Crime “Surge” In D.C.

| Posted: February 23rd, 2012

On Sunday, the Washington Times reported a story about the “violent crime surge” in Washington, D.C., in the first month and a half of 2012. The article states that violent crime is up 40 percent over the same period (January 1 through February 16) last year, with homicides, sexual assaults, robberies, and aggravated assaults rising at an “alarming pace.” While the Times analysis is factually correct, the numbers are less alarming if other facts are considered.

Figure 1 shows our analysis of the same data (overall violent crime in D.C.) for the first six weeks of the last 13 years. We find a slightly smaller increase in violent crime (32 percent) from 2011 to 2012 than the Times reported (40 percent). By placing these data in a longer time series, it is apparent that violent crime in the first six weeks of 2012 fits neatly into long-term trends.

Violent Crime by Year, Washington, D.C., January 1–February 16 only

Source: Urban Institute analysis of MPD crime incident data, 2000-2012

As Figure 2 shows, violent crime in early 2012 also fits neatly into long-term monthly patterns. However, these annual reports mask the fact that crime is extremely volatile (A brief produced by the District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute [DCPI] takes up this issue). Seasonal effects and seemingly random events will trigger brief crime spikes and brief crime declines.

What skews the comparison is that violent crime in January 2011 was in a brief crime decline, likely triggered by the volatile nature of crime rather than by any long-term trend. Crime in January 2011 was lower than in all but six of the 146 months in this series. So, as crime rates return to more typical levels, comparisons with an anomalously low violent-crime period create the illusion of a crime spike.

Monthly Counts of Violent Crime, Washington, D.C., 2000–2012

Source: Urban Institute analysis of MPD crime incident data, 2000-2012

The Times story also expands on robberies in the 2^nd Police District, which have been the focus of many news reports lately. The article reports that 70 percent of violent crimes in the 2nd District were robberies. However, this robbery rate is also in keeping with long term trends—since 2000, robberies have accounted for between 50 and 80 percent of the violence in the 2nd District, and in fact, for the city as a whole. As is the case for all violent crime, 2nd District robberies in 2012 are within the range observed over the last eight years, which is somewhat lower than in the early part of the decade (Figure 3).

Robberies by Year, 2nd Police District, January 1–February 16 only

Source: Urban Institute analysis of MPD crime incident data, 2000-2012

We aren’t suggesting that violent crime is trivial or that it should be ignored. But an informed policy response should consider long-term trends and the volatile nature of crime over short-time periods. A spike in crime over a six-week period is not sufficient to suggest that the long-term downward trend in crime has reversed itself; it’s far too early to tell.

The news is not all bad however. Recent polls have suggested Americans have become rather complacent about crime, and these short-term changes in the amount of crime serve as a reminder that people, especially those who live and work in urban areas, should take necessary precautions at all times. And the reaction of police to short-term changes in offending—extra patrols, plain-clothed officers, call-ins of criminals on parole, and probation—are an important reason most crime spikes do not turn into long-term trends.

In summary, residents in urban areas should always be alert, regardless of the short-term crime trend. And they should be especially cautious of headlines screaming about crime surges.

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The "Avoiding the Ghetto" App

| Posted: January 31st, 2012

Recently, Microsoft received a patent for a new app that allows users to avoid dangerous areas as they walk around town. The patent application states, “As a pedestrian travels, various difficulties can be encountered, such as traveling through an unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures.”

In an interview with WAMU here in Washington, DC, University of Maryland criminologist Charles Wellford does an excellent job summing up the case for and against the app. Wellford says, “If the app does provide accurate information, it could be useful in helping people decide whether they want to adjust their behavior, such as walking down a different road.”

Seems innocuous enough. Yet, the app has launched a thousand reactionary headlines. Critics are calling it “appalling” and warning that it could lead to the kind of red-lining that mortgage lenders used in the 1950s and 1960s to isolate African Americans in less attractive neighborhoods. Pretty important stuff for one lonely app.

