Violent Crime and Property Crime Levels Fall to the Lowest Levels Since 1973

2003 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 109861112110420
Author(s):  
Sungil Han ◽  
Jennifer LaPrade ◽  
EuiGab Hwang

While western countries have had a decentralized policing model for many years, some countries, such as South Korea, still employ a centralized, national police department. Responding to calls for reform, South Korea launched a pilot program and implemented a more decentralized policing structure in Jeju Island in 2006. This study adds to the policing literature by offering the empirical comparison of a region before and after decentralization of a police department. This study will examine the intervention effects of police decentralization in Jeju, specifically related to crime rates, crime clearance rates, victimization, trust in police, and fear of crime. Using propensity score matching and interrupted time series analysis, this study found that the decentralized policing intervention significantly reduced total crime, violent crime rates, and property crime rates that lasted throughout the intervention period, while improving crime clearance rates for violent crime, as well as reduced fear of crime among residents.


Author(s):  
Randy R. Edwards ◽  
C. Kenneth Meyer ◽  
Stephen E. Clapham

There has been a steady decline in violent crime in the United States in the past twenty years. Trends indicate that violent crime was down 13.4 percent below the 200l level and for property crime, society is experiencing the tenth straight year of declining rates. Yet, the Southern region of the U.S is disproportionately represented by percentage of overall violent crimes committed nationally. Also, the South is over-represented in the number of police officers who are feloniously killed or assaulted. This empirical research concentrates on violence directed against police in the U.S. and begins by examining the type and magnitude of workplace violence, then transitions to a review of the sociological, political, and psychological literature, focusing on the individual and social causes for violence generally. It ends with an examination of officers feloniously killed (their personal characteristics and that of their assailants), the level of violence against police by type of arrest or enforcement situation, and by region of the country. This paper provides a comparative analysis of street-level violence for general municipal assaults, robbery, and the most rapidly growing type of felonious assaultambush attacks. The paper concludes with an analysis of the societal and behavioral characteristics and considerations related to violence against police. The authors present a number of current trends, training recommendations, and suggestions for improving officer workplace safety.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001112872110547
Author(s):  
Jordan R. Riddell ◽  
Alex R. Piquero ◽  
Catherine Kaukinen ◽  
Stephen A. Bishopp ◽  
Nicole Leeper Piquero ◽  
...  

We investigated the relationship between COVID-19 stay-at-home regulations and property and violent crime indexes in Dallas, TX during the first 6 months of 2020. We tested for changes in property and violent crime trends using four key “intervention” dates: the stay-at-home order issued by Judge Clay Jenkins (March 24), the start of Governor Abbott’s phase one of re-opening (May 1), a second phase of more widespread re-openings (May 18), and a third phase of increased capacity limits for businesses (June 3). Our analyses point to two main findings: (1) the time between the initial stay-at-home policy and the phase one re-opening was associated with an increase in the trend of both violent and property crime (although at lower levels than pre-pandemic); and (2) the third phase of re-opening the City of Dallas was associated with higher daily counts of property and violent crime. Our findings suggest that policy makers need to consider policies not only related to police enforcement but also allocation of other social services, particularly when such a sudden policy (e.g., stay-at-home order) is implemented.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kolawole Ogundari

Purpose The cyclical behavior of US crime rates reflects the dynamics of crime in the country. This paper aims to investigate the US's club convergence of crime rates to provide insights into whether the crime rates increased or decreased over time. The paper also analyzes the factors influencing the probability of states converging to a particular convergence club of crime. Design/methodology/approach The analysis is based on balanced panel data from all 50 states and the district of Columbia on violent and property crime rates covering 1976–2019. This yields a cross-state panel of 2,244 observations with 55 time periods and 51 groups. In addition, the author used a club clustering procedure to investigate the convergence hypothesis in the study. Findings The empirical results support population convergence of violent crime rates. However, the evidence that supports population convergence of property crime rates in the study is not found. Further analysis using the club clustering procedure shows that property crime rates converge into three clubs. The existence of club convergence in property crime rates means that the variation in the property crime rates tends to narrow among the states within each of the clubs identified in the study. Analysis based on an ordered probit model identifies economic, geographic and human capital factors that significantly drive the state's convergence club membership. Practical implications The central policy insight from these results is that crime rates grow slowly over time, as evident by the convergence of violent crime and club convergence of property crime in the study. Moreover, the existence of club convergence of property crime is an indication that policies to mitigate property crime might need to target states within each club. This includes the efforts to use state rather than national crime-fighting policies. Social implications As crimes are committed at the local level, this study's primary limitation is the lack of community-level data on crime and other factors considered. Analysis based on community-level data might provide a better representation of crime dynamics. However, the author hopes to consider this as less aggregated data are available to use in future research. Originality/value The paper provides new insights into the convergence of crime rates using the club convergence procedure in the USA. This is considered an improvement to the methods used in the previous studies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lu Wang ◽  
Gabby Lee ◽  
Ian Williams

