Crime rates across the country dropped significantly last year and are at the lowest point in 40 years. Crime experts are baffled. Why, they are asking, are crime rates, including robberies and other thefts, dropping when high unemployment and the continuing recession would seem to predict the opposite?
No definitive answers yet.
Statistics show that U.S. big cities are safer than they have been in years (New York City excepted) and that the murder rate in towns under 10,000 population dropped 25 percent last year alone. Violent crime in New York rose last year, to make it an exception to other metropolitan areas, but last year’s rise followed several years of sharp declines there.
The numbers were released Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation based on re-ports from 13,000 law-enforcement agencies, maybe including Iola’s and Allen County’s. They are raw numbers that include no analysis.
Why is our country becoming more law-abiding even as the incentives to steal rise; even as the stresses brought on by the most stubborn recession since the 1930s continue to rub nerves raw?
Some explanations occur:
— The nation is growing older. The percentage of people under 25, those most likely to commit crimes, keeps falling. In addition, many of the under-25s are illegal aliens who face deportation if they are arrested. The risk is far greater than the potential reward.
— Police science has im-proved dramatically. The in-creasing use of DNA samples to make positive identifications has increased the rate of arrest and conviction after a crime has been committed. It would be difficult to exaggerate this advance. Only a few years ago lack of evidence was the most frequent explanation for the release of those arrested in very suspicious circumstances. Today a criminal has to work very hard to avoid leaving incriminating samples of his or her DNA at a crime scene.
— Fatal rampages in the nation’s schools and universities have forced society to pay more attention to deviant behavior among students. It is reasonable to assume that at least some of those who would have grown up to be violent criminals were discovered and helped toward normalcy be-fore they left school.
A LESS POSITIVE explanation is that crime rates have dropped because U.S. prisons are full. Fewer criminals on the streets mean less crime, some will say.
Point taken. Recidivism rates demonstrate that those in prison commit new crimes when paroled or released at a discouragingly high rate. Therefore, the numbers seem to say, lock ’em up and throw away the key.
Other countries give other testimony. Incarceration rates are far lower in all of Europe and most of Asia. Only Russia puts as many people in prison as we do, as a percent of the population. Crime rates are lower, too. The lower incarceration rates elsewhere do not result in higher crime rates. The explanation must be found in the differences between societies, between cultures.
If that is the case, then the reductions in crime rates in this beloved country of ours may be explained by changes in our national personality.
Turn off the radio, don’t listen to our violent political gutter fights, ignore Wall Street and its super-rich thugs and that explanation becomes easier to accept.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
