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Abstract
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America's intensifying dismay about violent crime has become so pervasive that one may well affirm that there is something of a "national crime crisis." Yet there is something of a puzzle as well. Overall crime rates in the United States have been falling for nearly twenty years. Violent crime, declining on a national basis for the last three years, has not changed dramatically since 1980, especially in comparison to the startling run-up in serious crime that coincided with the maturation of the post-war birth cohort. The homicide rate has fluctuated to some extent, but despite recent increases it is still below the levels of the late 1970s and indeed, below the rates recorded though most of the 1920s.
To some extent the growth of public apprehension concerning violent crime can be explained by its cumulative nature: "[w]e experience the crime wave not as separate moments in time but as one long descending night." When serious crime touches oneself or one's family, it is an event that is more or less present throughout one's life. The direction of crime rates should be less important, therefore, than changes in the number of people whose lives have been touched by
crime. This number may constantly increase through a generation or more though the crime rate falls. It should be obvious, however, that
cumulative enlargement of the circle of people who have been victimized by crime can be at best an incomplete explanation for the change in public attitude that is taking place. Public attitudes about crime have changed much more rapidly than the size of its population of victims. "The crime crisis" is a crisis of confidence in the ability of the public sector to address the crime problem constructively. As such it is very much a part of the tide of skepticism about the role of government that has been an expanding feature of partisan political discourse in recent years. Liberalized carry concealed laws are essentially
a response to intensifying doubt about the capacity of government--the police, the courts, and the corrections system--to deliver adequate levels of public or personal security. Serious questions remain, however, concerning the ability of private sector practices to deliver the goods where the public sector has failed.
Because the techniques of social science are clumsy, the information generated is often nebulous and hard to interpret. |