Abstract
Adopting and refining O’Brien’s S-constraint approach, we estimate age-period-cohort effects for motor vehicle theft offences in the United States for over half a century from 1960. Taking the well-established late-teen peak offending age as given, we find period effects reducing theft in the 1970 s, and period, but particularly cohort effects, reducing crime from the 1990s onwards. We interpret these effects as consistent with variation in the prevailing level of crime opportunities, particularly the ease with which vehicles could be stolen. We interpret the post-1990s cohort effect as triggered by a period effect that operated differentially by age: improved vehicle security reduced juvenile offending dramatically, to the extent that cohorts experienced reduced offending across the life-course. This suggests the prevailing level of crime opportunities in juvenile years is an important determinant of rates of onset and continuance in offending in birth cohorts. We outline additional implications for research and practice.
Highlights
The United States dominated the global car market for most of the twentieth century
For brevity, here we discuss the findings for the Age S-constraint method, with those for the constrained methods and the cohort zerolinear-trend included in the Appendix
The sub-set of possible solutions for each parameter that was identified by the Age S-constraint method is represented in Fig. 2a–c
Summary
By the 1950s, over three quarters of the world’s vehicle manufacturing occurred in the US (Heitmann and Morales 2014). While the improved transportation this provided was a feature of rapid economic growth, one of the inadvertent consequences was that there was a rapid increase in vehicle theft between the Second World War and 1960 (President’s Commission 1967). From 1970 there was a downturn and the rate decreased for 15 years and by over a quarter (28.3 percent) by 1984. A resurgence brought a secondary peak in 1991, but the rate had more than halved by well over two decades of decline by 2014. The main aim of the present study is to shed light on the causes of change in the trend
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