Tag Archives: crime

James Q. Wilson on the difficulties of studying culture

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In a long opinion piece looking at possible explanations for the reduction in crime in America, James Q. Wilson concludes by suggesting that cultural explanations are difficult to test and develop:

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression’s fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society’s cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-driven social scientists. But we can take some comfort, perhaps, in reflecting that identifying the likely causes of the crime decline is even more important than precisely measuring it.

I find it a little strange that a social scientist wants to leave culture to the humanities (“novelists and biographers”). This sounds like a traditional social science perspective: culture is a slippery concept that is difficult to quantify and make generalizations about. I can imagine this viewpoint from quantitatively minded social scientists who would ask, “where it the data?”

But there is a lot of good research regarding culture that utilizes data. Some of this data is fuzzier qualitative data that involves ethnographies and long interviews and observations. But other data regarding culture comes from more traditional data sources such as large surveys. And if you put together a lot of these data-driven studies, qualitative and quantitative, I think you could put together some hypotheses and ideas regarding American culture and crime. Perhaps all of this data can’t fit into a regression or this isn’t the way that crime is traditionally studied but that doesn’t mean we have to simply abandon cultural explanations and studies.

Drop in crime due to decreased lead exposure?

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The crime rate in the United States is down again and people are looking for reasons why. Here is an interesting possible answer from James Q. Wilson: crime is down because people are exposed to less lead. This is how the reduction in lead would help:

In recent years, neuroscientists have made important progress in identifying the precise mechanisms by which lead exposure reduces impulse control…

While we can’t always control what we feel – many of our urges are ancient drives, embedded deep in the brain – we can control the amount of attention we pay to our feelings. When faced with a tempting treat, we can look away…

The tragedy of lead exposure is that it undermines one of the most essential mental skills we can give our kids, which is the ability to control what they’re thinking about. While the unconscious will always be full of impulses we can’t prevent, and the world will always be full of dangerous temptations, we don’t have to give in. We can choose to direct the spotlight of attention elsewhere, so that instead of thinking about the marshmallow we’re thinking about Sesame Street, or instead of thinking about our anger we’re counting to ten. And so there is no fight. We walk away.

This is an interesting argument. I suspect there is a bigger story that could be told about lead reduction over the years: Wilson hints at the background as the EPA announced a phased-in reduction in the lead in gasoline in late 1973 and lead was banned from paint in 1977. These facts are taken for granted now but I imagine these were public health announcements that created some discussion at the time, particularly from industry lobbying groups.

Is there a way to test the lead hypothesis by looking at a comparison group?

If this turned out to be a primary factor in the reduction of crime, how would public officials, police officers, and the public work with this information?

Columnist cites FBI data regarding Ray Lewis’ football lockout crime claim

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Earlier this week, I posted about Ray Lewis’ comment that if there is a football lockout, crime rates will increase. While Lewis has taken a media beating, I suggested that I hadn’t seen anyone cite data to refute (or support) Lewis’ claim. A columnist in Salt Lake City does look at some data that perhaps sheds light on the relationship between football and crime:

Well, it turns out that crime rates among the general population do actually decrease during the football season. The FBI believes the trend is not connected to football, but to the change in weather and the end of summer break for students. Apparently, criminals like to do their work in warm weather and when they’re not on vacation.

Research indicates that the only crime connection to football might be the increase in domestic violence on NFL Sundays when home teams lose emotional games. Maybe Lewis is wrong; maybe the lockout will reduce crime in the home.

I wish there were specific citations in this column but here is the gist of this cited data: overall, crime goes down in fall (compared to summer) and domestic violence goes up after certain game outcomes. The problem here is that it is difficult to separate the effects of fall (weather, kids back to school, etc.) from the effect of football games themselves. And if there are no close football games, then domestic violence cases might go down. Per my earlier post, I still think we could get more specific data, particularly comparing crime rates on Sundays with or without games and crime rates on other nights with football games (Monday, Thursday, Saturday) versus those same nights without games.

This columnist also throws out another idea that I had thought about:

Then it occurred to me: Maybe Lewis didn’t mean the fans would go on a crime wave without football; maybe he meant THE PLAYERS.

That’s not a big stretch. Look how Antonio Bryant has fared in recent months without football. Look what Michael Vick, Plaxico Burress and Ben Roethlisberger, among many others, did when they were away from football. Idle hands and all that. Maybe what Lewis meant was that we better end this lockout before the players starting (ran)sacking villages and throwing innocent bystanders for losses and intercepting Brinks trucks and so forth.

