Has there been a “reversal of fortune”? Paolo Buonanno, Francesco Drago, Roberto Galbiati, and Giulio Zanella step into these treacherous waters with a new paper (pdf):
Contrary to common perceptions, today both property and violent crimes (with the exception of homicides) are more widespread in Europe than in the US, while the opposite was true thirty years ago. We label this fact as the “reversal of misfortunes”. We investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes, incarceration, abortion, unemployment and immigration on crime. For this we use time series data (1970-2008) from seven European countries and the U.S. We find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime. Our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in Europe. Our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether a such a policy would also be efficient from a cost-benefit point of view. We leave this to future research.
I would stress that there are numerous controversial claims in this paper. (I also personally believe that the heavy U.S. reliance on incarceration is morally problematic.) Nonetheless we are committed to bringing you thought-provoking material and so there you go.
For the pointer I thank Noah Smith, who should not be construed as necessarily endorsing any of these results.
“with the exception of homicides”
Yeah, let’s just ignore these.
Especially since the data for homicides are the most reliable. The rest of the data might as well just be made up as far as I am concerned. Between pressure to keep crime stats low, unreported crimes and differences in the way crimes are reported, the other categories just don’t seem to yield to reliable crime statistics.
Thanks, that was my thought too as I read this.
Police have no pressure to keep crime stats low. That makes them look less important.
Ever noticed that years back getting pulled over drunk netted you a DUI? Now you get charged with 3-5 additional, unrelated things.
Most people going before a judge for criminal things are charged with 4-5 different charges and all but 1-2 get thrown out.
Often the reason the crime rate goes up is because police are overcharging. Not that more crime is being committed.
It’s like that scene in “The Wire” where Bunny Colvin goes on about knocking crimes to lower level misdemeanors, but then adds “how do you hide a body?”
Actually car theft is the most reliable statistic. Lots of murders never get reported, but there is almost no chance a car theft won’t be reported. Of course you have to acoount for insurance fraud thefts, but there is a huge industry that is very well funded and spends a lot of time trying to stop those.
Also unlike murder car theft isn’t culturally dependent. Socieies define morders in different ways, car theft is pretty much the same in every society on earth from the DPRK to America to Angola
“Murder” may be culturally dependent, but I don’t think “homicide” is.
You’d be surprised.
When my Mom was a kid Harris County, Texas home to the states largest city did not have a medical examiner and even today no county in Texas has a coroner. It is their is no medical examiner, the situation in most counties it is up to the JP, a joke of an office in this state at least, until quite recently it was no uncommon for funeral directors to find stab wounds and bullet holes in bodies that were not ruled homocides. And in many rural localities, my personal knowledge only extends to Northern Mexico and North Africa homicides are not usually reported unless someone the deceased has family that wants to make a fuss.
Also what constitutes homicide in one jurisdiction can really vary. Take for example a negligent homicide or suicide. In traditional chinese law both of these were theoretically capital crimes and every death had to be examined carefully to make sure that some culprit could not be found. Of course this was usually honored in the breach but is a complete contrast to say rural guatemala or a gold mining camp in the Western US in the 19th century.
There’s either a dead body (with signs of violence on it) or there’s a missing person. If the latter is never found then I suppose “homocide” is never entered into the books, but that would be true everywhere/. Any reason to think American murderers are better at getting rid of the stiffs?
I wasn’t commenting on the US in particular, I was just pointing out that data collection on homicides is not nearly as reliable as most people think.
As Roy indicates, murder is a little more complicated than that. Sick people in nursing homes are almost certainly the victims of murder more frequently than is reported. Suicides, too, can be misidentified as murders or homicides and vice versa.
The question is whether there is any systematic bias in the way murders are reported across countries. The answer is almost certainly yes. Where, for example, people have broad access to firearms, murder is probably easier to identify as such. If the dead guy has bullets in him and there is no gun nearby it is almost certainly a murder. In other countries, murderers are forced to resort to other, more ambiguous means. Falls from height, poisonings and drownings are common means of murder that can be difficult to distinguish from accidents or suicides.
