Analyses of violence are light on the whys

Oct. 21, 2007
Tom Ferrick Jr.
For The Inquirer

Stand back, please.

I am about to summarize a three-foot-tall stack of dissertations, monographs, learned treatises, regression analyses, and a veritable plethora of data, charts and graphs done by criminologists seeking to answer this important question:

Why did crime decline so dramatically in America in the mid-1990s?

And drop it did. Between 1995 and 2002, violent crime in the United States went down 23 percent. The number of murders was down 24 percent.

Philadelphia did even better, with violent crime down 25 percent and murder down 33 percent.

Crime numbers rarely change that much - either up or down - in such a short period of time.

What were the causes of this encouraging trend?

Let's take that tall stack of words and figures generated by criminologists and boil it down to a four-word sentence:

They really don't know.

To quote Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist who reviewed the data: "The crime decline of the 1990s was a classic example of multiple causation with none of the many contributing causes playing a dominant role."

In other words, we're stumped.

But, this is not a story about confusion among academics. (Is that even news?)

This is about what is happening today on the streets of Philadelphia and other big cities.

Because, after that eight years of decline, violent crime is on the rise again. In some cases, it is incremental - a few percentage points here and there. In some cases, it is exponential - witness Philadelphia's murder rate.

In 2002, there were 288 homicides reported in the city, the lowest number in nearly 20 years.

In 2003, there were 348 homicides reported in the city - a 21 percent spike in just one year. It's been going up every year since.

The rise in murders - and the attendant publicity - has caused an outbreak of worry among citizens in the city and a rash of stories in the national media that cast Philadelphia in a poor light. In most public opinion polls, voters rank crime as the No. 1 issue.

The Democratic mayoral primary in effect created a citizens' mandate for the new mayor:

Stop the killings.But how?

The current mayor, John Street, and his police commissioner, Sylvester Johnson, insist - unfortunately for us - that there's no good answer to that question.

Street and Johnson say the city cannot hire its way out of the problem by putting more police on the streets. Too expensive. (Your average veteran police officer costs $100,000-plus a year in salary, benefits and overtime.)

They don't want to imprison their way out of it. City jails are already overstuffed with inmates - 9,000-plus and rising.

It leaves them mumbling about addressing the root causes of crime, and how long that will take, and how difficult it is and how, in effect, people should lower their expectations about what government can do about crime and violence in the big city.

This line of argument has not gone over well. It smacks of governance fatigue, a specialty of the Street second term. But the mayor and the police commissioner have a point.

Just as there was no single factor that led to the decline in crime just a few years ago, there is - if you'll excuse the expression - no magic bullet to stop the rise in crime today.

Which is the shame of the exercise criminologists went through in examining the data on the crime drop in the 1990s. They went into the exercise hoping to shed light and find a cause. Instead, it stayed dark.

Actually, that research did have one good effect: It shook the fixed and certain beliefs of ideologues on the right and the left about crime.

To conservatives, crime is a manifestation of evil, caused by the libertine excesses of the '60s, the dissolution of the family, and the moral poverty that results.

As Zimring put it in his book The Great American Crime Decline, conservatives believed that "criminal propensities were hard wired into populations, so that the expected crime rate from a high-risk group at liberty should not vary over time."

In fact, there were predictions in the early 1990s that we were on the verge of a huge increase in crime, due to a rise in the number of 15- to 29-year-old poor, African American males, so-called super-predators.

Instead, the crime rate plummeted.

To liberals, crime is a product of racial and economic discrimination and will not lessen until we take steps to produce an equitable society. Zimring calls this the "No Peace Without Justice" school of thought.

The peace-and-justice quotient did not change much in the mid-1990s, certainly compared with the previous 10 years. Yet, the crime numbers came down.

Hmmm.

Even today, despite the recent rise in homicides and a number of other crimes, the numbers on both are still significantly down from the early 1990s.

Example One: In 1995, Philadelphia police reported 108,300 Part One crimes, a category that includes murder, rape, robbery and serious assault.

Last year, the number was 84,518.

Example Two: Even with the recent spike in homicides, the rate is still lower than it was in the early 1990s, when there were an average of 100 more murders a year in the city.

In his anticrime plan, Michael Nutter employs what I call the sugar-and-salt approach to the problem: Sprinkle enough solutions on and you may improve the situation.

So he calls for more police (salt) and more help for returning prisoners (sugar). Stop-and-frisk tactics by police in targeted neighborhoods (salt) and improved antiviolence programs targeting at-risk youth (sugar).

Nutter also favors increasing the number of police surveillance cameras in prime areas, a tactic that has reduced the crime rate in cities that have embraced the idea, such as Chicago.

Linking multiple solutions to multiple causations. Not exactly a slogan to rally the troops, but there you have it.

It is far more satisfying than embracing another theory advanced by some criminologists:

That crime is like the weather, subject to cycles beyond our control. It rises and falls to rhythms we cannot fathom, for reasons we cannot discern.

Which brings up one final, unanswerable question: Is the recent rise in murder and violence a passing storm or is it the beginning of a flood?

The answer will define the Nutter mayoralty. 

Contact Tom Ferrick at 215-854-2714 or tferrick@phillynews.com.

Also, read "Ideas from Elsewhere: Crime Fighting."