The Missing Crime Spike
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Heather MacDonald notes that the leftist conceit that poverty breeds crime has been thoroughly discredited.
The recession could still affect crime rates if cities cut their police forces and states start releasing prisoners early. Both forms of cost-saving would be self-defeating. Public safety is the precondition for thriving urban life. In 1990s New York, crime did not drop because the economy improved; rather, the city's economy revived because crime was cut in half. Keeping crime rates low now is the best guarantee that cities across the country will be able to exploit the inevitable economic recovery when it comes.Unfortunately, her identification of a likely cause of our nation's relatively low recent crime rate is inherently a warning, given who's in charge.
-- CAV
2 comments:
On my way home from work this morning I was listening to 'The Current' on the CBC(the Canadian equivalent of the BBC). They had someone on from Stats Canada talking about crime rates and then the author of Homicide America, Randolph Roth, came on to argue that homicide rates correlate to Americans trust in government. He predicted that a there would be a drop in African American crime rates would drop if Obama was elected because that segment of the population would have more trust in government. Early statistics from 2009 do seem to support his prediction. He also claims that states that were most opposed to Obama have seen there crime rates go up. It is an interesting argument but I have not had the time yet to investigate his claims for myself. I thought I would mention it though since you posted on the topic. If you would like to listen to the show you can follow this link below.
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2010/201001/20100106.html
Thanks for pointing that out, JC.
Not having time to look at that at the moment, but the statistic as well as the interpretation do sound thought-provoking.
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