starting in the mid-1980s with the introduction of crack cocaine in America’s cities.7 Then, as that epidemic subsided, violent crime rates started a historic decline, dropping to rates lower than those seen in the 1960s, with another 12% decline from 2009 to 2010 reported last month by the FBI.8 Less well known is the story of property crime, which has been in steady decline since the early 1970s. Our rates of property crime today are half their level when the decline started. These are remarkable stories. Who among us – particularly those working in this field for the past 25 years – would have thought we could stand in our nation’s capital and say that crime rates are at their lowest levels in our professional lifetimes?
I draw three lessons from this story. First, we need a much better understanding of why this happened. I can think of no stronger indictment of our field than this: we do not have a satisfactory, much less a sophisticated, understanding of the reasons that crime has increased and decreased so dramatically. Imagine we were meeting at a medical convention, noting that the incidence of one type of cancer had dropped in half since 1970, and another type of cancer devastated America’s inner cities, particularly its communities of color, for several years, then dropped precipitously. Would we not expect the medical research community to have a deep understanding of what happened, what treatments worked, what environmental factors influenced these results, and which strains of these cancers proved particularly resistant? Of course we would.
So, the crime scientists among us need to get to work, with appropriate funding from foundations and the federal government, to help us understand our own history of crime trends. And, looking forward, we need to develop a much more sophisticated data infrastructure to allow us to track crime trends in real time.9 Think about this the next time you hear about a business report on television: If economists can tell us which sectors of the economy were growing or declining last month, certainly we can build a data infrastructure to help us understand crime trends last year.
A second lesson: we need to rethink what we mean by “crime prevention.” Too often we narrowly define “crime prevention” only in terms of programmatic investments in young people to help them lead more productive, pro-social lives. But clearly, over the past forty years, this historic decline in crime rates has not come about because we invested massively in programs that helped our young people avoid criminal activity. Other policy choices have also made a difference. Let me give one example: according to a provocative new book by Frank Zimring on the crime decline in New York City, that city’s auto theft rate in 2008 is 6 percent –six percent–
of what it was in 1990.10 How were those crimes prevented? How much can be attributed to changes in safety practices and theft-prevention technologies developed by the auto industry, by new federal regulations requiring marking of auto parts to deter the operation of chop shops, and by more effective police investigations? My point is simple: a rigorous, scientific exploration of changes in crime rates will identify a broad set of practices that prevent crime, assign costs and benefits to those practices, and hopefully help us invest money and political capital in those crime prevention strategies that are proven to reduce harm. If we are passionate about reducing our crime rates even further by 2036, we will broaden our frame of reference and bring many more sectors of our society to the crime prevention table.
There’s a third, uncomfortable lesson of the great American crime decline: we have no reason to be complacent. The rates of lethal violence in America are still higher than in Europe, by a factor of five. (Our rates of property crime are, we should note, lower than in Europe.) And, if we were ruthless about our science, we must confront the reality that violent crime is highly concentrated in a small number of communities of color in urban America, and in those communities is concentrated among a small number of young men. These men are at high risk of being both victims of violence, and agents of violence.
http://johnjay.jjay.cuny.edu/extra2/...jectSpeech.pdf
Originally Posted by ConHog
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