I have no idea whatsoever. It's absolutely fascinating. It's also good news if you were a likely victim or even perp.

Wash Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/19/AR2009071902154.html?hpid=topnews

Major Cities' Plummeting Crime Rates Mystifying
Killings in the District, Pr. George's Have Fallen

By Allison Klein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 20, 2009

Violent crime has plummeted in the Washington area and in major cities across the country, a trend criminologists describe as baffling and unexpected.

The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

"Experts did not see this coming at all," said Andrew Karmen, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

In the District and Prince George's County, homicides are down about 17 percent this year.

Criminologists have different theories about why crime is down so much, although many agree that the common belief that crime is connected to the economy is false.

Whatever the cause, police across the region are taking credit for the drop.

"Everybody wants to beat us up when it goes up, so we'll take credit for it when it goes down," D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said.

She said police are able to target specific locations or types of crime and policing is so high-tech that investigators are analyzing crime minute-by-minute and have greater ability to attack crime before it happens.

In Prince George's, for example, the department's top commanders get mobile phone updates on crimes and 911 calls every 15 minutes.

In New York, when someone is killed, police send a mobile data center to a neighborhood, allowing police on the scene to listen to 911 calls and immediately search databases that list the names of everyone in a certain building who is on parole.

In the District, the department creates a weekly "Go-Go report," which details where and when home-grown bands are playing, because go-go concerts often bring together rival gangs, causing violence, Lanier said. There is also a weekly gang report that tells officers which gangs or crews are feuding that week.

Armed with that information, police can better predict where crimes might happen and take measures to prevent them.

The District is on track to have fewer killings than in any year since 1964, when the population was about 760,000 and Vietnam War protests were just beginning.

In the years since, the city has struggled at times with civil unrest, the arrival of crack cocaine and the rise of street gangs. In 1991, the District was known as the murder capital of the United States, recording 479 that year. This year, there have been 79.

Last summer, the city was struggling with so much violence in the Trinidad neighborhood that police set up military-style neighborhood roadblocks and stopped people from entering unless they had a "legitimate reason." The checkpoints were so restrictive that they were ultimately ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

This year, there have been several high-profile shootings in the District, including last week's late-afternoon killing of armed suspect Kellen Anthony White by the Capitol Police about a block from the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Also, a security officer, Stephen T. Johns, was killed last month during the lunch hour at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. An alleged white supremacist has been charged.

But Lanier said there has been a turnaround in violence this year. She pointed to a better relationship between the department and the community as a factor, saying it has helped get more violent repeat offenders off the streets. She said tips from the community have been flowing faster than ever, due in part to patrol officers knowing their beats and developing connections in the community.

Last year, the department paid about $500,000 in reward money for tips that led to arrests and convictions, double the amount in 2007. This year, detectives have closed about 70 percent of homicide cases.

"The community is giving us more information than ever," Lanier said. "They're used to seeing the same cop in the neighborhood every day. They feel comfortable. They have a connection to that officer. They know that officer isn't going to burn them."

Burning them, she said, would be to take information and not act on it, leaving sources to believe police are corrupt or lazy.

She also said she has torn down walls in the department so that homicide detectives talk more often with beat officers, sharing vital information.

Violent crime is also down in some of Washington's other large suburbs, including Montgomery and Fairfax counties.

Montgomery has recorded six homicides this year, putting it on track to have its lowest total since 1986.

In Prince George's, violence had been steadily rising since the 1990s, when the county started absorbing spillover crime from the District. But this year, crime is at a 20-year low, and homicides are down almost 17 percent.

Police Chief Roberto L. Hylton said that since he took over the department in September, there has been a more defined mission about how to attack crime.

He identified car thefts as one of the county's major problems and a "gateway" crime, meaning if criminals get away with stealing a car, they sometimes become emboldened and begin committing more daring acts. In 2004, about 18,500 cars were stolen in the county, more than in all of Virginia.

