Why did crime plummet in the US? | Hacker News Reader

Why did crime plummet in the US?

vox.com

93 pointsrl3162 comments

They missed a theory: fudging the stats and failing to report crimes. Excerpt from an interview with David Simon:

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They [the police department in Baltimore] cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/perceptions-havent-...

"These trends aren’t caused by changes in our willingness to report crime to the police. We see an even more significant decline in violent crime in data derived from surveys asking people whether they’ve been the victims of certain crimes over the past year. The National Crime Victimization Survey reports that the rate of violent victimizations has declined by 67 percent since 1993. This reflects a 70 percent decline in rape and sexual assault; a 66 percent decline in robbery; a 77 percent decline in aggravated assault; and a 64 percent decline in simple assault. This survey has nothing to say about the decline in homicide, for obvious reasons."

David Simon says that homicide is the hardest crime stat to fudge, since there's a body and the different rate changes between homicide and other crimes is actually used to try to measure how much the stats are being fudged.

Also: the coroner's office is independent of the police and makes the determination of homicide.

That's not true in all jurisdictions; I've seen several, e.g., with a sheriff-coroner's office, so that, where the sheriff's office is the applicable law enforcement officer, the coroner is not a separate office.

It is true in Baltimore, and Simon specifically references the fact.

There's a long treatment of this in Simon's 2008 talk, "The Audacity of Despair". I'd written at length on that earlier:

http://davidsimon.com/portfolio-item/the-audacity-of-despair

https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/CexR...

Simon says:

In this culture, if you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse some statistics. I learned as a reporter to start despising statistics, and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was pulling it out and using it.

As I got better as a reporter, I realized that as soon as any of our institutions create a means of measuring themselves in terms of quality, someone is running behind them in that institution to figure out a way of destroying that statistic as a meaningful measure of anything.

In education it's No Child Left Behind and standardized test scores. In the police department, it's crime statistics and clearance rates. In the journalism it's Pulizer Prizes.

These stats don't have to do with anything once the people looking to advance themselves and their agenda, and to protect their institution, get done with them.

...

It's not corruption in the sense of somebody thinking "I am here to make Baltimore worse", or "make the retaining walls in New Orleans collapse yet again". It's somebody thinking "I don't want it landing on me, I want my day to be easier than yours, and I want you to think well of me until I get out of this job".

...

You know how you unfound a robbery report? A guy comes in to report a robbery in a place like south-west Baltimore, you say, "are you sure the guy had bullets in the gun? Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn't just a larceny, are you sure he didn't just take your wallet from you? Oh, you're really insisting, he did have a gun, you saw the bullets, it was a real gun? Hold on, we've got to run a warrant check on you. We gotta see if there's any paper on you. You don't have any paper on you? Oh, by the way, door's over there."

Robberies in the south-west district of Baltimore went down 70% in just one year.

When time came to reduce the murder rate, the same trick didn't work -- you can't hide the bodies, and it's the state Health Department which defines murders.

It's a really powerful piece.

You can always report an homicide as a suicide.

You will have an increase suicide rate, but it won't effect the criminal rate.

Except that's a really serious felony far and above other statistics fiddling, Baltimore at its worst didn't go that far - you're making yourself an accessory to murder after the fact. Not only would you have Federal authorities getting interested quickly but you have pesky family members raising queries about how their loved one shot themselves to death 34 times on a street corner.

Even in the darkest days of Baltimore I don't think there were allegations of homicides being declared as suicides.

Just to be pedantic: in it's darkest days the police in Baltimore commit murder. It's naive to think the police would never do something purely because it's really bad.

I will agree that from a practical standpoint it seems far fetched to think they could get away with mislabeling homicides on any significant scale.

You can sometimes report a homicide as a suicide. Not very often, given things like the relative unpopularity of multiple gunshot wounds from a moving car as a suicide method, and so on.

And if the victim has life insurance, reporting a homicide as a suicide has insurance consequences, the family would provide resistance to.

I have no data for this (other than watching TV) but reporting homicide as suicide is probably more likely due to incompetence rather than malice.

David Simon is talking about one particular administration, he later says in the same interview:

"And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that’s when Baltimore makes some progress."

I've heard of this being done in Chicago as well.

Well rape numbers are not as high as they should be, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta isn't reporting them even at times when patients request it, either from misunderstanding new privacy laws in medical records or because of the rules.

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/crime-law/fulton-rapes-go-unrep...

Chicago Magazine had a big two-part investigative report into a similar pattern in the CPD: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/May-2014/Chicago-...

Would you expect that amount of fudging to change over time? Arguing that fudging stats explains the drop in crime requires that you believe in the last 30 years police throughout the country have started undercounting the amount of crime in their areas by increasing amounts year after year.

I suppose one correlation is missing: the price of a number of goods generally considered valuable has gone down and the quantity and availability has gone up since the 80's. Think TVs, car radios, stereo systems, computers. If you really think you want one, you can buy it second-hand for so cheap that crime doesn't pay off. And if you steal one, you'd have a much harder time finding a place where you can sell it for some reasonable amount of money. Because crime involves a risk, it also requires proportionally a bigger payoff. Regular households don't provide that so easily anymore.

Another thing is that the illegal nature of a crime is a deterrent for most people but not so if you grow up in a culture where casual crime is no big deal. But cultures change: maybe there's less people exposed to that than earlier. Or because of the first point, casual crime has gone down because the payoffs aren't high enough, and this has been shrinking the relevant subcultures that earlier favoured committing petty crimes, thus reducing the number of people used to do crimes and therefore, eventually, full-time criminals.

