The Great Crime Decline

Interesting, but they ignore other possible/probable contributors to the widespread drop in violent crime,such as reduced exposure of lead in early life, fewer unwanted children due to birth control and abortion, fewer parents who spank their children.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-great-crime-decline-and-the-comeback-of-cities?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace, talks to CityLab about how the drop in crime has transformed American cities.
CityLab | Richard Florida

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Violence started to rise in the 1960s and stayed at an extremely high level from the ‘70s to the beginning of the ‘90s. That’s when violence started to fall. By 2014, the homicide rate was 4.5 per 100,000 people, and that was the lowest rate in at least 50 years. 2014 was really one of the safest years in the history of the U.S.

It happened because city spaces transformed. After years in which urban neighborhoods were largely abandoned, left on their own, a whole bunch of different actors came together and transformed urban neighborhoods. Part of that was the police. Law enforcement became more effective at what they were doing by using data about where police should be stationed, where the problems were arising. They started to shut down open-air drug markets to really end the crack epidemic, which was a major source of violent crime all over the country.

There were other changes, too. Private security forces expanded. Private companies started hiring private security guards. Home-owners started to install alarm systems and camera systems. Technology improved that made motor-vehicle theft much less successful. Cities started to install camera systems.

So it wasn’t just the police. It was about the transformation of urban spaces, about a set of changes that took place at the same time. Part of that was a very local mobilization against violence that was driven by residents and local organizations to retake parks, alleyways, city blocks, and to confront violence in a way that communities have always tried to do but that they did in a much more systematic and comprehensive way in the early 1990s. These local organizations had a causal effect on violence and their emergence should be seen alongside the expansion of police forces as one of the most important changes that took place in the 1990s.

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The first study that I did looked at a survey of children who lived in the same neighborhoods, but as part of a large study they were given assessments of cognitive abilities at different points in time. And purely by chance, some kids were given this assessment just before a local homicide had taken place in their neighborhood, some right after. The timing was completely random, so it allowed me to look at kids who lived in the same exact place and isolate the impact of being exposed to that incident, a homicide, which can completely change the feel of public space in a neighborhood.

The results from that study were disturbing. The kids who took the assessment in the days after a local homicide had taken place scored as if they had regressed back to their level of academic skills from two years earlier. The effects were so large that I thought they were wrong. So we replicated it with an entirely different sample of children, and the magnitude of the second study was larger than the first.

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