Crime and Inequality

Is crime related to inequality? In one sense yes - this report says the opportunity for crime is highest in the transition zones "where the haves and the have-nots are in close proximity," but the report also says it's not clear how crime is related to the degree of inequality:

Crime and the gap between rich and poor, Marketplace: Kai Ryssdal: The FBI report out today on the nation's crime rate ... "The Uniform Crime Report" ... confirms what police organizations and neighborhood activists have known for months — that violent crime rates are rising.

Not a lot, just a percent or so overall, but still rising. After years during which crime — and especially violent crime — fell dramatically. Those also happen to be the same years the gap [between] America's rich and poor grew to its widest point since the Second World War. Marketplace's Steve Henn looked into expanding economic inequality and rising crime.

Steve Henn: Chuck Wexler is executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. Wexler likes to think of himself as a kind of infectious disease expert — on the lookout for the next plague. He sees today's crime stats as an early warning.

Chuck Wexler: And in a lot of mid-size and large cities, we're seeing significant spikes in violent crime — not all crime, but in violent crime.

Unlike the great crime decline in the 1990s, the changes now aren't uniform. In Los Angeles, Dallas and Denver, overall crime fell despite big up-ticks in some neighborhoods. But crime rose in most large and medium-sized cities. Shooting up in cities as different as Las Vegas, Nev., Jackson, Miss. and Washington D.C.

The mystery though — one that really no one has an answer to — is what's causing crime rates to change. ... Criminologists say in some ways, this is all kind of predictable.

Jeffery Butts: The transition zones between wealth and poverty are where the opportunities for crime are greatest.

Jeffery Butts is a research fellow at the University of Chicago. He specializes in juvenile crime.

Butts: When you're 15, 16, 17, you hear stories about how easy it is to force someone to hand over their wallet. You're not going to get on a bus and go across town to do that, you're going to walk to an area that's near you. Areas where the haves and the have-nots are in close proximity, you'll find those crimes of opportunity happening more often.

Butts says economic factors can tell folks a lot about which neighborhoods are more likely to be violent than others — or even what groups of people are more likely to commit a crime. What's a lot harder to understand is why one neighborhood or one city would see a sudden increase.

Butts: It's very difficult to predict crime trends, and we learned a lot over the past 10 years about how risky that proposition is.

Predictions in the early 90s that legions of poor, young men would soon push up crime rates were way off the mark. Instead, there was a drop in crime that taught cops and criminologists something kind of counter-intuitive: crime isn't a given because of economic inequality.

Criminologists say it's interesting to think about what stayed the same in New York City during the 90s. The population didn't change radically. Did the city fix the schools? No, not really. Was poverty wiped out? Not even close. Did illegal drugs disappear? Maybe from open air street markets, but not in hospital emergency rooms. What about income inequality? In New York, it's still enormous, but the crime rate fell 74 percent. It turns out when it comes to crime, it may not be about the economy after all.

Of course, there are papers like this:

Inequality and Crime: Separating the Effects of Permanent and Transitory Income, by Matz Dahlberg and Magnus Gustavsson: Abstract Earlier studies on income inequality and crime have typically used total income or total earnings. However, it is quite likely that it is changes in permanent rather than in transitory income that affects crime rates. The purpose of this paper is therefore to disentangle the two effects by, first, estimating region-specific inequality in permanent and transitory income and, second, estimating crime equations with the two separate income components as explanatory variables. The results indicate that it is important to separate the two effects; while an increase in the inequality in permanent income yields a positive and significant effect on total crimes and three different property crimes, an increase in the inequality in transitory income has no significant effect on any type of crime. Using a traditional, aggregate, measure of income yields mainly insignificant effects on crime.

Though I should note the paper uses Swedish data. For the U.S., a quick search produces lots of papers supporting an inequality-crime link, e.g.:

Inequality and Crime, Morgan Kelly, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2000: Abstract This paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties. The behavior of property and violent crime are quite different. Inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime... By contrast, poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime, but little on violent crime. ...

This isn't my area, but there seems to be more evidence for a link between crime, poverty, and inequality than implied in the report.