Generally, a crime nearly always happens for a reason: a crime can happen only if someone wants something and there's no other way as easy to get it than to commit a crime. To summarise, a crime happens because someone wants to achieve a goal. In a crime there's always a risk involved: you might get into a fight, you might get caught, or you might get shot. Thus, nearly nobody does crimes routinely just for the fun of it: the payoff must be good enough, and the payoff generally correlates with the risk.

I don't think crime usually has a rational proposition value. If you're desperate or an addict or whatever, you'll take what you can get.

I lived in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood (http://spotcrime.com/il/chicago/humboldt+park) for three years. During that time, my wife's car was broken into for a $99 GPS, that was 4 or 5 years old and had a resale value of maybe $10 at most? My own car was broken into for the near free Sirius radio you get when you sign up for service. This isn't even resellable as Sirius has the serial number and will refuse to active it. This didn't stop them from smashing our windows. Of course, this ignores other types of crime like murder, rape, etc where there is no economic argument at play.

Looks to me that there's variety of factors here: a strong economy means the opportunity for jobs instead of joining a gang, abortion access means less unwanted children, foster policies moving from "paycheck" children to permanent adoptive placement, the end of concentrated crime and misery in 'the projects' to section 8 vouchers which lets poor people have a choice in housing, the removal of lead from gas and paint, the rise of cheap CCTV cameras, the rise of CCW permits, the rise of cheap/subsidized college, massive urban gentrification, police gang management policies that encourage stability and limits territory disputes, consolidated drug markets, etc.

But it does. You even said it yourself. "If you are desperate .. you'll take what you can get." The people that could be the most desperate, or that have the least to lose. Would be homeless, I think homeless don't steal a whole lot because they are fewer, and they don't really have the resources to steal. On the contrary they are more likely to be abused by people with more resources than them.

99% of crime has some economic factor, they have to do with society. Society and economy are inextricably connected.

Could combine permanent long term decline in standard of living with the decline in physical consumer goods. So my high school educated grandfather bought my grandmother a mink coat way back in the 50s. Now a days an average middle class college educated guy couldn't afford to give his wife a consumer good like that (aside from "fur is murder", just simply couldn't afford it). On the other hand I gift my wife an evernote subscription and an amazon prime subscription fee. Its easy for an unskilled criminal to figure out how to successfully steal a $3000 coat, but really hard for an unskilled criminal to steal an evernote subscription. You can't steal my wife's mink coat; she doesn't have one. On an enormously smaller scale, before 1962 every middle/upper class white male wore an expensive formal hat with his suit, after '62 statistically no one wears them; you could steal my grandfather's fedora, but you'll never steal mine because I don't own one and likely never will. You could steal joe average's fishing boat in 1970 because joe average could afford a boat. In 2015 joe average cannot and will never afford a boat, with the side effect of no one will steal it.

Likewise every dollar I spend on medical, which only goes up 10%/yr or whatever it is, is money I'll permanently never be able to spend on something physical, small, stealable. If you steal my kindle I'll merely download my books again. You could steal my dad's 1980s laserdiscs (remember those?) but you can't steal my streamed movies, well, maybe you can "steal" as in piss off the copyright holders, but you can't take the experience of having watched them in the past away from me.

You believe that people today own fewer expensive consumer goods? My first impression would be the exact opposite.

A majority of the population owns a small, easily stolen electronic device (smart phone) that is worth an average week's pay. Not to mention computers, TVs, video game systems, etc. All stuff commonly stolen.

"All stuff commonly stolen."

Isn't that in direct opposition to the data and claims? A TV financially worth stealing is going to be too big and delicate to steal. I'm not in the i-ecosystem but I'm told changes have been made making a stolen iphone basically worthless.

I was motivated to pull my communities police blotter (which is online) and look at the last weeks thefts. Stolen last week: one microwave oven, garbage cans (the city owns the rolling bins and it is incredibly inconvenient and costs $75 to replace each rolling bin, so its a revenge crime type of thing rather than for resale profit), gasoline was siphoned out of some car dealership cars, and misc office supplies (aka someone got fired for cause for taking a pad of paper instead of getting downsized to keep unemployment insurance costs lower). Apparently in my suburb there were no "real" thefts last week.

I think its interesting that HN posters would make excellent thieves compared to the general population. Apparently the general population thieves are really stupid, or are not stealing for the sake of profit maximization but for punishment or getting even. Possibly we're seeing some kind of variation in drugs, like crack users could be effective thieves via the chemical stimulation but most of the local addicts are pill heads and the chemical effects mean they can't effectively steal things. The crime report in an urban area is likely much longer than this suburban example and that might be useful data. Finally school is out so dorm related crime last week would be very minimal compared to during school.

I think the implication is that people still involved in the crime economy aren't idiots. If you're a criminal looking to make money, robbing houses is too high-risk anymore. Other crimes like credit card fraud are much more lucrative and don't carry the possibility of getting shot by a police officer or homeowner.

I don't think the risk from robbing houses is any higher than it used to be, but the reward is probably lower and there are other, better ways to make money illegally.

I don't own a CD or DVD player, dedicated film camera, dedicated video camera, speakers, typewriter, game console, CRT TV.

These days I have a flat screen TV, smartphone, a game console, plus a few computers with peripherals; router, modem. For me it may balance out or be slightly more.

I certainly replace what I have far more than I ever would back in the 1980s back then I certainly would not have casually spent 5% of my after tax income on a single entertainment device that's the big difference I see today.

Worth an average week's pay? Not unless you define "average" as "minimum wage". Even at $10/hour, a full-time (40 hour) week is $400 (maybe $300 after taxes and deductions). That's pretty high for the kind of smartphone that the majority of the population is using. And I suspect that $10/hour is below average, as well.

