Understanding Crime Trends Workshop Report (2008) / Chapter Skim
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2 Factors Contributing to U.S. Crime Trends--Alfred Blumstein and Richard Rosenfeld
2 Factors Contributing to U.S. Crime Trends--Alfred Blumstein and Richard Rosenfeld
Pages 13-44
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From page 13... ...
Despite its salience in the public arena, very little is known about the factors driving the crime trends, and the knowledge base is too limited to support intelligent forecasts of the direction in which crime rates are moving, especially when changing direction. Developing such a knowledge base is important for enhancing the rationality of public policies and public expenditures related to crime, particularly because many such commitments have to be made well in advance of their actual use.
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From page 14... ...
. Except where indicated otherwise, we use the term "trends" in this chapter to refer to yearto-year variation in crime rates and associated conditions.
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From page 15... ...
The rather steady rise in both rates until 1980 can be attributed to factors associated with the postwar baby boom that began with the 1947 birth cohort. As the baby boom cohorts moved into the high-crime ages of about 15 to 20, they were important contributors to the crime rise of the 1960s and 1970s.
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From page 16... ...
1985 and the Recruitment of Young People into Crack Cocaine Markets A second turning point in robbery and murder trends took place in 1985. Crime rates declined between 1980 and 1985, the decreases associated with the demographic trends already identified.
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From page 17... ...
It is not surprising that the strong downward trend of the 1990s finally flattened out, but at the time it was not at all clear when that flattening would occur. The fact that the crime drop continued until 2000, resulting in low crime rates that had not been seen since the 1960s, was fortunate but not readily predictable.
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From page 18... ...
Trends in Burglary and Motor Vehicle Theft We have been examining just the trends in murder and robbery, the two most well-defined and well-measured violent crimes. Among property crimes, burglary and motor vehicle theft are of particular interest because of their seriousness, prevalence, and reliable measurement in the UCR.
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From page 19... ...
The trend in motor vehicle theft, with a turning point in the early 1990s, is more similar to those for robbery and homicide than to the burglary trend, and it is consistent with qualitative accounts of stolen cars traded for drugs during the crack era (Jacobs, 1999) or for use by drug dealers to avoid having their own cars confiscated as forfeited assets.
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From page 20... ...
Reliable forecasting requires either strong time-series predictors or knowledge of leading indicators that can be used to predict future changes in crime rates, such that knowledge of the indicator's value at t0 yields an accurate prediction of the change in crime at t1, some later time. We consider the forecasting possibilities of several of the factors already mentioned and a few additional ones that appear to hold some promise at both the national and local levels.
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From page 21... ...
. These aggregate growth rates are generally quite small and so are not likely to have a major effect on crime rates during a period of major change, such as the 1990s, when the homicide and robbery rates fell by about 5 percent per year, or between 1985 and 1991, when they rose by 3 to 4 percent per year.
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From page 22... ...
But incarceration was also increasing during the 1980s, when crime rates were going up. This highlights the fact that crime rates are affected by a
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From page 23... ...
estimate that rising incarceration rates accounted for about 19 percent of the decline in national robbery rates and 23 percent of the drop in burglary rates during the 1990s, controlling for the effects of economic conditions, growth in police per capita, changes in age and race composition, and lagged crime rates. These results are similar to those reported by Spelman (2006)
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From page 24... ...
There is a clear need for research on the impact of incarceration on age-specific crime rates as the scale of imprisonment changes. The Economy The idea that crime rates rise and fall with economic conditions has a long pedigree in criminology.
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From page 25... ...
If these results are replicated in future research, they hold some promise for perceptual measures of economic conditions as leading indicators of crime rate changes. The findings to date on the impact of the public's economic perceptions on crime rates are limited to property crimes and the violent crime of robbery.
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From page 26... ...
Public economic perceptions certainly warrant attention in future research on changes in both property and violent crime rates. Other Proposed Factors Aside from the previous enumeration, a number of other explanations have been proposed in the literature.
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From page 27... ...
