Why Is Crime Going Down in Big Cities?
While crime rates are going up in the US, in three major cities: NYC, Chicago and LA, it is going in the opposite direction. While innovate police work usually gets the credit, there is a demographic shift that is helping as well.
The most obvious change is that, thanks in part to high property prices, all three cities are shedding young people. Together they lost more than 200,000 15-to 24-year-olds between 2000 and 2005. That bodes ill for their creativity and future competitiveness, but it is good news for the police. Young people are not just more likely to commit crimes. Thanks to their habit of walking around at night and their taste for portable electronic gizmos, they are also more likely to become its targets.I would be curious to know what percentage of the decrease in crime can be attributable to these changes.
Another change is that poor Americans have been displaced by poor immigrants—who, as studies have repeatedly shown, are much better behaved than natives of similar means. This trend is symbolised by the disappearance of blacks. Roughly half of America's murder victims and about the same proportion of suspected murderers are black. In five years America's three biggest cities lost almost a tenth of their black residents, while elsewhere in America their numbers held steady.
via The Economist
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4 comments:
The apparent crime declines in those cities may be due to fraud. Police may be under political pressure to classify major crimes as minor and to avoid reporting minor crimes.
I have wondered about that myself, especially after seeing the police do it in The Wire. But, I believe that murder rates have gone down as well and that seems harder to fudge than robberies.
Black migration from these cities to the rest of the country is the chief reason for the decrease in these cities and the corresponding rise in the rest of the country. Let the Old South and Midwest deal with the problems NYC and LA are extirpating from their own city limits. Great.
Yes, poor immigrants are better behaved than native blacks. Everyone in the US is.
But poor immigrants are less well behaved than American whites or Asians, which is the pertinent thing to consider in formulating a logical immigration policy.
AE,
Black migration from these cities to the rest of the country is the chief reason for the decrease in these cities and the corresponding rise in the rest of the country.
Do you have stats for that?
I hear what you are saying about migration, but shouldn't the take away from this article be that if those in the Old South and Midwest are concerned about increased crime rates due to migration, that they ought to promote building fences around NYC and LA rather than the Mexican border?
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