Since then, the department has focused on arresting car thieves and educating the public about protecting their cars, and the number of car thefts has shrunk by half.

"We have a very detailed and comprehensive strategy. We are triaging our community," Hylton said.

He said the homicide closure rate is about 70 percent, which has helped get many criminals off the streets.

"If you come into Prince George's County and you commit a murder, we're going to track you down and arrest you and lock you up," Hylton said.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum, said the drop in homicides this year is notable, especially considering the weather.

"This does come at an important time," he said. "We're midway through summer, and summer is when you see the most significant increase in street violence. Departments have had to be more strategic in terms of gangs and hot spots."

Wexler said that crime isn't down everywhere. Baltimore and Dallas are among some cities experiencing a higher number of killings compared with last year.

Gary LaFree, a criminology professor at the University of Maryland, said it has taken police decades to figure out how to effectively target crime.

"In the '60s, crime was like an act of God, like a tornado or earthquake," LaFree said. "Where policing has changed is that we've gotten the idea this is a problem we created and there are human solutions to it. Obviously, crime is not randomly distributed. It is connected to hot spots in cities and other areas."

LaFree and others agree that crime doesn't automatically go up when the economy is poor. Property crime is also trending down in many jurisdic

tions, including the District, Prince George's and Montgomery. The FBI reported last week that bank robberies across the country fell in the first quarter of the year, with 1,498 reported, compared with 1,604 in the first quarter of 2008.

Criminologists point to the Great Depression in the 1930s as a time of relatively low crime compared with the Roaring Twenties, when the country experienced more violence.

Lanier said that despite the good news, there's not much celebrating going on among police chiefs across the country.

"We're afraid to relax in any way and say crime is down," she said. "We tend to not talk about it much because we know how quick things can turn. What's successful today, tomorrow can turn on a dime."

Staff writers Maria Glod, Tom Jackman, Dan Morse and Josh White contributed to this report.

Maybe all the criminals have been recruited to the military...

Maybe its fear ...maybe there's something in the water...

maybe the despair that lead some to be criminals has turned to despondency and they just don't have the impetus due to a very deep depression...(who could blame them here?)

Definitely interesting...

Maybe all the criminals have been recruited to the military...

Maybe its fear ...maybe there's something in the water...

maybe the despair that lead some to be criminals has turned to despondency and they just don't have the impetus due to a very deep depression...(who could blame them here?)

Definitely interesting...


Don't think so Mary

What is the definition of "criminal"? What % of the worlds prisoners are incarcerated in the United States? (its a staggering number)

Think about California *releasing* prisoners..and you know why..

The jailers are running out of money

Maybe all the criminals have been recruited to the military...

Maybe its fear ...maybe there's something in the water...

maybe the despair that lead some to be criminals has turned to despondency and they just don't have the impetus due to a very deep depression...(who could blame them here?)

Definitely interesting...


Don't think so Mary

What is the definition of "criminal"? What % of the worlds prisoners are incarcerated in the United States? (its a staggering number)

Think about California *releasing* prisoners..and you know why..

The jailers are running out of money


Duh, hadn't finished my coffee...makes sense...

There is something about temperature and violence, peaks at 93 degrees, then it drops dramatically.."I wanna hit you, its just too fuckin' hot..."

Crime rates were very low during the Great Depression and very high during the 20's.


Take, for example, the Great Depression. In the years after the stock market crash of 1929, crime plummeted as well. “People sitting in their houses don’t make great targets for crime,” says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State University. “People going out spending cash and hanging out in big crowds do.” That was especially true in the Roaring Twenties, a time that also suffered from Prohibition and its attendant crime syndicates.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-recessions-increase-crime

Another thing or two - there are people right now pushing the idea that bad economic times will lead to massive crime waves. Police, security agencies and politicians are saying that.

The fear of the rabble resorting to crime will be used as an excuse to put down demonstrations, rallies, and other political activities. Count on that.

"Booming economies" are not a good thing and lead to all sorts of aberrant behavior. Bad economies lead people to pull together and cooperate more.

