Violent crime rate is down, but few believe it

With the economy alarmingly troublesome, many criminologists were saying
that the crime rate would escalate. In fact following the Police Executive
Research Forum gathering of police chiefs in 2005, a report was published
in 2006 called the Gathering Storm, which warned that violent crime was
on the rise. In an article published
in the New York Times today, the title says it all: The Real Murder Mystery?
It's the Low Crime Rate.

Police chiefs from major cities gathered at the forum concurred that
violent crime was rising and would escalate very quickly. But today
we read that "from New York to Los Angeles to Madison, Wis., major
crimes, violent or not, are down between 7 percent and 22 percent
over the same period last year. In Chicago, the number of homicides
dropped 12 percent. In Charlotte, N.C., hard hit by the banking crisis,
that total fell an astounding 38 percent. It is too soon to conclude that
crime will decline throughout the recession, and the new numbers, which
come from standardized reports that police departments send to the F.B.I.,
have yet to be made into a national measure. But crime was supposed to
go up, not sharply down."

Reading the actual report that was published after the Violent Crime Summit
met in 2005, it is worth noting that reference is given that crime rates had
declined or remained flat for a number of years. Putting things in perspective,
if there have been no homicides for two years and then there is a homicide,
can we infer that crime rates are rising? or can we only state categorically
that there was a homicide and see if it is aberrational or indicative of an
upward swing.

Experts are puzzled and have no explanation nor a reliable predictor
of future trends. Improved policing methods and innovation have no
doubt played a role, but the exact extent to which police can take
credit is an unknown.

One can only hope that whatever is working to cause the rates to drop
will continue to do so.

Theories will abound and so will extensive research by criminologists.
But predicting human behavior is not open to reliable scientific exploration.
Since one does not know the group that will definitively commit a violent
crime, scientific research, complete with control groups, and variables
will probably not prove to be definitive.

We need to watch the official reports from the UCR and NCVS and see
if in fact the trend continues unabated.