[speakeasy]

US:



UK:



CA:




It seems as though crime in the US, Canada and the UK hit their peak in the early-mid 90s and have fallen ever since. It's often said that things like demographics, more imprisonment and police policies are the reason. But Given that this trend has happened in 3 Anglo countries(not sure about Ireland, Oz and NZ) simultaneously something greater is at work. It can't be simply police policies, or gun laws or demographics or greater imprisonment because the three nations vary on these data points too much.

Has there been a profound change in the culture? Could the rise of hipster culture have something to do with it? I'm often amazed when I think of a place like Los Angeles which is pretty safe now and when I last lived there, I'd see kids on fixie bikes from poor neighborhoods riding in these hipster cliques. I was thinking that if this was the 90s, these kids would probably be in gangs. But now they are listening to Morrissey, wearing clown red skinny jeans and riding fixed gear bikes painted with bright colors.

Could it be a decline in testosterone? Testosterone can lead to violence.

[booksarefun666]

There's also more ways than ever to make yourself busy. Video games and easy access to any media that titillates you through the internet as opposed the 90s where the best you could possibly get was a few heavily used comic books and maybe a few DnD games with your friends.

Hell, I couldn't blame a kid for keying somebody's car if he had absolutely nothing to do. That's my humble theory on why crime started to decline post 90s but what originally caused the spike is beyond me because I don't think there was any major event that was going on during the 90s. No wars that the people had an utter detest for or some government that was being overthrown.

To properly piece the puzzles together we may need to examine actual history and what was going on at the time.

55 - 75 was the Vietnam conflict, which no doubt had a profound effect on public order as time went on and you can start seeing things creep up during that time period in the first chart.

76 - 90 I don't personally know and there might've been something hardcore going on that time or the 'nam war spawned something that just started to manifest and make things even more uneasy. The '90s had the Gulf war though.

[kruger41]

If my memory serves me correctly, the author of Freakonomics attributes the fall of violent crime to abortion. The idea is that potential felons and other violent offenders were simply being removed from the picture before they could commit offenses.

May be a case of correlation =/= causation, but it's certainly a compelling notion.

[Paracelsus]

At a guess the declining rate is because DNA testing came online in a big way from that point on. It's become a lot easier to identify property crimes in particular because shitheads might not leave fingerprints behind, but they often leave blood when they bust in windows. You're more likely to commit a crime if you think you're going to get away with it.

[Lizard King]

It's not really a question you can answer in one sentence. It will be multi-causal.

Areas to look for clues would be things that caused changed; agents of change. How about the Crack explosion in America? It preceded an era in New York where crime was unusually high. The original Bad Lieutenant film with Harvey Keitel is set around then. Also Gary Webb's book: Dark Alliance, documents the introduction on a large scale, of cocaine to American society.

[H1N1]

Reported crime has gone down. Anecdotally, it is my firm belief that crime continues to rise, people just aren't bothering to report it.

My own experience:

I've reported 2 thefts and one pick pocketing (on behalf of friends) that have been caught on camera, and the police have done nothing.

Some friends and I caught a man trying to rape a girl down an alley. We chased him and caught him, and one friend had called the police because he was too pissed to run, so we had to just restrain him until the police arrived. Even with 4 of us giving statements until the early hours of the morning, the guy walked free 30 minutes after we left the station.


I do not honestly see any point in reporting crime to the police. Particularly given the laughable physical standards they are now held to. I would not trust a child with my tax return, why would I trust girls and girly men with my physical and proprietorial safety.


Returning to the graphs above, people in high crime areas where gang violence is common do not report crimes to the police, because they are intimidated, because the police simply won't do anything, or because it is too much an everyday occurrence to bother.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

Freakonomics had a good take on it.

The real reasons for the spike in crime which was perpetrated mostly by young offenders was the joblessness and the relative number of aimless unemployed youth, who had nothing to do in terms of jobs.



