crime

The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story earlier this week in which a number of criminologists were consulted about whether recent shootings, murders, and other violent crimes could be linked to the economic downturn in the United States. The paper cites a number of cases that have made the headlines in recent weeks:  “Four Oakland, Calif., police officers shot down. An Alabama man strolling a small town with a rifle, looking for victims. Seven elderly people shot dead at a North Carolina nursing home. And on Sunday, six people, including four kids, died in an apparent murder-suicide in an upscale neighborhood in Santa Clara, Calif.”

The details in all these cases are still emerging. In most, the exact motive has yet to be determined – or may never be fully understood. On a broader level, however, such incidents may be happening more often because an increasing number of Americans feel desperate pressure from job losses and other economic hardship, criminologists say.

“Most of these mass killings are precipitated by some catastrophic loss, and when the economy goes south, there are simply more of these losses,” says Jack Levin, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Direct correlation between economic cycles and homicides is difficult to prove, cautions Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University at Albany in New York. But an economic downturn of this breadth and depth hasn’t been seen since data began to be collected after World War II, he also points out. “This is not the average situation,” Mr. Bushway says.

Still, criminologists do say that certain kinds of violent crimes have risen during specific economic downturns. The recession in the early 1990s “saw a dramatic increase in workplace violence committed by vengeful ex-workers who decided to come back and get even with their boss and their co-workers through the barrel of an AK-47,” Mr. Levin says.

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Forbes Magazine is running a story this week about peripheral effects of the economic meltdown, and for this they turn to the work of famous sociologist and criminologist Sudhir Venkatesh.

Elizabeth Eaves, for Forbes.com writes,

You may think the economic meltdown is hitting bankers and Realtors hard, but spare a thought for members of the underground economy–prostitutes, drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods, to name just a few participants. That’s what sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh does, having spent much of the last 15 years studying, and sometimes living within, the underground economies of New York and Chicago.

“The recession is engendering more violence,” says Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University. “There’s far greater competition for whatever meager resources there are. The folks down on Wall Street peddling drugs, they’re fighting. The sex workers are trying as hard as they can to retain their clients,” he says, sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant a short walk from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he’s on jury duty. Considering his well-documented friendship with a gang leader–the subject of his bestseller, Gang Leader for a Day–one might have expected the court to disqualify Venkatesh, but no such luck.

About today’s economic situation…

Today Venkatesh is watching black market workers slip into despair along with the rest of the population affected by the economy. Lest legal workers consider this a distant problem, one conclusion of Venkatesh’s work is that the underground and mainstream economies are intimately entwined. “The boundaries are fluid, particularly in the global city where the black market has become instrumental–one might even say vital–to the overall economy,” he says. In New York City illegal workers serve sex, drugs and takeout to the wealthiest members of society–or at least they did until financial sector layoffs began in 2008.

The underground economy includes a vast array of people providing services that are off the books but otherwise legal. Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, “canners” who scavenge for recyclables (there’s less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off. And as business contracts, underground workers face certain problems unique to their status. They have no unemployment insurance or other benefits, and, with little protection from law enforcement, they tend to resolve disputes by physical means.

Venkatesh prefers to leave detailed prescriptions to policymakers but nevertheless ventures a few. Microcredit loans, as well as education on risk management and planning, could help shift some black market entrepreneurial zeal above ground. He heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama–a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there–to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents. Sales taxes also hit the poor hard, he says; one way to help would be to let them use prepaid cards to buy goods tax free.

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed. In the same Parisian banlieues that erupted in riots in 2005, he observed an “almost aristocratic,” highly centralized criminal operation. In the ghettos of Chicago, by contrast, he observed underground workers convene an ad hoc court to solve a dispute. His dismisses the “culture of poverty” theory, which suggests that poor blacks in America don’t work because they don’t value employment. “People in America want to work,” he says. They do so ever so industriously, even when they’re breaking the law.

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This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review highlighted a compelling new book from sociologist William Julius Wilson entitled, ‘More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.’ 

The Times writes:

In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.

The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).

And today…

Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.

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The New York Times blog City Room, ran a story this week about a sociologist’s new book about graffiti…

Gregory J. Snyder, a Baruch College sociologist, spent years hanging out with graffiti writers, earning their trust and conducting scores of interviews. The new book based on his studies, “Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground,” reveals that he became more than an observer in that decade and a half: On very few occasions he wrote graffiti himself, scrawling his tag perhaps seven times.

