Is the U.S. a safer country than it was a year ago? In late May, the answer appeared to be "no," when the FBI released figures for the number of crimes recorded by police across the United States in 2000. There was virtually no change since 1999. The experts flooded the airwaves with tales of woe--the crime drop was over, things could only get worse from now on, we had to look at ways of just maintaining a steady state.

But the FBI figures reflect only a portion of the crime rate, because not all crimes get reported to the police. So the Department of Justice undertook a separate survey aimed at assessing crime's full impact. The figures for 2000 were released on June 13, 2001. They showed a 15 percent drop in violent crime—the biggest since the survey started. Criminologists who had been so vocal a few days earlier were nonplused. The two measures had never before shown such a divergence. But there is an explanation that fits both findings. It is the "civilizing effect" of the drop in crime.

The crucial difference between the FBI's figures and the Justice Department's survey is that not all victims report their traumas to the police. There are many reasons, including shame and stigma (as in the case of sex crimes), distrust of the authorities and police incompetence. Moreover, when crime is the norm—when it happens to everyone and is an accepted part of the way society operates—people feel less of a need to report it. It is the exceptionality of crime—the way it strikes at our mutually-decided way of doing things—that drives a need for police action. When there is nothing exceptional about it, policing becomes irrelevant to everyday life. We start to regard crime as a private rather than public matter. The rule of law suffers as a result.

It is therefore illuminating to read the Justice Department's figures on how often crimes are reported to the police. Significantly greater numbers of violent crimes, rapes and sex assaults, simple assaults, property crimes and thefts were reported to the police in 2000 than in 1999. The increase in reporting among minority communities was especially apparent. In 1999, for instance, Hispanic women reported only 47 percent of the violent crimes against them; in 2000, they reported 61 percent, the highest of any demographic category. The necessary corollary to higher reporting rates is that the number of crimes police record will not go down by the same rate as the overall crime rate. It may even go up.

That seems to be what has happened in this case. It may be that, as the crime rate has dropped, people have gotten less used to the idea of crime as the norm and have begun to realize that it is a blight on their community and that the police can do something about it. So they report more crimes with the result that the crime rate seems to be stabilizing when it is still dropping.

If this is so, then we may have entered a "virtuous circle": less crime leads to more complaints about the crime that does happen, which in turn means the police catch more criminals, which leads to less crime. The beauty of this theory is that it fits perfectly with the already proven policing strategy known as "fixing broken windows." The idea behind this strategy, championed by Professor James Q Wilson of UCLA, is that a broken window that goes unfixed leads to less respect for the local area and more disorderly behavior, which results in more broken windows and a vicious circle resulting in an ever higher crime rate. Police and local communities should therefore work to "fix broken windows," reducing disorderly behavior and civilizing the area. The crime drop seems to have led to a civilizing process of its own.

And with that civilizing effect might come a re-engagement in other areas. Groups that have felt estranged in areas such as civic responsibility, charitable involvement or voting might once again feel they have a stake in the system. The crime drop could lead to a nation more at peace with itself.

We still have a long way to go. The Justice Department estimates that 52 percent of violent crimes and 64 percent of property crimes go unreported to the police. In total, there were an estimated 19 million property crimes and 6.6 million violent crimes in the U.S. last year, afflicting 18 percent and 3 percent of households respectively. These crime rates are still too high, although they are lower than supposedly civilized countries in Europe such as Britain. But if the crime drop continues to have its civilizing effect, we may yet end up with a much safer, and more tolerant, United States of America.

Copyright © 2001 Iain Murray. All Rights Reserved.

Iain Murray specializes in the analysis of crime data at STATS—the Statistical Assessment Service—a Washington DC based nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy organization.