Why would you be looking at the average for this though? The reason economic factors and crime rates are so tightly correlated are because it is those who are desperate for money, e.g. unemployed, working low-wage and/or part-time, etc., that would be most likely to be tempted to steal these devices. Even if you drop the resale value of those devices to around $100 you could easily get away with a smartphone, tablet, laptop at once and make enough to get by for a couple weeks.

That was what I meant. Stuff that even a minimum wage worker could purchase, thus very common.

But they are all either very inexpensive or there are knockoffs or used versions that are very inexpensive.

> before 1962 every middle/upper class white male wore an expensive formal hat with his suit

Now, nearly everyone has an expensive mobile phone with them at all times

Across the board, I'd be willing to wager that portable consumer goods now tend to be locked behind closed doors. One might see an uptick in breaking-and-entering robberies, but it'd have to be a significant uptick to offset the loss from mugging being less profitable.

Smartphones are a bad theft target; too traceable, since they tend to have phone-home technology built in (along with integrated GPS).

permanent long term decline in standard of living

Yet I suspect that any average middle class Joe/Jane in 1962 would trade their fedora, boat and RCA TV for our cellphone, ability to instantly search for anything, access to all recorded music for $10 a month, etc. But you make a good point - I might trade some of the above for their pension.

>permanent long term decline in standard of living

This is patently false but some cannot abandon the everything is getting worse narrative because it is central to their identity of being victimized. Meanwhile the myriad of wonders available abounds and is accelerating.

"This is patently false"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/US_Real_...

And note that being a .gov production, they have every motivation to make things look better than they are. And thats just looking at permanent decline in top row revenue numbers, obviously increasing medical, real estate, and education costs by 10% annually for decades lowers standard of living because merely paying $30K for a leg cast doesn't mean its 100x better than paying $300 for a leg cast, it just means middlemen siphon out more money. Or paying $600K for a house that used to sell for $60K doesn't mean the standard of living increased by a factor of 10.

Median income is not standard of living. The reason income inequality is trumpeted so much around here is because it is one the few remaining metrics that still work for the worn out everything is getting worse trope. Standard of living is the entire scope not your cherry picked datapoints.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living

"The standard of living includes factors such as income, quality and availability of employment, class disparity, poverty rate, quality and affordability of housing, people, hours of work required to purchase necessities, gross domestic product, inflation rate, number of holiday days per year, affordable (or free) access to quality healthcare, quality and availability of education, life expectancy, incidence of disease, cost of goods and services, infrastructure, national economic growth, economic and political stability, political and religious freedom, environmental quality, climate and safety."

(And edited to add, "happyscrappy is, indeed, happy" did not appear on the list, although I am happy for your happiness, because life should be fun)

Make my day, pick some and provide unbiased data showing improvement, much as I've done for decline in income.

Wikipedia is weird so I don't know what "people" or "climate" means in the context of standard of living. Also GDP is totally irrelevant to individuals and any way that it could be relevant is already handled in the previously listed economic indicators.

>Make my day, pick some and provide unbiased data showing improvement

I won't need any sources because I believe you will be able to stipulate:

Access to virtually any info at your fingertips

Safer water, food, health care, workplace etc.

Increased protection of LBGT

Increased consumer protections, remedy of fraud

Longer lifespan, medical breakthroughs, better protections and access for the blind and deaf

I could literally go on forever. It takes a pretty stubborn dogma to insist things are getting worse.

>> Meanwhile the myriad of wonders available abounds and is accelerating.

Right, so a rich kid will have 10 wonders to keep him busy. A poor kid may only have 1, but it keeps him happy enough not to have to steal one. Back in the 1970's we all played outside because there wasn't anything to do inside. This is why the Atari 2600 was a huge deal - it was the first amazing tech gadget most people had ever seen. Oh and oddly I didn't see cable TV in this discussion - more variety in couch potato options may have also kept people indoors.

I don't agree.

While it's true that buying power for small consumer goods might be greater (see first comment) because a lot of these goods are cheaper now, I think there really is a growing income gap that is eviscerating the middle class.

The important things that matter in standard of living--housing, transportation, and free time--are not better. From the 60's to maybe the 80's, one wage earner with a decent job was enough to support a family nicely with two cars, vacations, guaranteed retirement, health care, and spouse staying at home, plus maybe even a little domestic help. At some point all those things have eroded and all are less common now.

I am confused as to why one would need two cars and domestic help if they had only one working spouse. Was it really common in the 60s to have two car households? My grandparents (3 of them worked) all worked factory jobs and they certainly couldn't afford two cars or domestic help(!!!) Domestic help is the job of kids anyways.

The other things is in the 1960s the who family all shared bedrooms and stuff. Now everyone has their own room, iPad, TV, video games...

No:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Number_of...

imglorp's understanding of the past is basically just wrong

Sure, his generalization regarding "nicely with two cars" might have been overstated, but your link supports his notion that "at some point all those things have eroded," at least in the case of car ownership per household.

Now, I understand there are lots of different factors at play, some of which would actually have positive overall quality-of-life impacts correlated with decreased car ownership. For example, decreasing urban sprawl, increased livability in cities and decreased noise/air pollution. But a drive-by posting of a link, with no explanation, and with a "just plain wrong" comment is a little over the top.

If you're talking about the small dip around 1990 you're missing the the forrest for the trees.

Granted I probably gave lousy examples. Here's what I was trying to say.

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Real-Media...

Nothing in that link is consistent with any conclusion that things have "eroded" in the past 50-60 years.

If people think that things have "eroded" since 1960, then they should first go back to living like the middle class did in the 1960s and see how far their money takes them under 1960s living standards.