So, should we be concerned about the “avoid the ghetto” app?

I vote no. And yes. No, because no app can really do what the Microsoft app claims to do, as I show below. And yes, because in opposing this app, well-intentioned people perpetuate the (incorrect!) stereotypes they seek to defend against.

Let’s consider how a ghetto app would work. The idea here is to keep you safe as you walk about town.  My work takes me to some of the country’s most dangerous cities, and I have often thought it would be nice to know if a particular neighborhood was safe for me to explore. If I lived there, I might like to know where it would be okay for my kids to go without me.

In many people’s minds, an unsafe area looks disorderly—groups of potentially dangerous folks loitering about and lots of abandoned cars, graffiti, litter, and so on. That image might hold for cities in the northeast, but if you were to walk through a high-crime public housing complex in Portland, Oregon, you would not see any of those physical cues.

So, what actually determines whether a place is too dangerous to traverse? How much crime occurs there, of course. Let’s walk through Washington, DC, and see where the ghetto app should tell us not to go. More than half of all blocks in DC report fewer than 5 crimes in any given year, meaning there is a crime every couple of months. So, there’s little crime to avoid in most places.

Average Crime by Block in Washington, D.C., 2000-2009

Source: DCPI analysis of Part I crime incident data from the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, DC, January 2012

But some places in DC experience quite a lot of crime, and these are fodder for the app. Logically, however, the type of crime matters a lot in determining whether an area is safe to walk through.

Most crime is property crime. Looking at the most serious crimes (what used to be called Part 1 crimes) reported to the FBI in 2010, theft, burglary, and motor vehicle theft accounted for more than three times as much crime as serious person crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and assault). There were 36,000 Part 1 crimes in DC last year, but only about 8,000 were person crimes.

Now, the app is designed to guide our walk (so forget motor vehicle theft) through an area where we do not live (so forget burglary) or own a business (so forget theft), and where we probably don’t know anyone (if we did, we probably wouldn’t need the app!). That means what we care about avoiding is being hurt or robbed by a stranger.

First and foremost, we want to avoid being killed. While DC’s murder rate is declining rapidly, it’s still the 4th highest among big cities in America.   We would want to focus on recent homicides, of which there were 108 in 2011. Once we exclude the murders where the killer and victim are somehow connected (parents killing infants, husbands killing wives, guys in a crew killing each other, friends or coworkers killing each other, etc.), very few murders are left for the app to map.

We would like to avoid being raped too. But, there are fewer than 200 rapes a year in Washington, DC, and in most cases the victim and offender know each other. So, again, there’s not much data to go into the app.

That leaves assault and robbery (taking something from a person by force or threat of force).  There are about 4,000 assaults and 3,000 robberies a year in DC, so these seem like good candidates for our app.

Checking out a map of 2009 data, the part of DC with the most assaults is in the 3rd police district, an area known as Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. (Maps of previous years’ data show the same hot spot.) These places are not the poorest in the city, nor are they the areas with the most minorities. What makes Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights so dangerous? That’s where the bars are heavily clustered.

Where are robberies most concentrated? Same place! And, within that place, the “hottest” hot spots are near Metro stations and along the busiest commercial corridors (where the most bars are).

Maps of Robbery Hot Spots by Police District in Washington, D.C., 2000-2009

Source: DCPI analysis of Part I crime incident data from the Metropolitan Police Department, Washington, DC, January 2012

In other words, walking through a poor or minority neighborhood doesn’t automatically make you more susceptible to serious personal crime. Walking late at night through a heavily populated commercial area, especially one with lots of impaired people, does.

So, a word to those who demagogued this app: your assumption that the kind of crime a person walking through a city would most want to avoid would naturally cluster in poor, minority areas is wrong.  Please let go of this stereotype.

And to Microsoft I say this: I really don’t think I’ll pay 99 cents for an app that tells me I am safer if I avoid bars and public transportation. But good luck anyway!