I believe that modern forensics has gotten pretty good at identifying suspicious factors in deaths. The days you could get away with slipping arsenic to an unwanted spouse or clamping a pillow over your rich, childless aunt’s face at night are long gone.
I would also say that death by puncture wounds or blunt force trauma (outside certain contexts, e.g., auto accidents) will also be suggestive of murder.
Yes, but as one category of theft, car thefts are subject to all sorts of different trends unrelated to the actual frequency of crime more generally. Technology has made casual car theft much more difficult, while the growth in expensive, easy to steal mobile devices has siphoned thieves away.
That’s the sort of uncertainty factor that should be operative everywhere. So while the absolute numbers might not be wholly reliable, the relative numbers still tell us something.
This is absolutely true.
Homicides, auto theft, perhaps bank robberies. Everything else is basically nonsense noise.
Yeah, let’s just ignore these.
They don’t say we should ignore homicides. The fact that homicides are worse crimes than non-lethal acts of violence and property crimes doesn’t mean those lesser crimes are unimportant.
I also believe that heavy U.S. reliance on incarceration is morally problematic. Many of those incarcerated should be executed.
We don’t execute them. We just put them on death row and chill indefinitely.
Many? Like all the people there as a result of the War on Drugs or there on parole violations?
Just stick to the violent offenders and you’ll be fine….
I suppose they think they’ve covered their arses on the political correctness front with “if we draw random samples of immigrants and natives in a given country after conditioning on certain socioeconomic characteristics, the two groups would probably have very similar criminal attitudes.” But I think not. The whole point of multiculturalism is that cultures differ and should be allowed to continue to differ – to deny those differences (and without evidence – “probably” indeed!) must surely therefore be incorrect. Moreover, to focus their subsequent analysis simply on immigrants while ignoring their children and grandchildren is also to avoid the whole notion of differing cultures, and therefore is also incorrect. Furthermore, they fail to distinguish between different immigrant groups, as if all must be equally prone to crime. Again, this is a sin against multiculturalism.
I trust that they’ll be attacked vigorously for these grave crimes against PC.
It is unclear exactly what dearieme point is here. Is it that the European “multicultural” ideal is better than the American “assimilationist” ideal is better in preventing homicide but worse than preventing property crime?
“I trust that they’ll be attacked vigorously for these grave crimes against PC.”
Of course not! The uber-pragmatists are an outcome-based lot. And by “outcome” I mean winning elections by the folks we over here call Democrats.
Andrew appears to be agreeing with dearieme, but I cannot understand what he is agreeing with. Does he?
‘Nonetheless’? Tyler, are you now explicitly breaking the fourth wall to provide us with your personal opinions? It’s a blog, sure, but lately your tone and stridency has changed, in my opinion.
Or should I not ascribe to malice what can better be described as snark?
I’m confused, where is the malice or snark?
I didn’t find any racial terms in their paper. Unless they used some PC code words, they didn’t address the different rates of crime for different racial groups. Controlling for race, a white or Asian person in the U.S. is even safer than this study shows.
Not sure about the immigration argument. Chinese immigrants don’t engage in a lot of crime.
“Our main measure of criminal activity is the total number of offenses
reported to the police per 1,000 inhabitants”
They’re not measuring crime rates, they’re measuring reporting rates for petty crimes.
Yep.
Sounds like bad data here, though we do have pretty good data showing UK violent crime exceeding that of the US quite handily.
As to the rest of Europe having more violent crime it’s probably too close to call at worst. Also getting killed is quite a bit more violent that being assaulted, so there is that.
They do take this into account, and claim to have evidence that the trends they find are robust, though their discussion of that point is not very detailed. As they note, one way to avoid issues with divergent reporting is to study homicides (where official statistics are usually fairly reliable; it is rare anywhere for a murder to go unreported), which are not the focus of the paper but which they claim show similar trends. I would like to know how similar.
In regard to the effects of incarceration, the reason for the incarceration would presumably be important, as incarceration for drug offense would have no deterrent effect on commission of either property or violent crimes. If the effect of incarceration is through getting certain demographic groups “off the street,” that could be investigated by making the variable = rate of unincarcerated members of group x in the population.
“as incarceration for drug offense would have no deterrent effect on commission of either property or violent crimes.”
