By Alan Bean

Crimes rates and homicide rates are falling across the United States even as the nation is mired in the economic doldrums.  Furthermore, no one can explain why.

As the article below suggests, the prevailing conservative consensus is generating predictable, but unconvincing explanations.

It’s mass incarceration, some say.  If you lock up every petty crook and two-bit vandal you eventually reach a point where all the bad guys (and potential bad guys) are locked up.  You can’t harm society from a prison cell.

There is little hard evidence to back up this position.  There is no clear correlation between incarceration and crime rates.  The crime rate has been falling since the early 1990s even as incarceration rates have soared.  Now, with homicide rates (the best measure of violent crime because they can’t be fudged) at their lowest level since the 1967, the rate of incarceration has slowed considerably. 

This is particularly impressive when you note that LA added over one million souls to its population between 1967 and 2010.

Zero-tolerance policing is another explanation.  But as the article below points out, the crime rate is falling faster in jurisdictions that didn’t embrace this philosophy. 

As the charts above suggest, the drop in homicide rates has been most dramatic in Los Angeles, a city that has been plagued by gang violence for decades.   LA had 1092 homicides in 1992, but only 291 last year.

Many are crediting a shift in public policy from the failed “war on gangs” philosophy to the current gang intervention approach.  Fifty-five percent of the murders in LA County, according to police estimates, are gang related. 

According to a recent report, “The city’s office of Gang Reduction and Youth Development operates programs such as Saturday Night Lights, which keeps parks open until midnight during the summer and offers activities and sports to at-risk youth. Gang interventionists also respond to every gang shooting to relieve tensions between families and rivals.” 

Traditional drug sweeps create violence.  When you take one layer of drug dealers off the streets you are merely creating job opportunities for the up-and-comers.  Unfortunately, the new cohort of hustlers are forced to work out turf issues with other aspirants.  When this happens, the body bags pile up at the morgue and dozens of innocent children are caught in the crossfire.

Any move away from drug war tactics, however modest, was bound to reduce crime and homicide rates.

But there’s something much deeper going on here.

Randolph Roth has given more thought to issue of fluctuating homicide rates than anyone in America.  The article below rightly points to Roth’s central insight, but reaches precisely the wrong conclusion.  Here’s the salient quote:

Historian Randolph Roth recently surveyed U.S. homicides over the centuries and concluded that violence rises whenever citizens develop a strong distrust of the government and feel powerless over their own lives. Murders soared just before the Civil War, when anti-Washington fever reached its peak. Crime has never settled back to European levels. The homicide rate among white Americans, Roth notes, soared again in the late 1970s, when ‘malaise’’ was widespread. ‘Our high homicide rate started when we lost faith in ourselves,’ he says, ‘and each other.’

This is interpreted as bad news.  “With polls showing a growing distrust in government,” the writer suggests, “that’s a worrisome thought.”

No it isn’t.

Who is currently manifesting a deep distrust in government?  Tea Party activists.  These folks can be denigrated in all sorts of ways for all sorts of reasons, but the homicide rate among this bunch is likely very low.  The reason is simple.  They are angry because they have always believed that America was an essentially white nation dominated by a typically white, conservative, conventional outlook.  The election of a black Barack Obama has these folks beside themselves.  Just look for people of color (or people of youth, for that matter) at a Tea Party gathering.  Appearances notwithstanding, these folks aren’t really alienated from their government; they simply fear that, should present trends continue, they may find themselves on the outside looking in.  That’s why they’re so militant.  That’s why all the talk about “taking our country back”.

The link between political alienation and violence is particularly evident among the population responsible for a wildly disproportionate percentage of violent crime — inner city gang members.

The best portrait of this phenomenon on record is the brilliant HBO series, The Wire.  Beginning in 2002, the series focused on the attempts of the Baltimore Police Department to infiltrate an inner city drug gang.  The street hustlers featured on The Wire refer to themselves as “niggers” (or niggahs), a technical term denoting the opposite of “citizens” (that is, non-gang members participating in the legitimate economy).  To be a black drug dealer, in this view, means to live outside the privileges and constraints of citizenship.  Generations of subsistence in the inner city moonscape of Baltimore’s poorest and most neglected neighborhoods encouraged this self-image.

Randolph Roth has little hands-on experience with inner-city gangs, and his otherwise excellent book never comes to grip with the social alienation revealed so graphically in The Wire.  Nevertheless, his essential insight applies to that world: “violence rises whenever citizens develop a strong distrust of the government and feel powerless over their own lives”.

So, why are homicide rates falling precipitously across the nation?  There are doubtless many factors, but the identify of the current occupant of the White House is a big part of the explanation.

Poor black and Latino males (especially those most likely to define themselves as non-citizens) feel more connected to America because a person of color currently serves as president.  These folks may have mixed feelings about Obama’s real-world performance.  They may question whether he really understands them and the harsh world they inhabit.  But the symbolic power of having a non-white president, for Tea Party animals and gang-bangers alike, is hard to overstate.

The image of a non-white president, coupled with a significant shift in philosophy regarding gang violence, is having a profound effect, even in the midst of the most painful economic downturn since the great depression.

