I don't think enough emphasis is put in these studies on the rise of cheap entertainment for bored male youth. Teenage boys that normally would have been running around in the streets committing entry level crimes are now glued to their Xbox. The declines in crime also happen to correlate with the ubiquitousness and availability of video games. As they get cheaper and more violent, crime goes down.
Sure policing has gotten better, and crime prevention tech has advanced, but these studies tend to ignore the fact that would-be criminals rarely leave the house anymore...
I think you're underestimating the scope. It's not just video games, but access to an unimaginably large quantity of free video and music...someone's watching all those kitten videos.
And time spent consuming entertainment of any kind is time spent being docile. It's been postulated that the Arab Spring protests were heavily spurred by regular people who, having their Internet cut, had little else to do but express their anger
What about the ubiquitous (and growing) availability of pornography (I mean, there are mobile porn sites now. Clearly demand is huge)? That could be a real factor.
Teenage boys that normally would have been running around in the streets committing entry level crimes are now glued to their Xbox. The declines in crime also happen to correlate with the ubiquitousness and availability of video games. As they get cheaper and more violent, crime goes down.
I really like your argument but I remember how ubiquitous the SNES, Sega Genesis and PS1 were in the 90s. I do wonder what role the quality of graphics plays here too (especially with regards to portraying violence).
Games in the 90s did cost more than AAA titles today but not by a huge amount and the hardware was similarly priced. Maybe it just took a couple more decades for gaming to be considered a truly mainstream activity rather than something for the geekier kids.
> I remember how ubiquitous the SNES, Sega Genesis and PS1 were in the 90s
They weren't "ubiquitous" for poor kids. For those kids, there was no way they would get their parents to buy us anything for (the 1991 equivalent of) $350 and $85/game.
Nobody assumed that upper middle class kids were normally carrying out burglaries...
My dad sold my SNES and Final Fantasy II for money to keep his kids fed. Poor kids didn't necessarily have shit back then, and certainly the used game market wasn't as available as it is now.
The big difference between games then and games today is the rise of multiplayer games. Gaming today is a much more social activity. I suspect that this is the primary reason why it's more mainstream and more addicting.
In Finland, there has also been a drop in alcohol consumption and an increase in Cannabis use. Most of the offences here are done under the influence of alcohol.
+1 to this! Also consider the endless entertainment available via the internet. Today for about $50 per month I have access to a plethora of streaming movies and television shows via Netflix, practically unlimited news to read, and many more forms of entertainment at my finger tips. Just 20 years ago I might have paid $4 per move rental at the video store. I'm honestly wondering if the fall in crime is due to the rise of the super couch potato lifestyle similar to that portrayed in the movie Idiocracy.
I wonder how much of it has to do with how kids getting caught for entry-level crimes like petty vandalism and shoplifting are treated. Are they getting thrown into big prisons where they can learn from their fellow inmates how to deal drugs, rob stores safely, steal identities, etc, and also get a criminal record that prevents them from ever getting an education or an honest job paying more than minimum wage? Or are they getting just enough of an encounter with the legal system to scare the crap out of them without any of the potential long-term consequences?
Taking this a step further... The more violent the video games, the more likely we are to take violent criminals off the street, right? I like where you're going with this.
No. Definitely not. I deal with the certain "urges" on a daily basis. No matter how much gore there is in a game, no matter how graphic, it will never replace.
Just like holding a brightly coloured object in front of someone doesn't cure depression. Nothing does, it only temporarily sets it aside.
So this would mean that a lot of crime is the result of boredom right? That kind of makes a lot of sense.
I don't think most people want to commit crimes and hurt others. They do it out of necessity. That necessity might be hunger, money or boredom coupled with a bad environment.
So next up is definitely hunger. I'd say in the end people who wish to steal for money when they're well fed, entertained and not homeless are just bad batch of humans we need to deal with.
I'd point to the internet in general as well. It's pretty much ubiquitous at this point. Just stay inside and spend hours on youtube and facebook instead of going outside and getting up to no good.
It's not the violence per se, it's the ability to get entertainment on demand. Whether it's Call of Duty or Minecraft, the thing is that you aren't left with 'nothing to do'.
Smartphone and camera ubiquity probably also plays a role. Just as cops know if they try to Rodney King somebody it will be on YouTube an hour later, so are criminals aware there will be a bunch of digital evidence.
Support is given to this by the fact that many of the crimes that are rising are things people can't witness you doing (bank fraud, identity theft etc).
And it's definitely not a silver bullet doing this. It's a combination of all of the factors in the article and here on HN and more we haven't thought of, all doing their part.
Increased respect for the 2nd amendment probably plays a role. Private ownership of firearms means that a home invader may get a face full of lead, which has to act as a deterrent for some.
not conclusively, but that notion is countered by the fact that crime is down in at least one country where gun ownership is very difficult (UK) while being up in at least one country where it's not so bad (Brazil)
This article mentions, but undersells, the lead factor. Lead exposure causes cognitive problems in children, especially related to impulse control. The drop in crime correlates very well with lead cleanup.
But lead by itself can't be the major factor behind the crime drop. Countries such as Brazil have banned leaded gas even before the United States, and crime rates are still rising dramatically.