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Is Charles Murray Right That Prison is THE Explanation for the Crime Decline? No.

| Posted: January 18th, 2012

Not enough has been made about a recent American Enterprise Institute blog post by Charles Murray, who argues that “higher imprisonment was the necessary condition for 100 percent of the reduction in violent crime” over the past 20 years—a claim that runs counter to his colleagues’ assertions that the real correlation is far smaller. Here’s Murray’s graphic supporting that claim:

Murray's Original Graphic: Violent Offenses vs. Prisoners per 1,000 Violent Offenses

Murray’s analysis is a textbook example of how to mislead with statistics. First, let’s look at what happens if you focus exclusively on the blue line, which is the ratio of prisoners to violent crime. Murray wants you to interpret this as the change in the number of prisoners in America, arguing that the increase is evidence that the growing prison population has resulted in declining crime rates.

But that’s not at all what the blue line represents. Because it is the ratio of prisoners to violent crime, the blue line is the number of people we incarcerate per 1,000 violent crimes. Violent crime is tragic, but we, as a society, want that line to be as low as possible. The lower the line is, the less we are spending per violent crime. The line is at its minimum in the late 1970s until 1980—just prior to America’s incarceration binge. That the line goes up after 1980 is not a good thing, as Murray would have you believe, but a very bad thing—it’s what economists refer to as diminishing marginal returns to imprisonment. Every year since 1980 we have had to lock up a lot more people to maintain the same amount of violence, which means prison is getting less and less cost effective.

Prisoners per 1,000 Violent Offenses

And that’s just one problem with this analysis. A more troubling problem is that the data behind the graphic are inherently tautological. With some mathematical sleight of hand, Murray claims to compare prison and violence, when what he actually compares is violent offenses (the red line) to prisoners per violent offense (the blue line). In other words, Murray compares violence to violent crimes per prisoner. The comparison of the red line to the blue line is basically a ratio:

Violence: (Prisoner/Violence)

What’s wrong with that? This ratio has the convenient property of overstating the relationship between crime and the prison population. If violence declines, it affects both measures in a way that makes increases in imprisonment seem to be more important than they actually are. When violence declines, the blue line goes down, of course. But, since violence is the denominator of the red line, and a shrinking denominator makes a number bigger, the red line goes up by a similar proportion.

Since Murray essentially counts violence multiple times, this approach guarantees that his argument that prison reduces crime is supported by the graphic regardless of what actually happens with imprisonment and violence.

Moving from left to right on Murray’s graphic, we start with 1960–1971 when violence increased about 250 percent and prison populations declined ever so slightly (from 212,000 to 198,000 or 6.6 percent). Thus, of course, the red line increases about 250 percent. What happens to the number Murray wants you to see as the “prison” statistic? In real terms, prison populations declined 6.6 percent, so the blue line should be almost flat. But, since violent offenses are on both sides of the equation, the red line declines more than 300 percent. Magic! The huge decline in the blue line visually supports Murray’s contention that declining incarceration causes more crime in the same way increasing incarceration causes less crime. But, of course, it is an illusion since the number of prisoners was basically flat.

Taking this analytic approach makes it very easy to disguise the real relationship between imprisonment and violent crime. Here’s a simple thought experiment to demonstrate that changes in violence, and not changes in prison populations, explain Murray’s entire story: suppose we take the real crime trend as depicted above and graph it. Then let’s assume that the prison population had remained unchanged. Here’s that picture:

Per Capita Violence Compared to a Static Prison Population

It looks almost exactly like Murray’s graphic. Why is that? Because Murray’s graphic is not really about the effect of imprisonment on crime at all. Instead, it’s just about changes in violence.

Want more evidence? Here’s a straight up comparison of the number of prisoners (per 100,000 Americans) and violent offenses (per 100,000 Americans). It’s far less convincing than Murray’s graphic.

The True Relationship: Changes in Crime vs. Changes in Prisoner Levels

While it is likely that prison had some effect on the crime decline, the picture Murray relies on dramatically overstates the effect.

