Asia-Pacific

US crime falls despite recession

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-08 09:52

LOS ANGELES: US law enforcement agencies are reporting a surprising drop in crime last year, with homicide rates in some major cities plunging to levels not seen in four decades, despite a deep and prolonged recession.

The FBI's latest nationwide figures show that violent crime for the United States as a whole declined by 4.4 percent in the first half of 2009, compared with the first half of 2008, led by a 10 percent drop in murders.

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Falling crime in urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles, coinciding with the worst economic slump since the 1930s, is challenging long-held social theories linking lawlessness to joblessness.

Experts say much of the credit for lower crime likely goes to proactive law enforcement strategies in which police quickly boost their presence in selected urban areas to deter would-be bad guys, using real-time analysis of street intelligence.

Scholars also suggest that the recession itself, contrary to conventional wisdom, could mute crime as rising unemployment keeps more people at home, where they are more apt to avoid trouble and look out for others .

"If they are at home, that means more eyes on the street, and more eyes on neighbors' property," said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. With less income at their disposal, people also venture out less frequently to nightspots during times of economic distress, leaving them less likely to engage in criminal behavior or to become victims of crime, he said.

Year-end statistics from the largest US cities defy the predictions of many police commanders who braced for a crime wave they expected to be unleashed by the recession, rising home foreclosures and social despair.

Last year turned out to be the safest on record in New York City since the city began gathering comparable data in the early 1960s.

Crime overall was down about 11 percent in New York and off 12 percent Chicago. The number of murders in Dallas fell for a second straight year in 2009 to its lowest mark since 1967.

Major crime in the second-most populous US city Los Angeles fell for the seventh straight year in 2009, with murders down 18 percent from 2008 and overall crime at its lowest level in half a century.

Reuters-Los Angeles Daily News