Crime drop a pleasant surprise
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During every recession since the 1950s, crime has increased.
But not this time.
The FBI's preliminary Uniform Crime Reports, released Monday, show all categories of crime in America declined in the first half of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008, continuing the downward nationwide trend of the last 15 years.
"I certainly would have expected to see crime increases across the board," said Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri at St. Louis, one of the nation's top criminologists. "I'm somewhat surprised by the continuing decline."
The 2009 drop in violent crime was reflected in Pittsburgh, too -- except for assault, rape and arson.
Total incidents of violent crime in the city dropped from 1,607 in the first half of 2008 to 1,598 in the first half of this year.
The city recorded 21 homicides in the first six months of 2009 compared with 28 in 2008, according to the report.
In the first half of 2008, the city reported 781 aggravated assaults, but that number rose to 836 this year. There were 62 rapes in the first half of 2008 but 64 this year, and 59 arsons this year compared with 47 last year.
Some other cities also saw spikes in a few crimes, as is the case every year. Seattle's robbery rate jumped, and burglaries increased significantly in San Jose, Calif., and San Antonio.
But the general trend was downward in most cities for most crimes.
Nationwide, violent crimes fell by 4.4 percent and property crimes fell by 6.1 percent.
Adjusting for population increases, crime in America is now at comparable levels to what it was in the 1960s. And in places like New York, the news is even better. The nation's biggest city once had more than 2,000 murders a year; now its totals are about 500 each year.
"New York's homicide rate is now what it was in the 1950s," Dr. Rosenfeld said.
Crime nationwide began dropping in the 1990s, rose slightly at the beginning of this decade during an economic downturn, dropped for a few years and then ticked upward again in 2005 and 2006 as the economy soured again.
It's been dropping consistently since 2007, but there doesn't seem to be a corresponding spike with the recession.
Murder and manslaughter, for example, fell 10 percent for the first half of this year, a remarkable decline for a statistic that is usually fairly constant. Experts expect the numbers to be worse for the second half of the year, but so far 2009 appears to be an anomaly for a recession year.
In Pittsburgh, for example, homicide numbers have stayed relatively low in the second half of 2009. As of Thursday, the city had recorded 43 murders, way down from the 72 in 2008.
That isn't to say, however, that Pittsburgh has less violence than it once did. In fact, the per capita murder rate and aggravated assault rate is higher today than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. That's because the city is half the size it once was, but those crimes have not dropped by the same proportion as the population loss.
Usually, the city records roughly 50 to 60 homicides every year. But that number should be dropping with the population decline and it generally hasn't. In 1970, there were 63 murders, but the city had 520,000 people. Today, according to the FBI figures, it has 309,000, but the homicide figures are roughly the same.
The assault rate has also stayed relatively constant despite the population loss.
But Pittsburgh is unusual in that it's lost so many people.
Most other cities haven't. So nationwide, the per capita crime rate has been dropping.
The reasons are varied, and theories abound. Record unemployment is keeping more people at home, so their residences are probably less likely to be burglarized. People also aren't out on the street as much and don't have much money on them, so they're less likely to be robbed.
The decline in opportunities for robbery in turn drives down the homicide rate, since homicide and robbery rates historically track each other, according to research by Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University criminologist and a colleague of Dr. Rosenfeld.
In addition, extended unemployment benefits and other economic stimulus attempts by the federal government may have cushioned the blow for many Americans and delayed the impact of the recession.
In the biggest cities, New York and Los Angeles, effective police work gets much of the credit. Techniques such as flooding hot spots and targeting guns carried by juveniles have proved effective. Dr. Rosenfeld said those approaches have spread to other cities, as well, possibly helping to drive down the crime rate elsewhere.
Another factor is the decline of illegal drug markets in the U.S., Dr. Rosenfeld said, that usually flourish during hard economic times. In the 1970s it was heroin, followed by cocaine in the 1980s and then the crack cocaine epidemic, which drove street violence to new heights, particularly among young black men.
But the crack trade is not what it was and drug trafficking has become more sophisticated, moving off the streets and behind closed doors where violence is less likely to erupt.
Trafficking in the drug of the 2000s, methamphetamine, also does not generate the type of violence that crack produced. Much of it is made in Mexico, which is overwhelmed with drug killings, but the violence has not spilled over into the U.S. to any great extent.
The only drug in America that is on the upswing is marijuana, which is typically not associated with violence on the same scale as cocaine.
"We're not seeing any comparable increase in drugs during the recession," said Dr. Rosenfeld.
He said one interesting aspect of the crime statistics that has been largely ignored over the years is the dramatic decline in auto thefts. Nearly every city has shown a drop in that crime for many years. It happened again in Pittsburgh, with 412 car thefts reported in the first half of 2009 compared to 608 the year before.
The reason for the decline, criminologists say, is that modern cars have all kinds of safety features that make them much harder to steal than older models. And as the older models are increasingly replaced by newer ones, that trend is expected to continue.
Predicting the future is always dangerous in criminology. In the 1990s, some in the field forecast the rise of juvenile "super predators" in this decade. Less histrionic observers rejected that theory as baseless fear-mongering but still thought that crime would rise somewhat in the 2000s.
It didn't, proving again that the causes of crime are complex, varying from region to region and year to year.
As for the coming decade, who can say? "I don't see any reason to expect substantial increases unless we see a heating up of the drug market," said Dr. Rosenfeld. "The big unknown is what happens to the economy."
First Published December 26, 2009 12:00 am
