Putting Crime Stats to Use
Analyzing crime stats isn’t just an intellectual exercise. Criminologists don’t stand around sipping glasses of Chateau Margaux with their pinky fingers extended, saying (in their best British accents), “Reginald, tell us your theory about why child homicides have risen.” Analyzing crime stats is too important to be a parlor game.
Rather, U.S. citizens ask — and deserve informed answers to — questions such as how can we do a better job protecting ourselves and our neighbors, how can we improve services for victims, and how can we prevent kids from choosing a life of crime? Crime stats help law enforcement agencies deal with these questions by helping them correct mistaken approaches and point the way to improvement.
The U.S. Congress, along with every state legislature, faces the challenge of not having enough resources to tackle all of society’s challenges. As a result, Congressional representatives must look for information to help them decide how best to spend tax dollars, and often they turn to statistics for help. If statistics show that a particular program is successful, a legislature is more likely to fund that program in the future. Conversely, a lack of evidence to support a particular program’s success more or less dooms it to termination.
The wisest course for policymakers to follow is to take advantage of all relevant sources of information, including crime stats, arrest stats, and surveys. I once attended a meeting to discuss drug trends in my home state. Although some people wanted to rely just on arrest stats, the group eventually agreed to gather information from each of these sources:
Arrest stats
A youth drug and alcohol survey
Amounts of drugs seized by police drug task forces
Studies of drug residue amounts in a city’s sewage system (which is an increasingly valuable tool for measuring drug use)
A survey of drug cops
Through careful analysis of the information from these five sources, policymakers may be able to establish an accurate picture of illegal drug use. However, this approach takes much more work than simply relying on arrest stats.
CONTROVERSY OVER CRIME REDUCTION
One of the larger criminology controversies arose in the late 1990s. Crime rates through the 1970s and 1980s had risen to all-time highs, but in the late 1990s, as states began to implement much tougher sentencing laws, crime rates began to plunge. As Figure 3-1 shows, violent crime began to decrease dramatically in 1992 and was almost cut in half by 2003.
Proponents of tougher sentencing laws pointed out the dramatic coincidence of crime dropping at the same time that sentences were lengthening. But others saw different potential causes. For example, Steven Levitt and John Donohue concluded that the drop in crime that began in the mid-1990s was, to a large extent, the result of the legalization of abortion, which occurred in 1973. Their theory was that unwanted children from unplanned pregnancies, who are more likely than children of planned pregnancies to be involved in crime when they become adults, were aborted and, thus, never lived to commit crimes. A potential criminal who was aborted in 1973 would’ve become an adult in 1991 if she’d lived. Other criminologists have challenged the methodology of Levitt and Donohue’s analysis, questioning the assumption that unwanted children are more likely to commit violent crime. Other criminologists posited different explanations for the drop in the crime rate, such as an improving economy in the 1990s, or demographic changes, such as baby boomers aging out of their prime crime-committing years.
The lack of a clear explanation for the drop in crime rates shows that crime statistics alone are not sufficient to help guide policy choices in crime prevention.
Considering the Costs of Crime
In the United States, the government devotes billions of dollars to public safety. From arrest to prosecution to jail to probation, the costs mount up fast. But crime has other costs, as well, including a plethora of economic costs, insurance costs, and, of course, the personal losses that millions of crime victims and their families face. Knowing how much crime occurs and how much it costs can help policymakers make smarter decisions in fighting crime.
Funding the justice system
The most obvious costs of crime are the ones incurred through the government’s efforts to control it. And, of course, the largest cost of these efforts comes from compensating the law enforcement personnel who fight crime and incarcerate criminals.
Figure 3-3 shows the inflation-adjusted cost of state and local police protecting one citizen, from 2000 to 2017. You will notice there is a clear trend upward even though the national crime rates have decreased.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics
FIGURE 3-3: The cost of police protection since 2000.
The police are not the only asset that costs money. As I explain in Chapter 19 in more detail, the number of people necessary to resolve one criminal case is astonishing. Here are just some of the steps — and the people — involved:
1 Police officers make an arrest.
2 A jail staff member books the suspect; in other words, he fingerprints and documents who the suspect is.
3 Another jail staff member moves the suspect into jail.
4 A police officer writes a report of the crime and sends it to the district attorney.
5 The district attorney decides whether to file charges against the suspect.
6 A secretary drafts an indictment, which is the charging document that lists the crimes.
7 A grand jury decides whether to indict the suspect.
8 The district attorney files an indictment with court staff.
9 Jail staff bring the defendant to a judge for arraignment, an initial appearance where the defendant is informed of the charges.
10 The judge appoints a defense attorney.
11 If the defendant wants a trial, the case is given to another judge.
12 The district attorney and the defense attorney select a jury.
13 The judge conducts the trial.
14 The defense attorney and district attorney bring their witnesses to court.
15 If the jury convicts the defendant, the defendant may go to jail or prison.
16 Corrections officers transport the defendant to jail or prison, move the defendant into a cell, and provide ongoing security.
17 A probation officer later oversees the defendant’s release from jail or prison.
Generally, you can break the