The Great American Crime Drop
The Great American Crime Drop, Part 1
Homicides and other violent crimes plunged in 2009, accelerating a decline that began in 1993. In this two-part series, we ask: what's going on?
BY Joe Domanick
TheCrimeReport.Org
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Late last year I was thinking about Bernie Goetz. In 1984 the pale, sparrow-like Goetz became a folk hero for doing what many fearful New Yorkers had only fantasized about: pulling out a 38 caliber Smith & Wesson Special and pumping a bullet each into four wolf-pack muggers who had crowded around him in a subway car demanding $5 in return for that special dose of humiliation that was so gleefully and routinely dispensed to victims back then.
Two decades later, Bernie Goetz and those days of despair and mayhem-when entire neighborhoods were abandoned by the police-seem like ancient history. (Although the crime anxieties are, sadly, justified in many of our still-neglected urban ghettos.)
What triggered my thoughts about Goetz and those years of fear, were the headlines that flashed across America as 2009 closed, all heralding the news that America's homicide and violent rates had dramatically plunged - more than doubling the decrease recorded in 2008. The drop in the murders was particularly striking. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, the homicide rate fell nationwide by 10 percent below the already low levels of 2008.
Why? In this story, and a second part tomorrow, we provide a snapshot of views from some of the country's leading criminologists and law enforcement analysts on the factors commonly held up as reasons for the Great American Crime decline of 2009.
