline and six that do not. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 18.

[2] Ibid

[3] Williams, J. (2007). Poverty and crime. Retrieved 2/17/2009 from http://www.capaassociation.org/newsletter_N009/Articles/PovertyCrime.htm.

[4]Espo, D. (2009, February 14). Stimulus bill heads to President's desk. The Free Lance Star, pp. A1, A9.

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Crime in Camden, America's Most Dangerous City

Despite its small population of just 70,0000 inhabitants, Camden (NJ) has been in the top 10 of America's most dangerous cities for more than half a century with just some rare gaps. In fact crime rate in Camden rarely subsided too much since the time the city picked up its infamous criminal background reputation in 1949. That was the year when an unemployed Howard Unruh murdered 13 people in 12 minutes, having thus set the sad record of killing as many people in as little time - more than one per minute! - and becoming the first known single-episode mass murderer in the USA's modern history.

If you review the city's only recent years history of crime and violence, then total of 7,639 serious crimes were reported to Camden police in 2000. In 2002 the FBI's Uniform Crime Report cited Camden, New Jersey, to have put on record 607 cases of robbery and 797 cases of aggravated assault, nearly double the national average.

The 2004 crime statistics ranked Camden, New Jersey, as the nation's highest crime rate city, up from the third place in 2003. Those rankings took into account a city's crime rate for crime categories covering 6 basic crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft. In 2004 Camden experienced an increase in every category over the same criminal statistics in 2003. Specifically, the murder rate was cited almost 9 times the national average of 5.7 per 100,000. The privately funded research in 2004 compared 354 cities with the population starting from 75,000 residents.

"We must give our people jobs, training and opportunity," said City Council Member Ali Sloan-El while talking before the public in 2005. The official then identified Camden's poverty and unemployment as the most important factors feeding the community's high crime rate. According to the Prosecutor's Office Camden also got then a position in the list of America's poorest cities.

Nonetheless, the year 2005 used to be seen by the Police and City Counsel as inspiring some valid hopes for the public safety improvement due to many police measures taken. Really, the start of the year 2005, from January to March, saw 24 percent decline in crime in Camden, providing more reason for the community optimism at the time than ever before.The city officials announced start of the program aimed to implement a proven aggressive crime-fighting technique called "crime mapping".

They were hoping to follow Newark, the other former violent crime rate leader in America that had started off with similar project in 1996. The "crime mapping" pattern implemented in Newark was able to result in truly dramatic 43 percent reduction in reported crime as quickly as already by 1998. There was no reason doubting the same scheme would work for Camden too, the more so that according to the Inc. Magazine, early in 2004 the city of Camden had been ranked #6 out of 277 biggest cities as the most promising place to do business in. The unseen flow of investments that had started literally pour into the city's infrastructure was expected to end up with poverty and unemployment and resolve the city's major crime problems. Even if no expert or analyst expected any immediate results and hoped only for long-term improvements, the hope still persisted.

Three years have passed since then. So, what do we see now?

By the end of the year 2008 Camden did report some noticeable decline in violent crimes, such as aggravated assaults, assaults with firearms, and thefts. From the other hand 48 homicides were reported, exceeding 42 in 2007. The first six months of the current year produced so mane fatalities and serious bodily injuries that Camden risked to break its own 12 years old record of 58 homicides reported in 1995.

Even if some improvement did take place, the progress was not even nearly close to what was expected in the year 2005. Sad thing to say, but Camden keeps holding firmly its reputation of the city drowning in street violence. In an attempt to keep control over the situation the Police try to make more arrests for minor offenses such as public drinking, playing loud music, loitering that all belong to the so-called quality-of-life offenses. These arrests are intended to prevent criminal offenses of more serious nature and to serve as a sort of warning for potential felons. But do they?

This current tactics pursued by the police of Camden during the last 2 months starting the end of October 2008 seem to spread public skepticism as for it's effectiveness. Citizens wonder if police expect to prevent street shootings, acts of homicide or drug-trafficking by arresting people for loitering. The fines imposed on the arrested for loitering are what many of them can't afford to pay, while getting record of having been arrested or issued warrants start showing up in pre-employment background check reports, making it harder for subjects to find jobs, if not reducing the very possibility of getting employed to the next minimum.

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Safety in Diversity: Why Crime Is Down in America's Cities

Richard Florida - Richard Florida is Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. More

By Richard Florida Jul 2 2011, 8:30 AM ET

Abortion, drug laws, reduced poverty--none of these factors is the main reason our metro areas are getting safer

Yesterday, the Financial Times ran an op ed piece of mine about the mysterious downward trend in crime. While this drop is a welcome development -- and very possibly a bellwether of even more positive changes in our society -- it poses a vexing challenge to professional explainers. What follows is a longer, more detailed, and more statistics-laden exploration of why crime rates are falling.

Almost three years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with massive unemployment and pessimism rife, America's crime rates are falling and no one--not our pundits, policemen, or politicians, our professors or city planners--can tell us why. As I wrote about here, there were 5.5 percent fewer murders, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults reported in 2010 than in 2009, according to the most recent edition of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report; property crimes fell by 2.8 percent over the same period and reported arsons dropped by 8.3 percent. 

And the drop was steepest in America's biggest cities--which are still popularly believed to be cauldrons of criminality. "While cities and suburbs alike are much safer today than in 1990," notes a recent report by the Brookings Institution, "central cities--the big cities that make up the hubs of the 100 largest metro areas--benefitted the most from declining crime rates. Among suburban communities, older higher-density suburbs saw crime drop at a faster pace than newer, lower-density emerging and exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe."

