One of the odder trend stories that pops up every recession is the confusion of crime experts who seem oddly surprised about the idea that the recession hasn't caused more violent crime.
Criminology experts said they were surprised and impressed by the national numbers, issued on Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and based on data from more than 13,000 law-enforcement agencies. They said the decline nationally in the number of violent crimes, by 5.5 percent, raised the question, at least in some places, of to what extent crime could continue to fall — or at least fall at the same pace as the past two years. Violent crimes fell nearly the same amount in 2009.
Here's Mark Kleiman talking about a similar trend story from last year:
Bad news: The Times hed is “U.S. Crime Rates Fell Despite Economy.” Reporters still can’t get it out of their minds that crime naturally rises and falls with the unemployment rate. It doesn’t. (Update: Peter Yost of AP makes the same mistake: he credits the decline with “bucking a historical trend that links rising crime rates to economic woes.” But that “trend” is entirely imaginary. The Roaring Twenties were a high-crime period; the Great Depression was mostly peaceful. The economically stagnant Eisenhower era had crime rates at historic lows; the Kennedy-Johnson boom in economic growth accompanied an explosion in crime rates. The Great Crime Decline didn’t pause for the recession of 2000-2001. The idea that crime and economic activity move in opposite directions is what Mark Twain called “a vagrant opinion, existing with no visible means of support.”
As Kleiman explained to me last year, the most relevant statistic when it comes to crime is the number of people in a given country who are in prime "crime committing age" between 15 and 30 years old. That's why the so-called Baby Boom generation correlated with such a large increase in crime. It also might help to explain the success and persistence of protest movements in the Middle East--young people are confident in defying their elders in part because there are so many more of them.
It just seems like it should be true that violent crime automatically rises during recessions, even though it isn't. Yet perhaps because it seems so intuitive, it remains a perennial trend story.