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Organizational Errors: It Takes A Village To Make Some Kinds of Mistakes

| Posted: December 2nd, 2011

Questions keep surfacing at Penn State about who knew what and when. The investigation of charges that a former coach sexually molested young boys on campus is likely to uncover more victims and more instances where administrators turned a blind eye. So far, however, the University itself is mainly escaping any direct blame.

It shouldn’t.

Everyone at Penn State from the janitors to Joe Paterno have argued that they followed the rules and reported what they knew to the appropriate person next up in the chain of command. Yet, nothing was done.

Inaction like this has the makings of what criminologists call “an organizational accident.” Borrowing from medicine, UI consultant James Doyle has developed an organizational accident model positing that  gross miscarriages of justice occur when organizations are set up to ignore those injustices.

To go back to medicine, it wasn’t just the surgeon who cut off your good leg instead of your bad one that made a mistake. The problem was that everyone from the bedside nurse to the operating room staff failed to notice that the wrong leg was being prepped and then amputated.

Death row exonerations tell us a lot about organizational accidents too. Many overturned convictions rest on unreliable evidence: cross-race witness identifications, testimony by jailhouse snitches, and junk science (think bite mark evidence). But zeroing in only on faulty evidence misses a crucial element of wrongful convictions.

Consider this case: an innocent person is convicted based largely on the testimony of a prisoner who heard the defendant “confess.” Even worse than banking on an unreliable witness is using unreliable testimony to implicate the wrong person — often, to the deliberate exclusion of all other possible suspects, including the guilty party. What happens is that prosecutors and investigators building a case around the evidence don’t question it. Then, judges allow the evidence to be admitted and juries believe it. The whole system is so badly warped that it can’t detect errors.

This kind of blindness to error sounds very similar to what we are hearing from not so- Happy Valley these days. And if there was an organizational accident along these lines at Penn State, then the university is culpable.

But it is not enough for universities to stop turning a blind eye to this kind of malfeasance, the solution is for systems to be put in place that detect problems before they become organizational accidents.  For instance, many states now have Capital Defenders’ units that assist defense counsel in death penalty cases. Philadelphia has created a Chief Performance Officer to monitor the behavior of prosecutors.  Universities could establish a similar system of oversight.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant, but it is not enough to simply open the blinds—the sunlight has to be pointed to the dark corners where these appalling acts take place.

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Murder Rates Consistently Down Across 25 Biggest U.S. Cities

| Posted: October 18th, 2011

Not to rain on New York City’s parade, but the much ballyhooed nosedive in the city’s homicide rate is mainly the reflection of a national trend. Yes, it’s great that New York’s streets are safer, but all the nation’s urban streets are safer than they were around 1990—the height of the crack cocaine epidemic.

Take a look at this list of the biggest 25 cities, ranked by homicide rate, and you’ll see that the relative standing of US metros has noticeably changed over the decade only for Dallas (which saw a bigger drop than NYC), Milwaukee and Columbus (which saw their ranking soar), and Los Angeles (which saw a 75% drop in homicide rate, almost identical to New York City’s 79% drop). On the chart, the numbers on the bottom show how a city ranks (smaller is worse,) and the heights shows you how close, say, Baltimore is to Dallas (not very) or  Chicago is to Memphis  (very).  Thanks to Steve Levitt for the basic idea of comparing homicide declines in the top 25 cities. The other features are MetroTrends originals.

National Homicide Rates

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Over-Priced Crime Reduction

| Posted: October 12th, 2011

On September 15^th, Gallup’s monthly poll of adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia went for the jugular: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”

Crime and violence finished 33^rd, tied with concerns about the media and “the way our children are raised.” In fact, less than one percent of Americans put crime in first place.  In the 1980s and 1990s, crime routinely headed the list.  Now Americans worry far more about inflation (which declined in June) and losing our military might (never mind that defense spending is at an all-time high, around $700 billion annually). The public sees crime as less of a problem today than some problems that aren’t even real.