It seems clear that other factors play a more important role. Things like police effectiveness, or economics.
In Brazil, Teixeira (32) has found that 11% of pipes used in the water distribution systems of 100 schools in São Paulo present lead levels above the limit considered safe by the WHO. In 2% of the water samples, the lead level was found to be five-fold higher than the highest acceptable value (< 10 µg/L, according to the WHO), thereby threatening the neuropsychiatric health of children.
Several studies have shown that high BLL in preschool children are strongly correlated with high lead levels in house dust (33-35). This association has been attributed to dust intake from the frequent hand-to-mouth behavior of young children. Flaking lead-based paint, road dust, garden soil and airborne lead-bearing particles are believed to be the sources of lead in household dust (36).
Leaded gas has caused more exposure to the metal than any other source worldwide (37). According to the São Paulo State Health Department (19), about 80% of the lead found in urban air samples before 1982 was derived from leaded gas. Car battery manufacture is the main source of secondary lead (38), but other sources cannot be discarded.
None of that is to say that lead is the only factor of course, just that I don't think your data disproves the theory that lead plays a significant part.
Lead bans in America varied by state, the end date on that wikipedia page is a misleading number in that leaded gasoline use had been substantially reduced starting many years earlier. There was a major drop in leaded gasoline starting in the early 70s, by 1980 it was down over 50% from peak. By 1986 it was down over 90%.
I can't speak to the implementation of lead reduction leading to the outright ban in Brazil, but in the USA the outright ban was more of an after-the-fact recognition of the reality rather than an enforcement action.
You misunderstand. I meant the federal law was an after-the-fact-recognition of what many states had already done. Kind of like the way DOMA (defense of marriage act) was struck down by SCOTUS only after a bunch of states started recognizing gay marriage or how marijuana is likely to be legalized at the federal level only after enough states have already legalized it.
When was it effectively phased out in Brazil, though? Leaded gasoline was mostly gone in the US by the 1970s and there was a 20 year lag before the crime rate started dropping. The wikipedia article says lead was banned in the US in 1995, but it was definitely not widely available.
However, if lead was widely used in Brazil right up until the ban date there (1989) then it would stand to reason that the crime rate wouldn't start dropping for another six or seven years.
I was buying leaded gas in Indiana as late as 1990, and had no trouble finding it in the general Illiana area. I don't think it's fair to say it was "mostly gone" in the 70s.
[By 1979 half of the gasoline in the US was unleaded](http://66.147.244.135/~enviror4/about/ethyl-leaded-gasoline/...). So by the early eighties it was mostly gone. So yeah, I slightly misspoke saying it was mostly gone in the 70s, but it was halfway gone by then.
> But lead by itself can't be the major factor behind the crime drop. Countries such as Brazil have banned leaded gas even before the United States, and crime rates are still rising dramatically.
This is not logically sound. Brazil could have other factors which increase crime more than getting rid of lead reduces it. The fact that Brazil's crime has increased does not, in any way, tell us that the lead ban couldn't possibly be a major factor in the US's drop in crime.
There are other sources of environmental lead exposure besides leaded gasoline. Brazilian enforcement of environmental protections may not have been as successful as the US EPA was, especially in the past.
There are reasons to be skeptical of any claim based on correlations between such widely separated variables as lead exposure (the cause) and crime (the effect). Consuming lead does not instantly turn someone into a criminal in the way that consuming vitamin C cures scurvy. It affects the child’s developing brain, which makes the child duller and more impulsive, which, in some children, and under the right circumstances, leads them to grow up to make short-sighted and risky choices, which, in some children and under the right circumstances, leads them to commit crimes, which, if enough young people act in the same way and at the same time, affects the crime rate. The lead hypothesis correlates the first and last link in this chain, but it would be more convincing if there were evidence about the intervening links. Such correlations should be far stronger than the one they report: presumably most kids with lead are more impulsive, whereas only a minority of impulsive young adults commit crimes. If they are right we should see very strong changes in IQ, school achievement, impulsiveness, childhood
aggressiveness, lack of conscientiousness (one of the “Big Five” personality traits) that mirror the trends in lead exposure, with a suitable time delay. Those trends should be much stronger than the time-lagged correlation of lead with crime itself, which is only indirectly related to impulsiveness, an effect that is necessarily diluted by other causes such as policing and incarceration.
This caution makes sense in general, and it is good to be skeptical of long chains of causation. However, we know so little about the brain that it's possible we're missing a much shorter chain of causation. It's possible that impulsiveness, IQ, aggression, etc. is only tenuously related to whatever aspect of the brain actually affects criminality. A very strong circumstantial case shouldn't be dismissed just because we can't think of a mechanism.
> A very strong circumstantial case shouldn't be dismissed just because we can't think of a mechanism.
On the other hand, if a convincing causal chain can't be identified, it shouldn't be assumed true either. It should go into the (very large) pool of interesting possibilities that may or may not be substantiated if someone wants to invest in the time and energy to research.
Crime statistics across 100 years is a really complex beast - but lead in the atmosphere is something Occam's razor might suggest is not worth following up.
I fly planes, and I haven't met a rich owner yet. The typical cessna 150/172 costs less than a new SUV. The rich owners tend to fly kerosene burners.