Comments

[reason]

I thought demographics were important - what proportion of the population is young men. Doesn't seem to be mentioned. But sudden spikes - probably due to specific factors like gang warfare, or the decline in power of a local illegal drug monopoly.

[jamzo]

didn't the law and order types tell us that tough sentencing and more prisons would deter crime?

us has more people in jail than anywhere on earth and we still have "bad guys"

[ken melvin]

What he is saying is interesting and there may be correlation, but it is an incontrovertible fact that crime goes up and down with unemployment. Raising crime rates are more likely proof that unemployment is quite high. Purse snatching doesn't require much gradient in income.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Rise in crime tied to ailing economy (today)

Detroit sees 11% jump; property crimes, murders up sharply.

Ronald J. Hansen and Norman Sinclair / The Detroit News

DETROIT -- With Michigan's economy sputtering last year, robberies and other thefts soared in Detroit, fueling a slight rise in violence and a steep increase in overall crime in 2006.

Robberies went up 6 percent and overall property crime climbed 15 percent in Detroit last year, according to the annual crime report. Those crimes helped push overall crime up 11 percent. In the sharpest rise in a decade, murders rose by 44 to 417 for the year.

On Monday morning, a Detroit man was electrocuted while stealing copper, another sign of desperation in the troubled city.

Nationally, violent crime was up a second straight year, ending years of declining totals, while property crimes declined nearly 3 percent. In Detroit, violent crime increased more slowly than the national trend.

Violent crime rose 13 percent in Flint, but most of Michigan's other large cities, including Warren and Sterling Heights, saw little change to their usual crime totals.

The rise in Detroit's property crimes led some to suspect the region's long-battered economy in the surge in thefts...............

[bakho]

People with jobs have less time to commit non-white collar crimes.

[ken melvin]

bakho,

Yeah, interesting that he didn't try associating an increase in white-collar crime with say - GWB.

[Winslow R.]

Lose the minimum wage/eitc and replace it with a guaranteed minimum job.

[evagrius]

Lose the minimum wage/eitc and replace it with a guaranteed minimum job.

But they'd have to be Repulican party loyalists, at least for now.

[anon]

Actually I didn't see this topic when I just posted on the next one. This one makes the connection I suggested for me, and before me.

[Meh]

The obvious issue is that there's a set of complex relationships at work. It's not just about income inequality, it's also about unemployment. But those two things don't run to the same cycle.

Not to mention that if inequality runs through psychological effects, then you need to estimate the point in time where people become aware of the inequality. Even if it is more physically instrumental there is likely a threshold change effect. After all, it takes some time before income inequality turns into the physical manifestation of wealth inequality.

Few of these studies seem to take this into account.

[James Kroeger]

Quite a while ago, when there were riots in Los Angeles and many disparaging comments were being made about the looters, I pointed out that there was a reason why the poorest classes were more inclined to loot than members of the middle class. The single most important reason is that the poor have little to lose compared to members of the middle class.

Thanks to mass advertising, the poor develop the same tastes/desires for big-screen TV's, etc., that members of the middle-class have, but they do not have the means to obtain them legally and have little hope of ever obtaining those means. If you live in a middle-class neighborhood and have a job that enables you to realistically aspire to owning a big-screen TV some day, you have too much at risk if you were to try to exploit the absence of police protection. It becomes easy for you to brag about your moral identity.

If you are poor and have nothing but jobs at McDonald's to look forward to the rest of your life, then you will not be giving up much if you happen to get caught stealing one of those TV's, giving a tempting opportunity. (Also the reason why drug-dealing becomes so appealing.) If these people end up in jail for a period of time, what have they really lost?

This is the single biggest reason why those who once lived in poor neighborhoods quite easily develop middle-class 'morals' when they've been fortunate enough to get a job at a unionized auto-manufacturing plant. The moral of the story? Give these people something (like a good paying job with a future) that would be too valuable for them to risk losing and suddenly they become "good people."

[James Kroeger]

...didn't the law and order types tell us that tough sentencing and more prisons would deter crime?
Like most of the solutions proposed by the Republican Party, the "tougher sentencing" answer is pathetically flawed. Their reasoning: increase the horror of the punishment and you will deter crime with little or no additional expense. What is wrong with this 'solution' is that most people who commit serious crimes do not expect to get caught.

