Trends in Street Crime and the Crime Drop
The Individual and Society
Conformity and Deviant Behavior
The crime data displayed in Figure 1 are from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which compiles annual crime figures from local police departments. To show the correspondence between the violent and property crime trends, despite their different levels, they have been scaled on separate axes.
Theft committed with force or threat of force.
Assaults producing serious injury or committed with a weapon.
Breaking and entering a residential or commercial premise to commit a felony.
Theft unaccompanied by force or breaking and entering.
Abstract
After rising for nearly three decades, rates of street crime have declined in the United States since the early 1990s. Researchers have attributed the crime swings to changes in the economy, age structure, imprisonment, and drug markets. Recent studies also highlight the role of immigration, abortion policy, and policing. A major challenge for future research on crime trends is to explain why street crime did not increase during the Great Recession of 2008–2009. National research agencies should devote attention to the question of why and how crime rates change over time.