Also, most small-engine planes can already burn regular unleaded autogas. It's just the high-compression engines that require the lead. The FAA, AOPA and others are working on developing alternatives, but it takes time. Perhaps they should have done this sooner.
"Rich" is a pretty flexible yardstick. Somebody who can afford to drop the price of a new car on a hobby item is rich compared to most Americans. I recall a thing a while back about how hardly anyone in America will admit to being rich, because they all measure themselves against someone even richer. "Sure, I have three houses and a yacht, but I'm not rich! It's not like I can afford a private island!"
Your points about engines and fuel make sense, though.
Well I'm pretty sure I'm less rich than Cory if he is a MS employee.
I pay about $85/hour to fly and don't own a plane. If I lived in the USA it would be $68/hr due to lower gas prices. I think the majority of Americans can afford to spend $68/month on their hobby (assuming they flew once a month).
There are high school students who drop thousands of $$$ into their hobbies. My hobby (computers and video games) was cheap in comparison to those getting tuned-up small cars as made famous in movies and racing games. $68/hr is a fairly inexpensive hobby indeed.
> I also have to wonder where high-school students who drop thousands of dollars into their hobbies are getting their money from. Parents?
I often wondered the same thing, given that neither I nor my parents had anywhere near that much money to fritter away.
I think it comes down to parents directly or indirectly though. You can make a fair amount of money with a summer job and part-time job the rest of the year, when you don't have to pay for rent, food, etc.
It becomes harder to maintain a hobby once you have to move out and live on your own.
Depends on the age. I know when I was a teenager, I worked since I was allowed to (16). So, part time jobs, summer jobs and saving --that's where teenagers get the extra money. It's relatively easy to save money when you don't have to pay for room and board, as it were.
> most small-engine planes can already burn regular unleaded autogas. It's just the high-compression engines that require the lead
So they could change engines, but would rather continue to poison us to save the cost/loss of performance. AOPA is fighting against it in the bureaucratic way, via numerous stalling tactics, for 40 years now:
Well as I've pointed out above, I don't own a plane and you yourself appear to be a lot richer than me.
The majority of private pilots I've met are hardworking people (not rich) who love aviation. They either rent from a flying club or partnership, or own a cheap cessna 150/172 or homebuilt. You can buy a decent buck 50 for about $20k, which doesn't make you rich if you own one. The average HN programmer earns $150k+ if they work at Microsoft (like you), Google or facebook in silicon valley. That's fairly rich, and it's a bit hypocritical of you to be calling me rich when my income for the past few years has been around $40k. I used to earn over 100k 15 years ago, but I chose lifestyle over stress and being rich.
I pay $50/hr dry to fly a friend's plane, and he's not rich. He is retired and never earned much money during his career. He can only afford to own a plane because he was left money by his father, and also because his wife has a good pension. He absolutely loves flying, so that is what he has decided to spend his retirement money on. He drives a falling-apart car from the early 90s.
Getting back to the discussion: the high compression engines that run avgas tend to be in light twins, which are mostly used to train airline pilots, air-taxis, medevac, etc. There certainly are some rich people with high performance piston planes, but that is probably a minority. At the moment there simply isn't any viable engine replacement for these planes. AOPA is actually working hard with industry groups to find a drop-in replacement for avgas, which will work in all these engines. It's not an easy thing to do, as you have to make sure the new fuel isn't going to damage the engine, cause an engine failure, etc.
Perhaps they should have started looking for a replacement earlier. Part of the problem is that there isn't too much innovation in aircraft engines, in order to avoid possible problems and because it's very expensive to develop (and aircraft sales are a few orders of magnitude lower than car sales). Even new aircraft piston engines don't tend to have ECU/FADECs (or even electronic timing).
1) There are enough factual errors in that article to show that the author doesn't know what he's talking about.
2) Small airplanes aren't necessarily expensive, so you don't necessarily have to be rich to afford them. For instance, there's a Cessna 150 in good condition for sale on ebay for $16500 right now.
3) The FAA is actively working on unleaded replacements.
You've got plenty of replies criticizing your "rich" bit, but, well, you deserve at least one more.
Something should probably be done about the use of leaded fuel in general aviation. However, trying to turn it into class warfare (while every single pilot I know, and I know a lot of them, is middle-class) severely hurts your argument.
The average plane owner is richer than the average car owner. The average plane owner needs the plane less than the average car owner needs the car. The average car isn't burning leaded fuel.
I would still say "rich jerks" is overstating things, but there's not zero relevance.
I don't think that's the same thing at all. The mention of "(rich)" was an absolute statement, not a relative one, which portrayed light aircraft owners as wealthy people hurting the populace just so they could have a little more money.
I live in China and regularly paint car owners as rich jerks in my head, considering that they are very expensive and most people don't own one. Then they drive like they own the road, don't yield at all, run pedestrians off the street, drive on the side of the freeway when there's traffic (I look on from a taxi)...
Give me an electric powered tri (trash) cycle anyday.
Talk to the FAA, who have made it so expensive to upgrade/update anything related to airplanes. There is a marginally viable aftermarket parts market for these engines now, but for a long time owners were strictly limited to OEM, salvage, and remanufactured parts. Also, the number of older GA Airplanes, and antique/warbirds in service are so small, it's got to be nothing compared to the exposure from thirty years ago.