You can see how the fertility rate in the 1970s tanks. In the early 70s it is still high and then drops off fast.

But I am sure that testosterone fell tremendously through food, but I think that it's mostly demographics. As jobs became less common the demographics were out of sync for early 90s - too many kids born in the 1970s for the amount of jobs that were available in the 90s. By mid 90s they reduced fertility rate came into being and also the economy picked up everywhere.


US fertility rate.

[zombiejimmorrison]

There's an interesting theory that puts forward the use of lead in paints and in gasoline causing the epidemic of violence and the subsequent ban with a drop in violent crime.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/20...-epidemic/

Quote:

Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Within the United States, you can see the data at the state level. Where lead concentrations declined quickly, crime declined quickly. Where it declined slowly, crime declined slowly. The data even holds true at the neighborhood level – high lead concentrations correlate so well that you can overlay maps of crime rates over maps of lead concentrations and get an almost perfect fit.

Quote:

Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person’s ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for “emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility.”

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

During 90s in USA and similar countries, the breakdown of society as well as the deleterious effects of divorce and single motherhood on young men had just struck with full force, but the shield of easily available porn and social networks had not yet been formed to dull it. Until these two things rebalanced each other, the savage consequences of the modern sexual market reigned supreme.

As the level of distraction plateaus but the destructive forces continue to grow, the barrier will be overwhelmed and crime will spike yet again.

[Simeon_Strangelight]

While lead may be a factor, I am not buying that explanation, since unleaded gas was mandatory from the 1980s on in most Western European countries. Also that does not explain a spike in the 1990s.

It's probably a mix of factors, but the main reasons:

1. Demographics (less aimless young men, less crime) & a hitherto unmentioned fact - increased immigration, fall of the Communist countries (also fallowed by immigration), NAFTA and increased immigration from Mexico & South America
2. Unemployment - job transfer especially of the low end manufacturing jobs
3. Single motherhood mayhem and destruction of family (it takes almost 2 decades before the first major batch of single mother raised children arrived in the job pool - that was roughly end 1980s and early 1990s - for the US black community it was 2 decades earlier - this time the whites caught up to it at least in the US)
4. Decrease of testosterone / poisoning through foods, bisphenols - those factors are related

http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/newscienc...netal.html

Quote:

They found that testosterone concentrations dropped about 1.2% per year, or about 17% overall, from 1987 to 2004. The downward trend was seen in both the population and in individuals over time.

1.2% per year for a good 20 years!!! Do you think that happened because we "evolved"? Nah - we have been poisoned legally.

Quote:

The trend holds regardless of the men’s age. Similar declines over the 17 years were seen in all ages of men in the study.

It's not just old men, it's all men. Also life expectancy in the west is not increasing since the late 1990s.

[tylerdurden1993]

Here in the UK the only reason there seems to be a "spike" of crime in the 1990s is that now crime statistics are routinely fiddled to make it look like there is less crime. Here are a few articles I've found supporting this claim.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ddled.html

Quote:

How violent crimes 'are made to vanish like a puff of smoke': Police chiefs tell MPs that stats are routinely fiddled

Officers tell Commons committee about how figures are manipulated

Serious offences including rape and robbery are disappearing, MPs told

About 300 burglaries vanished from Met Police data in just a few weeks

Tory MP Bernard Jenkin said he was 'shocked' by the evidence

Crime figures are routinely massaged by police desperate to show that they are making the streets safer, it was claimed yesterday.

Serious offences including rape, child sex abuse, robberies and burglary are disappearing in a ‘puff of smoke’, MPs were told.

Police are accused of downgrading crimes to less serious offences and even erasing them altogether by labelling them as accidents or errors.


Crime figures are routinely massaged by police desperate to show that they are making the streets safer, it was claimed.

One police analyst claimed that hundreds of burglaries ‘disappeared’ in a matter of weeks at the Met after managers intervened.