This image would fit with research suggesting NFL players are arrested at fairly high rates.

Looking for data on Ray Lewis’ comment about the football lockout and crime

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Ray Lewis has gained a lot of attention with his recent comment that crime would increase if there was no football in the fall:

In an interview with ESPN, Lewis suggested that the NFL lockout could cause a spike in crime. “Do this research,” Lewis said. “If we don’t have a season. Watch how much evil, which we call crime, how much crime picks up, if you take away our game. There’s nothing else to do.”

Lewis offered no evidence from prior work stoppages that crime rose when the NFL season shut down. “I don’t know how he [Lewis] can make that kind of determination without having more facts,” New York Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka told CBS Sports, in response to Lewis’ comments. If the current dispute between owners and the players crept into the season, forcing the cancellation of games, the economic impact would be harsh for the stadium workers and local retail establishments who serve fans on game-day. There will be significant spillover effects. But would a bored populace turn to street looting because the Steelers aren’t on TV?

Kiwanuka is in agreement with a lot of others that have suggested that Lewis’ comments were strange and unsubstantiated. But why haven’t we seen many people use data to refute Lewis’ claim? We could look at two possible scenarios that Lewis was describing:

1. The more limited scenario: in the times when football games would normally be played, crime would be higher. I remember news stories during the Chicago Bulls’ championship runs in the 1990s about the decrease in ambulance calls and emergency room visits during games and I recall seeing similar stories about NFL playoff games. Couldn’t police departments or other agencies quickly go through their files to see whether crime rates differ during NFL games compared to other times? (Run a comparison between Sunday afternoons of bye weeks or weeks when the team plays on Sunday, Monday, or Thursday night compared to typical Sunday afternoon game times.)

2. The broader scenario: overall, crime would be higher when there are no football games. This would take some more data work to find comparison periods in the fall/early winter when there is no football at all. How about looking at cities by year when they had a NFL playoff team compared to years that they did not? I’m sure someone could figure this out with the appropriate crime data and years of football records.

Explaining the continued drop in crime in 2010

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The FBI recently released preliminary crime statistics for 2010 and crime was down again. While this is  good news for many places, scholars are left wondering what explains the drop:

Crime levels fell across the board last year, extending a multi-year downward trend with a 5.5 percent drop in the number of violent crimes in 2010 and a 2.8 percent decline in the number of property crimes…

“In a word, remarkable,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. In Fox’s view, the declines signify success for aggressive law enforcement and corrections programs and comprehensive crime prevention efforts. He said the crime levels could easily rise if the current environment of state and local budget cutting extends to law enforcement measures that are working.

Some experts are puzzled.

Expectations that crime would rise in the economic recession have not materialized. The size of the most crime-prone population age groups, from late teens through mid-20s, has remained relatively flat in recent years.

Whoever could provide a comprehensive answer to this this puzzle could attract a lot of attention. In my Introduction to Sociology class, I have my students read some about the prominence of the “broken windows theory” in the 1990s and the various commentators who think it does or doesn’t work. The people involved in putting that theory into practice in the 1990s, like William Bratton and Rudy Giuliani, rode that wave for quite a while. It is interesting to read Fox’s answer above: he seems to attribute the drop to “law enforcement measures.” Even here, there are multiple strategies in play. While communities might want a single factor or strategy that they could hone in on, crime, like many other social issues, is a complex matter with a lot of involved actors.

h/t Instapundit

From gated communities to cameras and license plate readers

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In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was an increase in scholarly work addressing the growing phenomenon of gated communities. Such communities were often criticized for at least giving the appearance of trying to withdraw from the world, being exclusive, and indulging the fears of suburbanites. So I wonder what these researchers might think about a community that wants to use cameras to read the license plates of everyone who enters their community:

Kings Point is one of the wealthiest villages on the North Shore, and residents want to keep it that way with the latest security…

To protect its 3.3 square miles, Kings Point plans to install 44 cameras and license plate readers at each of the 19 points of entry. The devices will take pictures of every vehicle and license plate and compare them to data bases.

“It will alert us to suspended registrations, felonies, stolen cars, order of protection, sex offenders, things like that,” Kings Point Police Commissioner Jack Miller said…

There’s no way of knowing whether the project will reduce crime. It may just send it off to other towns that are less secure.