A far greater deterrent to crime is to increase the certainty of getting caught. One rather obvious way to do this is to hire more police officers (remember Bill Clintin's anti-crime approach?). Republicans don't like this solution because it would cost them more money. Cheap bastards...

[jag]

In 1991 Boston had 2079 policemen and 62,000 crimes reported. From 1997 reported crimes dropped below 40,000 with an average of about 35,000 in recent years and with crimes in 05 below 35,000. As of May, 2006 reported crimes were only 12,000. During all this time police levels averaged only slightly over 2000.

In the last couple of years murders (mostly gang related) have nearly doubled. Last year, police solved only about 4 percent of the city's 290 nonfatal shootings. Boston police Tcleared 38 percent of the 74 homicides in 2004 and 29 percent of the 75 committed in 2005, when Boston hit a 10-year high .

Since Boston has been run exclusively by Democrats and certainly didn't get cheated on the opportunity to hire more officers in the 90s (but didn't) and still saw crime plummet, it appears the idea of merely adding more police has little to do with the dramatic, total, drop in Boston crime.

As far as the "certainty" of being caught being an issue, even with crimes per officer falling by half, successful prosecution of murder in the city of Boston has been steadily falling in the last three years.

Why did crime fall so much in the 90's? Probably a combination of fewer young men, more economic opportunity and longer incarceration. It certainly wasn't due to any increase in force in Boston.

So a Democratic city doesn't avail itself of the opportunity to add officers during record revenue increases, sees crime fall, and, even with total crime dwindling, solves murder even less effectively than before. Are they just cheap or stupid? I'd say neither. The murders being committed are notoriously hard to solve much less prosecute. Witnesses refuse to cooperate and, even when they do, jurors refuse to convict.

The serious crime problem in Boston is slender; mostly young males virtually randomly murdering each other. It won't be solved by more police but by a change in the pervasive thug culture that is "hip" right now.

[Patricia Shannon]

I am usually a very honest person. But when I was unemployed so long that I was losing weight because I couldn't afford enough food, I started thinking about doing things I normally wouldn't even consider, such as robbing a bank, nude dancing, or even prostitution.

Anything is easy if somebody else has to do it.
- Patricia Shannon

[James Kroeger]

So a Democratic city doesn't avail itself of the opportunity to add officers during record revenue increases, sees crime fall, and, even with total crime dwindling, solves murder even less effectively than before. Are they just cheap or stupid? I'd say neither.
I do not disagree. While it is true that I did use the hiring of more police officers as as example of an effort to ensure a greater likelihood of getting caught, it is certainly not the only factor that comes into play. All I was actually doing was comparing the worth of two variables in particular: (A) the horror of the punisment threatened, vs. (B) the certainty of getting caught. (I did neglect to say "all else equal", didn't I?) I actually believe that another variable---one that you alluded to---is an even more significant factor in deterring crime: economic opportunity alternatives for those tempted by crime. Thanks for introducing it...

[James Killus]

I see, so "violent crime" goes up by a percent that's a big deal and suddenly we've got to figure it all out.

Of course during the big decline in the 1990's everyone and his brother was taking credit for it, but now it's Somebody Else's Fault, I sure.

In California, at least, I know that the solution is always "more prisons" because there is a Prison Guards' Union, and both political parties always fall over themselves to please them, the Democrats because they love unions, I imagine, and the Republicans because they love prisons. From the outside, of course, and only at a substantial distance. Still, it's such a joy to see Bipartisanship in Action.

[ken melvin]

One would prevent crime, the other, punish crime.

[anon]

The US upper class should have some long time worries, but are probably too complacent to entertain them. Long terms they face millions abroad who hate them (as our leaders) and there may be millions here at home who will also come to hate them. When too many people hate you, even if they don't have tanks and nukes, you are in danger.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070605/ap_on_el_pr/obama_blacks

[KThomas]

anon

African-americans aren't the only ones ready to riot.

Even President Bush has, at the very least, paid lip-service to the growing inequality in this country.

Maybe Tricky Dick can start another war and we can forget about it all.