The claims were made at a hearing of Parliament’s Public Administration Committee.
Chairman Bernard Jenkin said he was ‘shocked’ by the evidence. ‘What we have heard is how there is a system of incentives in the police that has become inherently corrupting,’ he said.

Officers claim they are under pressure to record crimes as less controversial offences or even no crime at all.

Bernard Jenkin, chairman of the Commons committee, said he was shocked that massing the figures was 'institutionally prevalent'

Pc James Patrick, who analyses crime figures for the Met, said he found robberies being logged as ‘theft snatch’ in order to get them ‘off the books’.

The officer, who faces disciplinary proceedings for gross misconduct after writing a blog about the impact of police reform, said burglary figures were also changed.

‘Burglary is an area where crimes are downgraded or moved into other brackets, such as criminal damage for attempted burglaries,’ he said.

Pc Patrick said an internal audit found that ‘as many as 300 burglaries’ vanished from official figures in just a few weeks.

‘Things were being reported as burglaries and you would then re-run the same report after there had been a human intervention, a management intervention, and these burglaries effectively disappeared in a puff of smoke,’ he said.

He claimed that in 80 per cent of cases where an allegation of a serious sexual offence had been recorded as ‘no crime’, the label was incorrect.

Pc Patrick also said numerous other cases were incorrectly recorded as ‘crime-related incidents’, a category covering allegations made by third parties but not directly confirmed by the supposed victims.

He said pressure was put on victims to drop crimes by ‘attacking the allegation’ instead of investigating the crime.

He was supported by Peter Barron, a former Detective Chief Superintendent at the Met, who said victims are ‘harassed’ into scaling down the seriousness of incidents.

They would be telephoned and repeatedly questioned on the circumstances of the crime.

‘Victims were putting the phone down in disgust, harassed by another call from someone trying to persuade them that they were mistaken about the level of force used,’ he added.

Mr Barron said the Met had been set a target of reducing crimes in several priority areas by 20 per cent. ‘That translates into “record 20 per cent fewer crimes” as far as senior officers are concerned,’ he said.

The Met said it has appointed a ‘force crime registrar’ to rule on disputed crimes and to ensure the correct policies are followed.

There's also plenty of articles on Peter Hitchens blog when he documents how police fiddle with crime statistics to make people think crime has gone down here is one such article
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2...gures.html

[Troll King]

I would say it is a combination of all the things already stated in this thread plus some more.

Off the top of my mind, the following happened during the 90s when I was a kid/adolescent:

Gangs were beefing with each other constantly. Especially the bloods and crips on the east and west coasts. Gang mentality was also quite popular with teens due to gangster rap. Even in the south we had white trash kids getting together and making their own gang and starting fights or defacing property.

Also, organized crime pushed a shit ton of coke into Florida in the 80s causing a lot of violent crime in the 80's and 90s.

Another thing would be prescription drugs being abused a lot. Everything from Xanax to Oxy was easily available starting around the mid 90s and became a bit of a problem and still is.

Also, we had mandatory sentencing for drug related crimes which are now days usually sent to rehab but I don't know how that is figured in the crime stats.

Another thing would be technology. These days dealers, at least where I am, aren't standing around on the corner slinging their product. Or hanging out behind a known gas station. You simply send a text and meet them at their apt or whatever. So, I would think it makes it harder for cops to bust them.

Also, it was the 90s that we really started to re-label behaviors and to police schools and enact zero tolerance policies. So, where before a schoolyard fight would be handled by the parents now it is handled by the police.

If even 20% of schools in the 90s installed medal detectors and cameras and started random drug dog locker inspections, then you will see some spike as kids get caught with drugs and weapons.

One thing that I recently learned is that medical technology is responsible for dropping the murder rate by a drastic margin since the 70s. It isn't that people are getting shot at the same rates but that their mortality rate is much lower due to advances in treating wounds.

One researcher estimated that if we didn't have these medical advances, then we might have as many as 150k murders per year.

[realologist]

Another reason why is the courts generally don't sentence people as hard as they used.