Are you so sure they're rich? All the small airplane owners I have known drove beat-up old cars (often with a "My other car is an airplane" bumper sticker) in order to afford their aviation habit.
That article does not say what you think it does. It is 50% of new lead pollution, not exposure. According to the reporting of the original lead::crime theory, most of current lead exposure is due to lead dust that was created during the decades of leaded automobile gasoline. The dust has settled in urban areas and it gets kick up by weather and people breath that.
I don't know if we have to go reaching for lead as the reason.
If the effects of chemical substances on the brain are indeed a factor... and yes, they probably are. Then there is probably a far more simple explanation.
Drugs.
Instead of police being faced with impoverished young men of the 70s, 80s and 90s who are hyped up on cocaine, crack or pcp and trolling for their next hit. They are dealing with the impoverished young men of today, high on pot and trolling for snacks. That is, they would be trolling for snacks if the munchies are ever able to override their desire to keep playing whatever video game.
If we consider the issue in a rational fashion for a moment, it's not terribly surprising that Rodney King was hyped up on PCP and trolling for another hit, whereas Trayvon Martin was high on pot and trolling for snacks.
And, again, when one tries to consider the matter rationally, these two people represent two fundamentally different elements. With predictable impact on statistics when their stories are "writ large" in a society.
If your crime is coming from demographic groups like this... then your crime will probably change with the changing drug use pattern.
It's not a popular notion, because it smacks of "evil"... but drugs really can be used to determine and direct the course of a society.
I don't know if we have to go reaching for lead as the reason.
Reaching???
There was strong evidence that lead caused widespread and permanent damage to children's brains. Therefore the USA spent billions to remove it from our environment. After it is removed, asking whether this made a difference IS NOT a reach.
PARTICULARLY NOT when compared to a hypothesis of differences in drug use over time that you've provided no evidence for.
Is there some evidence somewhere that brain damage causes robbery? It's entirely reasonable to say that the lead explanation is "reaching," although it may turn out to be true.
>asking whether this made a difference
You're equivocating here, intentionally. The question is whether it made a difference in crime, not whether it "made a difference."
It's entirely reasonable to say that the lead explanation is "reaching," although it may turn out to be true.
My standard is that I don't use phrases like "reaching" unless I either am quite positive of what I will say, or am somewhat certain then did a Google search to verify.
You're equivocating here, intentionally. The question is whether it made a difference in crime, not whether it "made a difference."
I assure you that any equivocation was absolutely unintentional. I have been aware for years from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07... and other articles that the correlation between lead exposure and criminal statistics has been examined and proved very strong. And, of course, we have the known causal links between lead exposure and behavioral problems that could potentially lead to criminal acts.
Thus we have strong evidence of both correlation and causation between lead poisoning in childhood and criminal behavior decades later.
> They are dealing with the impoverished young men of today, high on pot and trolling for snacks. That is, they would be trolling for snacks if the munchies are ever able to override their desire to keep playing whatever video game.
Downvoted for being hilarious while talking out of your ass. FYI, pot has a (very) mellowing and relaxing effect. The idea of the munchies as some sort of dangerous rampage in search of food is hilarious; it usually involves more sitting on the couch and putting some Pink Floyd on (or Flying Lotus if you like rap, whatever), than presenting menaces to racially prejudiced vigilantes.
PCP is a dissociative anaesthetic. You aren't going to be very dangerous on it. More like dizzy, and confused, and very clumsy. Hardly killer stuff, for others at least.
Now, what's funny is the drugs you don't mention. Some people on cocaine, or alcohol, usually white Wall Street guys and other posh denizens, can behave like assholes. The kind of people who'll be self-aggrandizing, selfish douches, and hit you on the neck from behind if they get angry. But, since neighborhood watchers don't kill white drunkards, there's no need to rationalize retroactively our racism with those drugs.
Dude, your missing his point entirely. He's saying that young males are smoking weed instead of doing hard drugs and therefore less likely to commit violent crimes. It may or may not be true, but it's an interesting thought.
It's slightly more than just interesting. It's been a fairly long-held belief that, at least in New York City, their continued and constant drop in crime was largely attributable to the fall in popularity of crack and cocaine usage.
I'm not sure why he's been downvoted to gray. I don't know that his ideas extend well to areas outside of NYC, but there's at least one (fairly large) data point lending credence to his notions.
Did you get your drug folklore/knowledge from "Reefer Madness"? Can you cite any credible evidence that pot use is even remotely associated with violent behavior?
I read an interesting theory about "Leave It To Beaver" leading to more social problems than truly violent television; the premise is that the sanitized depiction of family life and the easy resolution of problems set a false standard in very young children that left them unable to cope with real problems, eventually leading to more violent behavior.
I wonder if marijuana used by teenagers could sometimes have a similiar effect; the actual payload is peaceful and gentle, but seen as part of the broader system of someone's emotional development, there might be a net-negative effect of antisocial behavior. (Hippies may smoke pot, but so do violent gangsters.)
I'm not reflexively pot-negative; it's absolutely nothing compared to alcohol, and should not be illegal (among other things, street dealers don't ask for ID). But like you, I'd be very interested to see the data.
