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The “Great American Crime Decline”: Possible Explanations

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Handbook on Crime and Deviance

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

This chapter examines the key features of the crime decline in the United States during the 1990s–2010s but also takes a broader look at the violence declines globally. The author argues that violent and property crime trends might have diverged recently, with property crimes increasingly happening in the online sphere. An important distinction is made between ‘contact crimes’ that require a victim and offender to be present in the same physical space, and other crimes. Contrary to the uncertainties engendered by property crime, the declines in violent (contact) crime are rather general, and have been happening across all demographic and geographic categories within the United States and throughout the developed world. An analysis of research literature on crime trends has identified 24 different explanations for the crime drop. Each one of them is briefly outlined and examined in terms of conceptual clarity and empirical support, with 9 crime decline explanations highlighted as promising. Most of these promising explanations, being relative newcomers in the crime trends literature, have not been sufficiently empirically tested and thus require further research. One potentially fruitful avenue for future studies is to examine the association of the most promising crime decline explanations with improvements in self-control.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Curiously, this trend was predicted by a founder of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and a “Father” of criminal justice in the South-eastern United States, Moore (1994).

  2. 2.

    This possibility has been corroborated for the United States by Lauritsen, Rezey, and Heimer (2016) who show that, during the 1970s–1980s, rape and assault rates based on official police statistics do not correctly reflect the trends in these crimes evident from victimization data. Thus, the authors conclude that homicide and robbery rates are the only reliable official violence indicators over the longer time period. At the same time, other authors doubt the ‘changes in reporting practices’ explanation based on victimization survey data that showed no changes in the percentage of crimes reported to police (for example, see Aebi & Linde, 2010, p. 272). Regardless, the ‘sensitization’ and ‘recording’ arguments still stand.

  3. 3.

    Even though data on violence are not completely free of the missing data problems, the convergence of the data from different sources outlined in this section, reflecting different modes of data gathering and different types of violence, confers a degree of certainty about the violence trends in the United States for the past several decades.

  4. 4.

    https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s.

  5. 5.

    Notice that murder rates have been multiplied by 20, and property crime rates divided by 10 to allow including all the trends on the same scale. In addition, 3-year average smoothing is applied to all crime rates, to compensate for the uncertainty inherent in the data: crime rate data are inexact due to differences in victim reporting and police recording practices, as well as due to uneven patterns of participation of police departments in the UCR program.

  6. 6.

    https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=nvat.

  7. 7.

    Notice that homicide arrest rates are multiplied by 1000 to bring them to scale.

  8. 8.

    https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/research-data-technology/reporting-systems/ncands.

  9. 9.

    https://wonder.cdc.gov/mortSQL.html.

  10. 10.

    Homicide rates for other racial categories besides Black and White are not available for the entire time period and, even when available, are often deemed ‘unreliable’ by the CDC for many of the years (if based on too few cases).

  11. 11.

    The data for years 1700–2015 were provided by Claude Fischer in personal email communication in May 2018, and I am very grateful to Dr. Fischer for his responsiveness and generosity.

  12. 12.

    At the same time, Baumer and Wolff (2014a) have found that there is more heterogeneity in trends for the 2000s compared to the 1990s. The same conclusion is reached by Parker et al. (2017) who have used data on homicide rates in large U.S. cities and found evidence of two separate crime drops: 1994–2002 and 2007–2011.

  13. 13.

    There is also a possibility that these areas of high crime are shrinking, in addition to the crime declines happening within them. Gentrification may be contributing to both processes though its effects on crime are not as straightforward as one may think, especially considering that it has been happening since the 1970s (Covington & Taylor, 1989; McDonald, 1986; O’Sullivan, 2005; Papachristos et al., 2011).

  14. 14.

    Though Berg et al. (2016) have also found the evidence of reductions in both prevalence and frequency of serious violence among black youth in their sample (based on the Pittsburgh Youth Study data).

  15. 15.

    Many other researchers also convincingly challenge the notion that longer sentences reduce recidivism by demonstrating the criminogenic effects of imprisonment (for example, see Vieraitis et al. 2007). Overall, see an excellent review of the relationship between punishment, deterrence, and crime by Tonry (2018).

  16. 16.

