Pat Dollard

Tweet

(AFP) Violent crime fell sharply in the United States last year, and experts are pinning the falling numbers on a greying population, high unemployment — even Barack Obama’s election.

Crimes from murder to robbery to forcible rape, from motor vehicle theft to burglary all decreased — sometimes by double-digit percentages — in the first six months of last year compared to the same period in 2008, a preliminary report by the FBI showed last month.

The fall in violent crime was greater in cities compared to rural areas, dropping seven percent in urban areas with populations of one million or more and by 3.8 percent in non-metropolitan counties.

Big cities, including Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, have all reported less murders committed in the first half of last year compared with 2008.

And Washington — once known as the murder capital of the United States — saw murders drop to their lowest level in 40 years, with just 143 committed.

“One factor is that the population is aging,” said James Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

“The fastest growing segment of the population is people above 50. The baby-boomer generation is certainly not violence-prone,” he said, referring to people born between 1948 and 1962.

Some 94 million Americans — around a third of the population — are over 50, according to Census Bureau data.

The spike in crime that many, including some law enforcement authorities, had predicted would go hand in burglar’s glove with the current economic slump, never happened. But that comes as no surprise to Fox.

“When people lose their jobs, they don’t decide to commit armed robbery to make ends meet,” he said.

“But they might commit crimes such as embezzlement, fraud or check forgery.”

Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri, said the high jobless rate brought on by the US economic slump could even have contributed to the falling crime rate.

“Higher unemployement rates mean people are more likely to be at home, and burglars tend to avoid occupied households,” Rosenfeld told AFP.

“So the more people at home, the fewer the burglaries.”

Rosenfeld also noted that, unlike the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the current downturn has not been accompanied by the rise of a new illegal drug.

“The period of great economic difficulty in the US in the 1970s coincided with the expansion of the heroin market. In the 1980s and early ’90s, economic decline coincided with the expansion of the crack cocaine market,” he said.

“We are not seeing anything like that happening right now.”

But the abundance of well-behaved older Americans, the greater number of people at home and the lack of a street drug market are not alone in driving back crime in the United States.

There’s also the Obama effect.

“Barack Obama’s election was historic and obviously very meaningful for African Americans, and African American young men are disproportionately involved in serious violent crimes, both as victims and offenders,” Rosenfeld said.

“It’s certainly possible that Obama’s hope and change message has affected that segment of the population and has worked to prevent some crime. That’s speculation and needs to be pursued in research — and a number of us are doing that.”

But if experts find there is an Obama effect, Rosenfeld cautioned it will not last forever.

“If there is an Obama effect, I don’t expect it to last much beyond 2009,” he said.

“When the hope and change rhetoric settles down a bit, the crooks will get back to business.”