Mulligan
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- May 3, 2009
- Messages
- 9,343
What I find very interesting about the last 20 years of crime statistics is that they have dropped in pretty much every state, regardless of any particular state's policies. So it doesn't appear to be related in a meaningful way to gun laws, three=strike rules, Rudy's New York clean-up, improvements in policing, etc, since these policies are set state by state, and every state regardless of policies has seen a vast improvement. I guess there has probably been an overall trend to incarcerate that might have had an effect.
The nation-wide change in abortion is a possibility best left undiscussed here.
My favorite theory is that the drop in crime rate lags the phase-out of leaded gasoline by 15-20 years. Kids who grew up with the extra lead exposure committed more crimes when they reached the high-crime young adult years. There have been international studies that claim to be able to see this trend at varying times around the world, but I haven't dug into the studies themselves.
I'm hoping that I will always welcome kids on my lawn.
I know the crime rate went down in the nearby metro city. But it was really assisted by more of a statistical accounting strategy, so this could lead to some misleading info. One example is, if a person went one a multiple crime spree in one night, say 5 car thefts in one night, it has now been consolidated to one event instead of separating out the individual offenses by the same person.