Police said the project will cost $1 million, and will be paid for over several years. They also stressed only police will have access to surveillance information.

The article mentions one other key piece of information: there seems to have been a (small?) string of recent crimes in the community which has prompted the installation of cameras.

There may be some privacy issues here but I think some of same concerns about gated communities could be raised about this move. This is a wealthy community: according to Census data, there are 5,305 residents, the median household income (in 2009 dollars) is $144,000, the median home value is $1,000,000+, 55.3% of those 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or more, and the community is 95.3% white, 3.4% Asian, and 3.1% Latino. Is this simply a move to protect the exclusivity of this community? While the article references plans in New York and London (presumably to fight terrorism), does a community like this really need to go to this level? If you look at some neighborhood/real estate websites, Kings Point Village seems to have quite a low crime rate (with a fun feature of this link being you get to see your odds of “becoming a victim” in whatever community you search for). This seems to me to be a much better question than whether police should have access to this information and therefore invade your privacy.

Additionally, it will be interesting to see what police do with this data. Which criminal offenses are enough to warrant attention? Is the goal of the program just to have a record of who was in the community so that they can be tracked down later or will there be more immediate actions taken? If the goal is to just to track down people after a crime has been committed, will residents be happy or will they suggest that the crime should have been prevented?

CHA reports on families displaced by the Plan for Transformation

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After the recent removal of the final public housing high-rise residents in Chicago, the Chicago Housing Authority released figures Wednesday about what has happened to the displaced high-rise residents:

In the 12 years since the CHA began its Plan for Transformation, an ambitious effort to overhaul public housing, the number of families receiving CHA housing subsidies has been cut in half, with only 56 percent — or 9,388 households, excluding senior citizens — in the system, according to a study prepared by the CHA.

Only 60 of those families have rented or purchased homes in the suburbs, a finding that challenges long-held beliefs that crime had followed former residents from the high-rises into their communities…

The CHA, however, acknowledged that it has lost track of 2,202 families that once lived in CHA housing, and another 1,307 households found housing without CHA assistance.

Former residents now live in 71 of Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods, according to the report. However, the majority of them moved to neighborhoods such as Englewood, Woodlawn, Auburn Gresham, Roseland and Greater Grand Crossing, communities that already were burdened with high crime and poverty. Others moved into working-class African-American communities such as Chatham and South Shore, saturating formerly stable neighborhoods of single-family homes with renters.

Overall, this article seems to shy away from asking this question: has the removal of these high-rises led to better lives for their former residents or improved conditions for poorer neighborhoods in the city? This article doesn’t offer much positive evidence: very few have moved to the suburbs, the CHA has lost track of some families while others have dropped out of the system, and former high-rise residents encounter stereotypes when moving to new neighborhoods. The high-rises may be gone but the deeper issues are still present.

Mayor Daley on campus

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Influenced by his connection to former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was on the Wheaton College campus today for a lecture and fundraiser. Daley gave the kind of speech you might expect at the end of a politician’s career: he highlighted his successes and how much he enjoyed being a public servant. Here are a few things that he said:

1. Chicago is a world class city. He cited a few recent publications (Standard and Poors, Foreign Policy) that have called Chicago a top ten world city.

2. Chicago has been successful because it was “never afraid of changing” and “never lived in the past.”

3. About government spending: the federal government doesn’t have to balance its budget while other forms of government (state, counties, municipalities) do. Government spending has to level off. To help America move forward: we “need confidence,” we need to move away from being “a country of whiners,” and we can compete if we all sacrifice a bit for the common good.

4. Daley said his biggest issue to face was the education system and he hopes the improvement of this system is his enduring legacy. When he first became mayor, he helped stop social promotion. The Chicago schools today teach Chinese, Russian, and Arabic to compete on the world stage. Teacher’s unions have a responsibility to give more (he cited their 6 hour contractual work day while also saying he knows lots of good teachers and he is not blaming them). He said, “education is the cure of all the social ills we have.”

5. The success of Chicago has always been a public-private partnership. He cited Millennium Park as an example. This is what is behind his efforts to make connections with China so that Chinese businesses will see Chicago as the friendliest American city to them.

6. He said he had worked with mayors in the Chicago region, throughout the state, and around the world to discuss common issues. He said numerous times that the common issues they face are not partisan issues.

7. When asked what advice he would give to Rahm Emanuel, he said something to the effect of don’t give advice to people if they don’t ask for it.