Apparently, Americans believe we have defeated our crime problem.

Let that soak in for a moment. The nation’s list of conquered social ills is pretty short. We have vaccines that have markedly improved public health. We have much less lead in our blood since leaded gasoline was outlawed. Homicides by drunk drivers are way down. Medicare and Social Security mean few elderly Americans experience grave poverty and food insecurity. And that’s about it.

So are Americans right? And, if they are, what can we learn from our struggle to fight crime?

As for crime’s ranking, Americans are correct. It shouldn’t top the list. Crime has steadily declined since 1991--especially violent crime and especially in the past two years. Crime rates are down where they were when Richard Nixon was president.

So, the question is, what has led to improved public safety, and is it worth it?

Number one on the list is mass incarceration. According to the Pew Center on the States, 1 in 100 Americans was incarcerated in 2008 and 1 in 31 were in community custody or incarcerated. Among minorities, make that one in 9 black men between 20 and 34. Given the social and economic costs to families and neighborhoods, mass incarceration is an astonishingly expensive way to control crime. For example, a RAND study found domestic enforcement cost eight times as much to prevent as much crime as drug treatment.

Number two? On most lists, it’s policing. Many analysts say that improvements in police professionalism, police investigative practices and the introduction of proactive community policing have reduced crime.  This seems a likely explanation, but unfortunately we have too little data on crime and police practices to know how much better policing reduced crime, and we know it’s probably more expensive than alternatives to incarceration.

Number three is the end of the crack epidemic. Most drug policy experts think it died of natural causes as more and more of those in temptation’s way bore terrible witness to what happened to users. Here again, mass incarceration may have hastened its end, but again, at an exorbitant cost.

Number four is luck. Many explanations for crime's decline have nothing to do with public crime policy. The end of leaded gas is a prime example. Lead in the blood is associated with lower self-control—definitively linked to criminality—and lower IQ. But changes in the gasoline formula had nothing to do with crime fighting.

We have learned a lot in the last two decades of the crime decline about how public policy can prevent crime. “Best buys” are treatment for substance abuse, mental health and other disorders associated with criminality; educational and vocational training; and removal of stigmatizing laws. But these ‘softer’ alternatives to more marketable ‘tough on crime’ policies like prison are only slowly taking hold.

In some ways, it would be easier to fight crime and get better alternatives on the public’s radar screens if Americans worried about it more.  But for now, we are stuck with over-priced crime reduction.

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Could UK-Style Riots Happen in US Cities Next?

| Posted: August 12th, 2011

It has been a bad week in the United States in a bad year marked by remarkable international turmoil. The recession and  high unemployment persist at a time when the powerless seemed poised to fight back, creating a recipe for insurrection—as happened first  in the Middle East and now in Great Britain.

According to Wednesday’s (August 9) Washington Post editorial, “the common factors [sparking the riots] include high unemployment, resentment toward a prosperous and seemingly impenetrable upper class, and hatred of the police.”

All that sounds only too familiar, so should the United States expect riots here next? Are recent instances of mob violence in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Montgomery County, Maryland  leading edges of a  wave of violence here?

I think the answer is probably not, at least not on the scale of what has happened in London.

First, a few facts about riots. They are exceedingly rare events, and like all rare events exceedingly hard to predict.  There’s little formal research on what causes or comes with riots.  They seem to be more likely when the economy is sour, but aren’t in sync with larger crime trends – notably, the decline  in violent crime here and  in the UK.

And, a critical incident with police, such as the police shooting in South London, is often the spark that ignites.

Look at Washington, DC. It has seen two waves of rioting – the first in 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated, and then again in Mount Pleasant in 1991. (In both cases, the White House was just two or three miles away.) Of the two, the Mount Pleasant riots were closer to what’s going on now in the UK.

On May 5, 1991, Washington, DC police confronted a group of Hispanics drinking alcohol outside their homes. A minor but poorly handled confrontation blew up when police shot an unarmed man (look here for a riveting blow by blow account).

