Why crime rates have decreased

In , the most recent full year available, the FBI received data from around eight-in-ten agencies. BJS, for its part, tracks crime by fielding a large annual survey of Americans ages 12 and older and asking them whether they were the victim of a crime in the past six months. One advantage of this approach is that it captures both reported and unreported crimes. But the BJS survey has limitations of its own. Like the FBI, it focuses mainly on a handful of violent and property crimes while excluding other kinds of crime.

And since the BJS data is based on after-the-fact interviews with victims, it cannot provide information about one especially high-profile type of crime: murder. Property crime in the U. In , the FBI reported a total of 2, BJS tracks a slightly different set of offenses from the FBI, but it finds the same overall patterns, with theft the most common form of property crime in and assault the most common form of violent crime.

Using the BJS statistics, the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those reported by the FBI. While perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans believe crime is up in their own communities. In all 23 Gallup surveys that have included the question since , no more than about half of Americans have said crime is up in their area compared with the year before. There are some demographic differences in both victimization and offending rates, according to BJS.

In its survey of crime victims , BJS found wide differences by age and income when it comes to being the victim of a violent crime. Younger people and those with lower incomes were far more likely to report being victimized than older and higher-income people.

There were no major differences in victimization rates between male and female respondents or between those who identified as White, Black or Hispanic.

But the victimization rate among Asian Americans was substantially lower than among other racial and ethnic groups. When it comes to those who commit crimes, the same BJS survey asks victims about the perceived demographic characteristics of the offenders in the incidents they experienced.

In , those who are male, younger people and those who are Black accounted for considerably larger shares of perceived offenders in violent incidents than their respective shares of the U.

There are big differences in violent and property crime rates from state to state and city to city. In , there were more than violent crimes per , residents in Alaska and New Mexico, compared with fewer than per , people in Maine and New Hampshire, according to the FBI. Even in similarly sized cities within the same state, crime rates can vary widely. Oakland and Long Beach, California, had comparable populations in , vs.

See also: Despite recent violence, Chicago is far from the U. Most violent and property crimes in the U. Extra Information Publication Year:. Tags : Crime rate Criminology. Author s :. Roeder, Oliver. Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. Bowling, Julia. Clark, Veronica. The case against: While the research shows that gentrification isn't anywhere near as harmful or displacing as some critics argue, it also indicates that gentrification is very rare. If gentrification is helping push down crime in inner-city neighborhoods, it's not happening everywhere — or even in very many cities.

As Roman acknowledged, it's hard to know, from a research perspective, how much of an impact gentrification has had on the crime rate. Roman's hypothesis certainly makes intuitive sense, and it's backed by data from segregated and gentrified neighborhoods.

But there's very little research showing the direct impact of gentrification on crime, making it hard to gauge just how much of an effect is really there. Behold, the most dangerous drug in America. The case for: The correlation is there: alcohol consumption per capita has been declining since , and hit particularly low levels during the s and s.

It's gone up slightly since then. And alcohol abuse is definitely correlated with crime: according to one estimate, 40 percent of violent criminals in state prison were under the influence of alcohol when they committed their crimes.

The case against: Social scientists typically use beer consumption as a proxy for alcohol consumption generally. But while beer consumption has kept declining through the late s, wine and liquor consumption has increased.

So the existing research might be getting less useful at measuring how much alcohol people are consuming, which could skew analyses of its effect on crime.

The bottom line: Some effect. The Brennan Center analysis, as well as past research, shows that there's a strong association between alcohol consumption and crime. But in the specific case of the crime decline of the s and s, alcohol use simply didn't decline enough to explain that much of the drop. In all, the Brennan Center estimates, less alcohol consumption explains about 5 to 10 percent of the drop in crime in both the s and the s.

The case for: Researchers David Finkelhor and Lisa Jones argued that psychiatric medications, such as antidepressants and anti-ADHD drugs, helped decrease violent acts against and by children by improving people's moods and behavior. The case against: Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri in St. Louis calls this theory plausible, but he said there's no significant research to support it yet. That doesn't mean these medications didn't contribute to the drop, but there's no evidence at the moment — beyond simple correlation — that they did.

