1980s Crime Trends

During the 1990’s, the United States saw the greatest decline of violent crime rates since World War II. The dramatic decline gradually began in 1994. By the late 1990’s, the crime rate had dropped with a record 10.4% (“1990’s” ). Violent crimes generally include acts such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Although there are numerous theories as to why this happened, no one has actually pinpointed the reason for the substantial decline.

Although defining has been proven to be difficult, it is crucial to understand varieties of definitions to accurately measure crime. By knowing that Australia’s measurements of crime fail to collect the dark figure of crime, it still gives a general understanding of Australian crime. Through defining and measuring crime data as accurate as possible, media will regularly distort or reveal certain crime data which misleads the Australian public of crime stability. Overall, Australia’s crime rate through learning how to define and measure crime accurately has proposed to be stable which also is fitting to America’s crime

When we get into how society and people look at crime, it happens in every city, every neighborhood, people are victims every day, businesses, and even property. Crime dates back since colonization and the rates have varied over time, believe it or not, crime has decreased over the years. As a matter of fact, the United States has been on a decline. The crime rate for the year 2000 was a total of 11,608,072 a declining year in 2015 with a total of 9,225,197. (U.S. Department of Justice)

The Extent to Which Sociologists Agree that Official Criminal Statistics Do Not Give an Accurate Picture of the Extent in Terms of Crime

Fresno has become a place of crime and violence. Almost everyday we hear police sirens, people are reporting assault cases, Fresno criminal gangs and even the gun violence. According to Crimereports.com in the past 90 days, there have been 44 cases of violent such as assault, kidnapping, homicide. 107 cases of property like theft and breaking, and 364 related to quality of life which includes drugs and liquor (CrimeReports , 2018). Another report published by Areavibes.com, 1 in 164 people are at chance of being a victim of violent crime, 1 in 26 for property theft and 1 in 23 a victim of crime in Fresno, making Fresno’s overall crime rate 59% higher than national average. (Fresno, CA Crime , n.d.) Teenagers are involved more in crimes related to drugs and liquor. The chapter defines them as ‘superpredators’,as they are impulsive and

At one point, crime in America grew 13 times faster than population. Between 1965 and 1980s, crimes in every category rose to a record high in New York. Burglary related crimes rose from 183,443 to 360,925. Larceny-theft rose from 253,353 to 535. Vehicle theft rose from 58,452 to 171,007. Assault rose from 27,464 to 91,571. Murder rose from 836 to 2,228. However, during the 1990s, crime in New York crime tipped. Crime fell to a record low. Murder rates, burglary, larceny-theft, vehicle theft, assault, and rape all fell suddenly. Homicide rates plunged 43 percent reaching the lowest levels in 35 years. The crack epidemic along with the election of a new governor both contributed to the drop in crime not the “broken window theory”. Many

The fourth chapter of the book discusses the possible causes of the decline of criminal activities during the 1990’s. A quote that I believe can summarize the whole chapter is, “We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel not some distant or difficult phenomena”(Levitt). In this chapter, the author goes over the possible causes of the sporadic decline of crimes in the U.S. What Levitt tried to stress in this chapter is that changes today have possible severe effects in the distant future. He was successful with delivering this message with his examples of the changes in the US and Romania’s abortion laws and its effect on the crime rate. However, since correlation does not really prove causation he went

On the other hand, theft and burglary actually went down by 27%. Even though there's more of that than anything else, it is still reducing and that is something to acknowledge. In total, all crimes thrown together for a city wide rate is reducing by 8%. This means that their criminal behavior is going lower in most areas, but not enough. Though people believe statistics when they come from a valid source, it is hard to precisely measure the decrease and increase of crimes in a city.

In chapter 4 the chapter considers a variety of possible explanations for the significant drop in crime and crime rates that occurred in the 1990s. Based on articles that appeared in the country’s largest newspapers, the authors compile a list of the leading, commonly offered explanations. The next step is to systematically examine each explanation and consider whether available data support the explanation. What the authors, in fact, demonstrate is that in all but three cases–increased reliance on prisons, increased number of police, and changes in illegal drug markets–correlation was erroneously interpreted as causation and in some cases, the correlation wasn’t even that strong.

Crime rates are shared on each major offense; however, “crime rates are often skewed because reports of crimes are based on volume of a particular crime” (Schmallager, 2011). For instance, if more crimes are committed in larceny theft, these rates overshadow more serious crimes such as murder, due to the low amount of murders committed. Moreover, crimes those are unreported, though in recent years the number of unreported crimes is lower than in past years, along with crimes unreported by local officials give a false sense of overall crimes

Crime data and the tracking of criminal trends is an important tool used by policy makers and public program administrators. The need for accurate, detailed, and meaningful data is always pressing, because budgets, social programs, and other resources depend on the analysis of such data. But the decision maker needs to be careful the conclusions drawn and “consider what factors were taken into account in establishing them.”, (Mosher et al., 2011, P. 5). The voting public as well as decision makers bear a large responsibility in being skeptical of data presented to them, and question the accuracy of the conclusions presented by the media and politicians.

Just think about a world that has little to no crime. That would be quite the story. Ever since birth people always hear about crime. People will always hear about the school shooting, or the robbery at the bank. Crime has saw a decrease during the 90’s, but since then the non physical and physical crime has stayed the same.

The property crime rates of 45.7% occurs more in urban areas. About 16.8% of the crimes were committed by high school dropouts and only 0.4% of the crimes that occurs were related to the population density. The type of property crimes that happens includes larceny-theft, home burglary, home invasion, grand theft auto, forgery, and arson. These types of crimes may be caused by factors such as high school dropouts, the population density per square mile, and people living in urban areas. The paper will focus on the crimes against properties such as larceny-theft, home burglary, and grand theft auto, not a person.

The hypothesis claims that “changes in routine activity patterns can influence crime rates by affecting the convergence in space and time of the three minimal elements of direct-contact predatory violations” and that “the absence of any one of these elements [motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of suitable guardians against a violation] is sufficient to prevent the successful completion of a direct-contact predatory crime.” (1) The authors claim that controls for routine activities, therefore, are essential to maintaining order and keeping the crime rate down. They also note that and understanding of temporal and spatial relationships are key to understanding the changing crime rates. Illegal acts are events that occur in space and time and involve specific persons and/or objects. The spatio-temporal organization of everyday activities is what allows criminals to turn their criminal ideas into reality. Dispersion of activities away from the household has led to a change in the spatio-temporal relationship that increases the opportunity for crime, which in turn increases the crime rate itself.

According to the FBI's final crime statistics for 2006, see chart below, violent crime is up for the second consecutive year, the first time that's happened in over 10 years. Until 2005, violent crime had steadily dropped over 15 years. The new rise in violence is gradual, not a tidal wave. However, it is still sobering for law enforcement agencies that now realize they have been overconfident.