USA TODAY
Two decades ago, crime was big news — and bad news. Violent crimes had been rising steadily since the 1960s, making Americans both angry and scared. In Washington, Republicans and Democrats sparred over who had the better solutions, in much the same way as they do now over health care and budgets. Shows such as COPS and America’s Most Wanted were launched to huge audiences, and some local television stations experimented with crime-only news broadcasts.
Contrast this state of affairs with last week’s announcement from the FBI that violent crime dropped 5.5% last year despite a deep recession that has made millions desperate. It was the third such drop in a row and a continuation of the downward trend going on for almost 20 years. News coverage of the event was perfunctory, the political posturing minimal.
What’s behind the crime decline? Criminologists have largely dropped grand explanations. The settling of crack cocaine turf wars seemed plausible a decade or so ago, but it doesn’t explain why violent crime has continued to drop. The premise that poor economic conditions inevitably lead to more crime has also been called into question. As the Great Recession demonstrates, losing a job doesn’t suddenly turn law-abiding people into criminals.
Crime experts now tend to cite a range of factors — large-scale incarceration, better policing and police technology, an aging society, among other things — without any real sense of how much of a role each factor plays or how they interact.
While the criminologists are befuddled, much of society is simply relieved. But the nation should not grow overconfident that the sources of past crime waves have been stilled forever.
While crime is down overall, it is not down across the board or in all places. Crime among young, African-American men — many of them without strong male role models in their lives — has not dropped much. This suggests that certain inner-city pockets could regenerate a broader contagion unless deep and difficult sociological problems are addressed.
More immediately, with the economy wreaking havoc on state and local budgets across the country, the temptation to cut policing and crime prevention programs is strong. States as diverse as California and Mississippi have experimented with early release programs. That’s OK if it merely affects non-violent criminals caught up in excessive mandatory sentence programs enacted when crime was big political theater. But early release programs for violent offenders, designed to save money, appear shortsighted and counterproductive.
If communities get too smug about the nation’s falling crime rate, it won’t continue falling. The best approach is to combine satisfaction with the trend with gritty determination to make it continue.
Copyright 2010 Gannett Company, Inc.