There is a clear similarity between time trends in environmental lead levels and violent crime rates lagged by 23 years. But demographic trends -- the arrival and waning of the baby boom generation from the highcrime ages -- coincided roughly with the arrival and departure of leaded gasoline, and so the apparent effect of exposure to lead on crime rates may be confounded with demographic change.
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From page 28... ...
Figure 2-5 LOCAL VARIATION IN CRIME TRENDS The general consistency across cities of the large crime drop during the 1990s could leave the impression that crime trends are reasonably uniform across cities. In fact, crime trends are much more likely to vary across cities, and that has been very much the case since 2000, when the aggregate national trend has been flat.
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From page 29... ...
Richmond Indianapolis Hartford Dallas Atlanta New York Cincinnati Portland Chicago Fort Worth Los Angeles Oklahoma City Net Change = 2.9% Tulsa Jacksonville Fresno Median = 3.8% Seattle San Antonio Houston Greensboro Phoenix Tucson Charlotte St. Louis Washington San Diego Arlington Minneapolis Virginia Beach –30 –25 –20 –15 –10 –5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 FIGURE 2-6 Percentage change in robberies in 28 cities, 2004-2006.
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From page 30... ...
Of course, such factors may be as difficult to forecast as crime rates themselves. Furthermore, the existing research generally does not link specific factors affecting individual criminality (e.g., parenting styles or temperament)
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From page 31... ...
. Drug Markets As indicated earlier, drug markets can be an important source of violent crime.
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From page 32... ...
It is also the case that drug markets vary considerably in the degree to which they stimulate violent or property crimes. It is rare, for example, for marijuana markets to generate much violent crime.
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From page 33... ...
Indeed, when they see a significant jump in criminal violence within a city, local officials and criminologists often link that jump to the actions of such groups. It is difficult to know in advance when such escalation will occur or the extent to which retaliatory violence spirals are themselves a consequence of changing economic conditions, incarceration levels, drug market conflicts, police actions, or other factors.
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From page 34... ...
Future research needs We have identified several factors that prior research suggests have been associated with changes in crime rates in the United States over the past several decades. These include demographic shifts, growth in incarceration, drug markets, and changing economic conditions.
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From page 35... ...
The evidence for this explanation could be augmented by results from panel studies showing that the largest increases in youth firearm violence were concentrated in those cities with the largest increases in drug arrests of crack dealers. Those increases, in turn, should have happened in those cities displaying the largest increases in the incarceration of adult drug sellers.
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From page 36... ...
Criminologists are notorious for the inaccuracy of their crime forecasts; consider only the widely publicized prediction of a crime boom brought on by marauding "super predators" (Dilulio, 1995) issued just as crime rates began their historic plunge in the 1990s.
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From page 37... ...
For both the nation and regions, one would also look to drug activity, particularly drugs that are sold in street markets or that start a rapid escalation of demand, as primary indicators of rising crime rates ahead. Local-Level Estimates Both economic and drug market indicators should also be evaluated for their contributions to crime forecasts at the neighborhood or city level.
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From page 38... ...
The science of crime forecasting could be advanced significantly by incorporating findings from longitudinal research on individual criminal behavior into analyses of changes in crime rates over time. Building the Research Infrastructure The relevance of these proposals for future research on crime trends to assessments of crime control policy will be limited in the absence of a substantial upgrading in the nation's capacity to monitor crime trends.
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From page 39... ...
The precision of crime estimates from the NCVS, which was conducted initially with a much larger sample and with more face-to-face interviewing, has eroded considerably because funding limitations have reduced the sample size and resulted in more telephone interviews, even as declining crime rates warranted larger samples to maintain statistical power. Also, the NCVS, which now regularly provides only national estimates of victimization experience, could well provide subnational estimates, at least for the larger metropolitan areas (see Lauritsen and Schaum, 2005)
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From page 40... ...
In Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (Eds.) , The crime drop in America (revised ed.)
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From page 41... ...
In Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman (Eds.) , The crime drop in America (revised ed.)
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From page 42... ...
. The effect of prison population size on crime rates: Evidence from prison overcrowding litigation.
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From page 43... ...
. Connecting the dots: Crime rates and criminal justice evaluation research.
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