Criminal activities are often unevenly distributed over space. The literature shows that the occurrence of crime is frequently concentrated in particular neighbourhoods and is related to a variety of socioeconomic and crime opportunity factors. This study explores the broad patterning of property and violent crime among different socio-economic stratums and across space by examining the neighbourhood socioeconomic conditions and individual characteristics of offenders associated with crime in the city of Toronto, which consists of 140 neighbourhoods. Despite being the largest urban centre in Canada, with a fast-growing population, Toronto is under-studied in crime analysis from a spatial perspective. In this study, both property and violent crime data sets from the years 2014 to 2016 and census-based Ontario-Marginalisation index are analysed using spatial and quantitative methods. Spatial techniques such as Local Moran’s I are applied to analyse the spatial distribution of criminal activity while accounting for spatial autocorrelation. Distance-to-crime is measured to explore the spatial behaviour of criminal activity. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) linear regression is conducted to explore the ways in which individual and neighbourhood demographic characteristics relate to crime rates at the neighbourhood level. Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) is used to further our understanding of the spatially varying relationships between crime and the independent variables included in the OLS model. Property and violent crime across the three years of the study show a similar distribution of significant crime hot spots in the core, northwest, and east end of the city. The OLS model indicates offender-related demographics (i.e., age, marital status) to be a significant predictor of both types of crime, but in different ways. Neighbourhood contextual variables are measured by the four dimensions of the Ontario-Marginalisation Index. They are significantly associated with violent and property crime in different ways. The GWR is a more suitable model to explain the variations in observed property crime rates across different neighbourhoods. It also identifies spatial non-stationarity in relationships. The study provides implications for crime prevention and security through an enhanced understanding of crime patterns and factors. It points to the need for safe neighbourhoods, to be built not only by the law enforcement sector but by a wide range of social and economic sectors and services.


2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 989-1006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce L. Benson ◽  
Ian Sebastian Leburn ◽  
David W. Rasmussen

The conventional wisdom among the law enforcement community is that drug use causes crime and that stringent enforcement of drug laws is an effective tool to combat property and violent crime. Previous research by some of these authors found that a sharp increase in drug enforcement in Florida during 1984–1989 resulted in a reallocation of police resources which reduced the effectiveness of property crime enforcement and increased the property crime rate. Some have suspected that this result is the product of the very large increase in drug enforcement during this time period and that under “normal” circumstances greater drug enforcement would not result in higher property crime. This paper rebuts that suspicion.


2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimihiro Hino ◽  
Masaya Uesugi ◽  
Yasushi Asami

The aim of this study was to investigate, in consideration of individual attributes and neighborhood-level social capital, the association between official crime rates and sense of neighborhood security among residents in the 23 wards of Tokyo, Japan, using data obtained from a national questionnaire survey and police statistics on crime for 511 neighborhoods. We found that crime rates affected residents’ sense of security differently according to the type of crime committed and the spatial scale. Regarding individual attributes, sense of security among men and those aged 35 to 49 years was in line with the actual property crime rate, whereas that among women and the elderly was in line with the actual violent crime rate. In addition, even when controlling for social capital, which had a strong positive effect on residents’ sense of security, and individual attributes, all crime rates except that for violent crime were significantly related to residents’ sense of security in their neighborhood.


Author(s):  
Gillian Stevens ◽  
Timothy Hartnagel ◽  
Dave Odynak ◽  
Jasmine Brazil

We present forecasts of crime rates in the Province of Alberta, Canada for the decade 2010 to 2020. The results suggest that rates of all types of crime in the province will drop between 2010 and 2020, largely because of the aging of the population. Our forecasts of crime rates rest on three projections of the age-specific and gender-specific composition of the population using sets of assumptions about fertility, mortality, and net migration. We then estimate the rates of total crime, violent crime, property crime, and other crime by taking the age composition of the projected populations into account and presuming that the age-specific crime rates observed from 2006 to 2009 remain constant.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 142-143
Author(s):  
Richard Rosenfeld

Paul Cassell maintains that de-policing was a major cause of the spike in violent crime many American cities experienced during the summer of 2020. While plausible, Professor Cassell’s argument is unconvincing because it fails to explain why de-policing did not produce a rise in property crime, and it overstates the impact of policing on crime. Nor does he present evidence of a drop in police presence and activity large enough to produce such a huge increase in violence. Professor Cassell’s criticism of the argument that diminished police legitimacy caused the violence spike is more persuasive. He and I agree that the explanation for the spike lies somewhere in the nexus between the police and the disadvantaged communities they serve more or less effectively.


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