Despite calls for calm from leading civil rights activists, Mount Pleasant exploded in a wave of violence.  The city’s response, however, is what makes me optimistic about today’s situation.  DC basically acknowledged that the rioters’ complaints—a police force insensitive to cultural differences when dealing with recent immigrants and too few resources to meet these newcomers’ needs—were valid.

Since then, DC’s government has made headway against both these problems a priority. It  has  improved at-risk communities, adopted community policing, created more humane and rehabilitative juvenile justice systems, and applied effective programs to divert drug- involved offenders to treatment instead of prison,  among many other initiatives.  Though imperfect –many moves  have been responses to critical incidents, not staples of a long-term strategic plan–overall, local government has been working to help address the problems of those on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

Another substantial US/UK difference  is that the US is much more of a police state than the UK. While the UK’s police force is shrinking, the number of sworn officers per US citizen has held steady, growing along with the US population for three decades.  Since the number of prisoners in the US has quadrupled since 1980, the UK’s incarceration rate is only about one-fifth of ours. Heavy policing costs a lot, but it does leave the US better prepared for emergencies, including riots.

That said, the London rioters seem to defy many stereotypes, which should give us pause.  The UK rioters are multi-racial and appear to encompass middle class and poor residents alike. While anger over  social service cuts is often named as a cause of the riots,  closer to the whole truth might be this take from Richard Sennett and Saskia Sessen in the August 11^th New York Times: “the rioters seem motivated by a more diffuse anger, behaving like crazed shoppers on a spree.” This sounds more like Philadelphia’s  flash mobs in 2011 than the Watts rioters in 1965.

At day’s end, the question is how much we are willing to spend to protect ourselves against a potentially high cost event that is unlikely to happen.  I wish I felt less sure that in today’s super-charged political atmosphere we’re unlikely to get the open and honest discussion needed to answer it well before push comes to shove.

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Why Costs and Benefits Matter in the Debt Ceiling Debate

| Posted: August 1st, 2011

When asked how to make an important decision, Ben Franklin suggested tallying up the costs of the various options and their benefits and picking the option whose benefits outweigh costs.

Now imagine making an important decision without even considering the benefits.

That is exactly what is happening with Washington’s debt showdown. The focus is exclusively on costs. Without a serious discussion of the benefits of government activities, there is no possibility that rational, evidence-based policies will result.

A guiding principle of good government, after all, is to do things that work and not to do things that don’t work.

We now have a government that violates that principle day after day. It does so by not even considering whether programs and policies are effective.

Do you remember acid rain? Remember high-rise public housing teeming with violence and hopelessness? Or how about gang wars, the crack epidemic, lead paint, and lead gas?

These problems and many others have been largely solved by governmental intervention. And not by all of government. Just by that tiny slice with the innocuous label of “non-defense domestic discretionary spending.” You know, the part of the budget that has been the “slash point” of the Washington wrangling.

Such spending is responsible for safer medicine, safer streets, safer schools, safer workplaces, safer food, cleaner air, cleaner water, better public housing, fairer business practices, a fairer legal system, and a more efficient transportation system.

How has government achieved these objectives? For starters, regulation. Many environmental and safety victories have been won by fighting against what economists call “negative externalities”—a fancy phrase for the public paying for something it does not want, often something harmful.

When, for example, a factory produces toxic waste  that it does not pay to clean up, the public bears those costs, not to mention the costs of related health risks. Worse, because the waste’s costs are not included in the original product’s price, more of the product is made (along with more toxic waste) than should be. I think virtually everyone would agree that government has a role in regulating against negative externalities.

Second, spurring innovation. Many advanced technologies and medical breakthroughs started with government-funded research and development. Non-defense domestic discretionary spending has also spurred innovations to better serve at-risk populations: the homeless, the mentally ill, substance users, high-risk youth, and many others. These developments, in turn, have reduced crime and improved the quality of life for most, if not all, Americans.

Third, government passes money to the states to fund cops, teachers, firefighters, and many other critical people.