That means

1 car with a short commute, 1,500 sq/ft house, no internet or cable, 1 TV, no iPods/Kindles/Tablets, no phones (with expensive data plans) for each kid, no internet, 2 kids per bedroom, using a broom and mop instead of expensive disposables (like Swiffer and Diaper Genie, or even disposable diapers), no air travel (vacations are a weekend car trip out of town), babies/kids have a reasonable amount of consumer goods (no endless amount of plastic crap - having a 1,500 sq/ft home helps with this). With the amount of consumer goods kids have now it is a wonder how my parents made it to adulthood without all of that stuff.

Seems to me a lot of this so called "erosion" is a very broad increase in consumer spending without an increase in salary. Otherwise known as "living above your means."

Don't get me wrong - the big things that are a challenge nowadays that didn't exist in 1960 are healthcare costs and job security. Employment benefits also seems on the decline.

One white male wage earner whos job was protected by racism and sexism.

I gotta wonder - if everyone has less stuff than they did in 1960 then why are homes getting so much bigger? The average amount of living space per person in a new home has almost doubled in just the last forty years. Do these people have a lot of empty space or are they filling up that extra space with a lot more stuff? I'm inclined to think it is the latter.

Speculative real estate option, at least until 2007-ish, "real estate only goes up". A lot of approval processes etc are based on $/sqft so obviously if real estate always goes up 10%/yr then you'll make much more money off a 4000 sq ft house than a 1600 sq ft house. So always buy the largest most expensive house the subprime lender will approve to maximize future return. Which works really well as a strategy until prices stop going up, or drop.

There is also a cultural trend aside from any financial issues where big and bland beats small. See SUVs and trucks, or rather stark looking big box CRE architecture.

Factual small scale observations can be made off TV size/resolution vs sofa position. You need a very large living room indeed to handle the angular viewing dimensions of an 80 inch TV. You need a large living room, certainly over 20x20, to pull off 4 player kinect video games (or suffer lots of impact). Empty space is easy to build and cheap (free) to furnish.

Zoning has a lot to do with it, as it's damned near impossible to build anything less than a 1500 square foot home anymore unless you build on property not in a subdivision or under city ordinances. There's now a whole counter-culture, with people building small homes where they can (out in the woods), and some going so far as to build and live in small tiny homes in truck beds or on trailers in city lots or trailer parks.

Also -- and I don't know if this is cause or effect -- we're becoming more detached as families. Everyone has their own room and own stuff. Back in the Leave It To Beaver / Brady Bunch era, kids shared rooms much longer, you had a single family room TV and you ate together at the table. Now, everyone has their own rooms, their own TV/console/entertainment, and often don't eat or entertain as a family unit.

> I gotta wonder - if everyone has less stuff than they did in 1960 then why are homes getting so much bigger?

Because:

(1) everyone doesn't, just the median person, and its by value, not volume of stuff.

(2) means aren't medians.

> The average amount of living space per person in a new home has almost doubled in just the last forty years.

Averages (arithmetic means) are often misleading.

If the biggest 10% of new homes added 15 times the old average to their size (which would be a much smaller multiple of the size of that largest-size cohort), but the bottom 90%, on average, reduced their size by 5/11 the old average, the average (arithmetic mean) size of a new home would have doubled, even though most new homes were significantly smaller.

(And that's even assuming that you can accurately assess the size of homes people live in by measuring the size of new homes -- which is obviously flawed to start with.)

One thing to note is that crime in pretty much all of the all of the wealthier countries have decreased in the last few decades, and this this is not a specifically American phenomenon: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582041-rich-world-s...

Yes, and the disconnect here as for what people believe, I think largely due to scaremongering to sell newspapers and ad time on TV, is interesting. Over here, I think we've never been as worried about pedophiles and rapists than now. It's rare to even see kids out and playing alone compared to when I was young, and the stories on America's Worst Mind comes to mind: http://theweek.com/articles/505724/last-word-advice-from-ame...

http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/149151...

Recommended read by Gates and Zuckerberg.

Why is cultural evolution never discussed as a possible reason?

We know cultures change. When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen. But when it's crime, we rack our brains looking for the one single physical reason crime dropped.

> When we note that acceptance of gays has become mainstream or that smoking has decreased or that people get married later, we don't presume that it has to do with abortion rates or leaded gasoline -- we just understand that cultural shifts happen.

We absolutely try to discover the causes of those shifts. There are similar articles about why those things are happening, too, in each case!

So, not necessarily this article, but I haven't seen much in sociological or economics literature that's put forth one single reason crime dropped. There's argument over primary causes, or how much each cause contributes to the drop, but not much about single unifying theories.

> smoking

Tobacco.

This is an important distinction. Tobacco usage has gone down. Electronic cigarettes, however, are booming among former tobacco users. Americans are also opening up to marijuana legalization.

Some potential reasons not mentioned in the article:

Electronics have become cheaper. Cars are harder to steal. Criminals can commit crimes online instead. We possess less objects as more things become digitized. Improved welfare programs. Improved forensic investigations.

You're spot on — our valuable items are becoming harder to steal and cheaper to purchase legally.

Criminals used to make off with your TV, whereas any TV worth stealing today is just too delicate to move in a hurry. We don't tend to have expensive VCRs either.

Remember when car stereos were stolen? Most modern cars have fully integrated head units and aftermarket alternatives are now niche and often worth very little. After that it was GPS units, but even they are now dirt cheap and not much of a theft target.

Mobile phones used to be an easy score. Today they're trackable and lockable, making the more desirable models — particularly iPhones — worth almost nothing. Criminals know this, which is why iPhone thefts have plummeted.

A friend recently had her phone stolen right out of her hand. They police were able to catch the kid fairly quickly, and return the phone. They said that they call it 'apple picking', and it is fairly common. I was surprised because smart phones are so easily tracked/locked.