Crime rates were very low during the Great Depression and very high during the 20's.


Take, for example, the Great Depression. In the years after the stock market crash of 1929, crime plummeted as well. “People sitting in their houses don’t make great targets for crime,” says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State University. “People going out spending cash and hanging out in big crowds do.” That was especially true in the Roaring Twenties, a time that also suffered from Prohibition and its attendant crime syndicates.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-recessions-increase-crime


Yeah, this is actually pretty obvious when you think about it. Every type of "comerce" is restricted and near flat-lining..

What % of the worlds prisoners are incarcerated in the United States? (its a staggering number)




I thought it was 25% this morning that I remembered reading...didn't have time to check and didn't want to say as that seemed so high...that's right though...even the ny times wrote about it... other sources were listed, and wikipedia has a piece on it...this article may have you screaming...especially as it discounts race as a factor (other countries show the same tendencies!! the article says implying that makes it ok, argh)...70% of all prisoners in this country are minorities, (gee, I guess its a way to become a majority.. >:( ) I post this article just because it is so rife with misinformation, or maybe misperceptions would be more accurate, but that's what so many read and thus believe... :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

April 23, 2008
American Exception
Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations’
By ADAM LIPTAK

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China’s extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England’s rate is 151; Germany’s is 88; and Japan’s is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America’s extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.

It used to be that Europeans came to the United States to study its prison systems. They came away impressed.

“In no country is criminal justice administered with more mildness than in the United States,” Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured American penitentiaries in 1831, wrote in “Democracy in America.”

No more.

“Far from serving as a model for the world, contemporary America is viewed with horror,” James Q. Whitman, a specialist in comparative law at Yale, wrote last year in Social Research. “Certainly there are no European governments sending delegations to learn from us about how to manage prisons.”

Prison sentences here have become “vastly harsher than in any other country to which the United States would ordinarily be compared,” Michael H. Tonry, a leading authority on crime policy, wrote in “The Handbook of Crime and Punishment.”

Indeed, said Vivien Stern, a research fellow at the prison studies center in London, the American incarceration rate has made the United States “a rogue state, a country that has made a decision not to follow what is a normal Western approach.”

The spike in American incarceration rates is quite recent. From 1925 to 1975, the rate remained stable, around 110 people in prison per 100,000 people. It shot up with the movement to get tough on crime in the late 1970s. (These numbers exclude people held in jails, as comprehensive information on prisoners held in state and local jails was not collected until relatively recently.)

The nation’s relatively high violent crime rate, partly driven by the much easier availability of guns here, helps explain the number of people in American prisons.

“The assault rate in New York and London is not that much different,” said Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group. “But if you look at the murder rate, particularly with firearms, it’s much higher.”

Despite the recent decline in the murder rate in the United States, it is still about four times that of many nations in Western Europe.

But that is only a partial explanation. The United States, in fact, has relatively low rates of nonviolent crime. It has lower burglary and robbery rates than Australia, Canada and England.

People who commit nonviolent crimes in the rest of the world are less likely to receive prison time and certainly less likely to receive long sentences. The United States is, for instance, the only advanced country that incarcerates people for minor property crimes like passing bad checks, Mr. Whitman wrote.

Efforts to combat illegal drugs play a major role in explaining long prison sentences in the United States as well. In 1980, there were about 40,000 people in American jails and prisons for drug crimes. These days, there are almost 500,000.

Those figures have drawn contempt from European critics. “The U.S. pursues the war on drugs with an ignorant fanaticism,” said Ms. Stern of King’s College.

Many American prosecutors, on the other hand, say that locking up people involved in the drug trade is imperative, as it helps thwart demand for illegal drugs and drives down other kinds of crime. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, for instance, has fought hard to prevent the early release of people in federal prison on crack cocaine offenses, saying that many of them “are among the most serious and violent offenders.”