Is the private sector going to step in and fill the gaps if government funding is cut? Hardly. According to the Foundation Center, all private U.S. philanthropies combined gave $45.7 billion in 2009, which is a rounding error in the current debate.

So, where do we go from here? To keep from reversing the positive trends and to address the social and economic problems that remain, the way forward is through rational, evidence-based policymaking buttressed by top-to-bottom cost-benefit analysis. The current debate heads in exactly the wrong direction. What we need is more of a focus on benefits, cost-effective governance, and rigorous, objective decisionmaking.

Federal spending—especially the non-defense domestic discretionary kind—has produced tremendous benefits for the American people. It is always cheaper in the short-run to do less. But it is not necessarily less costly. And certainly not more beneficial.

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Deciphering the Crime Decline

| Posted: July 27th, 2011

In June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that violent crime had declined by 5.5 percent in 2010, repeating a similar decline in the previous year.  Property crime continued to decline as well. Overall, crime in America is at levels not seen since the late 1960s.

Criminologists, sociologists, and economists have been intensely debating the cause of the crime decline. While I have identified 19 published explanations, none is wholly convincing on its own.

The most compelling explanation is that, since 1980, the prison population has quadrupled at the same time crime has declined about 30 percent. During this period, state spending on corrections has tripled. While crime has declined as a result, mass incarceration does not appear to be a particularly cost-effective means of increasing public safety.

The end of the crack epidemic around 1990 is also often cited for the crime decline.  Violence around drug trafficking, crimes committed to get money to buy drugs, and crimes by intoxicated persons all began dropping off at the end of this epidemic. However, data suggest that total drug use in America was lower in 1990 than at any point in the last four decades, and drug use is much higher now than it was in 1990 at the height of the crack epidemic.  Putting these pieces together, we would expect to have seen a more recent bump in the crime rate if the number of drug users was the core explanation.

A bad economy is often proposed as the fuel for changes in crime rates. However, the beginning of the crime decline in 1991 coincided with a deep recession, just as the current deep recession has coincided with an almost unprecedented drop in crime.

Many criminologists have pointed to changes in “routine activities” as responsible for the crime decline. Graham Farrell and colleagues in the United Kingdom have proposed that target hardening—making cars harder to steal, businesses more protected, and personal items easier to recover—explains the decline. Other changes from improvements in technology, such as the Internet and personal entertainment systems, are believed to keep people inside their homes where they are safer. This explains the lower incidence of property crime, and the even larger slide in violent crime is a spillover.

Changes in policing, from the old days of cops sitting in cars reacting to calls for service to the current practice of police walking the beat in neighborhoods talking to risky people in risky places to prevent crime, are also cited.  However, the number of officers per capita has not changed in 30 years, and the rate at which cases are closed has declined slightly even as there are fewer crimes to investigate.

Most observers believe gangs are less prevalent than 20 years ago, and progress has been made controlling organized crime. Yet, researchers have tremendous difficulty testing either of these elements because data are too limited.

Some economists have tried to connect changes in America in the 1970s to changes in criminal offending two decades later. The legalization of abortion, they maintain, led to fewer high- risk teens in the 1990s. Removing lead from gasoline and paint in the ‘70s may have had a similar effect.  Closing  mental institutions in the seventies and eighties may have initially contributed to the crime wave, while improvements in medications in the nineties and beyond may have contributed to its decline.  None of these explanations holds up to close scrutiny.

I would suggest that we are looking at this problem through the wrong lens. Instead of asking why crime has declined, we should be figuring out why crime jumped in the seventies and eighties. Long-term trends suggest that the seventies and eighties were in a fact a crime bubble.

Bubbles burst.  Be it Internet stocks, houses, or gold, bubbles last only as long as new buyers can be enticed into the marketplace. Drug use is socially tolerable as long as it is widespread.  As the number of new drug users declined at the end of the eighties, use became less tolerable and that bubble burst. The same reasoning holds with criminal networks. Changes in routine activities and massive expansions of the prisoner population in the 1970s and ‘80s likely hastened the bursting of the crime bubble.

