In a recent article at Vox, Dara Lind and German Lopez looked at the various theories for why crime has declined so much over the past two decades, based on a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice. One of the commonly accepted explanations is the trend in “broken windows” policing, the idea that aggressively focusing on smaller quality-of-life crimes lowers the incidence of crime overall. In looking at the evidence, however, they conclude:
The bottom line: Too difficult to tell. Ultimately, different departments define “broken-windows policing” differently and implement it in different ways — and, again, often alongside other changes. It’s true it’s hard to tell why crime declines in cities, but that applies to broken-windows policing as much as it applies to other macro explanations.
Furthermore, one of the main proponents of the broken windows success story, Malcolm Gladwell, has started to back away from that conclusion.
The Brennan Center report also comes down hard on the idea that mass incarceration is beneficial for reducing crime.
One thing that characterized both the broken windows and mass incarceration trends is that they were disproportionately used against minority communities. The protests in the second half of 2014 and into this year are a reaction to that. Minority communities feel harassed and victimized by police. Eric Garner’s last words “I Can’t Breathe” struck a chord for many people across the country who’ve dealt with it.
I’ve never bought into the idea that broken windows has any benefit. The idea that you can create order through fear and intimidation is a delusion. The combination of broken windows and mass incarceration with a society where so many little things are criminalized, from jaywalking to selling loose cigarettes to pot possession, inevitably ends up with increased antagonism between the police and the public. We’re now at the point where trying to measure the benefits of these crime prevention strategies needs to be accompanied with efforts to measure their drawbacks.
News items from the last two weeks…
US Attorney General Eric Holder has called for a national moratorium on the death penalty.
American and British spies were able to steal the encryption keys from multinational SIM card maker Gemalto.
Dan Froomkin writes about how the Obama Administration’s promises to scale back the collection of bulk metadata by the NSA haven’t been met.
Clare Sestanovich looks at the way police agencies and legislators across the country are dealing with the use of police body cameras and the requests by the public to see the footage.
Andrea Peterson writes about what Obama is getting wrong about encryption technologies.
Peter Maass writes about the prosecution of Stephen Kim, who was jailed for leaking info on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen.
Non-violent animal rights activists are being tried as terrorists in the U.S.
A Federal judge refused to dismiss the case against the Kettle Falls five, a group of medical marijuana patients in eastern Washington who were arrested in 2012. There’s hope that the oldest defendant, who is 71 and fighting pancreatic cancer, will not be tried with the other four.
Police in Pasco are under fire for killing a homeless man named Antonio Zambrano-Montes.
The ACLU of Washington is suing a Skagit Valley hospital district for violating the state’s abortion laws.
A Federal judge in California ruled that he can’t decide on the constitutionality of the NSA’s spying because it would reveal state secrets.
Josh Harkinson writes about US Attorney in NorCal, Melinda Haag, and her continued attempts to shut down dispensaries against the wishes of cities and the state Congressional delegation. Jacob Sullum discusses the legality of this and the Kettle Falls five prosecutions.
San Francisco uses money intended for anti-terror purposes to catch fare evaders on their transit system.
San Diego police attacked a family who was entering their own family-run store late at night.
A bill advancing in the Arizona legislature would prohibit the names of officers involved in shootings to be released to the public for three months.
More shenanigans from the Albuquerque PD.
Texas is preparing to execute a man who is very likely innocent (again).
The religious fundamentalist governor of Kansas removed the state’s protections against discrimination for its LGBT state employees.
In Chicago, victims of torture at the hands of police are still fighting for justice decades later.
Police in Illinois raided a family’s maple syrup operation, which they somehow thought was a meth lab.
In Alabama, an Indian man visiting his family was severely beaten by police while walking around their neighborhood.
Prisoners in South Carolina are being sent to solitary confinement for accessing Facebook.
The trial of alleged 9/11 co-conspirators continues to be wracked by U.S. government misdeeds in years past.