Still, it is the length of sentences that truly distinguishes American prison policy. Indeed, the mere number of sentences imposed here would not place the United States at the top of the incarceration lists. If lists were compiled based on annual admissions to prison per capita, several European countries would outpace the United States. But Americ

an prison stays are much longer, so the total incarceration rate is higher.

Burglars in the United States serve an average of 16 months in prison, according to Mr. Mauer, compared with 5 months in Canada and 7 months in England.

Many specialists dismissed race as an important distinguishing factor in the American prison rate. It is true that blacks are much more likely to be imprisoned than other groups in the United States, but that is not a particularly distinctive phenomenon. Minorities in Canada, Britain and Australia are also disproportionately represented in those nation’s prisons, and the ratios are similar to or larger than those in the United States.

Some scholars have found that English-speaking nations have higher prison rates.

“Although it is not at all clear what it is about Anglo-Saxon culture that makes predominantly English-speaking countries especially punitive, they are,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year in “Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective.”

“It could be related to economies that are more capitalistic and political cultures that are less social democratic than those of most European countries,” Mr. Tonry wrote. “Or it could have something to do with the Protestant religions with strong Calvinist overtones that were long influential.”

The American character — self-reliant, independent, judgmental — also plays a role.

“America is a comparatively tough place, which puts a strong emphasis on individual responsibility,” Mr. Whitman of Yale wrote. “That attitude has shown up in the American criminal justice of the last 30 years.”

French-speaking countries, by contrast, have “comparatively mild penal policies,” Mr. Tonry wrote.

Of course, sentencing policies within the United States are not monolithic, and national comparisons can be misleading.

“Minnesota looks more like Sweden than like Texas,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. (Sweden imprisons about 80 people per 100,000 of population; Minnesota, about 300; and Texas, almost 1,000. Maine has the lowest incarceration rate in the United States, at 273; and Louisiana the highest, at 1,138.)

Whatever the reasons, there is little dispute that America’s exceptional incarceration rate has had an impact on crime.

“As one might expect, a good case can be made that fewer Americans are now being victimized” thanks to the tougher crime policies, Paul G. Cassell, an authority on sentencing and a former federal judge, wrote in The Stanford Law Review.

From 1981 to 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, the risk of punishment rose in the United States and fell in England. The crime rates predictably moved in the opposite directions, falling in the United States and rising in England.

“These figures,” Mr. Cassell wrote, “should give one pause before too quickly concluding that European sentences are appropriate.”

Other commentators were more definitive. “The simple truth is that imprisonment works,” wrote Kent Scheidegger and Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in The Stanford Law and Policy Review. “Locking up criminals for longer periods reduces the level of crime. The benefits of doing so far offset the costs.” Assholes!!

There is a counterexample, however, to the north. “Rises and falls in Canada’s crime rate have closely paralleled America’s for 40 years,” Mr. Tonry wrote last year. “But its imprisonment rate has remained stable.”

Several specialists here and abroad pointed to a surprising explanation for the high incarceration rate in the United States: democracy.

Most state court judges and prosecutors in the United States are elected and are therefore sensitive to a public that is, according to opinion polls, generally in favor of tough crime policies. In the rest of the world, criminal justice professionals tend to be civil servants who are insulated from popular demands for tough sentencing.

Mr. Whitman, who has studied Tocqueville’s work on American penitentiaries, was asked what accounted for America’s booming prison population.

“Unfortunately, a lot of the answer is democracy — just what Tocqueville was talking about,” he said. “We have a highly politicized criminal justice system.”




Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

What % of the worlds prisoners are incarcerated in the United States? (its a staggering number)




I thought it was 25% this morning that I remembered reading...didn't have time to check and didn't want to say as that seemed so high...that's right though...even the ny times wrote about it... other sources were listed, and wikipedia has a piece on it...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/us/23prison.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print


I saw 40% cited somewhere but I was pretty sure that couldn't be write. I knew it was around 20 though..unreal whatever the number actually is.

fixed on edit for formatting, cl