    For example, Strom and MacDonald (2007, p. 62) conclude: “We find only partial support for the role of drug market activity [measured by drug arrests] on the increase in youth homicide”. Fagan et al. (2007, p. 700), using different methods and measures, reach a similar conclusion: “neither drug selling activity nor increases in problematic drug consumption adequately explain the run-up and decline in gun homicides”. Berg et al. (2016, p. 377) find no evidence either (based on the analysis of individual-level data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study): “We did not detect a significant difference in illegal drug sales during the period [of crime declines in the 1990s]”.

  17. 17.

    Green (2016) and Greenberg (2016) mount some thoughtful critiques of the hypothesis and of its preliminary test by Wendel et al. (2016a). Also, see the previous footnote for disconcerting evidence on a closely related issue.

  18. 18.

    Contrary to a common-sense expectation that ‘poor people steal to feed their families’, poverty and related economic factors do not seem to be associated with property crime (Tittle & Villemez, 1977; Elliott & Huizinga, 1983; Kposowa et al., 1995; Krivo & Peterson, 1996). The lack of relationship between poverty and property crime in developed nations is likely due to the protections of the welfare safety net (Hannon & DeFronzo, 1998; Pratt & Godsey, 2003; Rogers & Pridemore, 2017; Tuttle et al., 2018). There is also evidence that austerity measures (and thus reductions in welfare protections) increase serious violent crime cross-nationally (Tuttle, 2018).

  19. 19.

    In an analysis of racially disaggregated youth violence trends, Lauritsen et al. (2013) also find nuances and complexities that imply differential impacts of economic factors on minority youth compared to White youth (also see Blumstein’s (2010) summary of research findings about minorities’ greater vulnerability to economic conditions).

  20. 20.

    For additional evidence about the effects of macro-economic indicators in other countries, see Hooghe et al. (2011) and Andresen and Linning (2016).

  21. 21.

    A variation of this argument has also been developed by Baumer (2008) who has determined that the (lagged) percentage of births to teenage mothers (and thus children growing up in high-risk family environments) is significantly associated with crime trends 15–19 years later.

  22. 22.

    Pridemore and Chamlin’s (2006) interesting study has found significant contributions of alcohol consumption towards homicide and suicide rates in Russia over a 50-year period. Savolainen and his colleagues’ (2008) intriguing analysis of Finnish homicide trends for the past two and a half centuries finds that heavy alcohol consumption patterns are a likely reason for the outlier status of Finland as a nation with the highest homicide rates among other developed European democracies. The authors show that a typical Finnish homicide stems from an alcohol-fuelled argument between middle-aged unemployed men who are either family members or acquaintances/friends.

  23. 23.

    Though also see O’Brien (2011) for a critique of methodological issues with the age-period-cohort effect confounding in McCall and Land’s (2004) analyses.

  24. 24.

    At the same time, it is possible that the educational system of that time was overwhelmed by the baby boom generation. It is also possible that schooling was often cut short among those who were eager to become manufacturing workers in the post-World War II economic expansion era (1950s–1960s), which may have paid its unfortunate dividends in the increasing crime/violence outcomes in the 1960s and 1970s.

  25. 25.

    The most basic requirement for a violent act to occur is the presence (contact) of a victim and offender within the same physical space. Thus, if a potential offender is, say, interacting with a potential victim over Skype (or SnapChat, or Google Hangouts, or Facebook Messenger, etc.), an act of violence is highly unlikely to happen, even if one person gets really, really mad at the other one. In such circumstances, a potential violent act is likely to stay within the “potential” realm and not materialize due to the inevitable cooling-off period introduced by the distance.

  26. 26.

    Another process operating to reduce opportunities for crime is the transition to cashless monetary transactions (Wright et al., 2017; Pridemore et al., 2018) though this process likely applies mainly to reducing acquisitive (theft) and predatory-acquisitive (robbery) traditional crimes, which leaves no clear explanation for declines in homicide and other forms of violence.

  27. 27.

    Also see McDowall’s (2014) insightful short piece on the properties of a crime-rate-generating process through the lens of a time-series analysis.

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  1. University of New Haven, West Haven, CT, USA

    Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo

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  1. Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo
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  1. Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Marvin D. Krohn

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, Radford University, Radford, VA, USA

    Nicole Hendrix

  3. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

    Gina Penly Hall

  4. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

    Alan J. Lizotte

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Tcherni-Buzzeo, M. (2019). The “Great American Crime Decline”: Possible Explanations. In: Krohn, M., Hendrix, N., Penly Hall, G., Lizotte, A. (eds) Handbook on Crime and Deviance. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20779-3_16

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