The New Math On Crime
Murder is up, but alarms about a new surge in violence seem overstated-so far
Anomalies. But there are plenty of caveats to the new numbers. New York City's nearly 10 percent rise in murders-to 590-doesn't look as bad after taking account of the city's unusually high number of "reclassified deaths," those resulting from injuries in prior years. And the city's number of homicides is still historically low; more than 2,000 people were killed in New York in 1990 alone. Houston neared its highest number of murders in a decade, but the increase largely matches the city's surge in population from Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
Several big cities, including Dallas and San Francisco, bucked the murder trend completely. Washington, D.C., ended the year 27 murders shy of its 2005 total. Los Angeles's historically undermanned police force saw its fifth straight year with a reduction of violent crime.
In fact, the 6 percent increase in murders in the country's 20 largest cities is lower than the 9 percent rise the FBI charted in the first six months of the year. And once smaller cities are included, the FBI recorded only a 1.4 percent increase in that time. On average, smaller cities actually showed dramatic declines in their number of homicides.
That is more variability than was seen in the '80s and '90s, when murders spiked and then plummeted almost everywhere. The inconsistency leads some experts to contend that this year's increase is more an idiosyncratic phenomenon than a national crisis. Even among criminologists, there's not a lot of agreement over what's happening-or why.
In his new book, The Great American Crime Decline, Franklin Zimring, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school and an expert on crime statistics, tackles the prevailing explanations for what causes changes in crime numbers and finds them wanting. "Any blip in homicide statistics is unnerving because we don't know why we've had this epidemic of good news," he says. "There are a hundred theories and no confirmations."
Yet even some experts who remain agnostic on the significance of the more recent rise in homicides point to factors that could have contributed. Alfred Blumstein, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, highlights a diversion of resources from traditional crime fighting to preventing terrorism and a reduction in social services to the poorest neighborhoods. He also notes the phasing out of federal money for the Clinton-era COPS program, which gives grants to put more police officers on the street. The PERF report, "A Gathering Storm," partially blames the loss of funds for shrinking police forces in many cities. "I must confess, I expected [murder] to go up two or three years ago," Blumstein says.
With the Dow reaching new records last year and relatively low unemployment, an economic explanation for the rise in violence would seem unlikely. But Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says the economy's strong finish in 2006 belied a volatile year, with concerns about fuel costs and the end of the housing boom. The lack of economic stability especially impacts the urban poor, who are most likely to turn to crime, he says.
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