The drop in crime also correlates very well with the massive upswell of incarceration in the US, not to mention that 'entertainment-on-demand' swelled over the same period (crime is frequently a result of boredom).
>This article mentions, but undersells, the lead factor. Lead exposure causes cognitive problems in children, especially related to impulse control. The drop in crime correlates very well with lead cleanup.
Sounds like a totally unrelated issue.
In my country we had a 400% raise in burglaries etc in the course of 15 years, and it was all due to poverty (including an iflux of poor unskilled illegal immigration).
Oh, and that was AFTER the "lead cleanup".
Crime can go up and down with no relation to lead whatsoever, as it has in tons of places.
I think the reasons for this are: (1) People buy fewer used items in physical stores, i.e. fewer people buy stuff at pawn shops etc and a typical thief will never go through the effort of building up a decent eBay seller reputation. This makes it harder to monetize stolen property. (2) It's a self-perpetuating statistic, in that less crime means more resources/attention is given to the remaining crime (by the police and by the vigilance of citizens) which leads to even lower crime.
Right, but how much would you get for that smartphone if you brought it to a pawn shop? Assuming you properly reset its data and convince the pawn shop owner it isn't stolen I bet you could get $30 at most.
(And if the phone is locked down and the thief can't jailbreak it it essentially has a value $0)
On the other hand, you could probably make a lot selling on Craigslist.
I've been selling my family's old phones and computers for years, and the market is robust. Not $500 robust, but two-year-old iPhones go for about $200 (which, probably not coincidentally, is the upgrade price for a new phone).
Criminals moved to doing fraud. How many us have been a victim of credit card fraud? There's over $190 billion of it a year in the US alone. That is over $600 per person. Imagine someone broke into you house every year and stole your TV or you are mugged 6 times a year with $100 in your wallet. Crime is still there, its adapted to the times.
This sort of trite criticism of the hoi polloi is easy and lazy.
People are better informed than ever, read more than ever, and are more satisfied with their lives than ever. You dismiss this monumental progress by calling it a drug.
...Soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free "holidays". It was developed by the World State to provide these inner-directed personal experiences within a socially managed context of State-run 'religious' organizations; social clubs.
Soma was the recreational drug in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", a sci-fi dystopia book that presented a different view of the future than Orwell's 1984.
In it, the government uses entertainment and technology to keep people within their assigned classes as opposed to military force and surveillance.
My first thought is pure economics. 1990 or so forward saw a massive increase in the standard of living globally on average. US GDP almost doubled over that decade, and I suspect the same is true for most of the industrialized world. So why isn't crime rising now, with big financial and unemployment problems? The countries with those problems are still consuming their past wealth to pay for current entitlements, which is keeping the social contract alive temporarily. And if that theory is correct, the next 10 to 15 years will see a meaningful increase in crime.
Another thought - just a half-silly toss out, but perhaps the Web played a role. It changed a lot of social behaviors, and that would have began in the early to mid 1990s in the industrialized world. It altered how and where people spend their time; how they do their shopping; how they communicate; how often they leave their homes; knowledge available when it comes to almost everything, such as instantly being able to look-up good / bad neighborhoods based on crime.
I first got online around 1994/95, at 14 years of age, and it's almost hard to remember time before the Web. I have to consciously remind myself that it wasn't always there.
Since this piece mentions burglary in specific, I found it thriving in Southern California (OC), but in a very specific fashion. Very careful criminals are using the following M.O.:
- Parking garages with no cameras
- Security is part time, and they wait until they're gone
- They hit only cars that are unlocked, so no breaking, just entering
- Occasionally, if they see a big score like a laptop, they will break a window, but probably as their last act before getaway.
- They hit a building only once every few months, when people have let down their guard again.
I'd never heard of this until I was a victim, and the police told me the were aware of it but couldn't catch them. Then I asked around and they've hit buildings in several cities. Simply remembering to lock your door and leave nothing obvious on your seats will protect you.
I bring this up because although the crimes are reported to the police, I wonder how much they are reflected in statistics like these.
Laptops and cameras are the two things that would jump out to me. It should be obvious to you or me that you'd bring those inside for the night, but a lot of people don't out of convenience (some members of my family are/were guilty of this). Or maybe it's a work laptop and you just have no need for it inside.
In addition to laptops and cameras mentioned, they also go through your glove box. They stole my (prescription) sunglasses and my $5 phone charger probably thinking it was worth $30.
But some people leave their GPS in there (not everyone has a smartphone for that), or they forget their phone, or maybe keep some emergency cash there.
A little OT, but related to current events: Detroit, which has been facing fiscal problems, has enjoyed a drop in crime even though budget deficits has forced the city to cut hundreds of officers:
How to reconcile these things? Is crime really falling, or have reporting standards changed? Or, if cops can't respond to reports, do the reports ever get filed?
1. 'urban lead' is a studied off-shoot of the lead hypothesis. Detroit's lead situation is a studied and known problem. So lingering crime in Detroit is actually expected under the lead hypothesis. Particularly as the population shrinks and the remaining citizen 'average' shifts poorer, with a more-toxic environment.
2. 'structural' crime. Opportunists considering theft as a means to an end might be dissuaded as the risk/reward equation shifts. But convincing a (drug) gang that it's no longer a good idea to murder a rat/rival is much more difficult.