Former U.S. soldier Matt DeHart, who worked with Anonymous to reveal government wrongdoing, lost his bid for asylum in Canada despite having been tortured by U.S. government officials.
Canada’s Supreme Court legalized physician-assisted suicide, joining only 4 other European countries.
The Harper government in Ottawa tabled a bill that was intended to expand the government’s anti-terrorism powers.
A British court ruled that the GCHK, Britian’s top surveillance agency, broke the law in its collaborations with the NSA.
A Ukrainian journalist was arrested for making a YouTube video encouraging people to dodge the draft
With the Russian annexation of Crimea, effective drug treatment programs have been shut down.
Amy Goodman interviews Sami Al-Arian and his daughter Laila about Sami’s decade long persecution by U.S. authorities over his pro-Palestinian activism.
Turkey led the world in requests to Twitter for content removal.
A human rights activist in Azerbaijan named Emin Huseynov, who is married to an American servicewoman, was denied assistance by the U.S. embassy in Baku and had to seek refuge at the Swiss embassy.
The CIA successfully persuaded Newsweek for a year to bury the story of the assassination of Hezbollah operative Imad Mughniyeh before it was reported by the Washington Post.
Nina Easton writes about the progress being made in Saudi Arabia to give more basic rights to women.
Bahrain continues its violent crackdown on protestors.
The United States is still blowing up children in Yemen.
The Associated Press released some harrowing statistics compiled on the civilian death toll from the summer’s Israeli attacks against Palestinians. Meanwhile, Palestinian MK Hanin Zoabi has been barred from the upcoming election over her harsh criticism of Israel’s occupation and treatment of Palestinian communities. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court overturned that ban, along with the ban of Baruch Marzel, who had been barred for participation in a racist political group.
After various governments and activists worked to free journalist Mohamed Fahmy from an Egyptian jail, he was set free on bail ahead of his trial.
In Iran, jailed Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian is being prevented from hiring an attorney.
A controversial Malaysian cartoonist was arrested for “seditious tweets”. More here.
The Cambodian government is under fire for rejecting the claims of Vietnamese asylum seekers and returning them to areas where they’re in danger.
An Indonesian lawmaker was criticized for proposing that high school girls would have to submit to a virginity exam in order to receive a diploma. International pressure continues to grow on the draconian drug penalties in Indonesia.
My own opinion on the drop in crime is that DNA collection is a primary reason along with fingerprint data, cameras and just better technology in general. There is now easy access to national data as well so traveling criminals are easier to track. And even cell phone records can be used as evidence of location. It’s just much harder to be a criminal these days.
Dunceman @1 brings up an interesting point. No longer will you have inner city youth incarcerated by scum police and prosecutors looking for the easy conviction. This is why many of my people are being let go after being wrongly incarcerated for crimes they never committed and were railroaded into forced confessions to help some white prosecutor in a libtard town claim look at me crime solving statistics. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/.....index.html
In another note, it’s great to see children protecting their parents…http://news.yahoo.com/woman-sh.....37065.html One less scum in Columbus! Puddy wonders if she had to take firing and aiming lessons some DUMMOCRETINS scream people need to take.
Can’t post NY Times links… interesting
So, if you had to propose between one and a small handful of reasons why crime is decreasing, Lee, what might they be?
Thanks for the post.
Lee you can delete 2-5. Looks like browser issues on laptop.
Puddy, the extra comments were deleted
@4
I think the decrease is a combination of several things, not just one. I think technology, video games, and the internet may be playing a bigger role than we realize.
I think as people grow up, they get a sense of how easy it is to get away with things, and it’s possible that people today grow up with a sense that it’s harder to get away with crime because of the kinds of technical advantages that people have to find people.
I also think the drug war may also have played a role. The late-80s and early 90s was a time when the response to drug trafficking was really ramped up. This obviously didn’t reduce drug consumption in the US, but it led to a situation where criminal organizations outside of the US were able to dominate over criminal organizations inside of the US. I rarely ever hear this phenomenon mentioned. But it’s very possible that the crime decreases are just the balloon effect of our escalations in the drug war. Now, places like Mexico and Honduras have much higher crime rates.