The mystery of falling crime rates

Despite widespread economic hardship, the nation’s crime rate has continued to fall. Why?

What do crime statistics show?

The historic drop in crime that began in the early 1990s continues. Last year, violent crime fell an impressive 5.5 percent nationwide, marking the third straight year of decline after an even longer-lasting drop briefly lost momentum earlier in the decade. The cumulative falloff is truly remarkable: Murders slipped 7 percent last year, to 15,100—nearly 45 percent below the 1991 peak. And the declines involve nearly every category of crime, in communities big and small. Property crime last year was down 4.9 percent; robbery, 8.1 percent; and auto theft, 17.2 percent. Even struggling Detroit enjoyed a 2.4 percent drop in violent crime. For many experts, the big surprise was that crime continued to fall even as the national economy was tanking. “This is a real break in past patterns,” says criminologist Richard Rosenfeld.

What explains the decline?

Nobody is sure, though at least some credit must go to improved policing methods that began with New York City in the 1990s. The city’s police commissioner, William Bratton, adopted a strategy espoused by criminologist George L. Kelling known as the “broken windows theory”—the idea that street cops could suppress serious crime by paying attention to minor offenses, such as graffiti or vandalized windows, that create an anything-goes, Wild West atmosphere. New York City also adopted a “zero-tolerance’’ policy that got squeegee men, the homeless, and petty criminals off the streets, and sought to take illegal guns out of circulation. Finally, the new strategy embraced the idea that most robberies, assaults, rapes, and murders are caused by a small number of hard-core criminals who victimize citizens again and again.

What do police do about those criminals?

Identify them, track them down, and keep them in jail. In New York’s policing model, the commissioner’s office mapped crime patterns daily and demanded that precinct-level commanders take quick steps to locate the repeat offenders causing most of the crime. Using those patterns, police nationwide now target the repeat offenders in every neighborhood and seek to get them off the street. The concept even works for small-town vandals. Then again, major drops in crime also have occurred in places that have not adopted such reforms, which suggests they can’t be the only explanation for the crime decrease.

What else could explain it?

The exploding prison population. Since the 1980s, federal, state, and local governments have enacted harsher prison terms for major and minor crimes alike. As a result, the U.S.’s incarceration rate is four times the world average, with a record 2.3 million Americans now behind bars. Tough-on-crime legislators note that somebody who’s locked up can’t hurt society at large, and they see a direct link between the get-tough approach and the drop in crime. But statistics show that it’s not that simple. States in which prison populations grew most dramatically in the 1990s actually lagged behind the rest of the country in cutting crime. And the growth in the number of people behind bars slowed considerably last year, yet crime dropped significantly anyway. With neither improved policing nor longer sentences fully explaining the crime drop, experts have looked for explanations outside the criminal-justice system. And they’ve come up with some fairly wild theories.

What factors do they identify?

Lead poisoning and abortion, to name two. One intriguing hypothesis about why Americans were so prone to violence in the 1980s was that many young people were suffering the effects of lead poisoning. The link between lead poisoning and aggressive or impulsive behavior is well established. And peaks in children’s exposure to the toxic metal, first due to lead paint and then to leaded gasoline, were followed roughly 20 years later by two of the 20th century’s worst crime eras. Under this theory, the phasing out of lead paint and leaded gasoline explains the reduction in crime. As for abortion, Steven Levitt, co-author of the 2005 best-seller Freakonomics, argues provocatively that the legalization of abortion in 1973 reduced the number of unwanted babies being born into troubled homes, and thus reduced the number of troubled teenagers who reached their crime-prone years two decades later. Still, he hasn’t been able to explain why crime peaked when the leading edge of that cohort hit age 18, and then fell off.

So can any theory explain the recent crime drop?

A confluence of several factors is likely responsible, but perhaps the strangest theory yet is that the recent recession caused the recent drop in crime. Some sociologists are offering the idea that because millions of people lost their jobs over the past two years, there were far more people sitting at home in the middle of the day. That would reduce burglaries, and muggers might slack off, too, because they would assume that their potential victims have empty pockets. But, say these same criminologists, beware the day when unemployment benefits run out and desperation rises. Indeed, some cities have already seen violent crime jump in 2010. If there’s a link between economic hard times and crime, warns Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox, it may kick in after a short delay—and “the good news we see today could evaporate.”

Still nothing to brag about

Despite the recent decline in crime, the U.S. is still the most violent of affluent democracies. The annual U.S. murder rate of five per 100,000 people is down from 9.8 in 1991, but still twice that of, say, France. Historian Randolph Roth recently surveyed U.S. homicides over the centuries and concluded that violence rises whenever citizens develop a strong distrust of the government and feel powerless over their own lives. Murders soared just before the Civil War, when anti-Washington fever reached its peak. Crime has never settled back to European levels. The homicide rate among white Americans, Roth notes, soared again in the late 1970s, when “malaise’’ was widespread. “Our high homicide rate started when we lost faith in ourselves,” he says, “and each other.” With polls showing a growing distrust in government, that’s a worrisome thought.