What Affects Crime in Big Cities
From Economist.com :
A great article on crime in big cities, including Chicago. Its a must read, especially for those following crime trends in the cities and the impact of surveillance technology on crime. The article is based on the research of Wesley Skogan, a criminologist at Northwestern University. Here are some quotes from the article on the methods that help to reduce crime:
The big cities’ methods may sound obvious, yet they are surprisingly rare. Many police forces are not divided into neighbourhood units. Oakland’s struggling force, for example, is organised into three daily shifts, or “watches”, which makes it hard to hold anybody accountable for steadily rising crime in a district. Even when smaller police forces track emerging hot spots, they often fail to move quickly enough to cool them down.
. . .
However shrewdly the cops are deployed, they might not have cut crime so dramatically if social trends had not also been moving in the right direction.
The most obvious change is that, thanks in part to high property prices, all three cities are shedding young people. Together they lost more than 200,000 15-to 24-year-olds between 2000 and 2005. That bodes ill for their creativity and future competitiveness, but it is good news for the police. Young people are not just more likely to commit crimes. Thanks to their habit of walking around at night and their taste for portable electronic gizmos, they are also more likely to become its targets.
Another change is that poor Americans have been displaced by poor immigrants—who, as studies have repeatedly shown, are much better behaved than natives of similar means. This trend is symbolised by the disappearance of blacks. Roughly half of America’s murder victims and about the same proportion of suspected murderers are black. In five years America’s three biggest cities lost almost a tenth of their black residents, while elsewhere in America their numbers held steady.
The key issue for this blog is what is not mentioned in the article, surveillance cameras. In fact, in a draft article on Wesley Skogan’s web site, he specifically notes that there is no evidence of the effectiveness of smarter police techniques, such as cameras. (I have known about this article for a while, but decided to hold this back until Skogan was ready to go public – I will leave to the reader to find the actual article).
This is a clear slap to the face of Chicago’s PR machine for cameras. Once again cameras are found not to reduce crime. Nevertheless, Chicago will undoubtedly tout the efficacy of the camera network on questionable and publicly unavailable data.
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