Has the recession arrested crime?

By Tammy Joyner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The next time you see your unemployed neighbor, a nod of gratitude is in order. He may be what’s standing between a burglar and your flat-screen TV while you’re at work.

After two long years of economic woes, this recession has managed to create a few unexpected benefits — namely a noticeable drop in crime — and confound a few economists and criminologists along the way.

Until this recent downturn, a bad economy was easy to read: crime and deviant behavior (think drug dealing, fencing and the like) go up when the economy goes down.

But the latest set of police reports across the country, including in Atlanta, don’t square with past downturns. The underground market, it seems, has been turned on its ear in this recession.

“This is a real break in past patterns,” criminologist Richard Rosenfeld told about two dozen economists from around the world who gathered in Stone Mountain this month for the second annual meeting on the “Economics of Risky Behaviors.”

More eyes on the street

Across the nation, crime, on the whole, is down considerably, especially property crimes and violent crimes such as robbery.

The counterintuitive nature of this recession makes sense when you peel back the layers.

Take home burglaries, for instance.

“We assume crime climbs when the economy is down,” said Rosenfeld, Curators Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. But “during high unemployment, more people are at home and that cuts the rates of burglary.”

Additionally, people tend to carry fewer valuables these days, so there are fewer street crimes such as robberies, Rosenfeld added.

The drug trade, which usually grows and flourishes in a recession, has been contained mostly within the groups of people who were already buying and selling drugs. In the past, disputes over drug deals often resulted in murders or other violent crimes. Now, they’re contained and rarely reported. After all, who’s going to go to the police about a drug deal gone bad?

“The absence of expansion in the drug market could be related to the absences of crime increasing,” Rosenfeld said.

Add last year’s stimulus money, which extended unemployment benefits and food stamps to millions and helped many communities keep more police on the street, and you get a clearer picture.

“That may have cushioned the low-income against the full effects of the economic downturn,” Rosenfeld said.

Boomers behaving?

But don’t break out the champagne just yet. Rosenfeld cautions that the usual crime wave that accompanies an economic downturn may just be slow in arriving.

“These factors aren’t going to continue much longer,” he said. “The latter half of 2010 is going to be the real deciding factor” as to whether the current crime wave hiatus is a fluke or a real trend.

Rosenfeld has spent the past three decades studying correlations between the economy and crime. Crime patterns have rolled along at a traditional trajectory, spiking during periods of economic decay, such as the late 1960s and the mid- to late 1970s. It began leveling off in the 1990s. Could it be crime took a holiday?

Nope, the criminals have just grown older.

The large wave of baby boomers coincided with high crime rates in the 1970s and early 1980s — when baby boomers were at their hell-raising best or, in criminology speak, in the crime-prone years. Crime has flat-lined in the last decade with the onset of aging boomers and fewer young people.

“The larger the cohort of people in adolescent and young adult years, everything else equal, the larger the crime rates,” Rosenfeld noted. “And those cohorts [of young people] are much smaller [now] than in the past.”

Recession as a cure for crime

Still not convinced this recession, which began in December 2007, hasn’t had an effect on crime? Judge for yourself. Here’s a look at statistics for several types of crime in Atlanta.

Aggravated assault

• 2007: 4,221 down 2 percent

• 2008: 3,864 down 8 percent

• 2009: 3,419 down 12 percent

• 2010*: 219 down 16 percent

Burglary (residence)

• 2007: 6,940 up 20 percent

• 2008: 8,216 up 18 percent

• 2009: 7,416 down 10 percent

• 2010*: 567 down 15 percent

Robbery

• 2007: 3,577 up 21 percent

• 2008: 3,308 down 8 percent

• 2009: 2,725 down 18 percent

• 2010*: 170 down 36 percent

Purse snatching

• 2007: 307 up 18 percent

• 2008: 294 down 4 percent

• 2009: 277 down 6 percent

• 2010*: 18 up 20 percent

Auto theft

• 2007: 7,020 up 19 percent

• 2008: 6,490 down 8 percent

• 2009: 5,726 down 12 percent

• 2010*: 409 down 21 percent

*Comparison of January 2010 to January 2009; all other statistics annual totals

Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, Atlanta Police Department