Rosenfeld said the issue needs research, although he wouldn't put it at the top of his priority list. The case for: Crack consumption and sales definitely fueled crime and disorder in the s. While other "drug epidemics" have succeeded crack, it's possible that none of them have been as destructive — not least because crack is so cheap to make and sell.

The case against: Sure, it's possible. But cracking down on crack didn't stop illegal drug consumption or sales. It's called the balloon effect : cracking down on drug trafficking in one area merely shifts it to other places, since demand among users and sellers for the substances never really declines. The bottom line: The data is incomplete. Surprisingly, this is one of the harder theories to study — because most of the best data on drug use was collected as a response to the crack epidemic, it doesn't cover the worst years of it.

The case for: The thinking is simple: gangs have realized that shootings are bad for them. Knowing that police are much more likely to come down on their neighborhoods or organizations if they take part in a shooting, gang members have tried to avoid violence. The case against: There isn't good research on whether gangs are getting less violent overall and how much of an impact that's having on crime.

Tita acknowledges this: "No studies have been carefully constructed to give me percent confidence or even 90 percent confidence that any one of these things I'm telling you is true. Intuitively, the idea makes sense. But without adequate research, it's hard to know just how accurate it is.

The case for: There's certainly a correlation between the decline in crime and the increase in the median age of Americans. The crime wave hit when the baby boom was in its teens, twenties, and thirties — when people are generally more likely to commit crimes.

The case against: The implication of this theory is that crime rates among people in a particular age group didn't change that much — that there was less difference between the rate at which year-olds committed crimes in and than there was in the number of year-olds at that point.

But that's not really what the evidence shows. During the crime wave, crime rates for each particular age group rose; after the early s, crime rates for each particular age group fell. The Brennan Center's analysis suggests that the number of to year-olds in the population does have a small impact on crime though not the number of teens.

But we're talking about a difference of a few percentage points in the crime drop during the s — and nothing during the s, when there weren't big demographic changes in age.

Protesters demonstrate in favor of abortion rights. The case for: If you've heard of Freakonomics, you know this one. In , when the crime rate started to drop, a child born in was 21 — and a child who wasn't born in , because the mother got a newly legal abortion after Roe v. Wade, was one fewer year-old in the population. It's a very appealing argument to people who hate obvious answers. It's also, interestingly, one of the few theories on this list with strong empirical support from other countries: studies as far away as Romania have found the same effect.

The case against: There are two big problems with the abortion theory. One of them is that abortions didn't suddenly go from 0 to 60 when abortion was legalized.

Before Roe v. Wade, illegal abortions still happened; after the decision, there were still plenty of people who chose not to get them. There was also a supply problem: "It wasn't like Roe v. Wade was decided and suddenly there were a million places to get an abortion," Roman of the Urban Institute said. The second problem is age. In the s, the crime rate didn't just go down among people born in or later. It went down among a bunch of age groups at once.

There's evidence that youth crime rates influence the crime rates of older adults, but that doesn't mean that the people who turned 21 in were powerful enough to suppress crime among people a decade older. This theory also makes assumptions about abortion that aren't necessarily true. The unspoken assumption of the abortion theory is that abortions necessarily prevent unwanted children, and unwanted children necessarily commit more crime.

Those aren't proven assumptions. The bottom line: Probably some effect in the s. Like many of these theories, there's empirical support that abortion reduced crime to some extent in the s. Because there isn't detailed-enough data on abortions, the Brennan Center couldn't quantify exactly how much. But crime continued to decline in the s, after the Roe v. Wade generation was out of prime criminal age — making it unlikely that abortion explains why crime continued to drop through the first 15 years of the 21st century.

The case for: This is another newly popular theory, thanks in part to coverage from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones and others. Just like the timing of Roe v. Wade , the timing of the removal of leaded gasoline from America's filling stations, which decreased lead exposure among children born around and after , correlates strongly to the cohort of children who hit peak criminal age around the mids.

There's also a body of psychological research tying lead exposure to more aggressive behavior. The case against: The lead theory has the same problem as the abortion theory: in the s, even people who had been exposed to lead as children started committing fewer crimes. That indicates that while lead exposure may well have been a factor, it isn't the "real answer" that it's often characterized as.