An essay in The Economist featured a graphic which charts the arc of American crime rates since the 1960s. Its caption poses the question that is on everyone's lips:

Some explanations evoke Sherlock Holmes' "dog that didn't bark." When crime rates first began to fall in the 1990s, Steven Levitt and John Donohue III argued that legalized abortion was responsible, since unwanted children would have been more likely to grow up to be criminals - a finding that was not only wildly controversial but has been met with substantial challenge. Research by economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes find attributes a significant proportion of the decline in violent crime to children's reduced exposure to lead.

Others suggest that America's astronomical incarceration rate--the highest in the world--is responsible, though that begs the question why countries that don't incarcerate their citizens at anything like the same rate suffer from less crime than the US does. It's disquieting to think that what would seem to be an unalloyed social good--less crime--might have been brought about in part by what many believe to be a social disaster: America's draconian, unequally enforced drug laws.  Law enforcement must be given its due; many big city police departments have developed statistically-driven methodologies for targeting crime hot-spots, with conspicuously successful results. And we as individuals have changed our behavior as well--from taking elementary precautions like locking our doors, to investing in crime-stopping technology like burglar alarms for our homes and LoJack for our cars.

Still, it is confounding that crime would decline as economic conditions worsen. My own analysis, conducted with my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, turns up no statistical associations between crime and either the level or the change in the level of unemployment across metros, or between crime and the level of income inequality. There does seem to be a modest relationship between the absolute poverty rate and crime. Our analysis turned up an association of .19 between crime and the percent of population below the poverty line. But it has weakened substantially over the past two or three decades, according to the Brookings study.

So too has the relationship between crime and race. From evening news headlines to crime shows on TV, popular culture underlines the propinquity between crime and race Our analysis turned up modest correlation (.37) between crime and the share of population that is black. But again, Brookings Institute report assembles powerful evidence to show that the relationship has been weakening. "The association between crime and community characteristics--like the proportion of the population that is black, Hispanic, poor, or foreign-born--diminished considerably over time," notes the study. "The strength of the relationship between the share of black residents and property crime decreased by half between 1990 and 2008, while the association between the share of Hispanic residents and violent crime all but disappeared."

In the popular imagination, crime is frequently associated with big, densely populated cities. Here again, we can separate fact from myth.  Primary cities and older high-density suburbs exhibited the largest decreases in crime between 1990 and 2008, according to the Brookings study. And the gap between city and suburban violent crime narrowed in two-thirds of the nation's 100 largest metro areas. Our own analysis turns up no association whatsoever between metro size or metro density and the overall level of crime, though we do find a modest correlation (.25) between density and violent crime.

In a thoughtful essay in the Wall Street Journal, the distinguished political scientist and urban crime expert James Q. Wilson hit hard at strictly economistic explanations, suggesting that deeper changes in American culture can better account for the mystery. "The cultural argument" he writes, can help explain not only the current drop in crime, but also "the Great Depression's fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression--at society's cost--became more prevalent." My former Carnegie Mellon University colleague, the distinguished criminologist Alfred Blumstein, proposes an "Obama effect," in which young black males' increased optimism about their futures makes them more likely to refrain from violence.

But the key factor, as it turns out, lies in the growing racial, ethnic, and demographic diversity of our cities and metro areas. Our analysis found that the Hispanic share of the population is negatively associated with urban crime. Crime also fell as the percentage of the population that is non-white and the percentage that is gay increased. And of all the variables in our analysis, the one that is most consistently negatively associated with crime is a place's percentage of foreign-born residents. Not only did we find a negative correlation (-.36) between foreign-born share and crime in general, the pattern held across all of the many, various types of crime - from murder and arson to burglary and car theft. 

The Brookings study also finds evidence of a substantial shift in the connection between foreign-born residents and crime. While foreign-born share was positively associated with crime in 1990 and 2000, that relationship had disappeared by 2008. The foreign-born share of population now shows no relationship to property crime, and a negative relationship to violent crime. The pattern is most pronounced for primary cities and inner-ring suburbs, the Brookings study found, but not for lower-density suburbs and ex-urbs.

It might be hard to wrap your mind around this--especially with all the demagoguery about immigration. But the numbers tell a different story than our alarmist pundits and politicians do. "Since 1990, all types of communities within the country's largest metro areas have become more diverse," Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the Brookings report, wrote in The New Republic. "Crime fell fastest in big cities and high-density suburbs that were poorer, more minority, and had higher crime rates to begin with. At the same time, all kinds of suburbs saw their share of poor, minority, and foreign-born residents increase. As suburbia diversified, crime rates fell." Along with their entrepreneurial energy and their zeal to succeed, immigrants are good neighbors--cultural and economic factors that militate against criminal behavior, and not just in their own enclaves but in surrounding communities as well.

One additional factor bears on this. Our analysis also turns up a consistent negative correlation between crime and the overall level of city happiness. It makes intuitive sense that a low-crime city would be a happy city; still, it's worth pointing out that the happiness measure (which comes from Gallup surveys) is associated not just with overall crime but with almost every type of crime across the board. 

This is somewhat striking in an analysis where associations between crime and key social and economic variables are hard to find. More to the point, the Gallup research identifies openness to diversity as being one of the two most important factors that shape city happiness and community satisfaction across the board.

America's declining crime rates are cause for celebration, even if we can't completely explain the phenomenon. The fact that diversity appears to play such a signal role in the trend--something that most Americans regard as a moral and economic good in its own right-- makes it all-the-more satisfying.

Image Credit: Flickr / dsb nola

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