Despite Bad Economy, Crime Rates Plummet

(Dec. 24) – Looking for some good news in a year full of economic woe? Crime was down in 2009. Way down.

According to figures released this week by the FBI, the overall crime rate dropped by 4.4 percent this year. Property crime dropped by 6.1 percent and homicides were down an eye-popping 10 percent. In fact, crime rates have fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s.

It may seem counterintuitive that at the same time a recession has forced more people to live on less, crimes such as car theft and burglary are down markedly in comparison with a year ago – down 19 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. So why has the picture gotten so much brighter over recent decades?

In Thursday's Los Angeles Times, which details a staggering drop in overall crime in that city, including a 20 percent decline in auto thefts, Los Angeles Police Department Cmdr. Andy Smith tells the paper, "Vehicles are getting much harder to steal. A few years back with all the old American cars it just took a screwdriver and some yanking. Any joy-rider could walk down the street and rip off a car."

In New York, where crime fell by 8 percent, Mayor Michael Bloomberg bills the metropolis as "the safest big city in America." In a written statement, Bloomberg credits his police force. "When the economic downturn began, some thought crime could only go up. Instead of listening to the conventional wisdom, our police department has driven crime down again in 2009 as they did in 2008."

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist who teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, agrees that better vehicle security systems and policing that uses real-time computer data to target high-crime areas have helped slow illegal activity. He has other theories, too, as he writes on The Crime Report blog: "When unemployment rates are high, more people remain at home, and burglars prefer to avoid occupied households."

Interviewed by The Associated Press, James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University, posited that the decades-long drop in crime could be attributed an aging American population. "As the over-50 population grows, he said, crime goes down, even while other social costs, like health care, go up," AP writes.

Meanwhile, writing in Psychology Today, science journalist Shankar Vedantam takes issue with all of the aforementioned theories for their lack of evidence. Instead, Vedantam says he has another, more proven explanation for the declines in crime. "The most convincing evidence I have seen to explain the drop in crime is something much less sexy and much more rigorously studied – and also studiously ignored. Systematic research across several countries shows that as lead poisoning rates fall -- by phasing out lead in gasoline, removing lead from household paint, and making it mandatory to de-lead homes where young children are living – the crime rate falls about 18 years later."

Whatever the explanation, the fact remains that, in many American cities, crime is on the wane. Then again, not all of the FBI's numbers were so rosy. Violent crime rose in cities like Detroit and Seattle. And though urban crime tumbled by 7 percent in cities with 1 million residents or more, overall crime edged up 1.7 percent in towns with populations between 10,000 and 25,000.