In the state and county I'm in people can be caught with an ccw with an stolen unregistered weapon and receive 90 days in jail with probation to follow.

Also, they have the HYTA program which is hides a first felony from records. If they complete felony probation then the original first felony is expunged from their record.

If they get a operating and maintaining a meth lab charge with multiple labs many times they will allow a plea down to one lab.

I think overall it's a combination of crime being underreported, changes in courts and sentencing, and videogames and social media to occupy time instead of nothing.

[Guitarman]

Yes, crime is still increasing, it is just not reported or the Police in the UK, mindful of targets do not enter reported crime into the system if the think that they won't be able to solve the crime easily and meet their targets.

[Foolsgo1d]

I read somewhere the study for New York's crime rate going down was the introduction of cheap and widespread methods of abortion and encouragement by the state towards mothers in high crime areas or without a means to support themselves.

The criminals were never born.

Now this is a touchy subject because it opens up a can of worms with regards to society. Are most single mothers in poor neighbourhoods giving rise to criminals?

NY is a liberal town is it not? If you were to stand up and say abortion will cut the crime rate better than any other method, you will never see office.

It isn't a well known study as a result. The ugly truth would upset too many people.

[Samseau]

I agree with the UK posters. Here's the politically incorrect truth:

The crime stats are going down because police have "no go zones" full of "minorities" (i.e. non-whites) who commit tons of crime everyday, and do nothing about it. You routinely hear about dozens of blacks get murdered in Chicago every weekend, but there's also the crime in LA between the gangs no one does anything about, and the White collar crime on Wall St that's no longer prosecuted either.

Crime is at all time highs. I've been scammed before and the police do nothing. I've had to kick a woman out of my apartment with her crying false rape at me, and the cops, although they thankfully sided with me, said I did not need to file a police report. They simply do not give a fuck because all the crime is overwhelming and they cannot keep up with it all.

All that's happened since the 90's? Western countries have become less White and there's less enforcement via the police, since the police are just extensions of White power in every developed country.

Now, I'm not saying crime goes unpunished in non-White communities. It's just that the locals in these non-White communities take justice into their own hands and do not rely on the police.

Think Baltimore. After the Darren Wilson was indicted now the cops stay out of Black areas because they do not want to be prosecuted either, and you hear about a massive crime wave of multiple Blacks who are shot and mugged without police enforcement. Do you think any of those stats go reported? And of the murders, how many were done in revenge now that the locals must defend themselves from crime because the cops are scared?

The decline in crime stats are nothing more than an indictment of a dysfunctional system. It's like the job numbers - unemployment numbers are at record lows despite labor force participation rate being at all time lows as well. The system is fucked. This isn't to say, however, that crime has not gone down in certain areas, like in Manhattan NYC due to police state measures. But overall, across the Western World, crime is WAAAAAAAAY up (Think of the UK sex gangs - no arrests!) but our police are more powerless than ever to stop it. Buy yourself a gun if you can, you will need it someday.

[Bad Hussar]

(07-08-2015 04:45 AM)zombiejimmorrison Wrote:  

There's an interesting theory that puts forward the use of lead in paints and in gasoline causing the epidemic of violence and the subsequent ban with a drop in violent crime.


http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/20...-epidemic/

Quote:

Second, this correlation holds true with no exceptions. Every country studied has shown this same strong correlation between leaded gasoline and violent crime rates. Within the United States, you can see the data at the state level. Where lead concentrations declined quickly, crime declined quickly. Where it declined slowly, crime declined slowly. The data even holds true at the neighborhood level – high lead concentrations correlate so well that you can overlay maps of crime rates over maps of lead concentrations and get an almost perfect fit.

Quote:

Decades of research has shown that lead poisoning causes significant and probably irreversible damage to the brain. Not only does lead degrade cognitive abilities and lower intelligence, it also degrades a person’s ability to make decisions by damaging areas of the brain responsible for “emotional regulation, impulse control, attention, verbal reasoning, and mental flexibility.”

