less crime today than at any point in your lifetime?
if you are my age or younger and live in the united states, serious street crime has now fallen to the lowest levels recorded in your lifetime. according to the just-released 2004 fbi uniform crime reports, the murder rate is at a forty-year low and the overall violent crime rate is the lowest in thirty years. the ucr numbers are based on crimes known to the police, but they are really the most reliable and valid data source for homicide. ucr rates for rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft and larceny-theft were also down again this year, as were rates of property crimes such as burglary, larceny-theft, and shoplifting. for offenses other than homicide, these numbers should be considered alongside trend data in victimization and self-reported offending. in triangulating these sources, however, one generally gets an encouraging impression. the local picture is murkier, with serious crime trending upward in several important categories. nevertheless, here too the trend is decent if not encouraging -- particularly since the "murderapolis" days of 1995-1996.
so do you feel safer than you did 5 or 10 or 20 years ago? if not, why not? because 16,000 u.s. murders is still way too many murders? or, has the street crime effect on safety diminished relative to other concerns for you? do you think support for harsh anti-crime measures will diminish if the downward trend continues, or will punitiveness be cited as the reason for diminishing crime rates?
posted by christopher uggen @ 10:37 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
I don't really know the area, but has there been much good research that ties aggregate, or national, crime rates to how "safe" individuals feel? I mean, do declining national crime rates make people in "rough" neighborhoods feel more safe, or do rising crime rates make people better areas feel less safe.
I have seen research that links more localized changes in crime to feelings of safety, but wonder about the extent to which national crime trends impact individual feelings of safety.
Its actually a pretty simply empirical question, I imagine it must have been done, and I am just showing my ignorance by not knowing about it.
Roberts, Julian V. 2004. “Public Opinion and Youth Justice.” Crime and Justice
31:495-542.
Austin, James, John Clark, Patricia Hardyman, and D. Alan Henry.
1999. “The Impact of ‘Three Strikes and You’re Out.’” Punishment & Society 1:131-162.
Let me first state how guilty I feel listing citations in a blog comment box; with that out of the way, I use these articles in susequent sessions of a criminology class I've taught twice. The first examines how the fluctuation of crime rates is unrelated to public perceptions of crime. Instead, the public perception is more closely related to media portrayals of crime (which tend to overemphasize cases of anomalous crimes, without taking the typical media sensationalism into consideration). The pathway that ends with public policy, then, begins with media coverage, and ends with politicians passing legislation relatively unrelated to actual crime rates; instead, the political desire to satisfy a constituency overrides data-based reasoning (but that's not exactly news).
The second article asks about how much "three strikes" laws have affected courts, jails, and crime rates; they conclude with a resonant "not very much" on all counts. Whether deliberate or not, they argue that "three strikes" legislation offered an easily interpretable (it's baseball!) label that conveys the message to the public that politicians are becoming "tough on crime."
Short story long, I am somewhat convinced that public perceptions of crime is, and will continue to be for some time, completely unrelated to actual crime rates. I don't recall anyone being elected on a campaign recommending prison reform in favor of supporting/rehabilitating convicts, so I can't reasonably forsee a change in how politicians or the media operate.
Mike
Thanks for the great information! The second article seems a bit removed from my question, where as the first seems closer to the point... I will grab it today.
You say the Roberts piece "examines how the fluctuation of crime rates is unrelated to public perceptions of crime"
I am still kind of interested in the question of safety perceptions, do you know if that is addressed in either piece? Are perceptions of safety related to crime rates?
mike and punk, thanks for the cites and insights. jeff and i have a couple figures in chapter 4 of our book on this question that i'll post later. essentially, the gss "afraid to walk in own neighborhood at night" indicator tracks the ucr fairly closely, but the "most important problem" indicator bears no relation to actual crime rates (as k. beckett and others have shown).
I think the question being tackled too acadmically (imagine that). Punitive measures are justified often on the basis of a "crime explosion" or some such tortured metaphor, but are just as often justified on the fear that crime could explode. Because, as we all know, if we let up for a second, the streets will be flooded with superpredators who will rape every duaghter, wife, and mother (in that order) in existance. Fear of violent crime is one of those eay win, hot button issues. After all, who's opposed to stopping crime? Who's opposed to creating safer streets "for the children"? I hesitate to say that punitive measures will ever significantly decreases (in the absence of some sort of monumental shift in public opinion) because it's such a lazy, yet easy, way of getting votes.
I look at it in a similar way to the aboriton debate. Republicans don't want to outlaw abortion, because if they ever did succeed in making it illegal, they would lose THE issue they can almost always win on. I don't know the numbers on abortion rates, but it's similar to crime in that the actual rate has little significance to those outside of academia. What matters is what average folk fear to be true, and we all know that average folk are pretty afraid of pretty much everything.
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