The books discusses the origin of graffiti culture as well as the diversity amongst those who engage in in…

Professor Snyder, 40, argues that while graffiti culture emerged around the same time as hip-hop, in the early 1970s, graffiti in fact comes from a variety of cultural sources:

Whatever their class, race, ethnicity, religion, or age, writers define themselves not by what they look like, or what language they speak, or what clothes they wear, but by what they do. Their identities are as writers first, and as members of ethnic, religious, and other subgroups second.

He adds, “In its purest form, graffiti is a democratic art form that revels in the American Dream.”

The book, just published by New York University Press, argues that graffiti culture has, in some ways, been uniquely democratic. “What is lost sometimes in the cacophony of the debate over whether graffiti is art or vandalism is that when it’s art, it is free art,” he writes. “You don’t need money, or special knowledge, or the right outfit, or a car, or an ID to see it. This is why the graffiti subculture has inspired such a diversity of young people.”

Snyder addresses the where and why…

A provocative map in the book points out that unlike other “quality of life” crimes, graffiti does not tend to be focused in poor neighborhoods with high rates of violent crime. Professor Snyder writes:

Graffiti writers write in order to get fame and respect for their deeds, and therefore they write in places where their work is more likely to be seen by their intended demographic. It is not the amount of disorder that determines a good spot to write graffiti, but the number of potential viewers and the unlikelihood that the graffiti will be painted over. These spots tends to be where young people from all over the city are likely to congregate, and thus the East Village, the Lower East Side, and SoHo are the places where most of the illegal New York City graffiti can be found. These are not poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

Indeed, he adds, “Despite all of the negativity associated with graffiti, it remains one of SoHo’s selling points, literally.”

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US News & World Report presents the findings from a new study suggesting that when the economy is in a significant downturn, members of minority groups are more likely to be the victims of crime than others. The study, from sociologist Karen Heimer and criminologist Janet Lauritsen makes use of longitudinal data to establish the trend beyond our current recession…

National crime statistics from 1973 to 2005 show an increase in violent, non-lethal crime against blacks and Latinos during and after periods of recession, according to research that was scheduled for presentation Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago.

“Minorities experience substantially higher rates of violent victimization than non-Latino whites in the United States,” researcher Karen Heimer, a University of Iowa sociology professor, said in a news release issued by her school. “Our study shows that the higher rates of poverty, urban residence and differential age distributions of non-Latino blacks and Latinos help to explain these groups’ higher victimization rates.”

By knowing this trend, law enforcement officials, criminal justice policy-makers and those who offer help and services to victims can better prepare against fluctuations in crime during the current recession, said Heimer, who worked on the study with Janet Lauritsen, a professor in the criminology and criminal justice department of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

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Yesterday the Columbus Dispatch ran a story exploring whether thefts and break-ins rise in hard times – the answer is yes, but it may not be clearly linked to the state of the economy. Reporter Elizabeth Gibson calls on sociologist Richard Rosenfeld for a more in-depth interpretation of this trend.

The paper reports:

More people struggling with the economy means more people turning to crime just to put bread on the table. Right? It’s poetic, but police, economists and criminologists say it’s neither that simple nor that dramatic.

“Everybody thinks it’s just a law of nature, but that’s just not true. There are a lot of things more powerful than the economy, operating all the time,” said David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention at the John Jay College of Criminal Studies in New York.

The buzz on the street is that car break-ins and petty thefts are on the rise, prompting some residents to beef up their block-watch programs. But crime actually has been going down or staying stable in many central Ohio communities.

But sociologist Richard Rosenfeld presents a more nuanced argument as to why this trend might occur…

Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said a subtle increase in crime will deepen with the economy. It’s not that desperate people turn to a life of crime, he said; it’s that existing criminals can make more money in a down economy as demand for cheap stolen goods rises.

“It’s anecdotal so far,” he said. “But when the numbers come out, I do expect an increase in crime over the next few years.”

The Columbus Dispatch emphasizes that among academics, the verdict is still out on this link…

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Live Science reports on work by sociologist Sampson Blair suggesting that the recession may fuel more family murders and suicides. They write:

The dramatic murder-suicides last month involving a family in Ohio and another in California might be the tip of a deadly domestic-violence iceberg, a sociologist says. The topic, of course, is highly complex. In a nutshell, however, several studies have found that suicides as well as domestic violence spike for the unemployed. While family murder-suicides are relatively uncommon, such events can be tied to poor economic situations such as the current recession, said Sampson Blair, a sociologist at University of Buffalo.

