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Christian
Science Monitor...
US
crime
rate at lowest point in decades. Why America is safer now.
By Daniel
B. Wood, Staff writer
January 10, 2012
The crime
rate for serious crimes, including murder, rape, and assault, has
dropped
significantly since the early 1990s in part because of changes in
technology
and policing, experts say.
The last
time the crime rate for serious crime – murder, rape, robbery, assault
– fell
to these levels, gasoline cost 29 cents a gallon and the average income
for a
working American was $5,807.
That was
1963.
In the past
20 years, for instance, the murder rate in the United States has
dropped by
almost half, from 9.8 per 100,000 people in 1991 to 5.0 in 2009.
Meanwhile,
robberies were down 10 percent in 2010 from the year before and 8
percent in
2009.
The
declines are not just a blip, say criminologists. Rather, they are the
result
of a host of changes that have fundamentally reversed the high-crime
trends of
the 1980s. And these changes have taken hold to such a degree that the
drop in
crime continued despite the recent recession.
Because the
pattern “transcends cities and US regions, we can safely say crime is
down,”
says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in
Boston. “We
are indeed a safer nation than 20 years ago.”
He and
others give four main reasons for the decline:
Increased
incarceration, including longer sentences, that keeps more criminals
off the
streets.
Improved
law enforcement strategies, including advances in computer analysis and
innovative technology.
The waning
of the crack cocaine epidemic that soared from 1984 to 1990, which made
cocaine
cheaply available in cities across the US.
The graying
of America characterized by the fastest-growing segment of the US
population –
baby boomers – passing the age of 50.
The data
point to a persistent perception gap among Americans. Despite strong
evidence
of crime dropping over recent decades, the public sees the reverse.
“Recent
Gallup polls have found that citizens overwhelmingly feel crime is
going up
even though it is not,” says Professor Fox. “This is because of the
growth of
crime shows and the way that TV spotlights the emotional. One case of a
random,
horrific shooting shown repeatedly on TV has more visceral effect than
all the
statistics printed in a newspaper.”
In many
police departments across the US, changes during the past decade or
more are
hard to overstate, say many law enforcement experts.
Technology
has given detectives powerful new tools with which to analyze blood and
DNA
samples or other forensic evidence, for instance.
Computerized
“hot spot” crime mapping has also helped police connect dots in ways
that were
more difficult before.
From
pushpins to databases
“We used to
put pins on a map to figure out what the patterns were and where to
concentrate
our limited resources,” says Tod Burke, a former police officer in
Maryland who
now teaches criminal justice at Radford University in Virginia. “Now we
have
databases and computers. It’s really gotten a lot more sophisticated.”
Beyond
technology, law enforcement personnel are much better educated and
trained
today than ever before, adds John Paitakes, professor of criminal
justice at
Seton Hall University in New Jersey. They’ve also benefited from
leaders like
William Bratton, who recast policing in Boston, New York City, and Los
Angeles
by applying the “broken window” theory posited by social scientist
James Q.
Wilson in 1982. The theory held that run-down and vandalized areas were
more
prone to serious crime than were areas kept in better order.
Read the
rest of the article at the Christian Science Monitor
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