The Factors Affecting the Crime Rate

Crime and punishment are contentious issues in American politics.

Crime has long been a hot-button issue in American politics. Politicians and police commissioners take credit for drops in the crime rate. During elections, attack ads like the infamous "Willie Horton" ad of 1988 are used to portray the opposing candidate as "soft on crime." Isolating the factors affecting the crime rate is complicated and often controversial. Local variations in how crime is reported and recorded make it even more difficult to compare cities and regions and draw general conclusions as to the most effective methods of reducing crime.

Law Enforcement

Mayor Rudy Giuliani drew praise for the decline in New York City's crime rate.

After two decades of rising anxiety over crime in New York City, the 1990s saw a dramatic decline in the city's crime rate. Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bratton claimed victory for their "broken window" approach to policing and for the CompStat system, allowing increased coordination among police. These reforms were hailed as national models and many other cities strove to implement them. In his book "New York Murder Mystery," Andrew Karmen disputes these claims. He points out that New York didn't lead the country in either incarceration rate or prison expansion during this period, and that crime did not fall in the '70s and '80s when its inmate population did grow. Other studies find a cloudy relationship between crime and policing, while others see merit in law enforcement's claims but focus on narrower issues like the average length of incarceration.

Economic Factors

In speaking about the economic factors affecting the crime rate, it is important to be specific and focus on particular aspects of the economy such as poverty rate and unemployment. Though it might at first make sense to link these two with the crime rate, experts such as Bruce Weinberg have focused instead on the wages of young men without an education. After a decline in the wages of unskilled young men from 1979 to 1992, and a corresponding increase in crime, wages leveled off and rose slightly. Weinberg finds a strong link between wages and crimes involving money, and a weaker link in the case of murder and rape. Karmen also discounts the connection between overall poverty and crime, citing an actual poverty increase in troubled neighborhoods even while crime was falling.

Demographic Factors

Demography encompasses a range of factors, including the degree of transience within a population, and the relative size of the population in its late teens and early twenties. In his study on crime in New York City, Andrew Karmen focuses on other demographic factors, including a wave of new immigration that swept the city in the '90s. These motivated newcomers, he contends, tend to commit less crime than long-term poor residents. Karmen also argues that a high death rate among the population most at risk to commit crime also contributed to the sudden decline.

Abortion

One of the most controversial assertions of "Freakonomics," the runaway 2005 bestseller by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, is that the legalization of abortion in 1973 helped produce the steep decline in crime in the 1990s. Attacked by conservatives as a defense of abortion, the book's contention revolved around the idea that unwanted children are more at risk later in life to become involved in crime. Serious questions have since been raised about the authors' methodology.

References

• FBI: Variables Affecting Crime
• Washington Monthly: "True Crime"; Stephanie Mencimer; January 2001
• The New York Times: Why Did Crime Fall in New York City?; Sewell Chan; August 2007
• Ohio State University: Higher Crime Rate Linked to Low Wages and Unemployment
• "Freakonomics"; Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner; April 2005
• ISteve.com: The Freakonomics Fiasco in Perspective; Steve Sailor

Resources

• "The Great American Crime Decline"; Franklin E. Zimring; 2008
• "Thinking About Crime"; Michael Tonry; 2006