“I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few years because economic strain on families provokes depression and desperation,” Blair said. Blair is not alone in anticipating a rise in suicide and deadly domestic violence.

But there does appear to be some disagreement between sociologists about the link between economic trouble and suicide…

While several studies have linked unemployment to suicides, it’s not clear that overall terrible economic times cause spikes in the suicide rate.

In fact one researcher, Loren Coleman, an expert on suicides and author of “The Copycat Effect” (Pocket, 2004), argues that suicides actually decrease during times of social and economic stress: “Historical studies conducted by sociologist Steven Stack and others have discovered a noticeable dip in suicides and related violent events when there is society-wide anguish, for example, in times of massive immediate grieving in periods of wars and economic depressions.”

Suicide is more common than most people think, though. Each day about 85 U.S. residents die by suicide, or roughly 30,000 a year. Hundreds of thousands more try it every year, according to researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia. Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death in the United States, higher on the list than homicide. Men are more prone to suicide than women. (Women are three times more likely to report attempting suicide than men, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men apparently succeed more often, as they are four times more likely to actually die from suicide.)

The reasons are myriad and certainly go beyond mere economic misfortune.

A recent study led by Temple University sociology professor Matt Wray found Las Vegas residents are much more likely to commit suicide than people living elsewhere in the country. Among the reasons speculated by Wray and his colleagues in the November online version of the journal Social Science and Medicine: gambler’s despair, of course. But short-term economic woe is probably not the only mechanism at work in Sin City.

“Las Vegas is also one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the U.S., a pattern of growth that may amplify social isolation, fragmentation and low social cohesion, all of which have long been identified as correlates of suicide,” Wray said.

Read on…

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported on a new study, which establishes a troubling trend in homicide rates for black teenagers.  This new research suggests that the murder rate among black teens has risen in the last eight years, while murders by white teens have stagnated or even declines in some places. 

The celebrated reduction in murder rates has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released today, with Marc L. Swatt. They said the gap could grow without such countermeasures as restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youth.

The main racial difference involves juveniles ages 14 to 17. In 2000, 539 white and 851 black juveniles committed murder, according to an analysis of federal data by the authors. In 2007, the number for whites, 547, had barely changed, while that for blacks was 1,142, up 34 percent.

But why?

The report lays primary blame on cutbacks in federal support for community policing and juvenile crime prevention, reduced support for after-school and other social programs and a weakening of gun laws. Cuts in these areas have been felt most deeply in poor, black, urban areas, helping to explain the growing racial disparity, Fox said.

Sociologist Bruce Western raised some doubts…

But Harvard sociologist Bruce Western said the change in murder rates was not large and did not yet show a clear trend. Western also said the impact of the reduction in government spending would have to be studied on a city-by-city basis, and that many other changes, including a sagging economy, could have affected murder rates.

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The Los Angeles Times ran a story this week about a new study that details the persistence of negative racial stereotypes, reporting that “Changes in social standing such as falling below the poverty line or going to jail made people more likely to be perceived as black and less likely to be seen as white,” according to the researchers.

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story about how undercover sheriff’s operatives from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office, along with an FBI informer, worked to infiltrate the ‘RNC Welcoming Committee,’ a group that was planning blockades for the Republican National Convention this past September.

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. She introduced herself as Norma Jean. Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune… For a year Deputy Hedstrom led a double life as Norma Jean Johnson, filing her recollections, often daily, with the Special Investigations Unit, as did the other operatives. The covert operation was not without drama. When one informant was accused of being a cop, he broke into tears, convincing his accusers that they were mistaken, according to a report.

As the result of information collected by Hedstrom and the other operatives, these undercover operations led to the arrest of eight members of the Welcoming Committee…

A sociologist expressed concern over these developments:

…But David Cunningham, a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says that while authorities may have had probable cause to infiltrate anarchist groups, he is concerned about a potential chill on civil liberties. Cunningham, author of “There’s Something Happening Here,” a history of covert FBI activities in the 1960s and ’70s, said there needs to be more oversight of undercover work from Congress. He also believes local law enforcement agencies should be required to obtain court approval for undercover operations.

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