Seeing him in person, I was reminded that he can be quite funny, personable, and can connect with a crowd as an “everyman.” He consistently illustrated his larger points with personal stories and interactions he had. His policy recommendations seemed fairly centrist: better education, government has to add value or other contract out or privatize certain services, working together across the region is necessary, government has to work with business leaders to get things done, elected officials and all government workers (teachers, police/fire, etc.) have to work for the people. He told a number of jokes and also several times mentioned advice he had received from his father.

Some other issues were not addressed: the population loss in Chicago in the 2000s, the perception that the city has a crime problem (even though crime has been down – I thought he might highlight this as a success), budget problems in Chicago and where the money from privatization has gone (parking meter deal, the Skyway), corruption in city government, persistent segregation and inequality, the limited number of public housing and affordable housing units (even with the notorious projects, such as Cabrini-Green, being closed), Daley’s legacy of building (outside of mention of Millennium Park and Chicago as a world leader in “green roofs”), whether Chicago’s educationally system has improved dramatically or significantly, and regional issues that need attention such as congestion and expanding O’Hare.

Blog and order

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Overthinking It has posted some analysis from a painstaking survey of Law and Order seasons 1-10 (hat tip:  Above the Law):

[I]n November 1993, at the same time the DAs of L&O were stumbling to a 59% success rate, Rudy Guiliani was elected Mayor. One of his big campaign issues had been, well, law and order, and tackling the crime rate was the centerpiece of his first year….Giuliani didn’t just fight crime, he fought crime in a lot of very visible ways that average New Yorkers would take note of. I don’t mean to take anything away from his acheivements [sic] — there was a remarkable drop in crime during his administration. But even before the murder rate started dropping, Giuliani created a strong public perception that there was a new sheriff in town. He restored people’s faith in law and order, and Law & Order immediately responded.

Here’s where art really started imitating life:

The [L&O] murder rate dropped by about 15%, and the L&O conviction rate shot up by more than 20%. There was a whole new feeling of optimism in the city and on the show (not to mention a young new DA by the name of Jack McCoy).

For those of you who want to dig into the data for yourselves, Overthinking It has posted the dataset here (Excel spreadsheet).

While no one would accuse L&O of being 100% realistic, I would never have suspected that it tracked real-world aggregates this closely.  It is one thing to base a single episode loosely on a true story, but it is impressive that the show statistically mapped NYC crime rates so directly.

“The Wire” creator defends depiction of Baltimore

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In response to comments from the Baltimore Police Commissioner that the television show The Wire is going to harm  the city, creator David Simon defended the show:

Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.  That is the police department we depicted in The Wire, give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last twenty years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O’Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.  Commissioner Bealefeld, who was present for much of that history, knows it as well as anyone associated with The Wire.
We made things up, true.  We have never claimed otherwise.  But respectfully, with regard to our critique, we have slandered no one.  And to the extent you can stand behind a fictional tale, we stand by ours – and more importantly, our purpose in telling that tale.

It would be interesting to consider whether television shows and movies and other fictional works can have a significant impact on what people think about locations (and even further, whether it influences people’s decisions to move to certain places). The Wire was a critically acclaimed show but one with relatively low rating and even with more widespread DVD availability, it is still not a mainstream show.

There certainly is some link. Depictions of the inner city have impacted decades of suburban residents. I’m reminded of the Japanese businessmen who my father worked with when I was younger who knew two things about Chicago: it was the home of Michael Jordan and it was home to gangsters immortalized in film.

Now whether these depictions should reflect reality or some idealized or stereotyped view is another question. Simon defends The Wire on the grounds that the show was intended to showcase a different set of priorities:

But publicly, let me state that The Wire owes no apologies — at least not for its depiction of those portions of Baltimore where we set our story, for its address of economic and political priorities and urban poverty, for its discussion of the drug war and the damage done from that misguided prohibition, or for its attention to the cover-your-ass institutional dynamic that leads, say, big-city police commissioners to perceive a fictional narrative, rather than actual, complex urban problems as a cause for righteous concern. As citizens using a fictional narrative as a means of arguing different priorities or policies, those who created and worked on The Wire have dissented.

And this is a perspective or story that is rarely discussed in much depth.

I would be curious to hear how Simon would want people to view Baltimore after watching the show. Should they identify with the residents? Should they dislike the institutions? And ultimately, what should or could the viewers do to help change the situation?