Changes In Crime Rates Research Articles

Crime, Deterrence and the Business Cycle in New York City: A VAR Approach

A bstract-We apply a VAR (vector autoregressive) technique to estimate the interrelationships between unemployment, arrests, police, demographics, and property-related felony crimes in New York City from 1970 to 1984. Despite the limitations of using a VAR, the technique provides a useful alternative to more standard models in analyzing what causes crime. The study concludes that arrests provide a strong deterrent to crimes. But, the reverse effect of crime on arrests, is extremely small. We find a brief and relatively weak effect of changes in unemployment rates on crime. Changes in demographics are associated with relatively stronger changes in crime rates

Crime change patterns in American cities

A longitudinal analysis of the changes in crime rates between the late 1950s and 1970 in the 155 largest U.S. cities indicates that (1) there is virtually no relationship between the four major crimes against persons although there is strong mutual association between the four major crimes against property; (2) changes in racial composition account for more variation in changes in crime than do changes in income, thereby suggesting the need for more detailed studies of the noneconomic ways in which a city's racial composition affects crime incidence; and (3) there is a modest relationship between changes in the number of male youth and changes in certain types of crime. Since these findings are based on highly aggregated data with both known and unknown measurement errors, they must be treated cautiously.

A General Framework for Building Dynamic Macro Social Indicator Models: Including an Analysis of Changes in Crime Rates and Police Expenditures

It is generally agreed that social indicators are measures of social conditions. Accordinlgy, recent interest in measuring social conditions and in building models of how various social forces determine changes in social conditions was predated by work of William F. Ogburn and his collaborators over 50 years ago. In this paper, we argue for a revival of analyses of social change based upon time series of indices of social conditions. To provide a general paradigm for this type of analysis, we describe (1) an opportunity-structures theoretical framework for generating specifications of equations of dynamic macro social indicator models, (2) a demographic accounting framework for grounding such equations in population stocks and flows, and (3) a structural equation strategy for estimating and evaluating the resulting models. To illustrate this paradigm, we present analyses of three equation determining changes in the national reported property crime rate, the reported violent crime rate, and the rate of public police expenditures. The equations fit annual 1947-72 time-series data well, yield theoretically meaningful coefficients, and lack demonstrable autocorrelation of disturbances. Moreover, the conditional forecasts of the 1973 values of the reported crime rates fall well within bounds set by the standard errors of the equations.