So, will crime go back up? While crime is very volatile, America seems to be back along its long-term trends, and there's every reason to be optimistic.  That suggests that we may have an opportunity (which I’ll discuss in future posts) to cash in on this different kind of peace dividend, something that would be welcome in the current budget environment.

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Rare Means Rare - How We Deal With Crime Risks

| Posted: May 18th, 2011

The most gripping and scary takeaway from two new books on the recent financial meltdown’s origins, Scott Patterson’s The Quants and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, is that while the financial instruments whose use led to the crisis (collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps) baffled regulators, bond raters, and even many bond traders, the reason for trading them was simplicity itself. Those who bought CDOs and those who sold CDSs believed that home prices would never go down.  The probability of catastrophe—massive numbers of mortgage defaults as home prices fell—was considered vanishingly small, and the defining narrative of the period became “rare events can’t happen.” Wall Street and the millions of Americans who took on outsized mortgages bought into this philosophy even though the dot com bubble, the current gold bubble, and the tulip bubble have all been just such products of totally ungrounded optimism.

As a researcher on crime and justice policy, I’m struck that this optimism runs completely counter to how we think about crime, and, by extension, terrorism.  Take homicide. In 2009, there were 15 thousand homicides in America; that is, about 1 in 20,000 Americans were murdered.  That number includes many murders that are almost immune to public precautions (infanticide, domestic violence) and others that are extremely hard to prevent but affect a relatively small number of Americans (youth killing peers).  Only about 1 in 100,000 Americans was murdered by a stranger, roughly the same rate as death by drowning. So, ‘homicide’ as we commonly think of it is an exceedingly rare event.

Now, while the financial markets took virtually no precaution against one rare event (widespread mortgage default), as a society we make huge investments to prevent the other (homicide).  While one is life and death and the other is not, the size of the bets were roughly equivalent—the US spends roughly half a trillion dollars a year on police, courts, jails and prisons, and the markets gambled away a trillion or more over a few years. Of course, not all anti-crime spending is on homicide prevention, but it definitely dominates the use of law enforcement resources—from investigating a homicide crime scene, to trying a murder case, to incarcerating  (or even executing) offenders.

We treat terrorism much the same as homicide. As RAND’s Gregory Treverton aptly puts it, “Anyone’s probability of being killed by a terrorist today [i]s essentially zero and would be tomorrow, barring a major discontinuity. So, they [the public] should do nothing.” Obviously, government must respond, but the sums spent on anti-terrorism—from Homeland Security to intelligence gathering— reflect deep concern over an event far rarer than others that result in more deaths.

The incongruity is startling. One set of revealed preferences, as the economists would say, of our collective willingness to pay to avoid a rare event suggests wild-eyed optimism (the mortgage market can’t collapse) while the other suggests near-panic levels of pessimism (homicide prevention, terrorism). Why spend wildly to prevent one type of terrible event (homicide) and utterly ignore another (market collapse, loss of your home)?

Behavioral economics may tell us why, at least vis-a-vis homicide prevention spending. Prospect theory suggests that individuals find losses far more painful than gains are rewarding. And a closely related theory, status quo bias, says that people won’t revise their beliefs until the incentives to believe something changes. As a result, Americans beliefs about crime are relatively unchanged, no matter that crime rates have been dropping for more than two decades. The media deserves some blame here since crime stories trump most everything else, and true crime shows like American Gangster draw their grist from decades old news.  Meanwhile, government uses fear of crime to justify crime-fighting budgets. Perhaps the reason people are so fearful of crime is because they pay so much for protection. Since government is disinterested in spreading the good news about the crime decline, perhaps the financial crisis and need to cut expenditures create new incentives for people to view crime risks more accurately.

No theory, however, explains why bursting market bubbles don’t make people see that there is no market that can only go up. So watch out gold investors!

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