A Summary of

The Crime Drop in America (Revised Edition)

Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman, editors

Cambridge University Press (2006)

Summary by Alfred Blumstein

H.  John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management

Carnegie Mellon University

and

Joel Wallman

The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation

The United States experienced a dramatic drop in violent crime between 1993 and 2000.  Murder and robbery both dropped by around 8 percent per year, for a total decline of more than 40 percent, resulting in rates that hadn’t been seen since the 1960s.  This striking trend has puzzled many serious observers, even though advocates of various approaches to crime and crime control are convinced that they have the answer.  Blumstein and Wallman pulled together a number of clear-thinking analysts to address the various potential explanations.  The Crime Drop in America has chapters on gun violence and gun control (prepared by Garen Wintemute), incarceration and its effects through deterrence and incapacitation (William Spelman), adult homicide, which warrants a separate treatment because its trends differ from those of youth (Richard Rosenfeld), drugs and drug markets (Bruce Johnson, Andrew Golub, and Eloise Dunlap), changes in policing effectiveness (John Eck and Edward Maguire), changes in economic opportunity (Jeffrey Grogger), and changes in demographic composition (James Fox).

These chapters are preceded by an introduction by Blumstein and Wallman that provides précis of the chapters to come and argues that the crime drop resulted from a combination of factors working in synergy rather than from any single factor.  This is followed by a treatment by Blumstein of the analytics of the crime trends, with emphasis on age differences, changing patterns of gun use, and the influence of the rise and subsequent decline of drug markets.

The crime drop was a tale of two trends, that of youth and that of adults.  There was a sharp rise in violence by young people in the period from 1985 to 1993 as they were recruited into the crack markets.  Youth came increasingly to replace the large number of older sellers who were being sent to prison, a result of the massive growth in the use of incarceration driven by growing public concern over the devastation crack cocaine was causing in our cities and fear of its attendant violence.  In this period, arrests for murder more than doubled for all ages of 20 or under, with a tripling for 15-year-olds.  The increase for black youth alone was sharper still.  This entire spike in violence took the form of growth in the criminal use of firearms, a full quintupling in handgun murders among those under 18.

One major component of the crime drop was thus the undoing of this rise by young people.  And a crucial factor in that undoing was the decline in the demand for crack by new users.  This reflected not a response to the TV ads but rather a growing realization in affected communities of the impact of crack on parents, older siblings, and friends.  With the ebbing of the crack phenomenon, the street markets for which youth had been recruited no longer needed them.  Fortunately, there was a robust economy in the 1990s that could absorb them in legitimate activity.  The youth drop was also a result of growing police aggressiveness in pursuing the guns that had become prevalent on the street, not just among young people who had been recruited into the drug markets but also among youth who, though not directly involved in the drug trade, had nonetheless taken to carrying guns, a pattern of diffusion that was much more common among young people than their elders.

The other major component of the drop was the continuation of a decline in violence by those over 30 that had started in the 1970s.  Some of this decline is undeniably attributable to a dramatic growth in rates of incarceration that began in the 1970s.  Whereas the incarceration rate had remained impressively stable for the 50 prior years at about 110 per 100,000 population, an annual increase of about 6-8 percent per year has yielded a rate of 490 today and more than quadrupled the nation’s state and federal prison populations.  Two of the authors (Spelman and Rosenfeld) independently and with very different modes of analysis estimate that about 25 percent of the crime drop can be attributed to the growth in incarceration.  This is quite different from the simplistic argument, often advanced, that credits the entire drop to the growth in incarceration.

The current edition of The Crime Drop adds an update chapter by Wallman and Blumstein that covers crime trends since 2000 and reviews analyses of the period after the first edition appeared in that year.  The crime drop seems to have ended as of 2000.  Trends in the national rates of violence have been largely flat, with little change from year to year.  However, unlike the 1990s, when virtually all major cities shared in the downtrend, this flat period is one of considerable variation across the cities, with some going up, some coming down, and others oscillating.  Rises might be driven by violent drug markets, the emergence of gangs, or a local resurgence in gun carrying.  Areas of decline might be associated with innovative or effectively targeted police tactics, robust local economies that are absorbing young people who might otherwise turn to illegal sources of income, or, of course, a combination of these and other salutary developments.

The book is well suited to a seminar on crime, with strong chapters by strong authors on the various factors that contribute to crime trends.

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