Co-worker had his stolen from the gym. Reported it stolen - and thus it locked itself. Got contacted from guy in Russia who was PISSED that the phone he paid $$$ for was locked. Co-worker said "no way in hell am I going to unlock" phone. Got pictures of smashed iPhone.

Granted, the "end user" got burnt, not the thief... but the end result is the stolen phone was worthless. Co-worker is out an uninsured, stolen iPhone... the purchaser is out a phone purchase on eBay (I presume).

If I would be a car burglar today, airbags would be my target.

A pricy item, easy to (re)sell (= DIY looking for replacement parts), not trackable (serial numbers?), probably easy/quick to strip from a car if you know what your doing ...

Ebay even has a "Replacement Air Bag Buying Guide": http://www.ebay.com/gds/Replacement-Air-Bag-Buying-Guide-/10...

According to the recent bank thief AMA, robbing bank tellers is even faster and easier.

> Criminals can commit crimes online instead.

Violent crime, not really, and that's what the article is mostly about. But you're right that the shift to online crime seems often to be missed or ignored. For example: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/05/crime-statistics-a...

The article explicitly focuses on the decline of violent crime. You can definitely argue that lower resale value of VCRs can cause a decrease in burglaries, however, it doesn't explain a similar decrease in the number of rapes.

Cameras everywhere. Improved abilities to track illegal gains. See, mass surveillance works!

Nice article, but they got one fact wrong. On card 3 they state that robbery is a property crime. Per the FBI's uniform crime reporting standards, it's a violent crime: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/...

The logic is that, from the perspective of the law, the threat of violence is close enough to an act of violence to be considered violent.

The best thing about this article is that it didn't try to push one reason over an other so it kind of gave you a run down of all the commonly cited factors which contribute to one degree or other to the reduction in crime. On the other hand it was pretty light.

What I'd like to see is each of those factors studied in other countries and their impact or non factor there to see if there is some commonality. Now, I understand that some factors are irrelevant in some places, but they're all relevant somewhere else too.

This reason could be interesting among others: America's Real Criminal Element: Lead[1]

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-li...

That was number 17. I'd link to it, but individual cards don't seem to be real URIs.

"The case against: The lead theory has the same problem as the abortion theory: in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes. That indicates that while lead exposure may well have been a factor, it isn't the "real answer" that it's often characterized as."

They're missing some corroborative evidence though: several other countries removed lead in different years, and in almost all of them crime dropped around 20 years later.

> in the 1990s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes

Maybe people also just commit less crime as they age?

Or maybe it isn't just a matter of whether someone has been exposed to lead at all but a matter of how much and over what duration. Toxicology is all about the dose but the public (and apparently Vox writers) tend to think about chemicals in terms of exposed/not exposed.

A big point of evidence that I didn't see in the Vox or Mother Jones piece is that crime rates seemed to decline in different areas corresponding to when they stopped using leaded gasoline.

That was covered in the Mother Jones article:

"Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. 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.

Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at crime trends around the world (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. 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.""

B&Es are a lot tougher when you've got a bum knee and arthritis in your hands.

I believe they also measured this on a city level, too, and it fit the hypothesis.

I agree, but the card 17 doesn't cite exposure to other harmful and poisonous elements (mercury, aluminum, among others) and we have strong scientific evidence that these elements trigger psychiatric disorders.

There are lots of studies on how environmental and chemicals causes these illness that criminals seems to share and they are related to undeveloped/malfunctioning control centres on the brain.

Government policies to avoiding population exposure to poison and at the same time psychiatric/neurologic advances on treatment and drugs makes a stronger case for that theory.

Update: missing 'c' in centres

> individual cards don't seem to be real URIs

Indeed! When you click on the target, you get this URL,

http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-dropcrime-rate-drop/lead...

But if you load that URL, either directly or by reloading, you get a 404.

This is a bug. We're working on fixing it.

Looks good now!

http://www.vox.com/cards/crime-rate-drop/lead-crime

I don't get this sentence:

"And in the 2000s, when everyone under 30 had grown up exposed to less lead, the lead theory helps even less."

Did crime go back up in the 2000s? I thought it was still declining?

Also I'm sure I've seen reports that looked at exactly when the decline happened between states and countries that removed lead from their cars at different times, and it supported there being some effect. In general I find many sociological studies seem a bit ridiculous when they don't bother to compare across countries, e.g. this survey indicates that mass incarceration probably helped, yet no other nation followed the US lead, and saw a similar fall in crime.

I think the point they're making is that, once everyone is exposed to less lead, the crime rate should flatten out.

If the crime rate continues to decrease even though the relative number of young people with high lead intake doesn't change (because there aren't many of them) then there is likely to be an alternative explanation.

The answer seems most likely to be number 15; crime isn't constant by age group, true, but it is driven by it; both the crime wave and the subsequent fall track well with population and are consistent with the overall crime rate (and even the rates within each age group) being driven by the proportion of the population that is young adult males.

The article treats the evidence of the influence of demographics on the by-age-range rate as of it was evidence against this effect in order to have a for and against argument, but that's actually not counter-evidence of any kind.

Although Crime plummets... the interesting thing is, our perception of danger and our general sense of fear has increased by significant margin. We're more scared of things that have have an even less chance of affecting us than ever before.

Are there any other countries/cultures around the world that are as fearful as modern U.S.?

The fear is an illusion. Our perception of the world is largely shaped by the media. The media magnifies dangers that are otherwise relatively improbable. The logical conclusion from this fact is this:

To find a culture that has no fear, look for cultures that are technologically backwards. Cultures that have very limited access to media and thus a more realistic perception of fear should be your chosen targets. In these settings, you will find entire societies where doors are left unlocked, children are allowed to roam the entire town unsupervised, and places where the concept of "abduction" is relatively unknown.