3. Detroit's shrinking police coverage. The police department has explicitly warned people away from certain areas of the city, because they don't have the resources to provide effective coverage. This can only be interpreted as an 'opportunity' for structural crime.
Criminologists understand that crime moves in waves, and different crimes move differently. Crime overall might be down, but a particular class of crimes might have risen.
This is not an unusual state of affairs, but the news for the general public has no interest in educating people on this topic - after all, they need something with which to excoriate politicians; something will usually be 'on the rise', so politicians will be 'failing' in the whole field.
There's no mention of the rise of the welfare state. I'd be surprised if the presence of an economic safety net didn't have an impact on people's willingness to commit crime.
In the end, I'm sure the answer is a combination of all these factors. As individuals and as a species, we get better at living as time goes on.
Actually, welfare benefits are much lower than they were under Johnson's Great Society programs. They declared a War on Poverty back in the 60s, and it did about as well as the current War on Drugs. We've actually been cutting welfare benefits for some time, culminating in the reforms done under the Clinton administration.
Are those lower benefits spread across a wider demographic, or has the demographic been reduced as well? Just wondering about "10% of the population on $$" versus "40% on $"...
Absolutely. In fact, many welfare schemes are designed to encourage young people to stay in education rather than dropping out early to work.
In any case: since poor, unemployed young men commit crime, and we're never going to see 100% employment, lifting them out of poverty will reduce the impact of crime on everyone else. Intolerable for Ayn Rand; pragmatic for the rest of us.
Poverty rates have actually increased since the introduction of welfare and welfare reform in the US. Long term stability of your proposal aside (see the jump in Disability dependencies that followed the welfare reform), it doesn't match the data that shows a drop in crime over the same time period.
Has it really? It dropped significantly in the 60s and 70s. Following that period, it tended to track economic trends (Poverty goes up during recession, comes back down during the good times)
The future doesn't need us - or at least many of us.
Already now we have no need whatsover for 15-20% of population to get jobs, as demand for low-skilled labor is permanently reduced.
Soon it will be 30%, 40% and more. As soon as robots for stocking shelves, driving trucks and flipping burgers will be cheaper than minimum (or any livable) wage, we can expect that there will be no practical need whatsoever for large parts of population to work - the goods/services will be more and better if they don't get involved, and instead of "job" the question is how social policy will distribute resources to them - welfare, universal income, crime or starvation?
This is a fallacy that is levied every generation, that automation and technological advances will lead to mass unemployment in the future. It completely ignores the fact that new types of jobs are created all the time and that there's always something that will require expertise and hard work. Instead of assembling widgets in a factory it will be working with data and information.
Please take note that currently these new types of mass jobs are not being created; there is already observable mass structural unemployment, and there are no new major economy sectors that need a lot of people. In recent years the jobs "working with data and information", i.e., white collar middle-class clerical jobs are exactly those shrinking because of automation, not growing; they were growing 20 years ago but not in 2010s.
Where is the next wave? Historically new sectors opened up three times, but it's not a natural law that requires that to happen once more. There are some new jobs created in software engineering and product design, however, they are an order of magnitude less than the shrinking areas. Unlike the earlier shifts towards artisanal, industrial and later service jobs which could employ a majority of population, the new industries need relatively tiny numbers of employees - such as the (classic, exaggerated) example of 140.000 employed by Kodak vs 11 by Instagram.
The "new new" jobs are scalable - i.e., you need a few of the best specialists that can cover some need X for a billion people, instead of earlier nonscalable jobs where there was a need also for lots of average and below-average employees to fulfill the quantity of work. The whole modern "information age" that we enjoy needed only 3-5 million engineers to create it, that's 0.1% of the global working population. Even the ever-shrinking farming currently needs more people than the Silicon Valley 'digital economy'.
It's always the one with the most reasonable chance of producing the best outcome.
In some environments that's crime. There's no jobs and the welfare can't pay the bills.
In others it's welfare, as there's no jobs and nothing to steal.
Thankfully, most of the time it's gainful employment that comes out on top. Low risk, steady rewards, and significantly more affluent than welfare or prison.
The linked article mainly answers Pinker's data with anecdotes and US-hating (however justifiable). Notwithstanding Herman and Peterson's radical critique of Pinker's Enlightenment liberalism and some quibbles about selecting preferential methods of evaluation for casualty counts, they completely ignore the fact that Pinker's data analysis actually encompasses their outraged counterexamples.
That is, everything Herman and Peterson say about US postwar military adventures is more or less correct, but that doesn't undermine Pinker's argument that overall rates of violence have been in steady decline for centuries. Neither high levels of civilian casualties nor military industrialism nor mercantilism nor imperialism nor ideological conflict nor genocide nor civil war were inventions of the 20th century - an in all cases, their overall global trajectory has been downward.
With respect to WWI and WWII, Pinker goes to a great deal of trouble to explain and justify his argument that they represent outliers - trouble Herman and Peterson dismiss with dripping sarcasm but no counter-arguments.
