WASHINGTON — High unemployment. More folks on food stamps. Fewer owning their homes. Yet for all the signs of recession, something is missing: more crime.
Experts are scratching their heads over why crime has ebbed so far during this recession, making it different from other economic downturns of the past half-century. Early guesses include jobless folks at home keeping closer watch for thieves, or the American population just getting older- and older people commit fewer crimes.
Preliminary FBI crime figures for the first half of 2009 show crime falling across the country, even at a time of high unemployment, foreclosures and layoffs. Most surprisingly, murder and manslaughter fell 10 percent for the first half of the year.
“That’s a remarkable decline, given the economic conditions,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has studied crime trends.
Rosenfeld said he did not expect the 10 percent drop in killings to be sustained over the entire year, as more data are reported. But he said thebroad declines are exceptional, given that past recessions stretching back to the 1950’s have boosted crime rates.
The FBI report listed numbers for Little Rock but said this years’ numbers are not comparable to last year’s because of a change in the city’s reporting practices.
Little Rock police spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said the city switched this year to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, a more detailed format for reporting statistics than traditional summary reporting. Many cities across the country are switching to the more detailed format, Hastings said.
The department’s internal figures, based on the older reporting format, show that reported crime fell by less than 1 percent through June compared with the same period last year. That included a 6.6 percent increase in violent crime and a 1.9 percent drop in property crime.
By the end of October, reported crimes were up slightly - 0.01 percent compared with the same period last year. Property crime was up 0.4 percent, while violent crime was down 2 percent.
So far this year, homicides in the city are down compared with last year. As of Monday,the city had had 29, compared with 38 during all of last year.
Hastings said the city has been holding its own against crime with the help of initiatives that send officers to areas that experience spikes in violent crime, drug dealing and burglaries. He said an agreement in which some people arrested in the city are taken to the Faulkner County jail in Conway has also helped, allowing authorities to lock up offenders who would have been turned away from the overcrowded Pulaski County jail.
“If we had more jail space here, it would help a lot,” Hastings said.
The national figures are based on data supplied to the FBI by more than 11,700 police and law enforcement agencies. They compare reported crimes in the first six months of this year with the first six months of the past year. Separate statistics compiled by the Justice Department measure both reported and unreported crimes.
The early 2009 data suggest the crime-dropping trend of 2008 is not just continuing but accelerating. In 2008, the same data showed a nearly 4percent drop in murder and manslaughter, and an overall drop in violent crime of 1.9 percent from 2007 to 2008.
Overall, property crimes in the U.S. fell by 6.1 percent in 2009, and violent crimes by 4.4 percent, according to the six-month data collected by the FBI. Crime rates haven’t been this low since the 1960s, and are nowhere near the peak reached in the early 1990s.
Rosenfeld said there are several possible explanations, including that extended unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other government-driven economic stimuli “have cushioned and delayed for many people the big blows that come from a recession.”
James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University, said he was not surprised by the overall downward trends.
“The popular wisdom is wrong,” said Fox. “If a lawabiding citizen loses their job, they don’t typically go on a crime spree.” Information for this article was contributed by Devlin Barrett of The Associated Press and by Andy Davis of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 12/22/2009