Shit. I grew up in a time and place where petrol was loaded with lead. I'm definitely screwed. I feel as sudden urge to commit a crime.

I have recently had the good fortune of winning $10,00,000. Unfortunately in order to have the money deposited I need a bank account in America. This is very difficult for me to open a a Nigerian because of the racist Government of USA.

If any kind readers would allow me access to their US bank account please send me a message. As a thank you I will give you $500,000 just as soon as the $10,000,000 is transferred.

[TornadoByProxy]

There are a lot of good points here. Goes to show the intelligence of RVFers.
It is certainly a combination of many things. Two not mentioned yet are 1) the end of the Cold War and 2) Clinton's election. With these 2 events, there was a large shift away from military spending, towards social spending, and towards a more hippie attitude among the youth.
I would say however, better technology for the police was a major contributor. I remember a later CSI episode where they even addressed this. They reopened a case they couldn't solve in an earlier season. The point, even during CSI's run, police technology changed so fast that it changed the TV show.

[speakeasy]

(07-08-2015 09:05 AM)Samseau Wrote:  

I agree with the UK posters. Here's the politically incorrect truth:

The crime stats are going down because police have "no go zones" full of "minorities" (i.e. non-whites) who commit tons of crime everyday, and do nothing about it. You routinely hear about dozens of blacks get murdered in Chicago every weekend, but there's also the crime in LA between the gangs no one does anything about, and the White collar crime on Wall St that's no longer prosecuted either.

I don't buy it. What no go zones? This isn't Brazil where the cops don't go into favelas. There are NO neighborhoods in America, Canada or the UK that cops will refuse to enter. And you're telling me cops have done nothing about gangs in LA? I think you need to read up on the LAPD CRASH unit before you go making claims like that.

Quote:

Crime is at all time highs.

Bullshit. What are you basing this off? Statistics or a hunch?

Quote:

I've been scammed before and the police do nothing. I've had to kick a woman out of my apartment with her crying false rape at me, and the cops, although they thankfully sided with me, said I did not need to file a police report. They simply do not give a fuck because all the crime is overwhelming and they cannot keep up with it all.

Your argument is a variation of the "crime isn't going down, it's just not being reported" argument. But then you'd have to assume that many(more) crimes weren't being reported at the peak of crime in the 90s. So same difference.

Quote:

All that's happened since the 90's? Western countries have become less White and there's less enforcement via the police, since the police are just extensions of White power in every developed country.

What does this have to do with Canada and UK? The UK is 93% white still. Most the immigrants to Canada are East Asian and Indians not exactly known for violent crimes. And if there's less enforcement, why have incarceration rates gone up in America?

Quote:

Think Baltimore. After the Darren Wilson was indicted now the cops stay out of Black areas because they do not want to be prosecuted either, and you hear about a massive crime wave of multiple Blacks who are shot and mugged without police enforcement. Do you think any of those stats go reported? And of the murders, how many were done in revenge now that the locals must defend themselves from crime because the cops are scared?

Some crimes go unreported like theft and muggings. But I highly doubt serious crimes like murders and armed robberies go unreported.

[Gmac]

(07-08-2015 02:26 AM)Lizard King Wrote:  

It's not really a question you can answer in one sentence. It will be multi-causal.

Areas to look for clues would be things that caused changed; agents of change. How about the Crack explosion in America? It preceded an era in New York where crime was unusually high. The original Bad Lieutenant film with Harvey Keitel is set around then. Also Gary Webb's book: Dark Alliance, documents the introduction on a large scale, of cocaine to American society.

This. I recommend reading Freakonomics for more insight. The book discusses how crack cocaine became exceeding popular practically overnight. Crime skyrocketed and gangs started popping up everywhere. Probably not the sole reason but surely a large contributing factor. Then crime began to fall with rising abortion rates. Really interesting stuff.