Sidenote: there are only 8 footnotes, of which one is a note that the essay was first published elsewhere. The only references to critiques of Pinker's book (rather than general references to studies on particular wars or American militarism) are a few references to critiques of Pinker's assertion that pre-civilization nomads lived violent lives. One reference refers to anthropologist Douglas P. Fry, but while Fry takes issue with Pinker's case for rates of violence in pre-civilization societies, he does not disagree with Pinker's main thesis: "Pinker’s basic claim is itself largely on target: Physical violence has been decreasing over recent millennia."
I wonder if easier access to contraception, pornography and abortion have decreased the number of youth without access to opportunity and/or supervision.
heritability either biologically or by culture of crime?
Anyone with a genetic/cultural predisposition to addiction died as a crack addict in 1980-something, therefore no kids with the same predisposition alive in 2013? Don't have to be dead, just a reproductive failure. No kids, kids taken away, life in prison, etc.
Another interpretation is most crime is done by young urban males. A recent-ish development is the Daddy-figure has basically disappeared from the lives of those people, criminal or non-criminal alike. Therefore no following in Dad's footsteps if you have no idea who or what a Dad is. Which is too bad when Dad's not a dirtbag, but if he is, its probably a net positive.
Lack of employement opportunities, especially among the most disadvantaged, means the most disadvantaged kids are no longer latchkey kids?
I live in "Lost Angeles" and former police chief Bill Bratton took credit for any statistic he could. It's my belief that the reason for crime reduction here in L.A. is that the standard of living has gone up via social services and drugs as a income vehicle are more ubiquitous. (See the first 60-seconds of the intro to the film "Layer Cake" where the bank robbers realize they "are in the wrong game..." http://youtu.be/QHKI8zMHCjE )
Then there is credit card fraud too which is non-violent. In other words info and contraband crimes.
> In Chicago, where crime has been slower to fall than elsewhere, local politicians this year thanked hotspot methods for the lowest murder rate in half a century.
What year are they talking about? 2012 was the highest in something like 10 years, and 2013 is on pace with 2011.
Living in a bay area city with a recent alarming increase in armed robbery due to a shrinking police force (guess which one), I would suggest that crime, like real estate, is local, local, local. Perhaps Times Square and Talinn are safer than before, but the negative dividends of the crack epidemic, the rise of gangs and guns and glorification of criminal culture, the lack of parenting in at risk communities, and the collapse of municipal finances since 2008 has left cities like mine in the US with soaring violent crime rates.
There is a simple reason: computers and the internet. It makes people more docile and satisfies their urges. Porn for sexual urges, social media for "socializing", google and wikipedia for knowledge etc. That last part also makes everyone more educated. Which also correlates to less (blue collar) crime.
You're talking about only the USA. Actually, violent crime spiked in late 80s and then was coming down from that spike in the 90s, so there's that confounding factor. Most of the crime in the late 80s was juvenile crime in fact. It might have had to do with the culture of the time (inner city gangs, etc.)
A better way would be to compare what people focus on / use on a daily basis today vs in the 80s. If you are restless today you can pacify yourself with a mobile phone. In fact it's an addiction that gives you a boost of dopamine. And the virtual world is much less .... physical and violent, which reduces people's tendencies over time.
Another great pacifier of the 20th century is consumerism. Feel bad? Buy an ikea, veg out in front of the TV. There is a great documentary about how the PR industry was invented and Freud's theories about the "collective ego"
I'm talking across the industrialized world. The availability of the internet and other 'pacification networks' may be a contributing factor but it's clearly not the driving force.
Anecdotal, but growing up in a generally low-income rural area, I don't remember any of my peers not having a computer in the early 90s. Many of them, including myself, even had computers into the mid-80s and some of those families were quite poor, even by local standards.
The internet came later, but games like Doom were huge long before that, which is pertinent as you mention violent crime specifically.
I think computerization, more generally, is a very powerful factor.
More electronic transactions, less cash. More surveillance. More cameras. Traceable goods/tracked shipments. Better crime data analysis and police patrol routing. Consumer purchases tending toward electronics that are ever-cheaper and more-powerful. More digital goods, less demand for physical goods. Better media distribution. etc.
It may also explain the outliers to the global crime trends: places where computerization of the society (or subset of society) has lagged.
I think more cameras seems like a large factor. You don't need to just worry about the location you're at having a camera, but also neighbouring areas and buildings.
I don't really think so. Computers and the internet didn't became prevalent for median and lower income people until the 2000's (internet usage was around 30% of the population in 2000, versus 90% today). The drop in crime started in the 1990's.
As a Marxist, i see an explanation of this in that the crime thrives in societies numerically dominated by proletariat: people who have nothing to lose are easily motivated into crime, much easier their children with no view of the future. When the proletariat declined in numbers, so did the crime.
You may well be right. Then comes that big step from Hypothesis to Theory. Lots of research, boring work digging through white papers, reading old journals, constructing tests, requesting funding, and finally analyzing results. That is why hypotheses are like opinions, everyone has one, but real, hard data is respected.
“What are the facts? Again and again and again--what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"--what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
Here's another factor to consider: Sometimes crime is under reported or covered up or not acted on.
I've known of property and other crimes that did not show up in the statistics/annual reports of a particular city. The city in question was/is known for low crime and used that as a selling up point to attract businesses and home buyers. I'd be surprised if this was the only municipality that "fudged" their numbers.