Or go back to the US in the 1980s. You will find the exact same society. Listen to this podcast to learn more about the United States during this time and the nature of fear: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&i...

Yeah, sounds just like my old neighborhood, and I grew up in the 80s.

most probably and unfortunately, no. consequences can be felt in many places around the world.

Yes, I mean those frikkin' wars they wage here & there. From what I see, correct me if I'm wrong, many people in US still believe those wars are justified, soldiers are defending their homeland (in foreign countries half across the globe that didn't attack US anyhow imaginable), killing just few bad guys (and not creating many more by behaving like that-heck, if they would be killing my family and friends back home because of nothing, it would be hard to resist temptation to strike back somehow). And I could go on and on, you know the drill.

All this possible because of 9/11, relatively minor incident in terms of life loss/damage, but made look like Armageddon day by media. Not only, but mainly US residents scaremonged beyond belief my mass media (and I presume not many stood against it). Well, looking back, you were played damn well. Terrorist won by radicalizing you, all army-related companies won, and anybody who is on their payroll.

It's so much easier to control somebody who has fear, since they are already in irrational place to begin with. I am 34, and I don't think I'll live long enough to see US to become again "land of the free". From west european perspective, it's a sad joke for a long time.

> From what I see, correct me if I'm wrong, many people in US still believe those wars are justified, soldiers are defending their homeland (in foreign countries half across the globe that didn't attack US anyhow imaginable), killing just few bad guys (and not creating many more by behaving like that-heck, if they would be killing my family and friends back home because of nothing, it would be hard to resist temptation to strike back somehow). And I could go on and on, you know the drill.

Many people definitely still hold these views. It's actually kind of tragic, the impact it's had on the younger generation. I was 19 when 9/11 happened, but my ex was only 12. It, and her parents' reactions, have completely warped her understanding of the dangers in this world and the value/merit of the wars that followed. It doesn't help that she's a military brat (so am I, but my father, despite being in the military, was actually a pacifist; this has had a major influence on my view of things) who saw her neighbors going off to fight the wars. It had to be justified, otherwise she couldn't come to terms with the men and women that didn't come home, or didn't come home whole. If she'd been older, perhaps, she could've viewed it more critically and less emotionally.

I point to her as an example, but her stances and views on war and foreign policy, even for someone who's liberal [0], aren't that out of the ordinary. We've got a whole generation now that came of age in a period of (largely) media induced fear. As I said, tragic, and terrifying.

[0] US sense, not that liberal in the global sense.

The amount of fear is a function of risk * significance of loss. Crime is down, but we have more than ever to lose. That's why millennial parents are so fucking crazy. Much more to fear when you're investing a million into each of two kids than back when you invested a fraction of that over five kids.

Fear is less of a function of risk or loss and more of a function of the perception of risk.

IMO what has been magnified is not the significance of loss, but our perception of risk. If we perceive the world as a place constantly under threat by kidnappers, international terrorists, and criminals then we will be in fear. Who informs us about these threats? The media. It is the media that over reports and over-exaggerates danger, and this is what has changed over the past decades.

The birth rate in the US isn't any higher than it was when I was born (and until 2008 it was higher than when I was born). During the height of the baby boom it was only a tad over 3.5 - which is significantly less than your five children example. (http://www.prb.org/Publications/Datasheets/2012/world-popula...)

What has changed is 24/7 news. That makes the perception of danger all out of wack with actual danger. Media.

Fear is not rational. In general, people overestimate the risk of unlikely events and underestimate the risk of likely events. Case in point: nuclear power has killed less than 1 million people in all of human history (including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, which accounts for 90-99% of all deaths due to nuclear power), while the number of people killed in an automobile accident in a single year is about 1-1.5 million. Clearly, we should be more terrified of cars than we should be of nuclear power, but it is very much the other way around.

Although I think it's irrational to be afraid of flying, I disagree with your example. I was under the impression that many people had the tendency to just ignore the possibility of terrible things happening, as in the black swan theory.

Perhaps nuclear power was safer than cars till now, but in my opinion it has the potential to be a lot deadlier if something really wrong happen (and Fukushima didn't happen in a 3rd world country with terrible infrastructures, how would it be if there were nuclear power plants everywhere in every country, no matter how corrupt it is?), so I find it rational to be more terrified of it than of cars.

But it's also a question of benefits, you can arguably replace a nuclear power plant with whatever technology you prefer, a car is harder to replace I think.

I am much more fearful of cars than nuclear. People are just so stupid behind the wheel, running up on cars tailgating, bobbing and weaving lanes...I've already lost several friends and family to stupid drivers. It disgusts me how one idiot is basically, with a simple test, given free exercise of a dangerous weapon in public.

another example - fear of flying, fueled by flashy news articles.

I don't think there's any one big reason for decrease in crime. I think it's all of those factors in the article working up to a perfect storm.

I do think young kids being inside home playing video games (hence less time out in the street, lowering chance of running into trouble) is another reason. Basically all those video games trapped potential criminals inside their home and they eventually 'matured' enough not to get into a life of crimes.

Indeed 'one big reasons' seem very pathological for me in popular science and even some serious science. I believe we are attracted to a single fact explaining a lot: it gives some weird satisfaction, like seeing a puzzle come together; while this can work for creating a mathematical theory or explain some basic physical phenomena, it doesn't bode well when applied to complex systems or people. I get impression it happens all the time with cancer; I think the bee collapse saw some of this effect too.

All this motivation for finding 'the explanation' does lead to discovering mechanisms though -- but I suppose we still need some more lucid 'integrators' to combine many effects into a strong enough causal system.