That would be true if your average felon incarcerated for drug offenses were no more likely to commit crimes than your average non-incarcerated person. However, I strongly doubt that is true. Whether it’s worth the cost of imprisoning them is a different issue, but their incarceration is almost certainly going to drop the crime rate.
“Deterrent effect.” Does making drug possession/dealing a crime deter other crime?
“the reason for the incarceration would presumably be important, as incarceration for drug offense would have no deterrent effect on commission of either property or violent crimes”
This is kind of a clueless statement. That someone is currently in prison for a drug offense does not mean that their rap sheet doesn’t include plenty of violent offenses. Drug Offender and Violent Offender are not separate categories. This is a Venn diagram that’s almost merged into one circle.
But the relationship may not trend in the way you expect. We assume that incarceration makes it less likely a person will commit a crime in the future, but recidivism rates are quite high in the US and there are actually a lot of reasons to expect this. So if you imprison a druge offender, you might be creating a future violent offender. So imprisoning drug offenders could actually be increasing the level of violent crime. You won’t appreciate this factor with a snapshot approach.
So, what does this imply for the Levitt abortion hypothesis?
Levitt specifically used Romania to back up his conclusions (I can’t remember if he relied on any other European countries).
I don’t know if Romania was one of the countries researched in this article.
“Our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in Europe.”
What does “contrast” mean in this context? Did the authors mean “contract” (as in reduce)? I can’t think of a more plausible alternative. Which means they are sloppy proofreaders. Which makes me suspicious of the paper in general. (Call this a non sequitur if you wish.)
Maybe I’m confusing correlation with causation, but I like the way the previous post on MR connects with this one and implies that one of our growing exports is petty criminals.
I would stress that there are numerous controversial claims in this paper. (I also personally believe that the heavy U.S. reliance on incarceration is morally problematic.) Nonetheless we are committed to bringing you thought-provoking material and so there you go.
For the pointer I thank Noah Smith, who should not be construed as necessarily endorsing any of these results.
Of course not. Inductive reasoning will get you kicked right out of polite company.
What about the accessibility of video games for the poor? I still would love to try an experiment where instead of fighting the drug war we just send millions of video games and consoles to central and South America. Consoles and games are still much more expensive in Europe than the US.
In Canada, crime rates are down (and have been declining for years), but the Conservative federal government is building new prisons and introducing tougher sentencing guidelines (including, for the first time, mandatory minimums, an idea which I think is just terrible).
Of course, the media grilled Minister of Justice Rob Nicholson on this at one of their rare press conferences. Later, another Conservative, the extremely right-wing (for Canada) Stockwell Day, later said that the prisons were needed because the crime statistic were wrong – that crime was up but reported crime was down.
My first instinct is to just chalk this up to Stockwell Day being a nutbar, but it probably is worth considering seriously. For America too. Are people really just not reporting small crimes anymore, because they feel like the police won’t do anything? Or, like, having drunk homeless people yell at you or make lewd comments at the bus stop – that probably would have been reported as a crime fifty years ago, but not today? I’m not sure. Probably I should just go with my first instinct.
OMG, you mean that in Canada deterrence is up and crime is down! How could this be possible? What sort of crazy effect-follows-cause world could we be living in?
Also, please note I have a hispanic name and therefore have presumptive moral superiority as an aggrieved minority. My family has endured American racial prejudice against latinos since we came here in that darkest, most racist of years — 1993. You white, color lacking people have no idea the burdens we glorious people of color endured during that repressive age known as the Clinton years.
Read for content. Geoff is saying that despite crime already being down, the government wants to imprison more people, in part justifying it by saying that the official crime statistics are wrong.
Yes, I understood that. Try reading what I wrote again. I know cause and effect can be tricky to understand.
Jose – I don’t follow. My point was that crime has been declining for many years, even under the “hug-a-thug” Liberal governments. Only recently (since the last election, i.e. in the last year) have the Conservatives had a majority government and introduced their new omnibus crime bill with tougher sentencing and mandatory minimums. And are now planning to build more jails to house the increased prison population from the new tougher laws.
Chronologically, the tougher laws came later than the decrease in crime. So I fail to see how the Conservatives’ new tougher criminal policy has caused the decrease in crime.