Quote:

1) Five states legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade. Crime started falling three years earlier in these states, with property crime (done by younger people) falling before violent crime.

2) After abortion was legalized, the availability of abortions differed dramatically across states. In some states like North Dakota and in parts of the deep South, it was virtually impossible to get an abortion even after Roe v. Wade. If one compares states that had high abortion rates in the mid 1970s to states that had low abortion rates in the mid 1970s, you see the following patterns with crime. For the period from 1973-1988, the two sets of states (high abortion states and low abortion states) have nearly identical crime patterns. Note, that this is a period before the generations exposed to legalized abortion are old enough to do much crime. So this is exactly what the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts. But from the period 1985-1997, when the post Roe cohort is reaching peak crime ages, the high abortion states see a decline in crime of 30% relative to the low abortion states. Our original data ended in 1997. If one updated the study, the results would be similar.)

3) All of the decline in crime from 1985-1997 experienced by high abortion states relative to low abortion states is concentrated among the age groups born after Roe v. Wade. For people born before abortion legalization, there is no difference in the crime patterns for high abortion and low abortion states, just as the Donohue-Levitt theory predicts.

4) When we compare arrest rates of people born in the same state, just before and just after abortion legalization, we once again see the identical pattern of lower arrest rates for those born after legalization than before.

5) The evidence from Canada, Australia, and Romania also support the hypothesis that abortion reduces crime.

6) Studies have shown a reduction in infanticide, teen age drug use, and teen age childbearing consistent with the theory that abortion will reduce other social ills similar to crime.
These six points all support the hypothesis. There is one fact that, without more careful analysis, argues against the Donohue-Levitt story:

7) The homicide rate of young males (especially young Black males) temporarily skyrocketed in the late 1980s, especially in urban centers like Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC, before returning to regular levels soon thereafter. These young males who were hitting their peak crime years were born right around the time abortion was legalized.

If you look at the serious criticisms that have been leveled against the Donohue-Levitt hypothesis, virtually all of them revolve around this spike in homicide by young men in the late 1980s-early 1990s. (There are also some non-serious criticisms, which I will address below.) This is the point that Sailer is making, and also the point made far more rigorously by Ted Joyce in an article published in the Journal of Human Resources.

So, a reasonable thing to ask yourself is: Was there anything else going on in the late 1980s that might be causing young Black males to be killing each other at alarming rates that might be swamping the impact of legalized abortion over a short time period? The obvious culprit you might think about is crack cocaine. Crack cocaine was hitting the inner cities at exactly this time, disproportionately affecting minorities, and the violence was heavily concentrated among young Black males such as the gang members we write about in Freakonomics. So to figure out whether this spike in young Black male homicides is evidence against legalized abortion reducing crime, or even evidence legalized abortion causes crime, one needs to control for the crack epidemic to find the answer. This is the argument that I have been making for years. First in the Slate exchange with Steve Sailer back in 1999, then in the Donohue and Levitt response to Ted Joyce, and now in a recent paper by Roland Fryer, Paul Heaton, me, and Kevin Murphy.

http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abort...u-believe/

[speakeasy]

(07-08-2015 02:35 AM)H1N1 Wrote:  

Reported crime has gone down. Anecdotally, it is my firm belief that crime continues to rise, people just aren't bothering to report it.

But see we can't base anything off what people think the crime rate is because there's too much room for selection and cognitive biases. Same thing with sex surveys. Everyone thinks for example college is a fuck fest, then you read some stats where half the dudes admit they hardly ever got laid in college and many even graduated virgins.

Quote:

Returning to the graphs above, people in high crime areas where gang violence is common do not report crimes to the police, because they are intimidated, because the police simply won't do anything, or because it is too much an everyday occurrence to bother.

But this dynamic should hold consistent over time, so it doesn't change the relative drop in crime. You can assume that many crimes also went unreported in the 90s. And if the reported crimes were much higher, than the unreported ones were undoubtedly much higher too.

