After two long years of economic woes, the recession in the United States has managed to create a few unexpected benefits — namely a noticeable drop in crime — and confound a few economists and criminologists along the way.
Until this recent downturn, a bad economy was easy to read: crime and deviant behaviour (think drug dealing, fencing and the like) go up when the economy goes down. But the latest set of police reports across the country doesn't square with past downturns. The underground market, it seems, has been turned on its ear in this recession.
"This is a real break in past patterns," criminologist Richard Rosenfeld told about two dozen economists from around the world who gathered in Stone Mountain, Georgia., this month for the second annual meeting on the "Economics of Risky Behaviours."
More eyes on the street
Across the nation, crime, on the whole, is down considerably, especially property crimes and violent crimes such as robbery. The counterintuitive nature of this recession makes sense when you peel back the layers. Take home burglaries, for instance.
"We assume crime climbs when the economy is down," said Rosenfeld, curators professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. But "during high unemployment, more people are at home and that cuts the rates of burglary."
Additionally, people tend to carry fewer valuables these days, so there are fewer street crimes such as robberies, Rosenfeld added.
The drug trade, which usually grows and flourishes in a recession, has been contained mostly within the groups of people who were already buying and selling drugs. In the past, disputes over drug deals often resulted in murders or other violent crimes. Now, they're contained and rarely reported. After all, who's going to go to the police about a drug deal gone bad?
"The absence of expansion in the drug market could be related to the absences of crime increasing," Rosenfeld said.
Add last year's stimulus money, which extended unemployment benefits and food stamps to millions and helped many communities keep more police on the street, and you get a clearer picture. "That may have cushioned the low-income against the full effects of the economic downturn," Rosenfeld said.
But don't break out the champagne just yet. Rosenfeld cautions that the usual crime wave that accompanies an economic downturn may just be slow in arriving.
"These factors aren't going to continue much longer," he said.
"The latter half of 2010 is going to be the real deciding factor" as to whether the current crime wave hiatus is a fluke or a real trend. —©2010 New York Times News Service
