The long-held belief that crime surges or abates in sync with the economy — rising when times are bad and falling when times are good — is challenged by recent trends.
Property crimes are down. Violent crime is down, too, continuing a decades-long trend. And it is all happening as the nation struggles with historically high joblessness and falling incomes.
That’s doubly true in metro Atlanta, which experienced especially steep declines in both violent and property crime, even though its economy is even more battered than the nation’s.
“Despite the decline in the economy, there is no increase in street-type crimes, and criminologists are baffled by it,” said Robert Friedmann, a criminal justice professor at Georgia State University.
Last week, the FBI released 2011 statistics that showed violent and property crimes nationwide lower for the fifth year in a row. From 2007 — before the recession — to 2011, violent crime fell 15.4 percent and property crime dropped 8.3 percent.
Similar trends held true for metro Atlanta’s largest population centers — the cities of Alpharetta, Atlanta, Marietta, Roswell, Sandy Springs and Smyrna, plus the unincorporated areas of Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties — according to an analysis by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On average, they’ve seen property crime fall 14.4 percent and violent crime fall 33 percent since 2007. The only exceptions were upticks in property crime in Marietta and Clayton County.
“Police presence is a part of it,” said Atlanta Police Chief George Turner. “The way we deploy our police officers is more significant.”
APD deploys officers based on crime trends detected by computer mapping. The department also reconfigured the boundaries of its beats so officers would have less territory to cover and would be more attuned to the rhythms and the underlying tensions in their areas.
“We want to be a predictor in how crime is fought,” Turner said.
Such approaches, combined with an improving economy, mean “this trend of reduction in crime is going to continue,” said Volkan Topalli, co-director of the Crime & Violence Prevention Policy Initiative at Georgia State University.
“All those things work to drive the crime rate down,” Tapalli said. “But like all things, it will bounce back [up] and go back down and bounce back and go back down. If economy continues to drag, we will probably see an uptick.”
Other crime-fighting strategies may also have helped: technologies such as alarms systems and cameras, moving cases more quickly through the courts, and locking up those who break the law for longer periods, according to experts in crime and policing.
“The evidence linking increased punishment to lower crime rates is very strong,” wrote University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, a widely cited researcher on the subject.
Broader social factors can play a role, too. More and better social services can help stem the crime rate, according to some who study the issue. The dramatic decline in hard-core cocaine use is widely credited as a factor in lower crime rates. So, too, some researchers suggest, removing environmental toxins, such as taking lead out of gasoline and house paint, can prevent neurological injuries that may contribute to criminal behavior.
” … the reduction in childhood lead exposure in the late 1970s and early 1980s was responsible for significant declines in violent crime,” writes Amherst College economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes.
Even beyond that, demographic forces beyond anyone’s control — most notably the share of the American population made up of men in their teens and 20s — have a real impact, experts say.
Whatever the causes of reduced crime, it is real and significant. But whether ordinary people in their communities grasp that reality is another thing altogether.
In many areas, the perception is the opposite — that crime is on the rise. And that is almost as significant, experts say.
“If a state, community or jurisdiction develops a reputation for being unsafe, it’s very difficult to counter that reputation, whether it’s justified or not,” said Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which collects crime data that is sent to the FBI. “It may not be fair. The reputation may not be deserved. But it’s there.”
It’s individual experiences that determine perspective, he said.
“When you have what has been a quiet, very low-crime neighborhood or community and suddenly they have a violent crime on the street corner, that shatters the illusion they are completely safe,” Keenan said.“And when you look at media coverage of violent crime… people are appalled at what is happening.”
Monica Tannian is an example.
From her vantage, Atlanta’s streets are becoming more dangerous. She ticks off a list of examples to make her point.
Just a few weeks ago, she said, a woman pushing a stroller was robbed at gunpoint, during the day, on a sidewalk in the Poncey-Highland neighborhood.
Another woman was pushed down and her purse containing a large sum of cash was taken moments after she left the Yacht Club in Little Five Points to walk home.
And Tannian was at the North Highland Pub when two gunmen robbed customers in July. She said one of them put a gun to her head while his partner collected cash, cellphones and a laptop computer.
“I don’t even go out and walk the dog at night,” Tannian said, adding that she’s not a nervous person and is comfortable living in an urban neighborhood. “But people are saying ‘we’re scared.’ People feel so helpless, and they don’t think the police will help.”
That belief is reinforced when neighborhood newsletters list crime after crime, most car break ins, street robberies or burglaries.
Turner said word also spreads — and sometimes it’s exaggerated or false — quickly via social media.
“In your neighborhoods you have an information stream that is second to none,” Turner said. “Information flows so quickly; everybody knows because of Facebook or Twitter.
“I remember when the six o’clock news was the news and the 11 o’clock news was the news, unless you read a newspaper or somebody told you. It’s a good thing to have the informational network in place but we have to make people understand: People are regurgitating the same information.”
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