Why has crime been down in a recession?

As evidenced by the recent census, people are leaving the blue states in droves for the red states where it is safer. If the population shift is in safer states then crime has to drop.

In the Northeast (blue states) homicides rose by 5.7%.

Another thing is that in many of the major cities (ie New York) the police departments make if difficult to report minor crimes. In NYC the big scandal is that the crime statistics have been doctored because of this. Where you have dead people voting is where you'll find irregularities in crime reporting too.

Great point by BW. If population numbers go down in high crime areas, overall national crime numbers are going to drop.

Quite the interesting commentary if it is really the case that blue votes=high crime rates.

White Pig Police crimes are up.

Show me some facts or figures. I live in Mississippi and property crimes (burglary, shoplifting, etc.) have increased drastically. Talk to any police force and they will tell you the same thing. And I seriously doubt anybody is leaving the Northeast to go south due to crime. Have you ever been to the south? Just about every single town has pockets of abject poverty and crime. Businesses are moving south due to cheaper labor. Believe it or not, you can't tie politics to every discussion and still make sense. You lose any kind of credibility.

(P.S. I'm a moderate, so don't accuse me of being a lefty)

Prosecution of the Wall Streeter who created this mess, the legislators who didn't go after them and the regulators who didn't do THEIR jobs either.

THAT is a sign that crime pays.

I also shook my head with Eliot Spitzer got a TV show.

We may well be in THE END TIMES based on all that s*it. Make your peace with God and Happy New Year.

One viable explanation is called "cooking the books".

International War Crimes are way up as Obama, Clinton, Biden, Gates, Pertraeus, rack up the atrocities and human rights violations in the United States and in Islamic lands.

Human Rights Commision wrote:

International War Crimes are way up as Obama, Clinton, Biden, Gates, Pertraeus, rack up the atrocities and human rights violations in the United States and in Islamic lands.

Because the Bush wars were so justified? Give me a break. Sometimes I think the Internet is the absolute worst thing that ever happened to mankind. It gives stupid people a forum to spread their moronic, misinformed views. And then people believe the crap they read. It's actually kind of dangerous. I'm about done with this forum because of the dumbass people who post here and I've been coming here for eight or nine years. Don't worry. I won't let the door hit me in the ass on the way out.

Thanks to Roe vs Wade.

towhee wrote:

Crime has been dropping in 2010, the opposite of what one would expect in a recession-damn-near depression.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/12/20/crime.statistics/index.html

And I don't know what's happening in the rest of the country but here in the Seattle area policing is being cut back due to budget issues. If your car is stolen, cops are not going to do anything beyond giving you necessary paperwork for your insurance claim. But now they have dropped all pretense of even trying to investigate car theft, which the local sheriff loudly announced in the press as being due to budget cuts. According to the link, car theft nationwide was down 9.7 percent in the first half of 2010.

So why is crime dropping in a recession? I have a few pet theories, but I want yours.

It is the opposite in the studies I have red. For examplehttp://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2009/09/red_states_have_higher_crime_r.phpBue states might have more absolute number of crimes but that is because a shit load more people live in a place like CA or NY than in wyoming. It is shocking that the numbers are even close. Urban areas (i.e. blue states) traditionally have been much higher crime than rural areas. Of course education and wealth have also been linked to less crime so that helps the blue states a lot.

towhee wrote:

Great point by BW. If population numbers go down in high crime areas, overall national crime numbers are going to drop.

Quite the interesting commentary if it is really the case that blue votes=high crime rates.

Thanks for that link--you'll notice I was careful to say if it is the case.

I googled to see if I could find other studies and didn't find much. Seems like an interesting question that has yet to be completely answered.

That aside, I have a few pet theories to throw out.

1) demographics. The first baby boomers turn 65 in 2011. Baby boomers tend to move through the decades like a pig thru a snake. With baby boomers getting into old age they are not doing many rapes and robberies.

2) guns--since Florida enacted its concealed-carry law in 1987 there has been a revolution in such laws across the country. This gif shows it in pretty striking fashion. If you click it you can see the transformation of the past 25 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Rtc.gif

3) The emergence of various other personal security tools--especially electronics. I bought my first cell phone years ago after a guy tried unsuccessfully to rob me. That experience convinced me I needed one, which I bought a few days later. Smartphones I think have huge potential in this area.

4) As newUncleB posted, book cooking. One time I was a crime victim when living in Seattle and was amazed how cops & prosecutors tried to brush me off. It took incredible persistance on my part to get the perp charged & convicted. I think cops are more inclined towards activities that produce revenue these days.

The Connecticut suburb I'm in rarely has murders, but there's a lot more theft now and even a big increase in bank robberies in this town and the ones around it.

Vienna vagabond wrote:

Thanks to Roe vs Wade.

Well, that's what the idea was in Freakanomics. Makes some sense, mathematically speaking. But it opens a terrible Pandora's box in terms of ethics. Whether we're talking about abortion, sterilization, or infanticide, the notion that we can improve our future by eliminating "undesirables" from the gene pool is troubling.

Unless you belive that a first-trimester fetus is a "person", then there is little ethical problem with people VOLUNTARILY choosing either abortion or sterilization (infanticide obviously yes). A win-win for society and the individual, which is why both are currently legal in the U.S..

Perhaps. But try this little thought experiment. Let's say that 5 years from now, the human genome project has isolated "the gay gene." (Yes, we're assuming right now that the fetus is not a person and that homosexuality is caused by genetics... if only for argument's sake.) And that a significant portion of parents voluntarily choose to abort, if only to spare their offspring the difficulty of living in a world full of terrible right-wingers who don't treat gays nicely. What then? Does being "pro-choice" look so progressive if it bumps up against a prenatal homosexual holocaust?

Also, look at the locations of our nation's busiest abortion clinics. Not exactly in the middle of the Beverly Hills 90210 zip code. I wonder how many of the "voluntary" choices we see to terminate pregnancies is at least somewhat influenced by everything from marketing to economics to social norms (to hop across the pond, China doesn't specifically mandate aborting daughters, but they do combine the one-child policy and a traditional social value placed on male offspring--and the results are heartbreaking).

Anyway, I don't want to hijack the thread. But if crime rates are actually down because there are less criminals in the demographic cohort due to Roe v. Wade, then that's a challenging thought.

Crime has dropped everywhere since the mid 80s. States and cities with strong gun control laws have seen the same drop off. If there was a good study on if gun ownership reduced crime, I expect you would hear about it. All the ones I have seen are marginal both ways.

The best-known study was by John Lott and David Mustard that later became a book "More Guns, Less Crime."

It's not universally accepted of course, but I think it's fair to say it has gotten a lot of support & corroboration from other academics.

There was a study by Steven Levitt of 'Freakanomics' fame that found that it made little difference.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf

If John Lott & allies had not had pretty compelling evidence, I don't think you would have seen the march of enactment of concealed-carry laws.

Genocide is on the rise in Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen as Obama slaughters thousands of White Semites and White Caucasians every week.

I count that as one of the marginal studies. There has been enough criticism of their methods and data. Guns and Gun control are a things that are not really backed up by data. They are more ideological beliefs driven by emotion than reason on both sides. Some people think guns will save them from crime. Others think they will be victims of gun crimes.

towhee wrote:

The best-known study was by John Lott and David Mustard that later became a book "More Guns, Less Crime."

It's not universally accepted of course, but I think it's fair to say it has gotten a lot of support & corroboration from other academics.

There was a study by Steven Levitt of 'Freakanomics' fame that found that it made little difference.

http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf

If John Lott & allies had not had pretty compelling evidence, I don't think you would have seen the march of enactment of concealed-carry laws.