Plot crime rates and video game sales and there is a correlation between the decrease of crime and increase in games. (Though I am not implying a causal relationship in any way, just an observation)

Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature goes over all of the probably reasons for this in its general survey of the correlation between violence and civilization. And he's mentioned for the Leviathan theory, but that is only one of the areas he touches on. It's the most credible explanatory frameworks for violence that I've come across.

As far as property crimes go, there are probably fewer because if you break into a random home, all you likely find is cheap stuff that you would have to be paid to take away. Nobody wants your TV, stereo, computer, made-in-China furniture, etc.

A new 40" TV can be had for under 300. How much will someone pay for a three-year-old stolen one?

It's amazing how many people want to believe in single causes.

- Because the US is all for individualism, so not enough protection nets.

- Because the US had tens of millions of black slaves it fred, people starting out from absolute poverty and had to face discrimination, Jim Crow laws, reduced opportunities and seggregation until the seventies (legally - in practice until today). Even poor white immigrants didn't have it bad like that.

- Because prisons create criminals, and the US prison system is the worst in the West.

You appear to be answering the question "Why is there a lot of crime in the US?". But the actual question is "Why did crime plummet -- I.e., rapidly decrease -- in the US?".

Doesn't he? He lists pasts problems which have been mostly fixed now, causing the crime rates to drop

At least mass-incarceration hasn't, since USA has the second highest rate in the world.

He describes them mostly in present-tense terms, and my reading of the point about slavery is that it's a past problem with effects persisting into the present.

And FWIW I wouldn't say that they have mostly been fixed now. It's true that racism's got a lot better, but the US is still very individualistic (for good and/or ill), there are still big racial differences in prosperity (whatever the causes), and the US still puts an awful lot of people in prison.

It's harder to get away with crimes today than it was 20 years. Advances in fingerprints, surveillance cameras, DNA, electronic records, etc. all make it much harder for criminals to repeat and much riskier for those who start.

A perfect example is the decline in serial killers. Even if people are as bad or crazy as they were in the past, getting away with killing 5, 10, 15, 20 people is incredibly more difficult now than it was years ago.

Because everyone, even the potential criminals, are spending all their time peering into smartphones.

Literally described, in detail, with analysis, arguments for and against, and statistics in TFA.

That would be #9 on the list.

Was Huxley correct?

I am getting a 404 as soon as I click on any of the links

Me too. Bad web page.

A similar treatment was comedy-documentary Bowling for Columbine in 2002. Moore explores a half dozen reasons why the US seems to have more mass shootings than other countries. He doesnt choose one main answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_for_Columbine

I'd probably add that 13 years and a hundred more shootings later there could additional theories like the ubiquity of violent video games and the heroic portrayal of previous mass shootings.

Another idea to add to the list: There are often a dozen murders a week in places like Chicago. How long is that sustainable? Maybe the gangs have killed their selves off?

A historical analogy is the decline of gunslinger/cowboy culture out west a bit more than a century ago.

Something to consider is 1000 equal competing gangs each fighting 999 equal competitors means quite an impressive body count, but once MS-13 or "whoever" takes over and there's only one operational gang, the body count will naturally implode. Note that you don't necessarily need only one gang, in fact you can operate quite well with the original 1000, what is necessary is a stable and predictable hierarchy. Without a stable hierarchy every competitor you shoot increases your overall systemic stability and finances. With a stable semi-formal hierarchy every competitor you shoot pisses off someone at a high level who used to have two workers and now has one dead worker and one malfunctioning worker, and thats not likely to turn out very well for the shooter. A cultural drift from equality to hierarchy needs to be considered along with the obvious economy of scale argument.

Deleted comment

That theory is mentioned in the article.

I didn't appreciate having to do all those mouse clicks, to learn not very much.

Why did it go up to begin with?

In the early 60s and crime kept increasing every year until it peaked in the early 90s. Its been on a steep decline ever since. There's some interesting graphs here - http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-...

Murder rates are plotted with lead exposure here - http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/05/us-murder-rate...

Correlation is not causation.

What's the point of this comment? I wasn't trying to make a point I was answering the GP's question (which was a good question). The lead hypothesis is common and was examined in the article in more detail. The main reason I added the second link (which included the lead hypothesis) was because it contained the most data I could find - it went back to 1876. The fact it was graphed with lead exposure wasn't at all important, the murder rate data going back to the 1800s was the important part and it answered the question.

In The Better Angels of our Nature, Steven Pinker postulates that one likely reason for the increase in violent crime was the first set of baby boomers becoming teenagers, with rowdy young people outnumbering older ones who might control them by quite a large margin.

I think its due to the rise of endocrine disruptors in our food chain. That should definitely be looked into.

It would have been interesting to look at the world in general and common factors between countries with drops in crime. The UK has had a similar drop in crime, that many attributed to lead being removed from petrol. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27067615

Car crime reduction is definitely a technology issue. Basically a car below a certain age is impossible to jack.

It would be interesting to see how much electronic fraud has gone up. With the population living longer and dementia on the rise, lottery fraud is an easy way to relieve vulnerable old people of their money. With the operations working out of different countries, prosecution is so much harder.

I'm not seeing much accommodation for the Flynn effect in these findings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

.. although I may have missed it.

Note that this article talks about Violent Crime & its reduction.

One theory to add to the mix of all others (one that is somewhat touched upon in the article) - We are moving to more digitized, less physical (things) economy.

If what you think of as being "Valuable" is not physical but digitized, it is harder for violent criminals to deprive you of it.

However if we consider all crime - violent (physical) & non-violent (hacking, White-collar problems, Scams frauds etc) there will be a more interesting & perhaps less dramatic result than "Plummets".

Obviously Murders (& certain other baser crimes) cannot be digitized away.

