Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews - Violent Crime

Jack Lessenberry writes:

Years ago, when I was a young reporter at a newspaper in another state, my editor got very excited about a story.

A new government report indicated a dramatic drop in crime, especially violent crime, and I was to dig deeper into this and write about it. Unfortunately, when I dug into it, I found something else.

Certain cities, including cities in our state, hadn’t got their data in to the federal government in time for the report. Some of this was probably due to normal bureaucratic inefficiency.

But it also seemed clear to me that some places deliberately delayed their reporting because their numbers didn’t look so good. Crime, in other words, hadn’t really declined at all. And my marvelous, life-is-getting-better story died, stillborn.

Ever since, I have been skeptical of any stories indicating that crime has dramatically risen or fallen in any particular year. Crime is like climate change. Things fluctuate year to year, but what matters is what happens over a longer period of time.

Violent crime clearly has declined over the last few decades, but not because of government policies. We haven’t had as much in large part because our population has been aging since the postwar baby boom started to slow. The median age nationally and in Michigan used to be under 30. Now, half of us are over 36.

More than half of all white Americans are over 40. The older you get, the less likely you are to commit violent crimes. At age 54, I have to admit, I can’t run from the police as fast as I used to.

But if the latest FBI statistics are correct, then why are crime rates again going up? One explanation may be the economy.

There may also be a more ominous explanation. Kurt Metzger, who is now with the United Way of Southeastern Michigan, knows more about population trends than anyone else I know. He spent years with the Census Bureau, then ran a population studies institute at Wayne State University. Some years ago, he told me to watch for a spike in crime in Detroit, starting about now.

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