Sunday, October 16, 2016: 11:35 AM
Greatly declining crime rates in the nation’s big cities, a phenomenon that began to unfold somewhat unexpectedly around the 1990s, has since been the subject of intense cross-disciplinary research. New York City led the pack in this decline, its achievement being truly remarkable, given that it significantly outperformed most other big cities in this dimension, in spite of its immense size. Unsurprisingly, the City has received the most research attention, with the intensity of focus remaining on the era with the most precipitous drop in crime, the 1990s. Interestingly, ever since then, felonies have continued to decline. This study, using 1970-2014 data, updates the existing literature, identifies which factors have led to the crime reductions persisting, and examines whether they are likely to continue in the future. In particular, the analysis considers whether “Broken Windows” policing efforts that target minor misdemeanor crimes have been a significant factor explaining why felony crime levels have continued to decline. Utilizing multiple sources, our dataset spans 45 years of information on different crime rates, law enforcement activity (as proxied by different arrest rates and the size of the police force), economic and socio-demographic variables (such as the unemployment rate, the percentage of young adults in the population, undergraduate college enrollment rates, etc.) as well as a marker for broader drug related activity. While the regression results demonstrate that changes in the risk of apprehension, labor market conditions, drug market activity and demographics explain part of the decline in felony crime, they also provide support for the Broken Windows hypothesis. Specifically, heightened enforcement targeting misdemeanors also leads to fewer economic felonies (i.e., robbery, burglary, larceny and auto theft) while crimes associated with passion, namely murder and assault, remain unaffected.