What about the effect of the Internet on crime? Is the internet giving access to information and a different way of life to a lot more people? Maybe in the 50's a kid with an interest on say skydiving would feel like that would never be possible. But today the same kid contacts skydivers. And even if the kid did not actually skydive, some how being closer to it means something. Maybe skydiving is idealist. But really, could the Internet be a big factor?

Another explanation could be attributed to the food supply: in America, the lower standard of living you have, the more likely you consume a nutritionally poor diet and consume water from the tap which in some areas has been shown to contain trace amounts of medications, spores, lead, fluoride, etc. In other words, medical conditioning.

Not on the list. The government has institutionalize being poor to the point they likely have reached the point for many where the benefits are sufficient. From food stamps, living assistance, child care, and more, there are thousands of assistance programs. Give the sense of security and most won't do anything wrong.

Great summary of the theories, with impressive breadth and depth of scholarship. This sort of article goes to show how complex the world is, and how hard it is to definitively prove sociological/economic theories. Even when one study seems to give very good evidence, another might come along and cast doubt on it.

Crime just moved up the value chain, Too Big To Jail, Too Big To Remove from Office. Goldman Sachs is doing very well.

The freakonomics movie has a great study on crime.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-sh...

Did everyone just finish watching the latest season of "Orange is the new black" or something?

(context: this freakonomics topic of the crime drop was referenced in the recently released season of the show, specifically relating to the increase in abortions idea)

There's a Freakonomics documentary on Netflix as well.

I'm partial to #9, but it's great that they review so many in one piece.

I think it's because we are more connected than ever. It's easy to get caught up in your reality, but the internet makes it more possible than ever to see what's out there and how things could really be.

It is interesting, and possibly enlightening, that mass surveillance is not listed as a contributing factor to the reduction in violent crime.

I'm sorry, the downvote was mine by accident. Pushed the wrong button cause they're too fucking small and I'm a dunce.

What you say is indeed interesting.

Still a bit skeptical of the abortion theory from Freakonomics. Correlation does not imply causation.

The reduction in environmental lead exposure makes much more sense than Roe v Wade.

State by state, country by country, it matches up to a crime reduction more than abortion.

They forgot to count the rise of online scams. Bet that will offset those stats a plenty.

Never trust a statistic you didn't forge yourself. First of all, I would have to be convinced that the phenomena compared are actually commensurate. This topic has just too many agendas attached to it to make it credible that any two observers would actually apply the same metric, let alone over 25 years.

I've been following the trend for the last 15 years and there have literally been hundreds of articles, papers and a few dozen books that touch on the this phenomenon. It's a popular topic in the world of criminal justice and most people tend to have their pet theories that match their agendas.

What people don't debate is whether the rates actually dropped.

> Never trust a statistic you didn't forge yourself.

I would go further and say that you shouldn't even trust a statistic forged by yourself. Statistics & probability is hard. If you don't regularly practice your statistics & probability calculation skills, you will probably get it wrong.

Read Steven Pinker's The better angels of our nature. He has some ideas why.

I get error 404 when browsing the article.

Why not DNA testing?

Because most types of crime won't make you financially or socially successful.

I'll say it: Parallel Construction.

Take out the really bad apples at the bottom of the barrel that law enforcement normally can't reach because they are isolated by many layers or are hard to get warrants for and it has to have a magnified effect on crime in general.

edit: to the 3 downvotes in 3 minutes, just because you don't like it doesn't make it not so. Since CompStat has a measurable effect you can be sure that something with way more targeted information will also have even more effect.

I'm only familiar with parallel construction being used in reference to very recent events, so it's not clear to me what you are referring to.

Are you saying the evidence was there before, and they only started using parallel construction in the 90's? Or did new ways of getting evidence that required parallel construction appear?

Parallel construction is a recent term that describes the widespread use of unwarranted information. It seems reasonable to assume that beforehand there was less commonly used unwarranted information; in the 2000s they used it to arrest street gangs, in the 1990s they probably used it to arrest drug lords.

While I'm against jailing for non-violent drug offenders, the first thing that came to mind was what is the 2nd reason listed. That all the worst criminals are locked up due to mandatory minimum sentences, and the most violent criminals just aren't born at a fast enough rate everyday to replace them.

I wasn't too far off, the article states ~25% reduction can came from locking up more. It says possibly less, but honestly I'd assume more than 25% till you reach diminishing returns. Egregious criminals usually get caught at some point, sentenced harshly with less false convictions thanks to modern technology and it makes sense.

I think we could reduce violence even further by having a mandatory minimum sentence of 50 years hard labor for anyone caught with a gun outside their house. Or using any knife or object to injure someone. This includes the cops and gov't figures. Start to ratchet up the sentence to that and publicize it, even the craziest might decide to find another hobby.

Crime has gone down but police abuse has gone up. Time to take away their tools to abuse, and make prison less attractive for everyone.

Taking that to the logical conclusion, if everyone spent 50 years doing hard labor in jail I'm pretty sure the rate of violence outside jail would decrease even more.

I'm not sure that putting more people in jail for longer is a great solution.

I think putting demonstrably violent people in jail is a fine idea. Cleary GP's ideas are too extreme, simply having a gun or knife doesn't harm anyone, but if you use a weapon to commit a crime and injure/kill someone (as distinct from doing that out of self-defense) yeah, in general you need to be taken out of society.

It sounds extreme, but it works in the UK and other societies. Why wait till someone uses a weapon or harms someone? What other purpose is a weapon used for? It's for offense, or "offense is the best defense", which I disagree with.

Disarm everyone, civilize this place a bit. We should be following Europe's lead here.

That's not the logical conclusion at all. I'm suggesting if you're carrying a weapon, you're going away to some seriously undesirable conditions.

Would you carry a gun in that instance? Not me.

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