@ 7
Mexico and Honduras have much higher crime rates because the criminals run most of what we nominally call “government”. There are whole states in Mexico that are almost completely controlled by the drug cartels. Crime reduction in the United States is not a product so much of increased enforcement of particular laws, but increased selective enforcement of those laws among a more specific demographic.
It is a simple thing claim greater success in crime reduction when the primary crack down is engineered towards one segment of society that has a tradition of lower expectations of access to education, economic benefit and social responsibility, not to mention political influence.
Notice, that the gloves are off again with the die-hard racists and religious jingos that used to completely dominate American political discourse up until the mid-1960s. The law enforcement program was then, as now, geared toward the weakest political demographic.
Whites are not given nearly the same length of sentences, nor are they charged as harshly for the same crimes or so heavily patrolled as non-white populations that have a long and well publicized reputation for criminal behavior, as propagated in the corporate media.
The drug wars were not promoted so much as geared towards getting criminals off of the streets, as they were about creating and maintaining that weakness. One cannot change how law enforcement behaves towards a particular demographic when one is not permitted to vote, hold office or have access to quality education when one is a convicted felon, as exemplified in places like Ferguson Mo or anywhere in Florida or Texas or Louisiana. Whites are often offered reduced charges for the purpose of sentencing when compared to non-white populations for the exact same crimes.
Couple that with elimination of lead from motor fuels and commercial pigments, and other environmental toxins and you get a reduced crime rate. The crime rates are still rather high when you isolate jurisdictions with a high level of localized environmental toxicity, like the areas around petroleum refineries and corporate farming operations.
This thread is 43% polluted.
Broken windows or leaded gas? Kevin Drum has postulated that the decrease in crime correlates with decrease in lead emissions. 20 or so years after taking the lead out of gasoline, crime decreases. Different countries took the lead out of gas at different times and crime decreased approximately 20 years later in those countries. See Google for details.
@10
In the Vox article linked above, they claim that there could’ve been some difference from that, but since crime levels were reduced among people all ages, it can’t explain the phenomenon alone. Same with abortion. It’s likely that other forms of modernization are occurring simultaneously and causing a cumulative effect.
@8
“Mexico and Honduras have much higher crime rates because the criminals run most of what we nominally call “government”. There are whole states in Mexico that are almost completely controlled by the drug cartels.”
True, and my hypothesis is that the crackdown on American-based DTO’s shifted more of the bigger profits to those countries, allowing that increased wealth to overwhelm those governments.
Part of the difficulty in determining the causes here is that different types of crime happens for different reasons, so there are likely several different factors each having their own effects on specific types of crimes. I’d love to see these analyses get more granular to determine this more specific effects.
“We’re now at the point where trying to measure the benefits of these crime prevention strategies needs to be accompanied with efforts to measure their drawbacks.”
I think we’re beyond that point. Official sanction of aggressive policing has turned the police into bullies who harass, harm, and kill ordinary law-abiding citizens. It’s time for police to look inward and do something about the criminals in their own ranks.
@ 12 Lee:
I see the primary factor as being poverty and access to higher education. Mexico is a plutocracy, for the most part. The original owners who took possession of much of the national infrastructure, including educational institutions has remained in power since the 1920s. The various regimes have changed, but mostly only in name while the primary old money families have retained political power and much of the economic power.
They know where the fast money is, and it is simplicity itself to dangle a small portion of that cash in front of people who are still living in poverty conditions, especially in the rural parts of the country. When one can go from making maybe $5 a day ( the Mexican minimum wage) to a thousand dollars a week or more, it requires no real thought process as to which choice one will make, especially when your house doesn’t even have running water piped into it. When one can dangle $10,000 cash in front of a police chief to look the other way while one runs a million dollars a week worth of cocaine or heroin through his town, his choice is simple when he’s only making maybe $300 a month.
Nobody is totally incorruptible. The Bush and Koch families have proven that over and over.