Right, here’s a graph of violent crime rates in Canada (using StatsCan data)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CanadaViolentCrime.gif
Declining since 1992. Basically parallelling the American decline in violent crime. Differing sentencing guidelines and justice policy doesn’t seem to be controlling.
After watching the police bumbling around and wasting my time too often after reporting petty crimes (in one case they became hopeless once they realized that no, I was really not the main suspect), I simply stopped reporting petty crimes unless it was a requirement to replace or get compensation for some item that had been stolen. This is all purely anecdotal, but I’ve also noticed a generation gap in how people approach these things.
Exactly, in my brief time living in Oakland I called 911 multiple times, often to be told by the responding officers that I was the only person who called it in, thwo of those incidents were drive by shootings, one of which left a victim screaming in the street for twenty minutes before the cops came and another was a raging fire on a major street on a Saturday night.
The day I moved out there was an unreported car fire in an Albertson’s parking lot. Lots of stuff doesn’t get reported.
I don’t know about Europe but in the US there are two ways crime statistics are measured. One is having the police report all reported crimes to the FBI which then releases a report. The other is they do a phone survey whether anyone in the household has been the victim of a crime. So even crimes that have not been reported to police end up in crime statistics.
What is not appreciated by most people is the magnitude of the changes in crime rates. In 1970 the US crime rate was double what it had been in 1960 and triple what it was in Europe. In 1990 US crime rates had gone up another 50% and then started going down. Crime rates in the US are now lower than they were in 1970 by about 15%. In contrast European crime rates quadrupled between 1970 and 1995 and hav stayed about the same ever since. Crime rates in the US are approximately half of what they are in Europe.
” Crime rates in the US are approximately half of what they are in Europe.”
Do you have a source for that? An easily readable one?
I don’t know about the European continent, but there’s a wide array of evidence that, while homicide rates are higher in the U.S. than the U.K. due to the vastly greater availability of guns, the crime rates by whites in the U.K. on most serious crimes (e.g., home-break-ins, burglary, car theft, and assault and battery) are notably higher than by whites in the U.S.
Just to give a personal bit of anecdata, in 1994 I traveled from Chicago to suburban Oxford on business, where my English colleagues took an entire lunch to regale me with sad stories of their cars being stolen. I tried to stand up for Chicago’s reputation, going back to Al Capone, as a world class crime capital, but soon ran out of stories and had to concede Oxford’s higher property crime rate.
I offered some speculations for why English whites are more prone to crime than their distant cousins in America here:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/how-much-ruin-in-a-nation-uk-vs-us-white-working-class
Being surprised that “white” people in one social circumstance act differently than “white” people in a completely different social circumstance requires some sort of racist ideology.
It’s actually not surprising to the HBD sphere. People are more diverse than the multi-cult would like to admit, which makes large-scale social engineering even more problematic.
Another inference is that the welfare state is dysgenic, and the British have a big head start. Charles Murray’s work seems to be pointing in that direction.
I also love the logic in that article that because blacks are imprisoned 9x more often than whites, that that means they commit 9x more crimes! That was really rich.
Or the market’s logic in pricing white neighbors. Racism is everywhere!
The English riots of August 2011, with looting in cities across England for several nights in a row, were unlike anything in the U.S. in this century.
They were particularly un-American in being racially integrated, with blacks taking the lead, but lots of whites and Pakistanis joining in the fun.
This century is a mere twelve years old. The US most certainly did see its share of urban rioting in the last century however.
Lots of people in prison on drug charges are violent criminals who could intimidate neighboring witnesses into not snitching against them, but not a forensic chemist. It’s like Al Capone going to jail for tax fraud.
A huge difference between America and England is how often rural and exurban homeowners are subject to home invasions by inner city thugs. In Southern California, for example, it’s virtually unknown for criminals from South Central to drive 50 miles out to the nice parts of Ventura County. But in England, it’s common for criminals to drive from Birmingham public housing to the countryside to break into isolated homes Clockwork Orange-style.
One obvious difference between the countries is in gun ownership. A second is that racial profiling doesn’t work as well in small town England as it does in Ventura Country because so many of the inner city British criminals are white.
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