> Sometimes crime is under reported or covered up or not acted on.
This could not be more true where I live, and with police departments shrinking nationwide, I would guess that it's true in other places as well.
Plenty of people are still getting their back doors kicked down while at work, and come home to find their laptops and consoles, and television missing.
You call the police, and they'll show up 4 hours later, and all they really do is put your name on a list. It's basically up to you to go around and search pawn shops and craigslist to find your stuff.
Most people don't even bother to call the cops, and don't bother filing an insurance claim since an LCD TV is $450 and the insurance deductible is $1500, not to mention the rise in rates or risk of getting your coverage dropped.
1) For many categories measured in the original article (murders, armed robberies of stores) it's not likely that a major part is unreported;
2) For simple thefts, of course, a large portion is not reported because people don't bother - but are you really arguing that in suddenly all the (very different) countries people started reporting crimes much less than 20 years ago; or that municipalities in 2000'ies are fudging numbers much more massively than they could in 1980's?
I have no absolute numbers, but in recent years I have heard far more about attempted burglaries than in the decades before (in Germany). It sounds to me as if the burglars are mostly professionals, driving with trucks into suburbs to find empty houses.
On the other hand I also wonder what is there even left to steal. Apple might singlehandedly sustain burglaries because their gear is the only stuff worth stealing these days?
Then again an acquaintance told me when her flat was burglared the thieves took everything, including photographs and files. I suppose there might be villages somewhere in eastern countries dedicated to scanning those files for bank account information.
It's more profitable, with less risk, to steal cellphones by mugging/pickpocketing/grab and running. One job can net an easy $200. Six a night and you're rolling in Benjamins.
I'm pretty sure I saw a documentary recently about the increase in juvenile crime and the increasing occupancy rates in jails. Also, what about biological disposition and hormonal influence?
Virtue to them is that which makes modest and tame: with that they have turned the wolf into a dog and man himself into man's best domestic animal. - Nietzsche
Manufacturing was outsourced to China starting in the 1990s, resulting in a flood of cheap consumer goods. Inexpensive labour means artificially low prices, which means in turn that most consumer goods are not worth repairing because the cost to repair them with North American or European labour is prohibitively expensive. It is cheaper to replace the item if it breaks.
This has led to a decline in two professions: electronics/appliance repair and thievery. Just as it doesn't make sense to repair most consumer goods, it doesn't make sense to steal them, either.
The street price of stolen goods is a tiny fraction of the new or even the used goods price. When new prices are so low, the miniscule price of stolen goods means that it is not worth the risk of getting caught stealing.
The decline in domestic manufacturing may also have a bearing on other crime rates. Depression and hopelessness in a population, paradoxically, do not necessarily lead to increased violence.
Look at any enslaved population; the first job of the keepers is always to create hopelessness, so that the population is easier to control.
Violence declines in any enslaved population--at least, violence against the keepers. And violent crime among the enslaved is rarely reported, partly because the keepers don't care and partly because the enslaved do not trust the keepers.
Criminals have either become anergic or else they have switched to confidence scams like organized religion. Religion, unfortunately, does not get reported as a crime.
You like it or not, but the famous "Broken Windows" and bandwagon effects are in play.
Crime falling in some places just because being dumb looter or thief is less respectable than being "easy" credit consumption bunny. Why should you try to knock down a drunk for a smartphone, or press some fast-food stall for money while you can drive a cheap new Korean car "brought" without even first payment.
But in places like Russia even this doesn't work. These miserable rednecks will never learn (being uneducated and unemployed have no access to A-class credit) and because they are the wast majority, anyone who is trying to lead modern consumption lifestyle are regarded as a peacock or even gay.
And, of course, being a low-level criminal is inferior comparing to a "successful" corrupted official of any kind, driving $100k cars on the very same streets. It is very common in Russia to see people who live in a miserable soviet time panel housing blocks, but having a luxury car in a parking lot.
So, street crime falls with easy credit, but this is only temporarily. Any severe economic disturbance and you will have it all back on the streets.
Yeah, to generalize, IMHO, a big part of this is there has been a move from blue collar to white collar crimes. Having grown up in South Florida myself, certainly there is anecdotal evidence of that. South Florida leads the nation in medicare fraud reaching possibly into the billions. Mortgage fraud was another linchpin during the financial crisis. There are tons of call centers in the area full of drug addicts who peddle every sort of scam you can think of to the gullible types in flyover country : automobile warranties, gold , carbon credits, home warranties. The latest craze is tax return fraud.
Here's an old article about medicare fraud:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/10/23/60minutes/main5414...
"They've figured out that rather than stealing $100,000 or $200,000, they can steal $100 million. We have seen cases in the last six, eight months that involve a couple of guys that if they weren't stealing from Medicare might be stealing your car," Ogrosky explained."
I think the simple answer a lot of these comments are pointing to is: civilization, wealth, progress, whatever you want to call it, but more and more people are aware of how nice life can be and also see that it doesn't really appear without hard work, course this is merely a hypothesis, but I think it's a pretty common sentiment in the first world that hard work creates an easier life.
Sure policing has gotten better, and crime prevention tech has advanced, but these studies tend to ignore the fact that would-be criminals rarely leave the house anymore...