A Couple Interesting Stories on Crime and Warfare

A couple of interesting articles concerning crime and warfare from the Economist.

First is this article that discloses that not only are murder rates declining, but violent crimes and property crimes, overall, are falling in all developed nations.

Both police records (which underestimate some types of crime) and surveys of victims (which should not, but are not as regularly available a source of data) show crime against the person and against property falling over the past ten years in most rich countries. In America the fall began around 1991; in Britain it began around 1995, though the murder rate followed only in the mid-2000s. In France, property crime rose until 2001—but it has fallen by a third since. Some crimes are all but disappearing. In 1997, some 400,000 cars were reported stolen in England and Wales: in 2012, just 86,000.

What is behind this spectacular and widespread improvement? Demographic trends are an obvious factor. The baby-boom in the decades after the second world war created a bubble in the 16- to 24-year-old population a couple of decades later, and most crimes are committed by men of that age. That bubble is now long deflated. In most Western countries, the population is ageing, often quite fast.

... [But] [t]he sheer magnitude of the improvement in places such as New York and Los Angeles, where the incidence of some crimes has fallen by as much as 90%, cannot be explained just by a young-person deficit.

Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, has argued that the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s cut America’s crime rate by reducing the number of children growing up in inner-city poverty and thus predisposed to criminality. But that cannot explain why rates have kept falling long after such an effect should have tapered off, or why crime rates in Britain, where abortion has been legal for longer, began falling later. Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an American researcher, has argued that the cognitive effects of exposure to lead were a primary determinant of violent crime, and unleaded petrol is to thank for the improvement. But the causal link is far from proven.

Could more criminals being locked up be the answer? The number of people behind bars has grown substantially in many countries over the past 20 years. In Britain the prison population doubled between 1993 and 2012; in Australia and America, it almost doubled. ... But in many places, the drop in crime seems to be down to people not becoming criminals in the first place. ...

Better policing is a more convincing explanation than bigger prisons: the expectation of being caught undoubtedly deters criminals....

Some broad social changes have probably helped. In most countries young people are increasingly sober and well behaved. They are more likely to live with their parents and to be in higher education ....

In America, the end of the crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1990s is widely credited with reducing crime. In Europe, the explosion in heroin use that accompanied the high unemployment of the 1980s has largely receded, even though hard economic times are back. ...

The repopulation of inner cities is probably also a help. A middle-class exodus to the suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s often left behind inner cities blighted by derelict properties and concentrated poverty. George Kelling, the American criminologist who first developed the idea that seemingly small signs of dereliction—such as broken windows—can encourage more significant criminality, points out that inner-centre neighbourhoods such as Harlem in New York, or Amsterdam’s Nieuwmarkt district, have been reclaimed by the well-off. The windows have been mended. Gentrifiers may not always be popular, but they set up neighbourhood watch meetings, clean up empty spaces and lobby politicians to take crime more seriously. They may be a consequence of falling crime that lowers crime further.

The last category of explanations is perhaps the most intriguing: that criminals simply have fewer opportunities [and the rewards have declined].

I would also credit video games and air conditioning, and overall prosperity.

The second article reports on research indicating that people are not inherently warlike.

But a paper in this week’s Science, by Douglas Fry and Patrik Soderberg of Abo Akademi University, in Finland, questions all this. Dr Fry and Mr Soderberg have reviewed what is known about modern hunter-gatherers. They suggest that although such people are far from peaceful they are also far from warlike. Most who die violent deaths in their societies do so at the hands of fellow tribesmen, not “foreigners”. Murderers, this research suggests, humans may often be. But they are not the died-in-the-wool warriors of anthropological legend.

Dr Fry and Mr Soderberg came to this conclusion by scrutinising 21 hunter- gatherer societies from all over the world. They looked at ethnographic studies of these groups, published over the past 100 years or so. Inter alia, these studies recorded homicides and their circumstances.

The two researchers classified such deaths into interpersonal events (what modern policing would dub “domestics”), interfamilial feuds, group-sanctioned executions and intergroup events. Only the latter could be described as war.