Analyst suggests spending "a lot" of money has altered the arch of violence

Jeff Asher, a crime-data analyst who frequently writes about the crime rates and runs the firm AH Datalytics, which powers the Real Time Crime Index, talked to New York Magazine about falling violent crime:

I would say that the thing that resonates strongest with me is that this has all been national in scope. It went up everywhere, and it’s going down pretty much everywhere. It’s happening in an environment where we didn’t see dramatic increases in policing, and we didn’t see huge increases in clearance rates — they plunged in 2020 and 2021 and have recovered since then, but that largely reflects the fact that we’ve just got fewer crimes, which usually means higher clearance rates. So there hasn’t been some massive improvement from law enforcement. A lot of times activists will talk about the root causes of crime — how you’ve got to fix poverty, you’ve got to fix education. We didn’t fix any of that. And the country is still awash in guns.

The trend started in 2023, so the “why” probably has its roots in things that happened in 2021 and 2022, because these things don’t usually change suddenly. So what are the explanations that fit? An article I wrote last summer focused heavily on investing in communities. We spent a lot of money on a lot of things, some of which had direct crime-fighting benefits to it, like the Department of Justice increasing its budget for grants by a billion dollars between 2021 and 2023 and 2024. A lot of those went to programs specifically designed to reduce violence, and a lot went to things that are not specifically directly tied to violence reduction but that we know have crime-fighting benefits: enormous increases in state- and local-government infrastructure, spending on streets and highways, on lighting, on neighborhood and social centers, on public-safety infrastructure. So a lot of money was available. We threw a lot of crap at the wall and we don’t know what stuck, but some of it undoubtedly stuck.

After writing that piece, I’ve been struck by other stuff that’s also plunging at the same rate. You look at drug overdoses, you look at traffic-accident deaths, alcohol deaths, suicides. And you look at something like carjackings, which I have a piece I’m going to run about in the next few weeks. Carjackings are down an insane amount. In Chicago, they’re down like 70 percent between 2021 and 2025. And carjackings are very specific, because they are, even more than murder, a young person’s crime. The average age of an offender is much younger than that of a shoplifting or a home burglary. So to see carjackings go up so much in 2020 and then plunge since 2022, 2023, suggests more of a societal change to me. You combine the drug-overdose deaths and the alcohol-related deaths and the murders and the carjackings, and it points to something that broke in the U.S. in 2020, and which is now healing. When I think about what’s driving this, it’s a combination of spending a lot of money on a lot of stuff, and some of it working, and that the thing that broke and caused all of this to go up is not as broken anymore.

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