[scotian]

As far as I know, overall crime trends in Canada have mirrored those State side and over the past twenty years, crime has gone down in all aspects. In a recent article called The world's nicest, most law-abiding generation, author Margaret Wente observes that "In Canada, crime rates are now back to where they were in the 1960s. Although theories abound, nobody really knows why. What’s clear is that Northern European countries now have the lowest homicide rates in all of recorded history. Homicide has become a lower-class phenomenon, and a middle-class citizen’s chance of dying violently is virtually zilch. Even places that used to be hotbeds of crime are now peaceful. The murder rate in Medellin, Colombia – once a nest of violent drug lords – has fallen 80 per cent since 2000. Today, Medellin is a popular destination for northern retirees."

[Phoenix]

Probably smartphones. So distracting that dudes can't focus on their murders anymore.

[H1N1]

(07-08-2015 04:46 PM)speakeasy Wrote:  

(07-08-2015 02:35 AM)H1N1 Wrote:  

Reported crime has gone down. Anecdotally, it is my firm belief that crime continues to rise, people just aren't bothering to report it.

But see we can't base anything off what people think the crime rate is because there's too much room for selection and cognitive biases. Same thing with sex surveys. Everyone thinks for example college is a fuck fest, then you read some stats where half the dudes admit they hardly ever got laid in college and many even graduated virgins.

Quote:

Returning to the graphs above, people in high crime areas where gang violence is common do not report crimes to the police, because they are intimidated, because the police simply won't do anything, or because it is too much an everyday occurrence to bother.

But this dynamic should hold consistent over time, so it doesn't change the relative drop in crime. You can assume that many crimes also went unreported in the 90s. And if the reported crimes were much higher, than the unreported ones were undoubtedly much higher too.

I understand where you are coming from, but I think your argument relies on me engaging you in some intellectual vacuum where the merit of the theory is discussed only with reference to mutually agreed upon sources, yet not allowing for experience.

The number of driving offenses, for example, has remained remarkably consistent over the past ten years. However, as someone who drives 10-20 thousand miles each year on business, I can say with complete certainty that the number of driving offenses perpetrated has exponentially increased in the UK. The frequency of occurrence of things like undertaking is far greater than it was when I started driving 9 years ago, as is the number of instances where people make threats from the safety of their cars. I can adduce no evidence as you would recognise it to prove this fact, but nonetheless it is a self-evident truth for anyone who has been using our roads for a number of years.

Equally, In 4 years living in the capital as a middle class, white, law student at a top university, I experience the 4 instances I mentioned, all of which were reported. I am now resolved not to report crimes such as these due to the ineffectiveness of the police. Your argument makes no allowance for the fact that standard of policing may (it fucking well has) have declined since the 90s, providing an additional motivation for victims not to report. If you put yourself in the position of a working class minority on a rough estate, with all the additional baggage their relationships with the police may involve, it is not hard to see how they may have come to the same conclusion as me.

So essentially, I don't agree with your premise that 'this dynamic should hold consistent over time, so it doesn't change the relative drop in crime. You can assume that many crimes also went unreported in the 90s. And if the reported crimes were much higher, than the unreported ones were undoubtedly much higher too.' I think a combination of increased police ineptness, and the rise of 'thug' culture, that most young people of a certain demographic, irrespective of race, try to mimic, has lead to a far greater prevalence of anti social crime - threats, noise, minor battery, minor theft etc, which reduce quality of life, and the reporting of which could lead to a far greater degree of heat and correspondingly dramatic decline in quality of life.



There are absolutely areas of London the police don't go, not necessarily through fear, but because the communities there do not call the police, and know that if they do it could seriously increase the number of complications in their already difficult lives.

[FortyAndFantastic]

I'm old enough to remember the financial recession during that time.
Money, or lack of, probably caused most of the issues.

Was a great time to buy repossessed properties shortly afterwards, which are still providing part of my income today.